Road to the Ocean


 * Road to the Ocean
 * by President Chester A. Arthur
 * 23 January 2002

From Persian Mirrors

And Nestorian Christianity did offer some protection from the Plague, though certainly not what most people at the time assumed. The great roaring temple fires which people of all faiths huddled around for hours at a time, praying to Christ United for salvation, kept away the fleas and rats that spread the Black Death.

The standard practice of running metal surgical instruments through an open flame for some minutes before going to work also helped matters. Persian surgeons (as opposed to doctors) were often sought far and wide for their good work and high survivability ratio.

Still, Persia was astride the major trade routes from Asia to Europe, with a Company whose ships prowled the Indian Ocean. (Long distance, though, ensured that the Black Death tended to rise up and then collapse aboard Company ships before they reached port.) Perhaps one in ten Persians died of the Black Death during the great outbreaks of the 4th century.

It might have been more, without the Underbelly Continent. Based on surviving Company records, we can estimate that around fifty thousand people migrated to New Parthia in the fifty years between 305 and 355 [1077-1127 CE]. Most didn't stay in Ghazi City, spreading out across the dozen small splinter-towns stretching from Freemantle FN1 in the west all the way to New Basra on the coast of the Isle of Stones. FN2 Most passed through Ghazi City, though, and it was there that they met...

Christianity, history of

We know surprisingly little of Ersen of New Parthia, only that he was born in SE 270 [1042 CE] in Tehran and died eighty years later while walking the Company Road from Freemantle to New Esfahan. He seems to have been a student of other religions; the oldest surviving Persian copy of a Buddhist manuscript was found in his library a hundred years after his death, and the faith he articulated seems heavily influenced by the strains of Buddhism floating around Persia in the fourth century.

Ersen might have remained an obscure, slightly odd High Priest of Tehran if he had not been assigned as a young man to New Parthia in SE 302 [1074 CE], to be head of all the churches of the Underbelly Continent. Somewhere, either on the long sea voyage or in the isolated farming community that rapidly became a major seaport, the young man articulated a very new type of Christianity.

A traveler from mainland Persia would have found nothing unusual about a temple in the Underbelly Continent around SE 350 [1122 CE], at least on the surface. They were all made of stone, painted as black as possible, with a roaring, perpetual fire in the foyer. But the meeting area...

Ersen, life of

...the new faith, for that was what it was, had no priests! Yes, there were Liaisons FN3, elected every Saturday by the body of parishioners, but they only moderated the Meetings. Every man and woman knelt in silent prayer for most of the meeting but could rise at any time if they felt God's Fire burning through them, and they would speak whatever revelation they had. Men and women were equal before Christ.

The Godly, as they called themselves, tended to be mostly small farmers and local Company merchants. The landed nobility and wealthy Company men contented themselves with the "Church Faith", as one anti-Ersen author put it. Had population densities been higher, serious violence might have broken out, but as it was, one could always move further along the coast, and that is exactly what many people did...

New Persia, history of

By the early 370s, no one could have predicted the future greatness of men like Bahram, Jasper, or Kaveh, perhaps the three most influential men in Persia in the new century. Bahram was just another minor noble, commanding a scouting column in the mother country. Jasper was at his plantation in New Antioch, writing his Natural Observations and eying the Koori servant girls.

Kaveh, somewhat famous already as a Company merchant and inventor, (we credit him nowadays with the discovery of paper and an ink usable on it) was living in quiet semi-retirement at his villa in a small company port off Sumatra...