AHC: Reverse the fate of Rome and China

I think they would need to control a lot more of the Roman Empire in order to be compared to the continuity in China. Besides the HRE was mainly focused on Germany, even though it did at times control much of Italy. The caliphate at its peak controlled a lot more of the former RE than did the HRE.

Maybe Charlemagne is more successful? That gets you France. Maybe focusing on Iberia instead of Saxony?
 
The HRE for much of the time between 1190-1260 was ruled by the Hohenstaufens, who also controlled the Kingdom of Sicily after Henry VI's reign. Henry VI notably attempted to make the crown of the HRE hereditary, and his son, Frederick II, was noted as much favoring Sicily where he grew up and was almost uninterested in Germany by comparison. However these events drew the enmity of the Popes, who found the Papal States surrounded to the north and south by the Hohenstaufen, and subsequently did all they could to break up that personal union between the Kingdom of Sicily and Hohenstaufen Holy Roman Emperor. If Henry succeeded in making the HRE a hereditary monarchy and Frederick managed to clearly triumph over Innocent IV, the emergence of a Italy centered HRE isn't impossible. Whether this would be at all a successor to the Western Roman Empire is debatable, but the Hohenstaufen were Kings of Jerusalem at the time and the Latin Empire would fall in 1259 only a decade after Frederick II died. A still strong Hohenstaufen could form an alliance with the new Byzantine Empire for recognition as the successor Western Roman Empire. A 'renewed' Western and Eastern Roman Empires could potentially cause a cultural renaissance for those with Greek and/or Latin cultures.

As for China. I'm far from an expert, but I'd say it would be difficult because of geographical reasons. The Mediterranean connects so many places it is a rich trade opportunity. This gives everyone around the Mediterranean a good reason to want to break into that market by gaining a reliable port. Rendering it a Roman Lake forged a situation where there'd almost always be multiple opponents waiting for a moment of weakness to take advantage. Eventually you have a dozen different countries taking chunks of the coast to end up like OTL. By contrast Chinese civilization developed along the Yellow River, which is not as large and unmanageable a target. The Grand Canal then extended the 'cradle' of Chinese civilization onto the Yangtze River, a valuable means of transporting goods over a large distance while also requiring a powerful government to maintain. A fertile, developed, and yet still relatively small region thus allowed the Chinese to support a massive population and subsequently spread outwards.

Simply put, sheer size makes clear any civilization holding all or most of the Mediterranean is going to be forced to deal with constant invasions and outwards forces pressuring them. It would take an organized, prosperous superpower greater than all around it to gain, which the Roman Empire was, and even the Roman Empire had times of strife and civil war. This meant holding it more than a few centuries, which it did, becomes increasingly unlikely. The best you could hope for was a Byzantine type successor kingdom for the 'Romans'. Having a second Roman Empire subsequently conquer the Mediterranean becomes increasingly unlikely as time passes, the Barbarian kingdoms build on the ruins of the Romans, and multiple cultures develop along the Mediterranean. By contrast the Yellow River, Grand Canal, and Yangtze River form an effective base to work from. While it could be split between multiple kingdoms, like during the Warring States Period, they're close enough and naturally are interconnected enough that there's a definite push to unite this area into one political unit. Once a state controls this cradle, they have the population, industrial, and resource capacity to start expanding outwards into the areas that would become traditionally dominated by China. Outside forces could conquer the Chinese, but that dense population base would almost always outnumber their conquerors enough that they assimilated to the native Chinese. To stop this, you'd need to permanently fracture the Yellow-Yangtze cradle. I'd say once the Grand Canal is built by the Sui, the trend towards a powerful central state is pretty set. Not completely so, but you'd need something major like the Mongols maybe deciding to destroy instead of conquer, destroying the Grand Canal and basically destroying the Chinese civilizations through outright genocide.

So the real problem is the Chinese civilizations are pretty set from a geographical point, an almost natural occurrence of a long lasting, great civilization. The Roman Empire took near half a century to reach the borders of its zenith, and was a consequence of its military, logistic, and organizational capabilities compared to its neighbors. Once these started to break down, the Roman Empire declined and was ultimately torn apart. The Chinese dynasties would fall, but naturally gravitated towards a certain base that simply put would always make the Chinese a major power.

Having a successor to the Roman Empire is entirely possible, and actually occurred OTL to some degree for over a millennia after the Collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Having a Roman Empire hold the territories of its zenith is near impossible, requiring the Romans to have advantages over all its neighbors in multiple areas despite centuries or millennia of interaction. A divided China is almost just as difficult to achieve, either needing a POD early in the formation of the Chinese identity or a major catastrophe on the level of the treatment the Mongols gave to a number of civilizations. Anything else is likely to end up like the half a dozen other times a major Chinese dynasty fell, only to eventually have the successor largely rebuild the exact same base back up again.
 
I believe Walter Schiedel questioned the geographical thesis. The Mediterranean was very possibly more conducive to integration than pre-Sui China, where all rivers ran west-east and there was no way to properly integrate the Yangzi and Yellow river basins (no Grand Canal, and maritime trade was poorly developed in Han China). And, of course, the Ottoman example shows that it certainly isn't impossible for an Early Modern state to attain control over a full half of the Mediterranean, while the repeated recurrence of the North-South divide in pre-Mongol Chinese history (between 184 and 1271, Beijing and Nanjing were ruled by the same empire for less than 350 years!) shows potential for two Chinas. Medieval Muslims thought North and South China were two different nations.
 
Well, you could have tried religious tolerance, somewhat like Julian the apostate tried.
Julian was, in my view, not that good an emperor. For religion, he tried swtching the boat mid-stream, and that included trying to divide the numerous christian sects against eachother, which caused all sorts of enmities within the christian populace of the Empire and undermined his popularity among the lower classes to little advantage. I'm afraid that christianity's rise among the citizens and ruling classes of the empire was inevitable after Constantine.
I fail to see how switching the main religion of the empire will solve its principal problems. Sure, one could say that christianity was divisive, but so were the various regionalistic paganisms of the empire. Instead of Julian, i'd propose that Valens being a bit more patient, waiting for his brother's forces to catch up, and winning the Battle of Adrianople would be a more surefire PoD for a longer-lasting Rome.
 

Deleted member 97083

I believe Walter Schiedel questioned the geographical thesis. The Mediterranean was very possibly more conducive to integration than pre-Sui China, where all rivers ran west-east and there was no way to properly integrate the Yangzi and Yellow river basins (no Grand Canal, and maritime trade was poorly developed in Han China). And, of course, the Ottoman example shows that it certainly isn't impossible for an Early Modern state to attain control over a full half of the Mediterranean, while the repeated recurrence of the North-South divide in pre-Mongol Chinese history (between 184 and 1271, Beijing and Nanjing were ruled by the same empire for less than 350 years!) shows potential for two Chinas. Medieval Muslims thought North and South China were two different nations.
If North Africa and the Levant were the same religion as southern Europe, as they were in Late Roman era, I wonder if it would actually be more likely to see an at least partial Roman reunification than to not see one at all. Particularly with the Ottomans reuniting the Islamic parts of the former Roman Empire IOTL.
 
If North Africa and the Levant were the same religion as southern Europe, as they were in Late Roman era, I wonder if it would actually be more likely to see an at least partial Roman reunification than to not see one at all. Particularly with the Ottomans reuniting the Islamic parts of the former Roman Empire IOTL.
Yes, I'm inclined to think that Islam was what made Mediterranean disunity permanent. More specifically, the Muslim conquest of Persia and the resulting creation of a new Islamic civilization. As Robert Hoyland points out, if the Arabs had conquered only the Levant, Egypt, and North Africa, they would probably have Romanized like the Germanic conquerors.

Edit: Or one could imagine that had the Arabs failed at Qadisiyyah but conquered Constantinople, the new Roman Empire would be a Muslim Arab one. Which would have certain parallels in the conquest dynasties of Chinese history.
 
What about having the Yue survive as a distinct people (along with the Miao/Hmong and the various Tai-Kadai peoples remaining the majority in the "lowlands" of Southern China) as a more ancient POD? Could that work/?
 

Deleted member 97083

Yes, I'm inclined to think that Islam was what made Mediterranean disunity permanent. More specifically, the Muslim conquest of Persia and the resulting creation of a new Islamic civilization. As Robert Hoyland points out, if the Arabs had conquered only the Levant, Egypt, and North Africa, they would probably have Romanized like the Germanic conquerors.

Edit: Or one could imagine that had the Arabs failed at Qadisiyyah but conquered Constantinople, the new Roman Empire would be a Muslim Arab one. Which would have certain parallels in the conquest dynasties of Chinese history.
An interesting, but probably implausible, potential TL could be the Arabs failing to take Persia but absolutely steamrolling the Byzantines, Visigoths, Franks, and Lombards, uniting the whole Mediterranean basin and in the process becoming completely outnumbered by their new subjects, the only unifying factors of this empire being Romanization and Islam.

Due to the logistical factors of Tours and the Sieges of Constantinople, and the political structure of the actual Umayad Caliphate, I suppose it's "Alexander goes West"-tier plausibility, though.

Then again, without Arab settlement in Mesopotamia, Arab settlement in Tunisia and Anatolia could provide two new powerbases.
 
I believe Walter Schiedel questioned the geographical thesis. The Mediterranean was very possibly more conducive to integration than pre-Sui China, where all rivers ran west-east and there was no way to properly integrate the Yangzi and Yellow river basins (no Grand Canal, and maritime trade was poorly developed in Han China). And, of course, the Ottoman example shows that it certainly isn't impossible for an Early Modern state to attain control over a full half of the Mediterranean, while the repeated recurrence of the North-South divide in pre-Mongol Chinese history (between 184 and 1271, Beijing and Nanjing were ruled by the same empire for less than 350 years!) shows potential for two Chinas. Medieval Muslims thought North and South China were two different nations.
I'm sure there are critics of this, and with good reason. However I do think it plays a factor.

It is exactly because the Mediterranean was so valuable a trade and transportation medium that the problem arises. I didn't mean to imply that the Yellow and Yangtze rivers are more valuable than the Mediterranean. What matters was that they were valuable enough to greatly enrich the Chinese, while not being valuable enough to invite invasions. The Chinese were able to generally have their main territories centered around them, without invaders arriving specifically seeking to gain access to them. They were comparatively enriching, while internationally not so crucial a resource as an entire sea. The Mediterranean was enough for wars to be fought over. Many wars throughout history have been fought for sea ports for access to trade and whatnot. Syria is always going to be a target for any civilizations controlling Mesopotamia, along with civilizations centered on Egypt. North African polities are generally always at risk from Berber tribesman or other mainland peoples wishing to control the Sub-Saharan trade routes all the way to the sea. Anatolia is always going to be threatened by the Eurasian steppe peoples. The Balkans from those migrating south from central Europe. Italy from Western Europe, to a degree. Having sole access to the Mediterranean Sea, as the Roman Empire did at its height, would all but ensure invaders making war on you to gain access to it. While a strong state could potentially hold off multiple opponents, no nation is always strong and so there's the constant risk of invasions happening during civil wars, plagues, times of corruption, etc.

The Ottomans if only are an example of this. Its one thing to conquer good chunks of the Mediterranean for a time. The Romans did it. The Arabs did it, multiple times. However this generally happened during times of strength, only for the real nightmare to be from holding them against pretenders, rebellions, and outside invaders. The WRE lost territory after territory to barbarians till it collapsed. The ERE found itself under assault for centuries without fail. The Abbasids gradually became decentralized till most territories along the Mediterranean were de facto independent. The Ottomans found themselves subjected to multiple countries taking bits and pieces. Conquering vast stretches is comparatively easy to holding those territories from invaders who want to them as well. In comparison besides a number of steppe peoples, who were drawn to the riches and power of the Chinese than the geographical advantages of their territory, most of the conflicts over stretches of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers were during times of division among the Chinese. Although I'm not at all an expert in Chinese history, so tell me otherwise if there are actually wars where groups actually invaded China for access to the Yellow or Yangtze Rivers rather than to conquer or defeat the Chinese as a whole.

I did actually consider saying a North-South divide was possible. However with the challenge being to basically have China go the way of Rome, I wasn't sure whether a North-South divide would be enough. That's closer to the establishment of the East and Western Roman Empires than the collapse most of Rome suffered over time. I figured we'd more need a China in the condition of the Warring States Period or at least the Three Kingdoms.

Just because a group Romanizes, does not mean they unite. It is possible all the Mediterranean nations could end up Romanized does not mean they are at all united. Would a Mediterranean that stays almost entirely Roman even if split up into multiple countries fulfill the challenge? Half a dozen states that all claim to be successors to the Roman Empire in the same strain as the Byzantine Empire?

Edit: What I mean is that while the Chinese aren't a self-contained unit to any degree, a country that holds the entire Mediterranean ala the Romans is exposed to almost constant directions on all sides but the West (assuming they hold all of Iberia) from peoples and places with a clear economic reason to snatching a piece of the Mediterranean from them whenever the opportunity arises. Not a position of safety to weather turbulent times.
 
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Well, you could have tried religious tolerance, somewhat like Julian the apostate tried.
The financial aspect of the imperial cult made this a somewhat tough sell, as did the fact that the rule of law was tough to maintain in the face of movements like that of the Donatists, who actively tried to martyr themselves in a sort of suicide by cop type action.

Religious tolerance as an official doctrine seems hard to maintain over an extended period of time. A nominally Christian imperial bureaucracy and emperor that simply decides not to stir up issues with anti-Pagan legislation happened repeatedly, and with any semblance of dynastic continuity, could have been made into a defacto policy.

The increasing intertwining of the Nicene compliant churches with the structure of the Roman government made it very difficult to imagine a pagan revival occurring.

Ultimately, however, there had to be reasons for the Roman state to behave in this manner, and in OTL, when the value of looted temples and expropriated property made tempting targets for a government in almost constant financial turmoil, there just weren't. Had Paganism died out quickly among the elite and Christianity never taken as much hold with the general population at large, then it is easy to imagine the opposite happening.
 

Wallet

Banned
China is basically one ethnic group.* The Han people speak a common language and genetics. *

Rome had so many different types of people. Hispanics, Latins, Greeks, Africans, Jews, Arabs, Franks, Celts, etc. Rome never fused into a single ethnic group. In times of distress it's only natural they would split apart. Lots of groups that wouldn't have peacefully interacted in any other circumstances.

*= I'm aware of the differences in ethnic groups and languages of china. But they are still "Chinese".
 
You would need to preserve the local cultures within China, instead of large-scale cultural homogenisation (Han) to start with.

Maybe the Yue could be the equivalent to the Greeks in this case, so a Yue-speaking southern "Chinese" dynasty could be the ERE equivalent.

China did preserve the local cultures, what it had done was create a resilient class of administrators that shared a literary culture to bridge the divide between cultures. No matter how bad it got or who conquered who they still needed to administer the land and the influence of the bureaucrats eventually permeated in the new administration. What you need for Rome was a heavier and more pervasive bureaucracy.

That, a proper succession plan beyond who has the best army, and some way to keep the military loyal.

China is basically one ethnic group.* The Han people speak a common language and genetics. *

Rome had so many different types of people. Hispanics, Latins, Greeks, Africans, Jews, Arabs, Franks, Celts, etc. Rome never fused into a single ethnic group. In times of distress it's only natural they would split apart. Lots of groups that wouldn't have peacefully interacted in any other circumstances.

*= I'm aware of the differences in ethnic groups and languages of china. But they are still "Chinese".

You need to understand that just as recently as the 90s, when I was growing up in China local dialects between province were mutually unintelligible even if the writing was the same. There's a reason all the popular comedians come from the North-West, its because its the only dialect that people from both the south and north understand. Its only very very recently that the Communists are enforcing Mandarin as the dialect of unity.
 
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@Irene makes a very good point. The differences between the language in different regions of China is so great that linguists (or, non-Chinese ones anyway) usually consider them to be seperate languages. Cantonese or Min, even in writing, are often entirely unintelligable to those who only know Mandarin. But this does bring up an interesting factor, prior to the twentieth century, almost all writing in China was in Classical Chinese, with its descendant languages remaining unwritten. Perhaps if a way could be found to tie writing to Latin as firmly, it might foster a feeling that the Romance languages, despite being mutually unintelligable, are merely dialects of Latin, like how most speakers of Sinitic languages reguard their language to be a dialect of 'Chinese'.
 
Of the later Emperors, Julian seems like a good starting point. He was a reformer in government as well as religious sense, and if given 20-30 years and a hand picked successor, you could have another period of 3-4 "good" Emperors who set up a "tradition" of hand picked successors that strengthens the Empire, avoids the divisions of east and west, and sets up an Imperial ideology.

Julian might be promising, although I think you'd probably have to butterfly away his idiosyncratic religious beliefs: since neither the Christians nor the pagans wanted to be part of his pseudo-Church, trying to set it up would only ever be, at best, a waste of time and effort, and at worst, divisive and damaging to the Empire's cohesion.

China is harder due to geography, as in it's all plains and thus few natural barriers. I think Nomads might be the answer. Have them be more disruptive. But that is fairly vague.

I've actually seen an interesting argument that the nomads were responsible for (northern) China uniting so much. Basically, because of climactic factors there was always going to be an agriculturalist-nomad divide relatively close to the Chinese heartland, creating a clear us-and-them distinction for people to unite around. In Europe, on the other hand, European-style agriculture and culture spread much further out, meaning that, even thought northern Europe is every bit as flat and barrier-less as northern China, there wasn't really a common enemy to unite people, and consequently the continent remained divided.

One problem for the late Roman Empire was religious disagreements. In order to make the Roman Empire more lasting, you would probably need to avoid the disagreements among various Christian groups (Christological controversies) or maybe avoid the empire to becoming Christian in the first place.

Religious disagreements were indeed a phenomenon of the later Empire, but I'm sceptical as to their importance in its fall. For all the anathemas being thrown around, religious differences seem to have had little or no role in Rome's foreign or civil wars,* and Emperors were happy to appoint heretics and pagans to high office.

(* The only exception I can think of is the civil war between Eugenius and Theodosius, although even here Eugenius' usurpation seems to have been caused by the political situation in the Western Empire, with religion being used to drum up support for a conflict that was going to happen anyway rather than being a cause of the fighting.)

China is basically one ethnic group.* The Han people speak a common language and genetics. *

Rome had so many different types of people. Hispanics, Latins, Greeks, Africans, Jews, Arabs, Franks, Celts, etc. Rome never fused into a single ethnic group. In times of distress it's only natural they would split apart. Lots of groups that wouldn't have peacefully interacted in any other circumstances.

*= I'm aware of the differences in ethnic groups and languages of china. But they are still "Chinese".

Most people in the Empire considered themselves Roman by the fourth century AD, and there were few if any nationalistic rebellions during the later Empire.
 
@Irene makes a very good point. The differences between the language in different regions of China is so great that linguists (or, non-Chinese ones anyway) usually consider them to be seperate languages. Cantonese or Min, even in writing, are often entirely unintelligable to those who only know Mandarin. But this does bring up an interesting factor, prior to the twentieth century, almost all writing in China was in Classical Chinese, with its descendant languages remaining unwritten. Perhaps if a way could be found to tie writing to Latin as firmly, it might foster a feeling that the Romance languages, despite being mutually unintelligable, are merely dialects of Latin, like how most speakers of Sinitic languages reguard their language to be a dialect of 'Chinese'.

Erm, I don't think the mere adoption of a different writing script will have any effect on the identity of a people. Take for example the Mongolian people divided in Mongolia (formerly under Soviet influence thus using the Cyrillic script) and the Mongolians in inner Mongolia (who continued using the traditional Mongolian script). If you ask any Mongolian today, I don't think any of them would say they aren't ethnically Mongolian just because they use a different script.
 
I'm afraid that christianity's rise among the citizens and ruling classes of the empire was inevitable after Constantine.

It can be argued that, given its appeal, this was inevitable from the start.

Instead of Julian, i'd propose that Valens being a bit more patient, waiting for his brother's forces to catch up, and winning the Battle of Adrianople would be a more surefire PoD for a longer-lasting Rome.

It would've helped but wouldn't have addressed the fundamental problem--loss of devotion to the empire by c 400 CE. Rome had beaten foreign enemies many times before but new threats kept coming. When the old resiliency of Rome finally faded, it was all over.
 
I wonder what would happen to the Tai-Kadai and Miao-Yao peoples in such a scenario.
They would probably stay in their respective (original) homelands, Guangxi-Guangdong and Huguang regions. They're still be Sinicized, but limited as their basic culture remained intact, especially the language,
 
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