For all my whining, not including turtle ships is the right thing to do. Great update as always!
Yeah, once I read those arguments and was convinced I didn’t see any reason to have turtle ships, unless I wanted to include them just for some heavy war junks to blow them out of the water. And that just seemed mean.
The Chinese invaded Korea like a kid shoving his hand into an anthill.
In their defense, I don’t think the Chinese had any reason to expect the violent reaction on the part of the Korean yangban and peasantry. When I started reading about the OTL Imjin War I was really surprised by the number of Righteous Armies that rose up to harass the Japanese invaders.
Great update as always, looking forward to the climax of the Eulhae War and the introduction of the Spanish Armada to South Asia.
Also, since this is getting into naval matters, if you need more resources on naval warfare and things that went into it this YouTube channel (
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4mftUX7apmV1vsVXZh7RTw) is a pretty good source for information and inspiration. Seriously, if you want a laugh listen to the videos on Russia's 2nd Pacific Squadron, the one that sailed around the world to be sunk by Japan, or the Battle off Samar, where a few destroyers and escort carriers actually hold off a main battle fleet.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Do the Chinese actually wish to annex Korea?
The initial goal was Liaodong and Chinese supremacy over the Jurchen, but with the seizure of Pyongyang the Chinese have gotten more ambitious and seek to annex Korea. Plus there’s the Han and Tang precedent.
It could be a good change of pace.
True. But I’m oddly a lot pickier about fiction than nonfiction books. Most new series I’ve discovered over the past few years have been by browsing the shelves at my local library, not an option right now.
I’ve been delving more into astronomy lately as a change from my usual history fare, and just finished a book about the Cambrian period which is new for me.
With the number of rich Japanese sons that must be going to Constantinople to study, I can't imagine that Japan hasn't adopted Roman style Kataphraktoi cavalry yet. Heavy lancers and curaissiers wouldn't be unknown in Japan by this point.
Then again most Japanese forces in Korea are the Shinto-Buddhists from Honshu who the Shimazu are trying to weaken, so the western style cavalry wouldn't be prominent.
There are some, but at this point there still aren’t that many Japanese going to Constantinople. It’s a really long haul from Osaka to Constantinople. So the numbers are in the dozens, not the hundreds.
Cavalry: The cavalry aspect will become somewhat prominent in the next update, but Korea really isn’t good cavalry country. I believe there’s a Korean saying that if Korea was flat, it’d be the size of China. Plus this is the era where firearm-equipped infantry are really become the rulers of the battlefield, so the cavalry issue, while prominent, isn’t a game-changer by itself.
As for Japanese cavalry, given the difficulties of shipping, their army is almost all infantry. (I believe this matches the OTL Imjin War; I’m having a really hard time remembering any mentions of Japanese cavalry, although plenty of Korean and Chinese ones.) And their military trajectory is similar to OTL, as the geography and the political venue of the Sengoku Jidai era is still really similar to OTL, so not much has changed.
This line of discussion is pointless if you're treating it with even some degree of 'it could happen!' because it never will. Not without significant changes that would make this into a completely different story.
Besides, you lose things in adaptation and the format of this TL is borderline impossible to adapt into another form of media.
Rather than talk about 'if' or 'how' or 'will' and waste your time just skip the chaff and pretend it has. Theorize about what actor you'd want to play Andreas Niketas or what you think would be the most interesting parts to be adapted into another form. Personally I'd like to see some of the big battles such as at Thessaloniki and Nineveh like something out of movies on Napoleon or the American Civil War.
While I’m flattered that some people imagine this turning into an HBO show, the above matches my opinion pretty well. Having the story as-is I just don’t see working. All historical fantasy of which I’m familiar is still fairly well rooted in actual history. The viewpoint character(s) may be fictional, but they’re watching events that actually happened.
If I were to convert young Andreas I’s story into a book, I would convert the setting into a fantasy world while keeping the plot and characters. It’d be much easier to explain and sell that way, rather than “it’s an alternate history set late enough that it’s completely divorced from real events”, which wouldn’t sell to anyone not interested in a niche alternate history already.
[Snip cool picture]
Constantinople in the 2100s lol
That's a nice f***ng picture
Oooo, pretty.
One thing people say doomed the empire was its incredibly unstable political system. Emperors could be crowned and de-crowned at a shockingly fast pace, so what are some things that this empire did to stop that?
Personally, I think the ‘incredibly unstable political system’ is a bit exaggerated. If you compare Byzantium to its contemporaries, the political strife seems consistent with other medieval states, be they England or the Abbasid Caliphate. Byzantium’s issue was that the political strife would often be combined with foreign pressure, and the double jeopardy is a killer.
That said, Excubitore covered most of it. One thing I’m going to be emphasizing in Not the End is the Laskarids working to break the nobility and convert them into a service nobility (which seems to have been a goal of Theodoros II IOTL). When you add university education being required for government service and regular pay in cash for the army, you have a structure where the nobility are incentivized to work with the state to get ahead, while those who won’t play ball are too weak to cause much trouble.
Yes, thank you.
As a Patreon member that has considered this a superlative work of fiction for years - planning for an adaptation is like planning for a trip to Mars.
But, but I want a trip to Mars…
(Actually Enceladus or Europa probably should be more of a priority than Mars.)
@Basileus444 I just caught up and I'd like to say this is an excellent timeline. Will the finished timelines page be updated anytime soon?
Thank you.
I’d completely forgotten about those. I don’t have any plans for updating on those. The initial posts are from before the forum had the ability to threadmark posts. With the ability to threadmark the update posts allowing readers to just jump to the next update rather than fishing for it, I don’t see the purpose of the Finished TL page.