Collier smiled at Krystal. “Miss Kent, that mulled wine smells delicious. May I have some?”
Krystal wordlessly filled a ceramic beer mug, arose, and served Collier, then resumed her seat, still unspeaking.
Collier sipped, then took a long draught and, still holding the mug, continued. “Oh, yes, Foster, there were Moslems here, as on our own world, but they . . . but let me backtrack a bit. In our world, the Church suffered a schism in the fifth century which weakened both resulting churches and made the Moslem conquests easier and quicker—divide et vine it. That never happened on this world; rather, it was amicably decided to split the papacy into two separate but equal sees, East and West. The Moslems enjoyed some successes, as too did the Seljuk Turks, and the same number of Crusades were launched against them as were in our own history, but with about equal results.
The difference occurred in the middle of the thirteenth century, here, when hordes of Mongols began to pour in from the east, sacking Samarkand and overrunning most of the expanse of the old Parthia before a Moslem army of Seljuks, Swarizmi, Kurds, Ortuquids, Zangids, Abbasids, and Azerbaijans met them on the banks of the Tigris and were soundly trounced. The same thing happened to them twice more, and in the third defeat the Seljuk Sultan was killed.
“At that juncture, Alexius VII of Byzantium offered the new young Sultan, Kilji Arslan III, the aid of a huge Christian army—in return for certain concessions, of course; trust a Greek to make a profit, they’re as bad as Jews—to stiffen his own, which I imagine was by that time a battered, draggle-tailed lot. An agreement was reached and the combined armies had their first meeting with the Mongols near Mosu, and, while the Mongols did not lose, they did not win, either, but their khan fell at that battle and they retired to Bagdad to choose a new one.
“They spent most of the next year assassinating claimants and fighting out the succession among rival clans, and all the while both Popes were preaching a Crusade against them, so that when they had patched together enough cohesiveness to again take the field, they were faced by a host nearly as large as their own, even including the fresh fighters who had ridden in from the east during that year, better armed and mounted for the most part and with a knowledge of the terrain which allowed them to choose advantageous battle sites.
“It is chronicled that one hundred and fifty thousand Mongols were slain at the Battle of Samarra.” He smiled another of those infuriatingly superior smiles. “Naturally, the figures are open to question; but, be that as it may, the Mongol migration into the Middle East did not here succeed, as it did in our own world. And when, some thirty years later, the infamous Golden Horde swept across Russia, one arm of it was stopped and generally extirpated at Tula, another arm at Novgorod, and both battles were won by combined armies of Christians and Moslems, drawn from almost every principality of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Those Mongols who were not killed or did not return to the east settled in various enclaves from southern Finland to the Caucasus and as far west as portions of Poland and Transylvania, It is their descendants who are Wolfgang’s mercenaries.
“I’ve no time to go into all the details, but suffice it to say that as time went on the two faiths—widely disparate, at their respective inceptions—began imperceptibly to merge, to adapt certain of each others’ usages and formulae. Now, Christianity of a sort extends from Cape Finisterre to Kashmir and from the Arctic Circle to the Cape of Good Hope.”
Krystal wrinkled her high forehead. “But was there no Reformation here?”
Collier took another pull at the wine. “No. First, the < Church here is, due to Her amalgamated composition, less hidebound, dogmatic, intolerant of variations and shadings of belief and practice in religious matters, and less corrupt than the Church of our world was at the time of our Reformation; also, this Church is far more powerful, in large measure because of her monopoly of niter.”