600-699 (Abrittus)

Rough sketch - additions and comments welcome!

Major events
First and Second Sassanid Civil Wars

Centennial developments and trends
Contacts between Europe and China take off, while contacts between Europe and India and India and China intensify, too.

Economy: Military: Philosophy / science: Religion: Nations of Europe: Nations of Africa: Nations of Asia:
 * In China, new furnaces produce excellent steel. The innovation only reaches Europe towards the end of the century.
 * Also in China, letterpress printing and newspapers are invented. Both innovations travel faster than the furnace idea.
 * Under the Tang dynasty, China finds anticaptialist solutions to the debt crisis and passes a land reform and creates a more rational, better trained bureaucracy. Both ideas are discussed in Europe only in the next centuries. China´s population enjoys enormous increases in living standards in the meantime, also caused by canal construction and easier sea trade.
 * Many petrochemical products are invented for use in all domains of life.
 * In Tang China, gunpowder is invented, but not widely used for military purposes.
 * The power of the Sassanid empire considerably weakens due to two civil wars.
 * Rome gains control over Arabian trade routes and petrol sources (although the latter cannot yet be extracted efficiently in great quantities) via several Arab proxies. Conflicts with these Arabs increase, too.
 * Greek medical researchers identify the bubonic plague germ and rat fleas as their major hosts. While no cure has yet been found, drastic hygienic measures are undertaken in Gaul, the Roman and Sassanid empires to prevent further outbreaks. By the end of the century, infections are reduced by 95 %
 * Catholic Christianity regains ground, especially among educated urban classes, who have turned away from the Roman cult, but are not attracted by the sober world-view of the "Celtic philosophy", which still has not developed a convincing moral philosophy.
 * A liberal, less theistic version of Zoroastrism, influenced by Buddhism, appears in Persia and finds followers among the educated, but is suppressed by traditionalist Zoroastric priests and the shahs after Chosrau II.
 * Invoking the "exceptio Visigothorum", more than twenty smaller and larger Danubian city states, now culturally effectively Visigoth-ised, join the Roman Empire`s Dacian province. In 663, a new province "Transdanubia" is established.
 * The centuries of a depopulated pontic steppe allow less agrarian Ugro-Finnic peoples to reclaim hunting grounds further to the south, from which they had been forcibly removed in the first BC and AD centuries; thus, no intense population pressure and no movement of the Magyars into the Balkans.
 * Slavs in the pontic steppe and "Ostrogoths" in Tauris are threatened by the advent of the Chasars. The ostrogoths are allowed defensive weaponry and are able to defend their fortress cities. The Slavs lose several battles against the Chasars and begin to form a confederation; in some regions, they become tributaries of the Chasars.
 * Simonism, and with it a revolution, reaches the Wagadu and overthrows their divine kingdom, too.
 * With Saba involved in inner-Arab conflicts, its cities on Africa`s east coast become increasingly independent.
 * Persia /// two civil wars ///
 * Arabia /// petrol, Roman investments, unrest, conflicts with Saba, conflicts Saba vs Aksum, inner-Arabian fights; Mohammed`s followers fail to reestablish themselves upon return from Aksum; Islam takes no roots in Arabia; a handful of Mohammed`s followers go back to Aksum, where their radicalism is tolerated but falls on dry soil. ///
 * India /// results of continuous Gupta control ///
 * Indochina and Sri Vijaya /// expansion and development ///
 * China`s reforms and developments; defeat of the Göktürk
 * Regular political exchange between Rome, Gupta India and China (later on including Sri Vijaya); search for a strategy to secure the Silk trade route and control central Asia.