Alternate history

[tkdguy]

I'm toying with the idea of how Renaissance Europe would look like if certain events were replaced by other events.

 

I read somewhere that if Zoroastrianism and its offshoot Mithraism had remained the dominant religions of the Middle East and the Roman Empire respectively, the Crusades may never have happened. Of course, the Romans were fairly tolerant of other faiths as long as the followers paid both their taxes and some lip service to the state gods. So the witch burnings may never have happened either.

 

The Moorish conquest of Spain and the spread of the Ottoman Empire would probably have happened, though. Greed would still be a major factor.

 

If Clovis had never conquered Gaul, there would be no France to speak of, and no Charlemagne either. The French and English languages would be very different. Same deal for England if William the Conqueror had been repelled at Hastings.

 

If Charles I beat the Parliamentary forces and hanged Cromwell, he would have become an absolute monarch. He may have eventually rescinded the Magna Carta.

 

If Marco Polo had returned to Venice with a few kung fu masters, would that have had a major development in western unarmed combat?

 

What do you guys think?

[JTesla]

Ack my head is spinning!

 

If you have even a slight lengthening of a religion being dominant would there even be an Ottoman Empire? If you change one piece of the puzzle the rest is radically altered. In essence there is no way of saying how something would have looked once you altered the past. You can theorize about the short term but you really can’t accurately take an alteration from the year 312 and see how it applies to the year 1066.

 

From a game standpoint this allows you to open things up and, lets your imagination run with whatever radical idea it can come up with.

[tkdguy]

The whole point is to figure out what would be almost (but not quite) the same, and what would be radically different. Keep in mind there is more than one reason for doing something.

 

Let's stick with the Europe vs. the Ottoman Empire storyline. Even without religious differences to fight about, there's still a possibility of a conflict because someone decided he needed more territory. Or both sides wanted a monopoly on trade with China. Never underestimate the power of human greed.

 

Also, what would have happened if Harold had repulsed William at Hastings? Definitely English would sound very different today. The Hundred Years War would probably never have happened, but does that mean the Magna Carta would also go the way of the dodo? England may still have conquered the rest of the British Isles, albeit under Saxon or Danish kings rather than Norman kings.

 

Keep in mind that this is just a mental exercise. You don't have to use athises things. Since my ideas never even happened, all it's good for is flavoring for the campaign.

 

Of course, there's a lot of stuff that did happen that you can use. A campaign set in Renaissance Europe could emphasize Machiavelli and the Spanish Inquisition. I' think I'll reread The Prince.

[dugfromthearth]

"If Marco Polo had returned to Venice with a few kung fu masters, would that have had a major development in western unarmed combat?"

 

Probably not, because unarmed combat is militarily useless. It was developed in asia because monks were not pacifists like monks in Europe and had time and the desire to develop such skills.

 

Knights would not have abandoned swords for karate any more then Samurai did.

 

All kung-fu movies aside, the development of unarmed combat in Asia was a trivial thing outside of historic importance. Any martial art that was truly significant usually focused more on weapons such as Penjat Silak.

[tkdguy]

Not strictly true. While the armed martial arts predominated, unarmed martial arts were used as backup. The samurai used jujutsu if they were disarmed in the heat of battle, at least until they rearmed themselves. Knights learned wrestling as part of their training for the same reason. Monks were notorious wrestlers during the Renaissance; they just didn't fight in wars like the Shaolin monks or the Hanebushi.

 

Don't foget that during the Renaissance civilian combat flourished. While long swords and armor still ruled the battlefield, unarmored warriors duelled with rapiers and side swords. And most commoners didn't have swords and armor; they relied on daggers and wrestling. Unarmed combat was definitely more popular with them than with the nobility.

[Lord Liaden]

I love speculating about alternate history!

 

Your suggestion about a change in the development of religion has potentially the greatest impact on the course of events. I should point out that the cult of Mithras was not actually dominant in the Roman Empire before Christianity; it was primarily confined to the soldiers of the Roman legions, and even then only concentrated on Mithras's warrior aspect. In fact at the time that the Romans adopted Christianity as the state religion, its primary rival was the cult of Isis, which had absorbed many of the qualities of worship of Aphrodite/Venus and Astarte to become an extremely popular love/fertility cult. It probably wasn't organized or theologically broad enough to have developed into a monotheistic faith, though.

 

Without the growth of Christianity, Islam might not have been inspired (assuming we're not accepting for purposes of discussion that religions are the product of divine revelation). In that case there would likely not have been an Arab jihad and establishment of the Caliphate. Persia might have remained a world power and the center of Zoroastrianism. The Byzantine Empire would also likely have remained more powerful, and might have been the dominant power of Eastern Europe into the Renaissance period.

 

Much of the centralizing of power in the European kingdoms was under the impetus of Christianity, both through the philosophy of the "divine right of kings" and as a deliberate use of religion as a tool of authority. Without it Europe might have remained much more fragmented, with many petty "kingdoms" and city-states resembling Renaissance Italy. Christianity also promoted the code of chivalry as a way to soften some of the local rulers' harsh treatment of their underlings and neighbors, so codes of conduct might have been more reminiscent of the early Middle Ages.

 

All of this could have greatly curtailed the trends of empire building in the West which led to Charlemagne, although the memory of the Roman Empire might still have spurred those who sought to emulate it.

 

All of this is subject to whatever unforeseen factors you might want to introduce into your campaign history, of course.

[Isaiah_26_4]

Chello!

 

This question remains:

 

With Mithraism as the dominant religion would Rome fall in the West? It was Gibbon in his histrory of Rome that specualted that Christianity weakened the empire due to its pacifistic morality. Mithras was a warrior god beloved of the legions.

 

Of course, modern historians point to a myriad of factors as to why the empitre fell in the West. But this is a game, not a thesis so....

 

Tony

[tkdguy]

Mithras and Isis? Now there's a kinky couple for you.

 

Seriously though, Rome would have collapsed eventually because of economics and bad leadership. Its army had become primarily non-Roman, the the lack of new conquests made it more difficult to pay the soldiers (no more looting).

 

Also don't forget Atilla and his boyz rampaging around Europe. My friends and I got into a big discussion whether the Huns would have been able to get away with it at the height of the Empire's power. I said Rome would have crushed the insolent fool; my friends weren't too sure.

[Markdoc]

I think most historians discount Gibbon's "pacifist" theory - christian rulers of the time were no more averse to leaving behind smouldering landscapes littered with corpses than their pagan counterparts. Rome would probably have collapsed anyway, regardless of what was going on in the temples, as pointed out: the collapse was primarily economic, caused by the need to maintain a large military in foreign regions at a time of slowing economic growth.

 

However, if we go with Rome staying pagan, then no Byzantium (the best you get is the Eastern Roman Empire). Without the unifying influence of christianity, probably no Europe as known: so scratch Big Charlie and Bill the Bastard (you can keep the Vikings, though...). Without Christianity to copy, probably no Islam either: so there goes the Ottomans and the Crusades.

 

So..... I'd use the Chinese or pre-christian Europe model: lots of small states coalescing into larger states and occasionally empires, before noisily self-destructing. Unlike China though, Europe does not have such clean boundaries (the Middle East is the primary "mouth of the bag" so you might expect Europe to remain more outward looking than China did.

 

cheers, Mark

[tkdguy]

I found this site last night. It's very interesting.

 

http://www.alternatehistory.com

[lemming]

Originally posted by tkdguy

I found this site last night. It's very interesting.

 

http://www.alternatehistory.com

Nice site; I visit it often.

[Alcamtar]

What if Abraham had never fathered Ishmael? I doubt that would have much more than local reprocussions until relatively modern times, but it might have played a large factor in the development of Islam, the relationship between Islam/Judiasm/Christianity, and of course the 20th century conflict in the Middle East.

 

What if Mohommad had converted to Christanity instead of founding Islam? The Middle East may have become unified under the banner of Christendom and perhaps even become a sister region to (or extension of) Europe. OTOH maybe the east would have played "big brother"...

 

If there had been no Christianity in Europe, how would the renaissance have been different? Would it have happened sooner, later, never, or would it have taken a different direction?

 

> So..... I'd use the Chinese or pre-christian Europe model:

> lots of small states coalescing into larger states and

> occasionally empires, before noisily self-destructing.

 

That's an interesting thought.

 

Mike

[SSJ Archon]

Those are all pretty big what ifs. Might favorite, in fact I have run a campaign based on it, is 1961.

 

The Bay of pigs instead ends in war. WW3, nuclear winter. In my world, I went on the assumption that such a war would not end, because each side would be too devastated to even be considered a side. I ran the starting clock to 1999, where parts of south america, australia, and africa are the only places left resembling civilization. In these places, the world is divided into tiny kingdoms, each fighting over surplus food, the only places left to have such a thing. The ecosystem is non-exsistant, ammo is non renewable, and motor vehicles are a luxury.

 

The first few years after A-Day, (Apocalypse Day) famine ensewed, as temperatures climbed globally for obvious reasons. After that volcanism went up dramatically, and most of the ice caps melted. This pushed dust into the air, and released tremendous amounts of water vapour into the air.

 

The current world is a dark and cold place. While the ice caps did melt, global temperatures are falling, and techtonic plates have been cracked by the bombs. Think the desert of the real.

[noumena]

another couple

 

A couple of my favorites:

 

1. What if Charles Martel lost the battle of Tours in 732 and Spanish Moors conquered France?

 

2. What if the Crusader Kingdoms had managed to hold on at least for another couple of centuries, giving the Byzantine Empire time enough to regroup. Might Constantinople be the superpower of today?

[CorpCommander]

Another way of going about this

 

An easier way of working this is to PICK how you want things to be and work backward to figure out how they got that way. Reverse engineer the process. Its a lot easier.

 

Pete

[Black Rose]

Not trying to be cute, really, but I was discussing sexuality and the Puritans in Colonial America with my fiancee (no, our pillow talk isn't usually this baroque, she's taking a class), and a funny thought occured to me:

 

What if Raleigh brought back to England, and thus Europe, not tobacco, but cannabis? How would this affect things in England, aside from being a good source of hemp?

 

Any (non-"drugs are bad") thoughts?

[Markdoc]

>>>What if Raleigh brought back to England, and thus Europe, not tobacco, but cannabis? How would this affect things in England, aside from being a good source of hemp?<<

 

People would have looked at him and said "So?" Cannabis in its various forms has been around in the Olde Worlde for a long time - enjoyment of its psychoactive properties is thought to have gone back as far as the Scythians and it was enjoyed in a pure form (Hashish) in at least the middle east and northern India before the rise of Islam.

 

Raleigh almost ceratinly used hemp ropes on his ships: hemp growing (because of its importance for rope-making) was a royal monopoly in England.

 

Still, with a bit of fiddling, perhaps he could have come back with LSD. The seeds of some strains of the common morning glory are rich in lysergic acids and similar psychotropic alkaloids, and it was apparently used by Aztec priests. The plant was considered so sacred that it was death for a non-priest to even see them.

 

The thought of a devout medieval monk whacked out on LSD is a bit worrying though....

 

cheers, Mark

[AnotherSkip]

And for a word from our sponsor...

 

Erm id suggest the works of H beam piper.

 

his lord Kelvan of Otherwhen and other stories of the cross time police are really good food for thought

 

 

for a bit of a twist on the story line you are suggesting i would suggest the Anne Mccaffrey community world about the Empire of Rome falling a tad bit differently if there was a; real magic and B. gunpowder discovered.

 

frankly there are so many tiny things that could be different that would later have a huge impact on things (see the show/book Connections for a rather random sampling) that even an empire falling a few centuries later would have such a divergent change in things that it could be nigh well useless to speculate.

 

fun, for sure, but im not sure if it would be accurate or useful