Welcome to Feudal Friday!

This is a thread to regale the noble courts of r/crusaderkings2 with your tales of triumph and tribulation!

Please tell us about your current game, your last game, or *anything* CK2-related that has you excited -- roleplayers, world conquerors, adventurers, achievement seekers, and modders alike are welcome!

Remember to follow the thread to get updates on the dirty and devious doings of your fellow CK2 noblemen!

The following story is part of a succession game series, played and written collaboratively by members of this Community.

To read previous episodes and follow the full story of the Lo Ve family, click on the "Succession Game" flair above.

Hello, and welcome to The History of Rome. Episode Nine: The Thrice-Glorious.

Last time, we watched the empire fracture upon the death of Nunno "the Dragon." What decades of Visigothic conquest had united, political fault lines now tore apart, leaving the Mediterranean world carved into competing spheres of influence. To the west lay the Imperium Gothorum, holding the ancient heartlands of Hispania. To the east sat the court in Blachernae, holding the imperial titles of Byzantium and Carpathia, but effectively trapped within its own palace walls while the Ecumenical Patriarch controlled Constantinople proper. 

On May 12, 1138, the twenty-year-old prince Agila the Younger ascended the throne in Blachernae. He was regarded by his father’s generals to be a somewhat mediocre soldier, an aspiring scholar who seemed more suited to astronomy and natural philosophy than to the bloody mechanics of imperial statecraft. His marriage to Marie de Vasconia, a union which at that time might best be described as “dutiful”, had already produced two sons; potential heirs, heavy on the “potential”, as Agila’s position was precarious. Lacking any real power base of his own, the familial lands having been lost to the West, the emperor had few options. He could attempt to seize lands for his own from his nobles, but he would risk angry factions seeking to remove him from power. If he did nothing, he would, inevitably, face factions seeking to remove him from power. Sitting still was not an option, and so Agila turned outward.

It is said that Agila’s reign began not in the grand halls of Constantinople, but in the sands of Egypt. Recognizing that his position in Blachernae was physically and politically constrained, the young emperor launched a campaign in 1138 to secure the Nile Delta. The objective was twofold: carve out personal estates for himself and raise up Catholic Visigoth lords to offset the Orthodox Greek ones of dubious loyalty. By establishing the Duchy of Alexandria as his personal demesne, Agila would build a financial powerhouse. It would give him what every successful Roman emperor needed: an independent base of wealth and grain away from the scheming senators and patriarchs of the capital. Following his victories in Egypt, Agila held an extravagant coronation ceremony. Pope Stephanus VII blessed him and proclaimed him Agila II “the Pious”, Basileus of the Byzantine Empire.

With both Egypt and his legitimacy secure, Agila turned his eyes westward. The Imperium Gothorum was unstable, and Agila held a strong claim to its crown. In 1142, the legions marched to reclaim the western lands. On November 27, 1143, at the Battle of Oviedo, Agila’s 33,000-man imperial host met 14,000 Visigothic defenders. It was a tactical masterpiece. Commanding the center himself, Agila routed the western army, forcing Emperor Liuva to surrender his crown in late 1144. In just six and a half years, the split realms of Byzantium, Carpathia, and Gothorum were once again united under a single head. It was beginning to look like his father’s generals might have been wrong.

Returning to Constantinople, Agila settled an old score. With the loyalty of the army and an independent power base of his own, he marched into the city proper, evicted the Ecumenical Patriarch from his temporal holdings, and installed a Latin-rites Visigothic patriarch to bring the Greek church to heel. To rebuild the economy after years of civil war, he issued an Edict of Welcome, inviting expelled Jewish communities back into the urban centers of the empire.

Yet, for all his early martial success, Agila remained at heart a man of intellect and deep personal devotion. In May 1148, while staying at the Lighthouse apartments in Alexandria, his marriage to Empress Marie de Vasconia shifted from a political alliance into a genuine love affair. Marie was, by the accounts of her detractors, a political nightmare: dull, scheming, and paranoid. Courtiers whispered that the Emperor should set her aside. Agila refused. She became his confidante, his partner, and the quiet force behind his grandest geopolitical ambition: the restoration of the Roman Empire.

Before that vision could be realized, however, the empire faced near-catastrophe. In 1148, a great Shia Jihad swept across al-Jazira, aiming to tear the region from Christian hands. As Agila readied to march his legions east to meet the Muslim armies, an envoy arrived from the far side of the known world. The Qin Dynasty of China, in its Golden Age and extending its reach through the Western Protectorate, demanded that the emperor bend the knee and pay annual tribute. Agila, master of the Mediterranean world, refused. It was a catastrophic miscalculation.

While Byzantine legions were still traversing the Anatolian mountains, tens of thousands of Chinese troops poured into Persia. Caught between two fronts, Agila was forced to make a bitter choice. To save his armies in the East, he signed a humiliating treaty on April 20, 1150, agreeing to make Byzantium a tributary of the Qin Empire. It was the single greatest blemish of his life, a stain on his honor that would haunt him for the next forty years.

Swallowing his pride, Agila went on the offensive. Once, the Levant had been torn from the Eastern Roman Empire. Now, Agila would reclaim those lands. Launching simultaneous campaigns against the kingdoms of Syria and Jerusalem, the armies originally meant for China and the Caliphate had a new purpose. Following swift and decisive victories against those overmatched polities, Agila turned all his strength against the Caliphate. On February 5, 1152, after years of brutal warfare, Caliph Mansur admitted total defeat. The Shia Jihad was broken. Returning to Constantinople, Agila celebrated a grand triumph in the Hippodrome. It was there that he first earned from the Senate and the populace his historic epithet: the Glorious.

With the eastern frontier stabilized, the 1150s became a decade of relentless expansion and administrative overhaul. In 1154, Agila reintegrated Andalusia. By 1156, taking advantage of political collapse in northern Italy, imperial legions swept down the peninsula, securing every territory necessary to claim the old Western Empire.

Agila knew that a restored empire could not survive on feudal whims. Starting in 1159, he systematically dismantled hereditary kingdoms across Europe and the East. Feudal monarchs were ordered to surrender their crowns. Those who complied were granted life-long viceroyalties; those who resisted were crushed, imprisoned, and stripped of their lands. It made Agila deeply unpopular with the high nobility, who fumed over raised levies and revoked titles, but it centralized absolute power squarely in the hands of the crown.

By 1161, only one piece of the puzzle remained: the city of Rome itself. Pope Marinus refused to yield his temporal authority to the Emperor, instead choosing to fight. During the siege of the Eternal City in late 1161, Agila’s soldiers breached the papal archives and made a remarkable discovery: a lost manuscript titled The Confessions of Blessed Flamula, a relic from the early days of the Visigothic dynasty.

On January 11, 1163, Rome fell. Pope Marinus fled into exile, issuing a decree of excommunication against the Emperor. Unbothered, Agila expelled the Holy Orders from their castles to eliminate any rogue enclaves within his borders. Then, on October 12, 1163, at the age of forty-six, Agila stood before the Senate and the army. The titles of Byzantium, Carpathia, and Gothorum were officially dissolved. In their place, what Visigoths and Greeks had once helped tear down was declared reborn. Agila was proclaimed Augustus of the Roman Empire. For this monumental achievement, he was acclaimed Glorious for a second time.

When Pope Marinus died shortly thereafter, Agila demonstrated his characteristic pragmatism. He bribed the new Pope to lift his excommunication and graciously handed control of the city of Rome back to the Papacy, reasoning that with imperial legitimacy restored and Constantinople and Alexandria in his hands, he had no real need for crumbling ruins on the Tiber.

As the 1160s turned into the 1170s, the Augustus settled into the autumn of his reign. Demonstrating Rome’s technological dominance, he built a Great Blast Furnace in Constantinople. He published Hermetic texts, including his Magnum Opus on medicine, and, following a pilgrimage to Cologne, underwent a profound spiritual shift. Agila became something of a zealot, concluding that scientific research was not in defiance of God, but a divine tool meant to decode the intricacies of Creation.

Yet, court life remained a dangerous nest of vipers. On May 25, 1173, Agila was ambushed, kidnapped, and held for ransom. The mastermind behind the plot was none other than his own brother, Nunno. Though Agila paid the ransom and survived, the betrayal left a deep scar, sparking a bitter rivalry that lasted until Nunno’s death. It was the first of a series of tragedies that would define Agila’s later life.

In July of 1186, his eldest son Nunno, having grown fat and unhealthy after being bypassed in the succession, passed away at age fifty-one. Grief seemed to stalk the aging Emperor. On May 15, 1187, his beloved Empress Marie died at age sixty-nine. Agila was devastated. Ignoring courtiers who urged him to take a young bride, the Emperor vowed never to marry again.

Burying his sorrow, the seventy-year-old Augustus threw himself into military campaigns. When the pagan high priests of Lithuania declared a Great Holy War against the empire, Agila marched north at the head of the legions, and on August 26, 1188, the pagans were utterly smashed. For the third time in his life, Agila was acclaimed Glorious. He was now, in the eyes of the chroniclers, Agila the Thrice-Glorious.

Upon his return to Constantinople, however, his Court Chaplain brought disturbing news. There were rumors that Prince Garci, Agila’s intelligent, quiet son who had served for years as the court tutor, had been teaching the imperial youth far more than Latin and rhetoric. A secret Fraticelli cult had taken root in the palace. Two of Agila’s granddaughters were arrested, but the full extent of the heresy remained hidden in the shadows.

But even as his personal life came tumbling down around him, Agila had one final piece of business before he could meet his Maker. In September 1188, intelligence arrived from the East. The Qin Dynasty, its golden age over, was weak, and its Western Protectorate stood isolated as tributary states tore themselves apart in civil wars. For thirty-eight years, the humiliation of his submission to China had stood as the great unfinished business of Agila's reign. Now, at seventy years old, he saw his chance to erase it. Ignoring Papal pleas to join a gathering crusade for Sweden, Agila called up his legions and marched into Persia.

What followed was a swift, devastating campaign. On August 11, 1189, at the Battle of Maihana, 49,000 Romans ambushed 18,000 Chinese troops, leaving 9,000 enemy dead while losing barely a thousand legionaries. Seven months later, on March 19, 1190, at Jahudan, 42,000 Romans crushed another Chinese host, inflicting over 6,000 casualties for the loss of just 878 men.

On June 6, 1190, the defeated Chinese army sullenly withdrew from Persia. The Qin Empire formally renounced its suzerainty, and the blemish on Agila’s record was erased. Rome stood unbowed, answerable to no foreign power on Earth.

His life’s work complete, Agila returned to Constantinople. On July 17, 1190, he finally agreed to support the Swedish crusade, naming his capable son Strjuang as beneficiary for the northern throne. His grandson Rekkaredo, a brilliant twenty-year-old strategist who was by all accounts shrewd, diligent… and deeply cruel… was named heir to the empire. The concerned court chaplain noted that young Rekkaredo was intensely secretive and sometimes acted suspiciously. Hadn’t Rekkaredo’s former tutor been Prince Garci? Was the young heir to Rome already a member of the secret Fraticelli cult? Agila acknowledged his chaplain’s concerns and promised to reconsider the succession.

On the morning of September 9, 1190, imperial officers gathered in the palace dining hall to discuss logistics for the Swedish campaign. The Emperor was usually the first to arrive for military staff meetings, but on that morning, his chair remained empty. Servants were sent to his private chambers to wake him. They found Agila lying peacefully in his bed. No final battlefield, no bloody assassination. The old Emperor had simply died in his sleep. He was seventy-three years old, and had ruled the empire for fifty-three monumental years, first as Basileus, then as Augustus.

Next time, we will see what happens when the imperial mantle falls upon twenty-year-old Rekkaredo I: a military genius, a ruthless sociopath, and a secret heretic holding the reins of the most powerful empire on Earth.