The Balkan Peninsula, shrouded in the clouds of war, seems to have finally broken free from the dawn of peace.

After Paul returned to Constantinople with the credentials approved by Li Jie, in order to express his sincerity, the next day, the Roman Senate organized dozens of real senators to visit Caesarea as a delegation to worship Li Jie.

Sure enough, Paul, the patriarch, was simply an unreliable impostor, and the patriarch who was really recognized by Greek Orthodoxy at this time was Theodor I, one of the leaders of the alliance with the Senate, just as the Great Min did not believe in Constantine IV, these Romans were also afraid that Li Jie would turn his face and cut off their heads, so even the senators who came were some minor nobles, bringing greetings from the Senate and conditions for further negotiations.

Although these nobles are all lowly in status, they are their own members of the Senate, and compared to Paul's back and forth, they can be regarded as opening up a real communication channel.

As soon as he arrived, more than a dozen noble senators wearing robes and cloaks that symbolized nobility and embroidered with strings of round bird patterns, and gold on the thimbles of the cloaks, begged Li Jie to immediately stop plundering the Balkans and recall those Arab eagle dogs.

In this regard, Li Jie was not stingy, since he agreed, he ordered Li Yexu on the beachhead of Constantinople on the spot, ordering him to start collecting troops on the same day and recall the Asian troops that had been all over the Balkans.

After the court meeting and listening to the elders, the Great Min further clarified the current political situation of the Roman Empire.

Constantine IV naturally refused to compromise, and he also paid too much for this throne, and Constantine IV did not hesitate to live and die with this throne.

But he has this consciousness, it does not mean that the patriarchs are willing to die with him, now the patriarchal forces in Asia Minor have been basically eradicated, the patriarchs in Constantinople are mostly composed of landlords in Macedonia, Thrace and other places, more than 400 years ago the Hun Emperor Attila destroyed the Balkans The tragic event is still vivid, even if they defeat the Great Min in the future, they will be finished in this fight.

Moreover, the performance of Constantine IV also disappointed the senators, the Roman legions formed by Heraclius were almost exhausted, and a large part of the army garrisoning Constantinople was composed of the sons of local nobles and estate guards in Thrace and Macedonia, watching the Arabs wreak havoc on their own land, Constantine turned a blind eye and only forced the army to defend Constantinople, which could not help but cause strong indignation in the Senate.

At the end of April, the Senate staged an armed coup d'état, demanding the removal of Constantine IV and welcoming Anna, but unlike Justinian a few hundred years earlier, Constantine IV, who fled from Antioch, was even more distrustful of his country's army, and he formed a new Praetorian Guard of 10,000 men from among the Bolgars and Slavs, plus the Peloponnese and the Dacian nobles on the Adriatic coast belonged to Constantine IV's cronies, and their Roman Empire had a strong sense of honor and supported Constantine IV, so the coup did not succeed.

On the contrary, the Thracian coup army and the Slavic barbarian guards fell into a bloody battle in the main square in front of the Dafna Palace, and after more than two days of bloody civil war, the two sides had to negotiate with no one to overwhelm the other.

This was the two political demands of Constantine IV and the senate nobles asking for the withdrawal of the siege.

Among the nobles who came to negotiate, the last noble senator wearing a black cloak and a black plush hat similar to a shepherd's child, with a gloomy face, was a close associate of Constantine IV, from the city of Apollonia, which was equivalent to Serbia in later times, and came to envoy on behalf of Constantine IV's interests.

However, the sharp contradiction between the two factions is really obvious, even in Li Jie's court, those senate nobles still spoke generously, denouncing Constantine IV, and the angry sheepherd hat and black-faced nobleman's goatee twitched for a while.

Sitting on the dragon chair and watching the two factions of Romans bite themselves, Li Jie shook his head, thinking that during the Third Punic War, the famous Carthaginian general Hannibal annihilated the main force of the Roman Republic in the Battle of Cannae, 80,000 people were killed, and after several consecutive wars, the male soldiers of the Roman Republic lost as much as half, and more than 300,000 men stained the battlefield with blood.

At that time, Rome behaved so admirably, the nobles only left a ring for their wives and daughters, and donated all the rest of the family property, regardless of whether they were rich or poor, almost all the Roman citizens and men took up arms to defend Rome, and before the Carthaginian army approached, the Romans themselves implemented a scorched earth policy, preferring nothing to harvest rather than provide the empire with a grain of grain.

But more than a thousand years have passed, the achievements and wealth of the Romans have made them almost lose the good traditions of their ancestors, and it is no wonder that the land of the Romans has been cut again and again, and the Roman Empire has crossed Europe, Asia and Africa, and turned the Mediterranean Sea into its own internal lake, and finally shrunk to only Constantinople, and in the end it was isolated and helpless under the Ottoman Turkish sword, and it was not without reason that the country of more than 1,000 years was destroyed.

Li Jie is lamenting history, but Anna on the side is overjoyed, now the two factions in Constantinople can not stand together, from her return to Constantinople, it is a closer journey, she is the only legal wife under Li Jie's Christian law, Li Jie wants to be called the emperor of Rome, but also needs to govern with her husband and wife, take revenge on her brother, and become a generation of empresses The goal of realizing her ambitions is close at hand, Anna's excited two bright eyes are smiling like a crooked moon.

The first contact with the Senate was quite successful, and after negotiating some details, Li Jie also left the senators in Caesarea for the night, and gave them some money before sending them back to the Golden Horn.

As the negotiations began to make substantial progress, the tension began to ease, under the city of Constantinople, Arab tribes were recalled in droves, the outer port of Jerusalem, and the Min army began to stop transporting new expeditionary forces into Europe.

The two sides agreed on the time of the coronation of Li Jie and Anna, the scale of the ceremony, and even the coronation ceremony in which church, it seems that the final war between the Great Min and the Roman Empire is also about to end, and Li Jie's final becoming emperor seems to have become a foregone conclusion.

But in terms of etiquette, Xiao Sheng, the secretary of the Ministry of Rites, had a dispute with the Roman Senate on the other side, and the state of etiquette in China is not called in vain, although the Great Min is compared with the Tang Dynasty, the etiquette has been simplified a lot, and these great rituals such as sacrificing the Taimiao and sacrificing to the sky are still not abolished.

The Chinese Great Rites Discussion inherited from the Zhou Rites is the most sacred thing in the hearts of scholars, not to mention the enthronement ceremony of their own emperor, and Xiao Sheng, Di Renjie, Lai Ji and others are not willing to give in at all.

However, the Roman Empire was also a country with great emphasis on ceremonies, and since Constantine the Great and Licinius jointly issued the "Amnesty of Milan" and declared Christianity a legal religion, God has occupied an extremely important place in the hearts of the Romans, and the Romans feel that they are not allowed to worship other gods.

As for the Emperor and the Queen of Earth? In the eyes of the Romans, they were no different from pagan gods, and the Roman Senate did not agree to these conditions in any case.

For this reason, Lao Xiao Sheng exerted the spirit of not being afraid of death when he went to Tianzhu to die, and personally ventured to Constantinople, where he quarreled with the Grand Pastor Theodora I in the Hagia Sophia Cathedral for a long time, and finally the group of Roman priests were scolded by Old Xiao Sheng and had to adopt a compromise method.

The coronation is carried out in two steps, the first step is the traditional ritual bathing and fasting of the Chinese emperor for three days, sacrificing to heaven and earth, sacrificing to the Taimiao, and paying tribute to the emperor and the queen of heaven.

The culmination of the whole ceremony was the arrival of the Roman Senate and the Church of Constantinople, when the real Patriarch Theodora I crowned Li Jie and his wife in St. John's Cathedral in Caesarea.

Fortunately, even if later generations shout how civilized the West is, they do not kneel when they see the king, unlike how servile the Chinese kneel, in fact, kneeling is also a very common etiquette in the Eastern Roman Empire, the Roman emperor has been sacred, the commoner ministers need to kneel and salute when they see the emperor, and the peasants see the nobles kneeling and saluting more often, when the serfs of Tsarist Russia Peter the Great reformed, there are famous paintings painted by painters who kneel on the ground and kiss the boots of the tsar's envoys.

Even the knight class and even the great feudal lords such as the King of England and the King of France, when they meet the Patriarch or the Pope of Rome, they also kneel down and kiss the feet of the Pope, which is called the Kiss Foot Ceremony.

With Xiao Sheng's return from Constantinople, the Min court also formally reached an agreement with the Roman Senate, and the enthronement of King Min is scheduled for the seventh auspicious time of the next month, from that day on, the Eastern Roman Empire will merge with Min and officially become a country, and Chinese civilization will also officially touch Europe.

As for Constantine IV, he also officially left Constantinople on the 27th of the next month, and went west to Rome with his subordinates and senators who were willing to follow him, anyway, there was still an Athenian navy loyal to him in Greece, and he used to be the Pope and the Governor's Office of the Expeditionary Force of Damin, whether the Lombards, Visigoths, and Germanic states could recognize him or not was something that Li Jie needed to care about.

Although it was only a month, it seemed a little hasty, but the court was very anxious, anyway, almost all the prime ministers and important ministers were accompanying the royal driver, as for those important ministers and nobles who stayed in the country, it was a letter sent over, it doesn't matter if they can catch up or not, anyway, from the dragon's work, they have caught up.

In July of the sixth year of the Great Min Dynasty, the entire Caesarea City was dressed up as a cluster of flowers, and there was really the hard work of Emperor Yang of Sui in order to boast in front of foreign envoys, and the trees and walls in the entire city were wrapped in colorful silk, making it seem like a cluster of flowers.

However, Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty failed to show off his wealth, and was recognized by the envoys of the Western Regions, who said that there were also poor people in the Central Plains who did not cover their bodies, and asked why they did not give clothes to the poor people by wrapping trees in silk, and the accompanying officials who asked were speechless. For this lesson from the past, Lao Xiao Sheng simply took out the small treasury of the Ministry of Rites, and everyone in Caesarea City gave out a few new clothes and a sum of money, and in a blink of an eye, those Romans who were still in a dominant position became rich people, and they really supported Da Min, and heard that the King of Min was crowned emperor, and more than 100,000 people nearby all gathered in Caesarea to cheer for Da Min.

At noon on July 27, amid the cheers of countless people, Li Jie and his concubine immediately drove to the port on the outskirts of the city, where on the opposite side of the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn was also decorated with countless Christian sacred motifs and 37 large ships formed a bridge across the sea.

From a distance, the figure of Theodora I, the Great Shepherd, holding a silver cross staff, wearing a large red robe full of gold crosses, and a long beard fluttering in the wind on his chest, was visible.

Romans, coming!