Senatum Porterlusque Romanus: lucky7 Restores Rome, Chapter 3: Hostia

In talking about Saint Leon's conquest of the Holy City, it is easy to get swept up in the glory of the first true sign of Rome's resurgence. I myself have written this chapter multiple times in an attempt to provide a fair and balanced account of what happened. The easiest way is to explain the history of the Levant and nearby Egypt a scant few decades before.

From 751 until "Leon's Crusade," much of Arabia and Northern Africa had been under the control of the Abbassid Caliphate. After Caliph Al-Mansur's death in 775, his heirs proved unable to hold onto the vast lands of the Arabian Empire, until finally Caliph Behir stood against the Roman onslaught.

While there are accounts of Leon's military prowess, he surprisingly might not have won against the Caliphate had it not been for heretics. More specifically, the Toumid Sultanate.

Touma the Cruel, devout Monophysite and Sultan of a doomed people. Portrait c.898

The Toumids themselves were in truth the second dynasty to rule over the newly-liberated Monophysites. The first was their leader; Ammon the Liberator, a heresiarch who revolted against the Sunni Tulunid dynasty in 887. He died without an heir several months into his reign, and no portraits were ever comissioned, leaving him a relative footnote save in the province of Abyssinia, where he is revered as Saint Ammon. Upon Ammon's death Touma Toumid, his second-in-command, stepped into the role of Sultan, saying the following upon his coronation. Sensing an opportunity, the famously-zealous Leon played the game of thrones and married his sister off to the new Sultan. In a letter to her, he wrote;

I know that in truth, they do not believe in the same Christ as us. But their views nearly tore the Empire apart under Justinian I and his heirs, and I refuse to sacrifice our future for some petty squabble. We are all Christains, and they may one day grow to respect my authority. The Catholics in the West and the infidels in the East will not. They must be cut down at the point of our sword, and the Egyptians shall prove a useful ally in this regard.

Touma was known widely as a cruel man, and he knew that an ally in Byzantium would protect him from threats both within and without. He gladly accepted the alliance, and when the messengers came to tell him that Leon was retaking Jerusalem, Touma was all to happy to march alongside him.
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The fighting was brutal. Ten months in the hot deserts of the Levant fighting off the armies of the Caliphate. Leon's tactic was simple: take the Holy City before Behir's forces could rally against him. The Egyptian forces (led by Touma himself) would besiege Mecca and Medina in an attempt to provide a more distracting target. Yet even then, Leon knew his own forces and the Varangian Guard would not be able to defeat the Arabian forces. So he invented a tactic he called the "Tacheia Epithesi"  or "Rapid Assaults," a tactic his granddaughter would perfect in the 950s.

Simply put, Leon brought the full military might of his empire to bear, assaulting fortresses along the coast no matter the cost to his own men. The Toumids adopted similar tactics, raiding and pillaging on their way to Mecca.

Byzantine forces siege Hebron while an Arabian army retreats,

Leon declared war in January of 898. By November of that year, he had won. Jerusalem now flew under a Byzantine banner for the first time in over two centuries, and Leon could not have been more overjoyed. He set about ensuring Christian immigration into the area, installing minor counts to rule the provinces in his stead. Alongside his conquering came something unexpected: another military power emerged, in service to the Khagan of the Magyars, the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre.

The Brotherhood was the first Holy Order of its kind.

Seeing in them a trustworthy ally, Leon saw the final pieces of a plan he had meditated so long on fall into place; the reunification of the Church. After the fall of Western Rome and the Holy Roman Empire that replaced it, the Patriarchs of Rome-the Popes-had slowly been converting to Arian values in an attempt to win over the Franks and the Goths. But now Eastern Rome was coming back, and Leon needed to assert the power of the Eastern Church. He attained salvation the easy way; donating a vast amount of the Empire's coffers to the Brotherhood in exchange for their loyalty on matters of theology. With the military arm of the church under his control, as well as the five holiest sites of the Faith, Leon called for a council in Rome, ostensibly to handle the Ummayad's conquests in Hispania.

Requirements for mending the Great Schism (before it happened). To be fair, Basielios I did most of the hard work. -lucky7

Abelard Von Ulm, Court Chaplain of the King of Germany, wrote down the best-preserved record of the historic Council of the Saint:

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"We were all gathered, us men of the cloth, when the Greek came, wreathed in finery. He was backed by Grandmaster Georgios, and that was when those among us loyal to the Pope began to fear.

'Friends,' Leon said smugly, 'I have gathered us here to defend Asturias against the Umayyads and the other Moors, but my method for doing so is...unconventional.'

His Holiness scowled, but did not speak.

'Simply put, the Patriarch of Rome must stop his heretical practices, and accept ours as the true Roman Church, submitting to the Ecumenical Patriarch.'

And then the room went into an uproar."

After the Pope fled the city, proceedings went on smoothly.

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While Leon was not canonized until after his death, his unification of the Church headed off what might have led to the complete collapse of Christian rule in Europe. While some Kings (notably the lords of Aquitane) remained loyal to the Pope, they were now branded as heretics, and the Empire would finish them off by the 15th Century.

A faith healed.

Of course, Leon's reign could not last forever, and even gods among men must one day succumb to that which takes us all.

Coming up in Chapter 4: The Decline and Fall of Saint Leon.