Part II
I have no idea how long this will turn out to be, as a fic. Not sure if I could come up with 101 separate unique ideas or a catchy number like that, but… I'll see how it goes.
6. Oh Jerusalem!
There were few cities more famous, more sacred, than Jerusalem. It was the envy of priests and princes from the chalky Cliffs of Dover to the crossroads of the silk road at Samarkand. Of course, the sort of zealous ruler who would set himself upon the path of seizing Jerusalem for his own would frequently fall into feuding with the magical elements with in his nation, but magic still found itself in one of the holiest cities on Earth.
When the Romans descended upon Canaan, the Jews resisted fiercely, forming golems from the dust of the Levant, and even using the famous staff of Moses and the Rod of Aaron, to tremendous effect. In the field, Mose's staff made Jewish armies almost invincible in battle as long as it was held in the air, and Aaron's rod transformed into a snake that roamed Roman camps by night, leaving rows of Roman dead behind.
Plagues of all sorts slowed the Roman advance to a slog, turning water into blood and killing draft animals by the hundreds, locusts that came in clouds so thick they could blot out the sun. The Roman armies bumbled in darkness or cowered from flaming hail, but still they came. The Romans had magic of their own, augurs who could predict the enemy's movements days in advance.
When the Bar Kokhba revolt began and the Jews revolted against their Roman overlords, magic was used in battle once more as Emperor Hadrian did battle with Simon bar Kokhba, and as the Jewish diaspora began magical techniques spread across the world as well.
When the Arab conquests came and the Rashidun caliphate seized control of Jerusalem, there was no real fighting, although that would prove to be a break from the trend, if anything. Holy relics and powerful magical artifacts were both smuggled out before the siege began in earnest although there was no real sack, and Jerusalem became Al-Quds, "The Holy One".
Until the Crusades came down upon Jerusalem in all their fury, Jerusalem was never a true center of conflict, even if it was passed from hand to hand, from the Seljuks to the Fatimids. Arab magicians proved no less wily than their Christian or Jewish counterparts, although perhaps a little more willing to parley with djinn to get what they wanted.
The first Crusade's entrance into Jerusalem was a brutal one, and any magicians unfortunate enough to be outside of their wards as the sack began were killed. Even if many portions of the holy city were secured by magic, the loss of knowledge was atrocious, although the resulting mix of Crusader and Arab magics proved incredibly fruitful- even if always kept away from the eyes of the King of Jerusalem. When that famed Kurd, Saladin, retook Jerusalem the Christian defense was fierce, and thousands of Christians, mostly muggles, were expelled afterwards.
The Third Crusade saw thousands of magicians being pulled from Europe in an attempt to retake Jerusalem, along with what would eventually evolve to be the Vatican's own answer to magic, the Sacred Commission on Sorcery, which would serve as a tenuous bridge between the Holy Church and magical elements across Christendom. Much debate was had about if Papal indulgences would technically cover witches and wizards, although many magicians held… more unusual faiths and just paid lip service to Catholicism.
Jerusalem in time to be one of the great centers of magical knowledge, as libraries grew grander and wards grew more complex, supplemented by knowledge from all across the medieval world. Despite all the violence that surrounded the world's holiest city, carefully hidden magical communities grew, enriched by an incredible mix of cultures- the cosmopolitan crusaders from France and England, the Mamluk slave soldiers of the Caucuses, and the Turkish conquerors would all shape Jerusalem in time.
The magician's quarter of Jerusalem was perhaps the finest in the entire world, one that put wizarding enclaves like Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade to shame through sheer scale. As cramped and complex as the Medina quarters of Marrakesh or Tripoli, yet filled with buildings straight from the streets of London or Paris, walls covered in runes of every tongue: flowing Arabic calligraphy next to Greek, Latin, or even Armenian alphabets. Libraries of dozens of languages, some of which weren't even spoken outside of the holy city spoke of creatures from every corner of the world: the Nundus which prowled the Horn of Africa, the Basilisks and Chimaera which prowled the hills of Arcadia, or the Runespoors which prowled the forests which lay to the north of the Gulf of Guinea.
The magicians of Jerusalem had survived the furor of the first Crusade, the Ottoman-Mamluk war, and the modern terrors of the first World War. The Eyalet of Damascus would eventually be replaced with the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem and then the British Mandate for Palestine, which would in time be replaced by the conflicting states of Israel and Jordan- the mages didn't care. In time, the city became as sacred to magic users as it was to the muggle faithful, the greatest jewel in the crown of the magical world.
7. Who Needs Guns Where We're Going?
Magic proved itself to be many times more effective than guns when facing a man in full armor, whether on foot or on an horse. Of course, a thorough application of a mace could kill a man in armor just as well as one without, magic made armor obsolete once magicians started to be integrated into standing armies.
Before fighting even began, soldiers needed to reach the battlefield, and magicians could certainly help with that- and prevent it. Something as simple as a basic levitation charm could make entire suits of armor as easy to carry as a feather, or it could turn a knight into a floating target for any soldier with a pike to go up and poke until they found a chink in their armor. A magician provided light at night and water for cleaning and drinking, and could easily do the job of a dozen blacksmiths a murmured "Reparo". A more ambitious wizard could transform roads to muck or spook all of an enemy's horses at once.
On the battlefield, there were few people more feared than witches and wizards. The killing curse was the most obvious example of how wizards could pierce armor, but if a magic user didn't fancy that particular spell, there were dozens of other possibilities. An explosive spell could make armor burst like a wineskin or shatter enemy formations. Armor could be melted off a man's body, torn off with a simple summoning charm, or transformed into cloth or air, leaving a man as defenseless as the day he was born.
When it came to weapons, a wizard could disarm a swordsman in moments, and fight with the ferocity of a hundred mundane infantry. Simple enchantments made arrows which aimed themselves, or made swords so sharp they could slide through steel and bone as easily as they tore through air. A magician who didn't feel like wand waving could brew poisons of the foulest sort, which could spread sickness and death with a glancing blow, cause infighting among the enemy or cause him to flee from the field entirely.
In time, battle was shaped around magicians, with great masses of muggles serving to support the real powers of the battlefield. Nobility were frequently uncomfortable with this shift, and many attempted to cling onto relevance by marrying into magic- not even the high and mighty pureblood families, which looked down on them, but muggleborn and halfblood mages which were usually of much lower social status. A noble's son marrying a farmer's daughter that just happened to be a witch was a frequent occurrence as the non-magical nobility rushed to catch up.
In time, enterprising Chinese magicians chasing immortality would make a peculiar black powder that proved to have a tremendous ability to explode. It was certainly useful, and in time alchemists across the world would know how to make it, but it was relegated to party tricks and fireworks, at least at first. Primitive hand cannons would be trumped by magic every time: many times faster and in many cases more effective, as the first bullets were nowhere near the speed of their eventual predecessors.
Cannons turned out to be much more popular than their small-arm counterparts. A group of wizards could launch rocks with speeds like cannonballs, but it was exhausting, and an overall waste of magical talent. Magicians were moved to less exhausting ways of destroying walls: sabotaging the foundations with spellwork, creating brews caustic enough to eat through the stone and mortar of the walls (of course, a sufficiently nasty potion could be created by a first year Hogwarts student bumbling around in a Potions class, but that didn't stop magicians from charging princely fees for them). Artillery proved to be useful in some cases: when magicians had better things to do, or as an incredibly fast way of delivering magical projectiles with all sorts of horrifying side effects.
Guns proved of particular interest to squibs, who usually had at least some magical education, but were relegated to fields where no magic was required. Potions and combat magic were obviously out, but the strange field of alchemy had some limited applications that didn't require a wand.
Among those squibs that were supported by their families, or at least not kicked out to the streets, gunsmithing was a frequent hobby, as it gave them a means of self defense in a hostile world, and usually served to spook any muggles would got too aggressive, as guns were practically indistinguishable from magic when they were first used, and muggles usually came to think of them as strange magician's staffs, not mundane weapons, at least at first.
Guns were developed as a hobby, but that doesn't mean they were trapped in a stasis and didn't improve over time. In gunnery clubs, the power of rifling or pre packed paper cartridges was discovered. Not good enough. Guncotton and percussion caps, the first steps to metal cartridges. Not good enough, but close. Revolvers, lever actions, and bolt actions were the weapons that finally changed war after centuries of magical domination. After finally reaching comparable speed, guns suddenly went from a novelty to the bleeding edge of warfare, a weapon that wasn't limited to a tiny magical fraction of the population.
8. O What Glorious Pride and Sorrow Fill the Name of '98!
The Irish and their English overlords had always had a…. storied history. Religious and cultural discrimination were just part of the problem, as well as Ireland being an early testing ground for that proud English tradition of colonialism. This was a long trend, going past the Potato Famine of the 1840's, and one of the most famed incidents was in 1798.
Inspired by the recent American and French Revolutions, unrest had grown to a boil, and even the failure of the French expedition to Ireland in 1796 couldn't dampen Irish enthusiasm. Despite growing unrest between Catholics and Protestants and establishment of martial law by the British, the rebellion began in May.
British officials had received information about where the rebels were to gather, and sent great masses of men to put down the rebellion before it could pick up steam, and without magic it might have been the end of the Irish rebellion right there. However, one Irish magician caught on, and in one of the most famous moments of the revolution, unearthed a fully grown Mandrake plant in the middle of Dublin, after he and his associates soundproofed as many muggle houses in the area as possible.
The fatal cry of the mandrake was a turning point, and planned revolutions in the counties next to Dublin sprung up in haste as well. With a deep understanding of the terrain and assistance from both Irish and French magicians, the majority of the British were pushed out of the island in time for a massive French reinforcement in August.
Great numbers of French infantry, complemented by the ferocious muggleborn battalions the French became so famed for, and with French aid the Irish Republic was born late in 1798. The French Empire would eventually collapse after the Battle of Nations. Despite this, Ireland had been given one critical thing by the French Empire: time, nearly 15 years to prepare themselves for the British, and even without the French defending them they wouldn't bend down to the Kings of house Hanover, or their magical cronies.
Deals with the merpeople and even negotiations with the banshees led to British landing being almost impossible, and although the reactionary powers of Europe certainly weren't happy with a liberal republic stirring up trouble, the difficulties, both martial and diplomatic, of invading Ireland meant that it managed to stay independent and liberal, even as the armies of Europe crushed constitutional rule in Spain.
The Irish Republic was free, about 140 years ahead of schedule.
9. Irminsul
After the death of his father and eventually his brother, Charlemagne would come to rule one of the great Christian kingdoms in Europe, the Kingdom of the Franks. Early in 772 Saxon tribesmen sacked a church in Frankish lands, provoking Charlemagne to invade the Saxons.
There was a powerful religious element to this war, as Charlemagne was both Christian and from a family famed for their piety, while the Saxons were Germanic pagans who provoked the war by sacking a church. The King of the Franks hoped to crush Saxon moral early by destroying Irminsul, a sacred pillar that served as a center of worship for the pagans, before Christianizing the region, by the sword if necessary.
When the Frankish armies first saw the pillar, it sent chills down their spines as it towered above them. The air around it practically shimmered with magic, and the weakest men among Charlemagne's army physically couldn't approach, the aura around the tree sending them to the ground as their knees buckled under them.
As Charlemagne and his guards marched closer, things only got stranger, as a pillar with the height of a fairly sized tree started to stretch, doubling and then eventually tripling in height with every step towards it, until the originally small pillar almost seemed to be holding the sky itself up. It was getting hard to breath as they got closer, and Charlemagne was suddenly reminded of tales he was told as a boy, of sorcery and magic.
The air was choked with a strange smell that no one could quite put their fingers on, pungent and yet at the same time almost "clean", like the scent of the air after a rainstorm. One of the men began to chop at the tree with an axe, and while the first strike bounced off the side of the pillar, the ones that followed struck true, and the pillar began to list to the side, which was certainly intimidating considering how the tree stretched into the clouds.
It leaned further and further to the side the more they worked, and after a good hour of ferocious swinging by several teams of men, and moment before it came crashing down Charlemagne thought it looked strangely like a bow, with a crescent like curve, almost as if the pillar was attached to some point in the sky.
When it collapsed, there was a terrible thundering sound, not from the body of the pillar which crushed man and tree alike, but from the sky itself. With a horrible feeling of dread in his stomach, Charlemagne looked up and for one horrible moment, it seemed as if the sky itself was falling.
10. Pax Romana
Rome always had difficulties facing those enemies which had great numbers of magic users. Very few things could check the power of a legion in the field, but a skilled druid or mage was one of them. The problem began in Cisalpine Gaul, where the tribes of the Po valley fought with strange magic that sent chaos through the ranks, causing routs and panic in the men. However, when the conquest was done, Rome learned and assimilated, as they did with so many conquests before, and in time their enemies mages swore themselves to the Republic.
When Julius Caesar marched into Gaul, resistance from mages and chieftains alike was fierce. Roman mages were still inexperienced, and many times it came down to the skill of the legionaries and Caesar's own brilliance to succeed, and even then things were close. Alesia itself, the battle that finally brought the Gauls to heel, was incredibly close, as skilled pyromancers under Vercingetorix nearly managed to burn down the fortifications which Caesar used to trap the Gauls. Pyromancers had always proved themselves a thorn in Caesar's side, starting when they attempted to set his Rhine bridges aflame and ending at Alesia. He was awfully fortunate the Gauls were lacking in particularly skilled fire mages.
When Rome was reborn as an empire, they continued assimilating mages from the entirety of the Mediterranean, from Lusitania in Hispania to the Kingdom of Iberia in the Caucauses, which served as one of many Roman client states that provided magical knowledge to their overlords.
Flashy battle magics were certainly impressive, but the number of emperors saved by simple use of Legilmency on the Praetorian guard was actually embarrassing, and eventually all members of the guard were replaced with magic users who were forced to take Unbreakable vows to actually serve the Emperor and not murder him.
Wards also made imperial border control significantly easier, although barbarian invasions would still be one of the great crises Rome would face. However, they wouldn't be the end of Rome.
Magic covered so many of Rome's weaknesses: it made communication instant, it made vows truly binding and could unveil the truth behind any number of plots. Of course, the magical aristocracy in Rome was legendarily bloated and corrupt, but their corruption could be tolerated if it meant access to actual magic.
The majority of Britannia fell to Roman forces, and Hadrian's wall was in fact part of a much larger magical apparatus: a complex system of wards along the coast of Britain which meant invasions from the Picts or even Hibernia impossible, allowing Rome to turn her attention to the east.
Parthia would fall to Rome in time, as magicians made the logistics of invading Persia much easier than before, and allowed Roman expansion into regions like Arabia and the Sudan in the south and allowed them to push the Sarmatians out of the fertile Ukraine in the north.
A heavily enchanted ship was blown off course and found itself in a strange new land far to the West, and in time Roman colonies were being settled in this strange new land, the Occident. As some Romans went further west than ever before, others were determined to go as far east as possible, to surpass Alexander himself, and as Caesar bridged the Rhine Romans would eventually bridge the Indus.
Rome was perhaps not the ideal society to live in, a stratified empire ruled by a nearly all powerful emperor supported by ancient magical families, but in time it became the only society to live in, as the sheer force of the legions chipped away at its neighbors and Romanization efforts united the world in a way it never had been before.
Rome did not weep after running out of land to conquer, but instead set about strengthening itself into an empire that would stand the test of time.
Maybe I'll finish off each chapter with some sort of crazy alternate universe that's particularly wild? Space colonizaton, hyper-Rome, etc.