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In 113 AH, the defeat of the Frankish army at Tours (now Limotas, capital of the Emirate of Firanja) marked the final few years of existence for the Carolingian Kingdom, beset as she was by external pressures and domestic quarrels.
Charles Martel Loses the Battle of ToursAlthough the Umayyah Host was greatly overstretched by the battle, the death of Martel during its the final stages robbed the Frankish Kingdom of her final elements of a centralised authority. By the time that Commander Al Ghafiqi, buoyed by the victory, had reorganised his military strategy and mounted a formal conquest of the region by the Caliphate, Paris was already aflame as various local princelings fought for the leadership of northern Christendom.
The expansion of Al-Andalus to the border with the Province of Austrasia resulted in a major shift in the Christian world towards the north-east. The Frankish King, Theuderic IV was freed from his captivity by supporters and was finally able to re-establish his court in Mainz by the end of the next year, although he was to die shortly after, perhaps poisoned by one of his many rivals. His successor, Carloman I, was able to sign a peace with Al Ghafiqi at Cologne, although it would take many years before the Kingdom was able to formally settle the boundary between the Caliphate and Christendom at the Rhine. By 136 AH, the year in which both Carloman and Al Ghafiqi died, the Papacy, under pressure from the growing threat of naval blockade and invasion from the increasingly Umayyah dominated Bahr al-Rum had moved to Cologne. Following the Treaty of Aachen in 155 AH, the Papacy formally united with the Frankish Kingdom to become the Holy Roman Empire, inspired no doubt by the spiritually minded system of the Caliphate in Damascus.
Such imitation failed to preserve the Catholic bulwark against Islam however, over the next three centuries, the Italian Kingdoms and Central Francia had both been absorbed into what is now the Emirate of Roma. Only the dynastic struggles that emerged with the death of the final Umayyah Caliph, Umar V in 367 AH, halted the expansion of the Empire, which was irrevocably split into the six nations that exist to this day. Whilst the Caliphate was formally passed to the greatest of the successor states, Cordoba, all are nearly as large as the territory of the largest Christian nation, the militaristic Empire of Brandenburg which continues to dominate the Christian world.
The Papacy, thrown into a period of interregnum following the death of Pope Celestine V in 578 AH, now has its base in the Anglish capital of Winchester. King Henry XI holds the office of Holy Britannia Emperor co-currently with his own crown, although the position has become a largely sinecure one over the years with the majority of Christians looking towards the Orthodox faction of the Catholic Church which has its base in Great Kyiv. As 1431 AH draws to a close, it is the new Hua Dynasty that remains the dominant rival towards the Caliphate.
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© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.




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