After the battle ended, Frey returned outside the city to report.
Vig was pleased with his performance.
However, he refused his second son's request to command the remaining siege operations.
At that moment, the artillery colonel approached with troubling news.
Another ten bronze cannons had been rendered unusable.
Including those losses, nearly seventy percent of their artillery had now been worn out.
Vig was stunned.
"So quickly?"
Italy was covered with fortresses, and the local population fiercely resisted submitting to a ruler of a different culture and religion.
Without artillery, it would probably take an entire month just to capture a city the size of Parma.
The colonel explained,
"The service life of each bronze barrel is about three hundred rounds. The fighting has been too intense. The men simply had no other choice."
Vig accepted a ledger.
It carefully recorded the number of shots fired by every cannon throughout the campaign.
Aside from those already lost, the remaining twenty-four guns generally had only a little over a hundred shots of useful life left.
After only a brief moment of consideration, he made his decision.
"Send orders to Toulon.
"Have the Navy transport its naval guns here.
"If the fleet can't secure control of the sea, then keeping those cannons aboard the ships is nothing but a waste."
After speaking, Vig looked past the shattered ruins of Parma toward the distant Apennine Mountains to the south.
"Did I underestimate how difficult it would be to conquer Italy?"
His thoughts wandered.
From Frederick Barbarossa...
To Louis XII...
Then Francis I...
In the original timeline, during the twelfth century, Frederick I, better known as Barbarossa (Redbeard), ruled when the Holy Roman Empire stood at the height of its power.
Coveting Italy's immense wealth, he launched six campaigns into the peninsula between 1154 and 1183, meeting with both victories and defeats.
His greatest humiliation came when his wife, Empress Beatrice, was captured by Milan.
The Milanese forced her to ride a donkey through the city in public humiliation.
Later, Frederick also quarreled with the Church and was excommunicated by the Pope.
Overall, medieval Italy was a chaotic patchwork of city-states.
Its apparent weakness repeatedly tempted powerful monarchs from France and the Holy Roman Empire to invade.
Yet...
The Alps formed a tremendous natural barrier that made supplying invading armies extraordinarily difficult.
The peninsula was also filled with stone fortifications, while its fiercely independent inhabitants resisted outside rule.
Together, these factors turned Italy into a quagmire from which invaders found it difficult to escape.
"If nothing unexpected happens, Basil will most likely enter the war personally.
"The smaller Balkan states may also throw themselves into the Italian campaign.
"This war could last a very long time."
After thinking for nearly half an hour, Vig drafted a letter to Britain.
He ordered the issuance of a second round of war bonds and requested additional supplies and mercenaries for the front.
Following the capture of Parma, Vig assigned the remaining bronze cannons to Birdsong and Utgard, ordering them to continue clearing the cities of the Po Valley.
After resting for two days, he personally led thirty thousand men westward through the mountain roads to the Italian coast, where the Royal Navy's naval guns awaited.
During the Battle of Nice two months earlier, the Royal Navy had lost two gunships.
A newly commissioned vessel had since joined the fleet.
At present, they possessed three gunships carrying sixty bronze cannons.
The situation was urgent.
Vig requisitioned forty-two of the best naval guns, together with their trained gun crews, before marching along the coast into Tuscany.
A thousand years earlier, when Hannibal invaded Tuscany, the region had been covered in marshes.
The miserable conditions had eventually cost him an eye.
Centuries of development had transformed the landscape.
Most of the marshes had disappeared.
Tuscany had become one of Italy's richest agricultural regions, famous for its wine, olive oil, and marble.
By the end of August, the Viking army captured Pisa.
Then came Lucca.
Then Livorno.
Finally, they advanced upstream along the Arno River.
As Tuscany's lifeline, the Arno's banks were lined with farmland and orchards.
Early autumn had arrived.
The vineyards were only days away from harvest.
A handful of farmers refused to abandon their crops, continuing to work among the vines despite the approaching army.
When the Vikings reached the western outskirts of Florence, Vig followed his usual practice.
He sent prisoners into the city to persuade its defenders to surrender.
Just as expected...
They refused.
After more than half a day of bombardment, Viking troops stormed into the city.
Like the defenders at Parma, the local count abandoned the walls and organized resistance from inside the streets.
At three in the afternoon, Viking soldiers pushed their cannons into the city itself.
One by one, they blasted apart barricades and fortified buildings.
After suffering more than a thousand casualties, they finally captured one of central Italy's greatest cities.
From Florence to Rome lay roughly two hundred miles.
There were few major cities along the route.
Only scattered towns, villages, and castles.
At the Vikings' current pace, they would reach Rome within four weeks.
That very night, Vig held a grand banquet to celebrate Florence's capture.
Perhaps the wine spoke for him.
Perhaps it was simple impulse.
Before the assembled army, he made an extraordinary promise.
"The first man to enter the city of Rome—
"No matter his birth or station—
"Will be made a Duke."
Within days, word spread throughout Italy.
The Serpent of the North was marching on Rome.
At that very moment...
Basil's army landed at Taranto in southern Italy.
Upon receiving the Pope's plea for aid, he did not answer immediately.
Instead, he found himself reflecting upon history.
For centuries, relations between the Papacy and the Eastern Roman Empire had grown increasingly strained.
Everything had changed in 800 AD, when the Pope crowned Charlemagne as Emperor of the Romans, effectively granting the Frankish ruler the legitimacy and inheritance of the Western Roman Empire.
Constantinople reacted with outrage.
To them, it was an unprecedented humiliation.
How could a Frankish barbarian possibly claim the Roman imperial legacy?
In the years that followed, tensions between the Frankish Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire repeatedly flared across the Adriatic.
After lengthy negotiations, both sides finally signed the Treaty of Aachen in 812, establishing the frontier between the eastern and western empires.
From Constantinople's perspective, the treaty was a humiliating diplomatic compromise.
Even then, the Eastern Romans acknowledged Charlemagne only as Emperor of the Franks and Lombards—
Never as Emperor of the Romans.
The consequences were profound.
The Frankish kingdom had been elevated into an empire equal in status to the Eastern Roman Empire.
Relations between Constantinople and the Papacy collapsed to their lowest point.
The political and religious divide between the Latin West and the Greek East widened dramatically.
In recent years, however, Europe had been transformed.
The Viking Empire had risen with astonishing speed.
After the collapse of the Frankish Empire, the Papacy lost its greatest protector.
With no alternative remaining, Rome gradually began repairing relations with Constantinople.
Basil spent the entire night discussing the situation with his closest advisers.
At last, he reached a decision.
"We will save Rome at all costs.
"Tell them to hold on.
"My army will arrive soon."
From Taranto to Rome, the ancient Appian Way stretched for more than three hundred miles.
If they marched without delay, they could reach the Eternal City in roughly twenty days.
The ideal outcome was clear.
Basil would annihilate Vig's army outside Rome...
Recover the former Frankish territories...
Reclaim the crown and legal inheritance of the Western Roman Empire...
And fulfill the dream Constantinople had pursued for centuries.
If that day came, history would no longer remember him merely as the Macedonian or the Usurper.
Instead, he would earn a title overflowing with glory and legend—
The Restorer of the World.
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