And so exits Odysseus Sideros, King of Kings, Basileus of Rhomania Imperium..
The current treaty is definitely the most plausible one. The Cypriot analogy is hopefully one that conveys how long this treaty will last. I mean it "evenly" splits off Arab and Persian majority cultures which should hopefully help Iskandar solidify his power.
I wonder what Iskandar's relationship with Athena is? Has this been covered at all that anyone would know of?
I never covered that; I kept getting distracted by other details. But they know each other personally, just from all the time Iskandar was around Odysseus before they went east.
I literally gasped when he drank that goblet. People were looking at me on the bus
That's the mark of an excellent story - when it pulls emotion like that out of you. Now Athena gets to rule in earnest just like her father said she would all those years ago.
Hehehe. Anti-sorry.
Now the goal is to make you cry in an inappropriate location…
considering the new nation is basically disarmed i think they look more like the ancient Sumer.
Disarmed…ancient Sumer…I think you need a different example.
Wow, what a finish to Ody. Now that he’s gone it’s just Athena left in terms of major narrative players?
Mesopotamia also reminds me of Armenia in Antiquity, hopefully with less foreign interference in the succession. Always interesting to see the Komnenoi and Drakoi reigning in the east versus the Sideroi west.
Athena is now the only major active narrative player. Not sure when and who more will join her at this point.
Also I guess the parallel with Alexander is even more evident: their age of death is quite similar (If I recall correctly Alexander was 33?).
Nice for the Roman empire to get Mosul, but the Mesopotamian Kingdom looks like trouble for sure. A Christian dinasty over a muslim population?
Yeah, Mesopotamia is not an easy tiger to ride. It’s a good thing Maria of Agra decided to go east with her sons by Andreas III.
Herakleios III and personality: Won’t go into details here, but his personality will be important and shaped by his parentage. I’m planning an update for the near future that is a look at the new generation.
Food, RITE, and the metropole: Food shipments from RITE to the metropole are not happening. It just doesn’t work. Rice is high-bulk and low-value, the exact opposite of what long-distance trade goods need to be at this time. Plus the lack of preservation, the several transshipment points, and that the traffic can only go west at certain times. Plus the inability to move bulk goods at sufficient scale. To feed the residents of Constantinople one pound of bread per person per day requires 160 tons of bread per day. If the entirety of the OTL Dutch merchant marine from 1670 (estimated 568,000 tons displacement) was dedicated to shipping bread to the Roman heartland, it could feed
3% of the Roman heartland’s population for a day. And that’s being generous on the shipping side, since it’s talking displacement and not actual cargo space, and not factoring in spoilage. Somewhere in Fernand Braudel’s
Civilization and Capitalism, he estimates that the early modern long-distance grain trade in the Mediterranean provided at most 2% of the region’s caloric needs. The remainder, and the vast bulk, was supplied by local sources.
(I think there are a couple reasons people focus on the long-distance and bulk trade. It feels very modern, and so people focus on it, but don’t realize the much smaller scale on which it operated compared to broader society than it does today. Also the bulk foodstuffs were used to supply the big cities. Big cities also feel very modern, and so modern people focus on them. Plus our sources concentrate on the cities, so the cities loom much larger based on the source material than they would in actuality.)
Holdings in the East: Spain still has Tidore and Ternate as vassals, as well as Ayutthaya as an ally. Then there are tons of trading/merchant quarters all over the place. Rhomania has a clear lead in local assets and holdings, although the Latins have the ability to directly send reinforcements from the metropole in a way the Romans don’t. The issue then would be where it would base once it got there, but that’s what native allies are for anyway.
Speaking of the Great Eastern Orthodox Co-Prosperity Sphere, I’d love an update on the Russian states and the process of Siberian colonization
Russia is going to be getting focused update(s) in the relatively near future.
Civilizationism vs racism: Civilizationism is still a form of prejudice and bigotry, just operating on different parameters from OTL bigotry. The Romans wouldn’t look down on Melanesian or Australian natives because of their dark skin. But they would look down on them for their primitive lifeways. No farming? Minimal clothing? No cities? On the civilizationism scale, they’re at the very bottom.
I'm curious, woth the mentioning of civilisationism what the Romans know of and think of both Majapahit and Nusantara?
It'd be very interesting if rather than RITE started along a journey towards a Despotate of Nusantara. It'd certainly need to have included and converted many of the peoples in their domain so that Orthodox locals are the ones calling the shots (or some sort of Greco-Malaysian demographic) for it to be more legitimate, but it'd be cool if RITE became less a vehicle for dominating Nusantara, but instead gained more independence and eventually even true independence whilst uniting the region.
Nusantara varies. There’s the likes of Majapahit and Mataram, which are high on the civilizationism scale because they have all the components of what the Romans consider a sophisticated developed society should have. But then you have various hill peoples and inhabitants of the smaller islands which don’t, so on that same scale they’re barely-human.
As for the second bit, well, that’s not how empires work.
This ties into a fundamental issue I’ve been grappling with. On the one hand, I do want the Romans to be good guys. But if they’re practicing empire, they’re not good guys. I can’t have it both ways. In a sense I could, but that would require whitewashing empire, which I find morally repugnant and offensive. One of my big issues with how the British Empire is so often portrayed on AH.com is that the British Empire is presented as a ‘good thing’, with the evil and suffering and oppression excused or justified or just ignored. I hate that, and I’ll be damned if I end up portraying the Roman Empire like that. No to protagonist-centered morality.