Alternative History
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The 11th century is the crucial turning point from the Early to the High Middle Ages and all three POD's are set in it.

Events[]

  1. In 1083 Radovan Trpimirović, son of the Croatian King Dmitar Zvonimir falls ill, but unlike in the OTL, he survives and marries Marija, daughter of his father's Ban (Viceroy) Petar Snačić, in 1087. This was actually a compromise that the King had to grant to the nobility, since Snačić and the other Croatian feudal lords kept pressuring the King to marry both of his children (Princess Klaudija married Viniha, count of Lapčani) into the native nobility, because they feared an increase of Hungarian influence over the court, due to the fact that the Queen and Radovan's mother was Illona Arpad, whose brother Ladislaus ruled the much larger and more powerful Kingdom of Hungary.
  2. In late 1089 King Dmitar Zvonimir dies of a stroke, in the Croatian capital Knin. Radovan, now 30 years old, is proclaimed as King by Petar Snačić and the other nobles and is crowned as King of Croatia and Dalmatia in the Cathedral of Split, by Archbishop Lovro of Split on the 12th of January 1090 and he immediately send a letter to Pope Urban II to recognise his title, which the Pope does in the summer of that year. In 1091 Radovan founds the Zagreb Bishopric and installs a man named Peter as Bishop.
  3. In 1092 King Radovan moves his court from the fortress of Knin to the coastal city of Split, one of Croatia's largest cities. This was an important political move, since, even though the formerly Byzantine Theme of Dalmatia was ruled by Croatian kings for almost two centuries by now, the Greeks still considered it to be merely a gift to the Croatian court, that could be taken back. Radovan further fortified this by starting to refer to himself in charters as only Radovan, King of Croatia, showing that he considered that Dalmatia is an integral part of his realm. This was also a warning sign to the Venetians not to make any military excursions along the Croatian coast. Radovan's son Dragoslav was born in October of 1092. To commemorate Radovan orders the construction of a large church near the town of Livno.
  4. At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II, after numerous calls for assistance from the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, calls the rulers of Western Christendom to march on a Crusade to reclaim Asia Minor and the Holy Land from the Seljuks and the Fatimids. Both the peoples and the Princes Crusade passed trough Croatia in 1096 and early 1097 and some younger Croatian nobles joined the Princes Crusade.
  5. In the year 1095 Cuman Khagan Bonyak, whom his enemies called the Mangy, because he was born with the caul, was at the peak of his power. He united the various warring tribes of the Cuman people and managed to forge an alliance with the Byzantine Empire, which lead to a stunning victory at Levounion in 1091, against the Pechenegs, another nomadic people, whom the Cumans considered enemies and rivals. Feeling empowered, Bonyak leads the Cuman hordes into plundering the Kievan Rus', reaching the city of Kiev by mid-May of 1095. There he burns and loots the country side, resulting in mass devastation, but the Rus' Knyaz, Sviatoplok II, unlike in the OTL, decides to negotiate with Bonyak, after Bonyak repeatedly threatens to burn the entire city to the ground. Bonyak demands all the lands south of Kiev, which the Knyaz agrees to do, with the condition that Bonyak sends his armies to help Sviatoplok in his war against Oleg of Chernigov and other Rus' princes opposing Kiev's dominant role in the East Slavic area. Bonyak's next move was essential in dramatically transforming the political reality of the Orthodox World. Since he knew that the Kievans would attempt to seize their southern frontiers from him at the first moment they suspect he is weakening and given the fact that he was still in amicable terms with Alexios Komnenos, in early 1096 Bonyak converted to Orthodox Christianity and, since he now ruled an area with more sedentary than nomadic population, decided to start settling the Cuman tribes on the steppes of the northern Black Sea coast and Kuban, as well as in the western part of the Crimean Peninsula. Bonyak did receive a Christian name upon baptism, but it is not recorded in history.
  6. In 1097 Bonyak controlled much of Crimea, so he negotiated with Alexios Komnenos a handover of the Byzantine cities there to Cuman rule, in exchange for a yearly payment for ownership of those cities. Alexios agreed, since he knew that even if Bonyak took his possessions by force, there was nothing he could do, since the Greek armies were preoccupied with the Seljuks of Rum.
  7. In 1098 Bonyak permanently settled in Crimea and made formerly-Byzantine Theodosia his capital. To appease his new Greek and Crimean Goth subjects, as well as the Patriarch in Constantinople, he built a large church, The Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, in the city, to publicly express his full devotion to his new faith. The Christianization of the now-sedetary Cumans was slow and difficult, but it was enforced and the mayjority of the Cumans would become Christians by the mid-12th century. Still Byzantine diplomats reported that Bonyak continued to worship Tengri deities alongside Christianity. Byzantine sources at this time refer to Bonyak as the Archon of the Kumanoi, while Catholic sources started calling the new Orthodox and sedetary Cuman state the Kingdom of Taurica, the Rus' called them Polovtsy, while the Cumans themselves referred to their state as the Desht-i Quman. In late-November of the same year he conquered the Rus' principality of Tmutarakan. Bonyak's realm now stretched from the Dniester River to the northern shores of the Caspian Sea. Over the Ural River the Kipchaks, a people with whom the Cumans were known to form tribal unions before, now became hostile towards their former brethren and a series of minor skirmishes and raids were conducted by both peoples, in the wider area of the Ural River, where the influence of both groups clashed. Greek priests also began to arrive in the territories of the Kipchak people to proselytize and so, in a first major shift from the OTL, Christianity not Islam started to gain a foothold among the Central Asian nomads.
  8. In the first months of 1099 Bonyak's armies marched on the Caucasus, a region in which Cuman influence was not fully enforced and started to clash with the, still mostly pagan, indigenous peoples. Meanwhile, with a Christian sedentary Cumania to their east, the weakened Pechenegs collapsed much earlier than in the OTL and by 1099 they existed no more as an independent people, gradually assimilating into the larger Vlach-Romanian population and on the territories which remained under their rule a number of small mixed Pecheneg-Romanian principalities emerged.
  9. On July the 15th 1099, the Crusading armies of Godfrey de Boullion, Raymond of Toulouse and Robert, Duke of Normandy defeated the Fatimid garrison of Jerusalem, victoriously entering the city. A massacre of non-Christian in Jerusalem ensued.
  10. The news of the fall of Jerusalem spread like wildfire over all of the Old World, Christians of all denominations celebrated, while Muslims of all denominations despaired. The word of the Crusader's victory flew down the Nile, from the Fatimid territories into the territories of the Christian Miaphystie Nubian Kingdoms and further to Ethiopia. The most powerful realm amongst the Nubians was the Kingdom of Makuria, ruled at the time by King Basileios. The East African Miaphysites had been isolated and separated from the rest of Christendom for nearly 500 years, since the Rashidun conquest of Egypt, although Makuria had some contact with the rest of the Christian world, unlike the Ethiopians. Now a chance had presented itself to King Basileios; to enlarge his realm at the expense of the weakened Fatimids and to strengthen his positions by finally establishing permanent contact with the Western Christians. In September of 1099 the Makurian armies marched into the southern Nubian realm of Alodia and besieged the city of Soba. By the summer of 1100 the entirety of Alodia was under Makurian control. With the entire Nubian land under him Basileios proclaimed himself King of all of Nubia, to solidify his control; Nubia was, however, an exonym which was only slowly being accepted by the Nubian population, most people continued to call their country Dotawo, but the embracing of the Nubian name clearly shows Basileios' international ambitions.
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