The Ancient World can be construed as a narrative of singularities, with globe-spanning empires founded upon the fabled bounties of the Fertile Crescent dominating the story. The advent of agricultural technology and the arrival of the Roman Climate Optimum had endowed the men and women of the Oecumene with the incentives to coalesce into three vast agricultural imperial states: Romania, Iranshahr, and China. And for the first five centuries since Christ graced the world, these vast superpowers remained unchallenged in their ascendancy. They defined human civilisation as the economic and intellectual nexuses of the world. The emperor Galerius, wrote of Rome and Persia as “the twin eyes of the world, two lights which should coexist and refrain from mutual destruction”. Beyond the fringes of these empires lay only barbarians whose uncouth ways were condemned as inferior imitations of civilised conducts.

Come the fifth century, the status quo was disrupted by convulsions in the Eurasian Steppes. The frigid climate had necessitated a brutal war for mastery over the grasslands, and on the great grass seas, the primal law of predation held sway: defeat meant exile or extinction. With their homes torched by the Huns, the Germanic tribes marched southeast in their quest for survival. Wave after wave of barbarian hordes poured into the land of the Romans, overrunning Gaul, Britannia, Hispania, Italia, Africa, Pannonia, Dacia, Moesia, Germania, and Illyricum, depriving Romania of its prized western provinces. New kingdoms were established amidst the charred ruins of imperial authority by tribal warlords, who sought legitimacy from the sole surviving institution which could still bestow it: the Church. For a brief moment, a new equilibrium enabled the preservation of relative harmony between the ancient powers and the new Germanic arrivals. The Franks ruled Gaul and Germania, the Ostrogoths Hispania and Italia, the Visigoths Africa, whilst the Romans retained the truly valuable territories in the Orient, and granted the western kingdoms legitimacy in exchange for deference and tributes. Christendom, as appropriated by the Roman orthodoxy in Rome and Constantinople, retained its primacy as the faith of the civilised, and the former barbarians were validated by and integrated into the Roman ideological framework.

The peace was broken in the sixth century, when the balance of power shifted once again in the Romans’ favour. Emperor Justinian purged Africa of Visigoths overnight, swept through Italia with veteran legions undaunted in the face of Germanic onslaughts, and reclaimed the coastal cities of Hispania. Frankia and Britannia were all that remained of the barbarian hordes that had taken Western Rome by force, and with the armies of Romania bearing down mercilessly upon their domains, led by a leader of unbridled ambition, it seemed that the restoration of imperial singularity was as imminent as it was inevitable.

But God intervened in this most crucial of moments, casting unto the mortal realm a comet which launched into the atmosphere tremendous clouds of ashes and debris upon its collision with Earth. The virile radiance of the sun was transformed by the ash-choked atmosphere into a pale, luminous veil. Snow fell, harvests failed, and virus thrived. Borne upon African rats, the Black Death travelled up the Nile into the Mediterranean, where it devastated Romania and Iranshahr. As much as a third of the population perished, and the great empires of the Ancient World lost their demographic superiority as well as their momentum of conquest. Engaged in a fruitless war amongst themselves, the twin eyes of the world were blind to the rise of the Bedouin tribes of the Arabian desert. The followers of Mohammad soon wrested control of the civilised world from the hands of the Romans and the Persians, forging an empire which stretched from Hispania to India. All that remained of Christendom, and indeed, Antiquity, were Frankia and Romania. In the far east, China had likewise fractured into a thousand pieces, each of them laying claim to the Son of Heaven, and so Antiquity was no more.

Between 700 and 1200, Western Europe began to grow into an independent civilisation, having been deprived of the support of the Emperor at Constantinople, who had lost his empire to the Arabs, the Franks diversified and consolidated their holdings. The demographic strength of the Europeans grew steadily whilst the Islamic Caliphate gradually dissolved into various independent emirates, and Romania languished in relative geopolitical irrelevance. The manifestation of their growing power were the Crusades and the Reconquista, whereby the Franks began projecting their might beyond the geographical constraints of Frankia. For the first time in history, the Germanic barbarians were endowed with the demographic might they needed to rival the armies of Islam and Romania. But even in circumstances of growing prosperity, the Franks remained disunited and decentralised, with power being held in the hands of disparate warlords in their castles rather than a centralised monarchy. The Kings of Western and Eastern Frankia took on merely a symbolic role as the leader of the Christian coalition rather than absolute monarchs.

As with 540 AD, the course of human history was altered by pestilence. The Black Death returned in force, ravaging every nation from China to Hispania, cruelly reaping the lives of 100 million souls. The resultant void in the power structure presented an unique opportunity to the kings of Europe, who swept in to fill the vacuum, establishing centralised monarchies in the image of Romania and Iranshahr.