alternatehistory.com
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It cannot be underestimated the cutoff of trade in Romania during the crucial period following the effective end of the Golden Horde as a unified state. As much as perhaps 60% of all commercial income was obtained through the vital Black Sea nexus, primarily through ports owned or influenced by the Golden Horde.
Now you might be asking, why didn’t they just trade with Georgia? Or with Trebizond? Well… they did. It just didn’t end up making a large portion of the budget as few Roman traders dared to go there. You can blame the reason on the fact that over the decades the Genoese had gained near absolute monopoly on the commerce of these parts. And they did not tolerate competition. Often a trade ship would find itself prey to ‘pirates’, ‘bad fortune’ or just blatant raids by Genoese ships. Normally this would provoke retaliation, but such was the need to stay on the good graces of Genoa that Romania’s state trading company [1] decided to merely stick to the Golden Horde’s territory. There, The Horde ensured no one state would have a monopoly on commerce, making it a safe place for to invest in commerce.
But now the Horde was in chaos. Timur’s attack and follow up campaign north had majorly disrupted the traditional routes of commercial flow since the establishment of the Mongol Empire over 2 centuries earlier. Less coin stopped filling the coffers of Constantinople.
Ok, so trade has slowed to a crawl. Why not just use the money saved up to whether this crisis? Why is this so bad? The answer is because at the time the empire was on a spending spree. A very big one.
Attempting to undo the economic ruin caused by the Crusader States of Greece, recentralize the state, patronize the cities to ensure the government was still strong, rebuild and repopulate Anatolia while recreating an army from scratch is very expensive. Doing it while keeping taxes low, allowing the Church to remain with a rather loose leash and while generally having a lighter hand on the lower classes is very, very, very expensive. Actually even before the crash such was the spending that Romania began to borrow money from Italian bankers (primarily Genoa and Florence) just to keep up the pace of spending. Economic Growth and internal state revenues were simply not enough to keep pace with costs. Thus the crash was swift and brutal.
In a mere 4 months the coffers were once more near bankrupt. The word panic has been thrown around quite a lot but that’s simply the only way to describe the mood in the state. The aging John V, deeply distressed and inexperienced at managing economic problems, due to his own limited training of economics and simply authorized with slashing spending whenever possible. This impromptu austerity fell overwhelmingly on the civilian sector; John refused to ignore the military (rightly) believing that his soldiers and/or his mercenaries would become a liability should they stop being paid.
This was both a good and bad idea. While the obvious benefit was yes, the government was indeed spending less money -and at first it seemed the budget was becoming manageable- this came with a huge drawback. It increased what we would call unemployment. The vast majority of projects the government employed what ‘day workers’, that is, temporary workers hired from the urban poor or countryside to take part in whatever task was needed to be completed. Could be construction on a building, could be land clearage, could be constructing roads. Also could be workers hired on government owned farms and what not. Point is, whatever projects that were in the making were suddenly and without notice put on hold. Of course, this might have saved the government money but it disenfranchised thousands of people who came to depend on these jobs for their livelihood. Once more, poverty rose. Poverty leads to angry citizens. Angry citizens who like to riot over bread and their livelihood.
That’s not all however. In cutting spending, salaries were slashed on government workers, including bureaucrats. This was perhaps one of the most dangerous policies that the regime decided on. Romania’s bureaucracy since the Second Palaiologoi Civil War had rapidly grown in size, power and reach. The rise of commerce had come with a rise in the need for recording transactions and the last Civil War granted the Bureaucracy a place of unparalleled prestige. Combined with the networks of patronage, clientelism and cronyism, this turned the previously neglected and emasculated institution into the third power bloc of the state, just behind the military and church in its influence. It gets even worse when you realize that the demand for educated workers to managed the endless flow of information gave them an additional bargaining power.
Pissing this off was a bad idea.
Upon receiving the news that salaries were to be cut, the bureaucrats simply ‘re-interpreted’ the order on reducing their salaries to reducing that of the military budget, of whom there was currently an inter factional rivalry thanks to recent government patronage (Yes its stupid and petty but this is Rome). The long story short of this is that soldier were not getting their salaries, receiving much less than promised, there was less money in the budget, military plans were not carried out as effectively, etc. Do note that mercenaries in the service of The Empire were not affected by this as they were paid from the Emperor directly in order to promote loyalty.
But I digress; back to the chaos at hand. When you have such a volatile mixture the situation becomes very hectic. You’ve got angry peasants who are starving, angry soldiers, a worldview of social welfare entrenched into the population and a government that appears to do nothing to alleviate the struggles of the common folk. Add in one of the more brutal winters in the 1394-5 period and it boils over; the Urban Mob in Constantinople explodes into waves of rioting. Out in the countryside we see isolated peasant revolts, and in major cities Zealots of Thessalonica, long since faded into minor radical religious groups (That the Orthodox church had tried to co-opt or get rid of) once more rise into prominence attacking the imperial government and calling for a renewal of the status quo and a redistribution of wealth.
Continuing, things once again get worse. Unpaid soldiers begin to join in with the unorganized mobs and revolts of dissent in European Romania. What was once small, local riots begin to coalesce into rebellion, led by charismatic figures eager to take advantage of the situation. Promising bread, coin and safety, they vow to take the fight against a corrupt government that has forgotten why they were put in power in the first place.
Romania, free of internal civil strife for an unprecedented 53 years, descended into civil war once again.
[1] Recall that the State has a monopoly on external commerce upon following the Venetian model. Therefore, trading is done via a state owned company, not unlike how guilds within a city would dominate a local industry.
The fact there won't be a Crimean Khanate to steal thousands upon thousands of slaves would lead to a wank in and of itself.
And I won't.I think Sov said earlier that he didn't want to do Timur ex Machina with this TL. I really don't care as long as it gets to the scale of my Byzantium in size.
Could happen.
Depends on the situation and whether the Byzantines benefit more. I doubt Egypt will be a target in the foreseeable future however.
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It cannot be underestimated the cutoff of trade in Romania during the crucial period following the effective end of the Golden Horde as a unified state. As much as perhaps 60% of all commercial income was obtained through the vital Black Sea nexus, primarily through ports owned or influenced by the Golden Horde.
Now you might be asking, why didn’t they just trade with Georgia? Or with Trebizond? Well… they did. It just didn’t end up making a large portion of the budget as few Roman traders dared to go there. You can blame the reason on the fact that over the decades the Genoese had gained near absolute monopoly on the commerce of these parts. And they did not tolerate competition. Often a trade ship would find itself prey to ‘pirates’, ‘bad fortune’ or just blatant raids by Genoese ships. Normally this would provoke retaliation, but such was the need to stay on the good graces of Genoa that Romania’s state trading company [1] decided to merely stick to the Golden Horde’s territory. There, The Horde ensured no one state would have a monopoly on commerce, making it a safe place for to invest in commerce.
But now the Horde was in chaos. Timur’s attack and follow up campaign north had majorly disrupted the traditional routes of commercial flow since the establishment of the Mongol Empire over 2 centuries earlier. Less coin stopped filling the coffers of Constantinople.
Ok, so trade has slowed to a crawl. Why not just use the money saved up to whether this crisis? Why is this so bad? The answer is because at the time the empire was on a spending spree. A very big one.
Attempting to undo the economic ruin caused by the Crusader States of Greece, recentralize the state, patronize the cities to ensure the government was still strong, rebuild and repopulate Anatolia while recreating an army from scratch is very expensive. Doing it while keeping taxes low, allowing the Church to remain with a rather loose leash and while generally having a lighter hand on the lower classes is very, very, very expensive. Actually even before the crash such was the spending that Romania began to borrow money from Italian bankers (primarily Genoa and Florence) just to keep up the pace of spending. Economic Growth and internal state revenues were simply not enough to keep pace with costs. Thus the crash was swift and brutal.
In a mere 4 months the coffers were once more near bankrupt. The word panic has been thrown around quite a lot but that’s simply the only way to describe the mood in the state. The aging John V, deeply distressed and inexperienced at managing economic problems, due to his own limited training of economics and simply authorized with slashing spending whenever possible. This impromptu austerity fell overwhelmingly on the civilian sector; John refused to ignore the military (rightly) believing that his soldiers and/or his mercenaries would become a liability should they stop being paid.
This was both a good and bad idea. While the obvious benefit was yes, the government was indeed spending less money -and at first it seemed the budget was becoming manageable- this came with a huge drawback. It increased what we would call unemployment. The vast majority of projects the government employed what ‘day workers’, that is, temporary workers hired from the urban poor or countryside to take part in whatever task was needed to be completed. Could be construction on a building, could be land clearage, could be constructing roads. Also could be workers hired on government owned farms and what not. Point is, whatever projects that were in the making were suddenly and without notice put on hold. Of course, this might have saved the government money but it disenfranchised thousands of people who came to depend on these jobs for their livelihood. Once more, poverty rose. Poverty leads to angry citizens. Angry citizens who like to riot over bread and their livelihood.
That’s not all however. In cutting spending, salaries were slashed on government workers, including bureaucrats. This was perhaps one of the most dangerous policies that the regime decided on. Romania’s bureaucracy since the Second Palaiologoi Civil War had rapidly grown in size, power and reach. The rise of commerce had come with a rise in the need for recording transactions and the last Civil War granted the Bureaucracy a place of unparalleled prestige. Combined with the networks of patronage, clientelism and cronyism, this turned the previously neglected and emasculated institution into the third power bloc of the state, just behind the military and church in its influence. It gets even worse when you realize that the demand for educated workers to managed the endless flow of information gave them an additional bargaining power.
Pissing this off was a bad idea.
Upon receiving the news that salaries were to be cut, the bureaucrats simply ‘re-interpreted’ the order on reducing their salaries to reducing that of the military budget, of whom there was currently an inter factional rivalry thanks to recent government patronage (Yes its stupid and petty but this is Rome). The long story short of this is that soldier were not getting their salaries, receiving much less than promised, there was less money in the budget, military plans were not carried out as effectively, etc. Do note that mercenaries in the service of The Empire were not affected by this as they were paid from the Emperor directly in order to promote loyalty.
But I digress; back to the chaos at hand. When you have such a volatile mixture the situation becomes very hectic. You’ve got angry peasants who are starving, angry soldiers, a worldview of social welfare entrenched into the population and a government that appears to do nothing to alleviate the struggles of the common folk. Add in one of the more brutal winters in the 1394-5 period and it boils over; the Urban Mob in Constantinople explodes into waves of rioting. Out in the countryside we see isolated peasant revolts, and in major cities Zealots of Thessalonica, long since faded into minor radical religious groups (That the Orthodox church had tried to co-opt or get rid of) once more rise into prominence attacking the imperial government and calling for a renewal of the status quo and a redistribution of wealth.
Continuing, things once again get worse. Unpaid soldiers begin to join in with the unorganized mobs and revolts of dissent in European Romania. What was once small, local riots begin to coalesce into rebellion, led by charismatic figures eager to take advantage of the situation. Promising bread, coin and safety, they vow to take the fight against a corrupt government that has forgotten why they were put in power in the first place.
Romania, free of internal civil strife for an unprecedented 53 years, descended into civil war once again.
[1] Recall that the State has a monopoly on external commerce upon following the Venetian model. Therefore, trading is done via a state owned company, not unlike how guilds within a city would dominate a local industry.