Recent content by Wednesday

This first post is mostly a teaser for the rest of the TL, including the PoD and a copious amount of setting. It also is somewhat long. If y'all think that this particular installment is too long, lemme know and I can try to cut down. Comments, questions, extrapolation, all are of course...

40,000 Romans are the most reasonable numbers I've seen, from Treadgold, FWIW.

Lulz. There was a minor diplomatic crisis in the mid-1890s over purported Turkish massacres of Armenian Christians. It was nearly brought to war in late 1895, when Russia was seriously contemplating seizing the Straits as preemptive action in the event of British intervention. Britain was...

Are you aware of the 1894 Rosebery appeal and of the subsequent formation of the Near Eastern Triplice?

It depends on who has control of German foreign policy. Von Bismarck wanted colonies as a sop to public opinion, and to try to put a wedge between Friedrich III and the British. The ministers under Wilhelm II wanted colonies as a way to make them enough of a threat to Britain to force the...

Sounds reasonable. In OTL 1914, the Anglo-Russian agreement over Persia was collapsing, and only solidified by the onset of the Great War.

Fiddle with the Second Schleswig War and you can at least go further with pan-Scandinavism. Problem is, in the upper levels of government it didn't have too many big partisans. The Swedes would need to feel genuinely threatened by somebody or something to want to unify with Denmark. Something...

I doubt Britain would have agreed to that, or France. :p

Fair enough. I haven't done as much reading on Selim Yavuz as I ought have (actually getting some books now to rectify that :)), so I didn't think of him.

The Holy Alliance was an instrument of suppression of revolution. The Greek uprising was a revolution. As such, the guarantors of the Holy Alliance were induced to ignore it and not support it, von Metternich especially. When the original Russian tsar to devise the Holy Alliance, Aleksandr I...

I blame Tuchman.

Khalid ibn al-Walid, by far.

Beat me to it. I'd say de Ruyter too, or possibly Phormion or the aforementioned Nelson.

Uh...by this, do you mean "Germany does not adhere to the plan broadly devised by Alfred von Schlieffen and better codified and constantly altered by Helmuth Johann Ludwig von Moltke during the initial stages of the First World war in August and September of 1914, instead embarking on a somewhat...

Alexios didn't have either the manpower or the interest in going after Jerusalem, much less most of Anatolia. (Kinda weird how the Komneni never really concentrated on Anatolia as much as they could have. I never really understood that.) Anyway, it's estimated that in the late 1090s Alexios'...