alternatehistory.com
0: The Opening Salvo
Turns out you can’t teach an old poster new tricks -- I’m back on my bullshit, writing about one of the three or four TL ideas that’ve been bouncing around my brain for my entire time on this here website.
I can’t promise any of you that this will be completed, nor deeply researched, nor even written beginning with the POD. Graphic design is emphatically NOT my passion, so unless some kind reader wants to make some maps the theater of the mind will have to do.
What I can give you, however, is a new stab into an old darkness -- the Migration Period. Long ago, before I emerged from the cave of lurkerdom, I enjoyed the History Channel series Barbarians. To this day, I remain amazed no one has tried making a prestige TV series about the era, which offers a combination of both “Vikings” and the twilight of classical sword-and-sandal civilization. Gaiseric the Vandal remains history’s most underrated Chad, in my book. I hope to exhibit a figure even half as cool as him within this work.
View attachment 625383
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When I first began seriously posting here in Pre-1900, two TLs covered the period -- Jaydoh’s Cadavera Vero Innumera and Zuvarq’s 2nd version of Relics of Rome. Although neither were the first major Early Migration Era TL (that being Thermopylae’s Coronation of the Hun, which was before my time), those two aforementioned TLs sparked an interest in the Völkerwanderung that, for me, has never waned.
What attracts me to the barbarian invasions, as well as the Age of Exploration, is the vastness of possibility afforded to a writer. These are periods of deep civilizational change, periods that decided the fates of peoples and their gods -- and unlike with the Bronze Age Collapse, contemporaries were nice enough to tell us future folk what the hell was going on.
By inclination, I am a Marxian. It is clear to see how the latifundias of the Roman Empire evolved into the medieval political economy we’re all familiar with. Far from the Romantic image of the era bestowed on us by the 19th century, economic and political elites kept their power and adapted to supposedly cataclysmic changes to what was once (Western) Roman society.
The two Gothic kingdoms in particular offer a powerful counter to the “Dark Ages” mythos. Even given the existence of legal separation between peoples in some post-Roman states, it was under the Ostrogoths that Boethius and Cassiodorus moved to save classical knowledge. It was under the Visigoths that the Roman Cassius, and his forebears, survived and lived as Romans -- until the coming of another barbarian invasion, instigated by the same political intrigues that once brought in Germanic peoples into the Roman empire.
However, the Völkerwanderung, and the many centuries after the initial Germanic invasions, still had massive effects on what was to come. Latin split into dialects, and then into languages -- the Roman Word, which was once alive in the flesh, became instead the province of books and laws.
The Merovingians, once foederati of the Rhenish frontier, merged Romanitas with Germanic social norms to forge the beginnings of the ancien regime of France, which shaped so much of what we think as European civilization. Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes and Normans crashed themselves against the shores of Rome’s final frontier, creating a world-spanning, culture-transforming, multi-imperial civilization that has tamed the land, the seas, and even the heavens. The Slavic and Turkic migrations changed the social character of vast regions, undoing centuries of Romanization and before that Hellenization, while also permanently shaping the religious dynamic of the Indian subcontinent.
And, of course, one merchant from the town of Mecca marshalled the energies of his people in the name of God, uniting Iranian and Hellenic civilization with Arabian theology and Indian science to change the world forever.
There were also possibilities left uncreated in our time. The Sassanids, (Eastern) Romans, and Chinese each dealt with their own barbarians, and managed to avoid conquest in the early Migration Period despite also dealing with problems both foreign and domestic. The Gupta Empire fell to their own Huns, ending classical Indian civilization and creating a fragmented political atmosphere that would remain vulnerable to invaders from over the Hindu Kush for the next 1000 years.
The Christological questions that seem academic to those of us raised in the time of the liberal world order could have been decided much differently. Different peoples being settled in different places would have created aftershocks both immediate and far-flung. What would Europe have looked like, if the Amber Road remained rich but the Volga never became important? If the slave trade was less robust in early medieval Europe, would Slavic state development have been retarded or sped up?
By using an undefined POD in the 4th century, I’m going to create a lot of these changes. Expect a Christian denomination breakdown at some point, along with the aforementioned alternate scattering of peoples. Most importantly, however, this butterflies the Prophet Muhammad and the Merovingian (and therefore Carolingian) monarchies. The changes here are astronomical -- as mentioned before, the Carolingians were key in the transition from a post-Roman but German-ruled Europe to the medieval Europe that we know.
View attachment 625384
The Muslims dwarf that by any metric -- the various permutations of their civilization and faith stretch from the Sahel to the Volga, from Xinjiang to the Bengal, from the Dinaric Alps to Papua New Guinea. It cannot be overstated the importance that Islam, and the early Arabian empires that fostered it, have to world history. A Sahel influenced by Christians, for example, wouldn’t be called the Sahel. The knowledge of three great civilizations will not be easily united in a single language’s literary canon. Trade, and the societies it helped shape, will be massively altered by Islam’s absence.
In more prosaic terms, “Medism”, as it was called derisively by the ur-Western Greeks, loses the vehicle that ultimately carried it to victory over the West’s Asian and African provinces. It was not just Muhammad whose ambitions were fulfilled by Mehmed Fatih -- it was also the ambition of Khosrau II, Shapur the Great, and the Achaemenid kings long before even them. That being said, Selim and Suleiman’s wars against the Safavids decades later had their own geopolitical echoes in the epic struggles of the Romans and the Iranians, from the time of Caesar to that of Heraclius to that of the Seljuqs and the Komnenoi. Although the West will still be able to define itself against its internal scapegoat (Jews, othered before and especially after the advent of Christ), the absence of Islam radically reshapes the geographic boundaries of what is considered Western. Exploring a different metanarrative, a different “clash of civilizations”, is one of my goals here.
Imagining a world without Muhammad is a mammoth task -- there’s a reason both of the TLs I mentioned before had analogues to Islam. This work will not include an analogue to Islam, nor a more martially inclined Arab Great Man. Envisioning a world bereft of Arabo-Muslim civilization will be both enjoyable and deeply difficult, a testament to exactly how important the Migration Period, and their contribution to it, is to human history.
While the Migration Period had its obvious immediate effects on the world, it also maintains a relevance to those of us in modern times. The past is not yet past -- in our case, the intellectual and cultural ideas of the 19th century weigh on the living to this day. The mythology of the Völkerwanderung was not a creation of the time -- it has its antecedents in semi-contemporary Germanic epics. The Volsungasaga mentions Armanaric of the Goths, Attila the Hun, and of course the Nibelung kings of the Burgundians. Beowulf also takes place in the same time period, and names a number of Germanic peoples and their semi-mythological leaders, showing the enduring power of historical memory even without widespread literacy and across both temporal and physical distance.
That being said, our conception of the Migration Era, of barbarians vs. Romans, of a Dark Ages and a total erasure of classical glory, is itself a myth. The Renaissance’s anti-medieval aspersions have left an enduring mark on our culture, but the Early Medieval period loomed large in the minds of Romantic nationalists. German nationalism drew upon the era most deeply, calling upon a rich pantheon of heroes and ancient glories that melded well with the political message of the ascendant German bourgeoisie. One Drang nach Osten cannot be conceived of as a programmatic conquest without the other taking place centuries before; one cannot conceive of Germanic unity without the heritage of the stem duchies and the firm conception of Germanic peoples as ethnically and genetically continuous, separate from the Romans.
Other cultures have also drawn on the ambiguities of the period to create their own myths. Pavelic infamously claimed the Croats were actually Ostrogoths; Polish nobles in the 17th century claimed the mantle of the Sarmatians (although only the Croats, Serbs and Sorbs bear names with a Sarmatic etymology). Most of Europe’s peoples had, at one time, entire lineages of mythic founders, going back to the Bible.
In reality, however, one must keep in mind the ethnic heterogeneity and blurred lines endemic to all sides of the Migration Period. Unlike the Arab Muslims, whose early history and tribal lineages were generally documented by a literate culture, we do not have granular explanations of exactly who was who in the barbarian tribal confederations.
19th century ethnic absolutism is deeply ahistorical, and while we can tell which groups were what in broad strokes, there was a lot of assimilation of prior peoples that gets forgotten in the mythmaking. Forgotten too in the modern era are figures like Aspar, Ricimer, Stilicho, Areobindus, Guntharic, and others -- “barbarians” who, much like the initial barbarian kings, served the Roman state and thought of themselves as members of that civilization.
Forgotten too were Romans serving their new barbarian overlords, as affiliations that were political in the 5th century were retroactively turned into permanent blood-and-soil lineages. The various royal lineages of epics like Beowulf are also much more poetic than historic -- taking them at their word is how we ended up with the farce of Swedish regnal numbering, among other things.
While a good story may be the driving forces of the latter-day histories of not-so-yesteryear (and Game of Thrones), power is power. The peoples of the long Migration Period weren’t fighting existential blood feuds to the knife against an inextricably alien Roman (or Frankish, or German, or Eastern Roman, or Arabo-Iranian) force.
The barbarian groups can best be understood as the final form of the peoples Rome fought and otherwise engaged with for centuries. Gothic wars long predated the coming of Alaric; the Goddodin of early medieval Welsh poetry were the same Votadini staring at the Romans from across Hadrian’s Wall.
To paraphrase Ibn Khaldun, these barbarian groups had greater internal cohesion, bringing in more people under a political umbrella as they navigated the slow collapse of the Roman empire. If the barbarians were forced to fight without the help of locals, without local soldiers or collaborators, they wouldn’t have won anything. The edge conquered the center, and in time the new political affiliation became social, and cultural, relegating Romanitas to a memory (in the West.)
I can’t promise any of you that this will be completed, nor deeply researched, nor even written beginning with the POD. Graphic design is emphatically NOT my passion, so unless some kind reader wants to make some maps the theater of the mind will have to do.
What I can give you, however, is a new stab into an old darkness -- the Migration Period. Long ago, before I emerged from the cave of lurkerdom, I enjoyed the History Channel series Barbarians. To this day, I remain amazed no one has tried making a prestige TV series about the era, which offers a combination of both “Vikings” and the twilight of classical sword-and-sandal civilization. Gaiseric the Vandal remains history’s most underrated Chad, in my book. I hope to exhibit a figure even half as cool as him within this work.
View attachment 625383
###
When I first began seriously posting here in Pre-1900, two TLs covered the period -- Jaydoh’s Cadavera Vero Innumera and Zuvarq’s 2nd version of Relics of Rome. Although neither were the first major Early Migration Era TL (that being Thermopylae’s Coronation of the Hun, which was before my time), those two aforementioned TLs sparked an interest in the Völkerwanderung that, for me, has never waned.
What attracts me to the barbarian invasions, as well as the Age of Exploration, is the vastness of possibility afforded to a writer. These are periods of deep civilizational change, periods that decided the fates of peoples and their gods -- and unlike with the Bronze Age Collapse, contemporaries were nice enough to tell us future folk what the hell was going on.
By inclination, I am a Marxian. It is clear to see how the latifundias of the Roman Empire evolved into the medieval political economy we’re all familiar with. Far from the Romantic image of the era bestowed on us by the 19th century, economic and political elites kept their power and adapted to supposedly cataclysmic changes to what was once (Western) Roman society.
The two Gothic kingdoms in particular offer a powerful counter to the “Dark Ages” mythos. Even given the existence of legal separation between peoples in some post-Roman states, it was under the Ostrogoths that Boethius and Cassiodorus moved to save classical knowledge. It was under the Visigoths that the Roman Cassius, and his forebears, survived and lived as Romans -- until the coming of another barbarian invasion, instigated by the same political intrigues that once brought in Germanic peoples into the Roman empire.
However, the Völkerwanderung, and the many centuries after the initial Germanic invasions, still had massive effects on what was to come. Latin split into dialects, and then into languages -- the Roman Word, which was once alive in the flesh, became instead the province of books and laws.
The Merovingians, once foederati of the Rhenish frontier, merged Romanitas with Germanic social norms to forge the beginnings of the ancien regime of France, which shaped so much of what we think as European civilization. Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes and Normans crashed themselves against the shores of Rome’s final frontier, creating a world-spanning, culture-transforming, multi-imperial civilization that has tamed the land, the seas, and even the heavens. The Slavic and Turkic migrations changed the social character of vast regions, undoing centuries of Romanization and before that Hellenization, while also permanently shaping the religious dynamic of the Indian subcontinent.
And, of course, one merchant from the town of Mecca marshalled the energies of his people in the name of God, uniting Iranian and Hellenic civilization with Arabian theology and Indian science to change the world forever.
There were also possibilities left uncreated in our time. The Sassanids, (Eastern) Romans, and Chinese each dealt with their own barbarians, and managed to avoid conquest in the early Migration Period despite also dealing with problems both foreign and domestic. The Gupta Empire fell to their own Huns, ending classical Indian civilization and creating a fragmented political atmosphere that would remain vulnerable to invaders from over the Hindu Kush for the next 1000 years.
The Christological questions that seem academic to those of us raised in the time of the liberal world order could have been decided much differently. Different peoples being settled in different places would have created aftershocks both immediate and far-flung. What would Europe have looked like, if the Amber Road remained rich but the Volga never became important? If the slave trade was less robust in early medieval Europe, would Slavic state development have been retarded or sped up?
By using an undefined POD in the 4th century, I’m going to create a lot of these changes. Expect a Christian denomination breakdown at some point, along with the aforementioned alternate scattering of peoples. Most importantly, however, this butterflies the Prophet Muhammad and the Merovingian (and therefore Carolingian) monarchies. The changes here are astronomical -- as mentioned before, the Carolingians were key in the transition from a post-Roman but German-ruled Europe to the medieval Europe that we know.
View attachment 625384
The Muslims dwarf that by any metric -- the various permutations of their civilization and faith stretch from the Sahel to the Volga, from Xinjiang to the Bengal, from the Dinaric Alps to Papua New Guinea. It cannot be overstated the importance that Islam, and the early Arabian empires that fostered it, have to world history. A Sahel influenced by Christians, for example, wouldn’t be called the Sahel. The knowledge of three great civilizations will not be easily united in a single language’s literary canon. Trade, and the societies it helped shape, will be massively altered by Islam’s absence.
In more prosaic terms, “Medism”, as it was called derisively by the ur-Western Greeks, loses the vehicle that ultimately carried it to victory over the West’s Asian and African provinces. It was not just Muhammad whose ambitions were fulfilled by Mehmed Fatih -- it was also the ambition of Khosrau II, Shapur the Great, and the Achaemenid kings long before even them. That being said, Selim and Suleiman’s wars against the Safavids decades later had their own geopolitical echoes in the epic struggles of the Romans and the Iranians, from the time of Caesar to that of Heraclius to that of the Seljuqs and the Komnenoi. Although the West will still be able to define itself against its internal scapegoat (Jews, othered before and especially after the advent of Christ), the absence of Islam radically reshapes the geographic boundaries of what is considered Western. Exploring a different metanarrative, a different “clash of civilizations”, is one of my goals here.
Imagining a world without Muhammad is a mammoth task -- there’s a reason both of the TLs I mentioned before had analogues to Islam. This work will not include an analogue to Islam, nor a more martially inclined Arab Great Man. Envisioning a world bereft of Arabo-Muslim civilization will be both enjoyable and deeply difficult, a testament to exactly how important the Migration Period, and their contribution to it, is to human history.
###
While the Migration Period had its obvious immediate effects on the world, it also maintains a relevance to those of us in modern times. The past is not yet past -- in our case, the intellectual and cultural ideas of the 19th century weigh on the living to this day. The mythology of the Völkerwanderung was not a creation of the time -- it has its antecedents in semi-contemporary Germanic epics. The Volsungasaga mentions Armanaric of the Goths, Attila the Hun, and of course the Nibelung kings of the Burgundians. Beowulf also takes place in the same time period, and names a number of Germanic peoples and their semi-mythological leaders, showing the enduring power of historical memory even without widespread literacy and across both temporal and physical distance.
That being said, our conception of the Migration Era, of barbarians vs. Romans, of a Dark Ages and a total erasure of classical glory, is itself a myth. The Renaissance’s anti-medieval aspersions have left an enduring mark on our culture, but the Early Medieval period loomed large in the minds of Romantic nationalists. German nationalism drew upon the era most deeply, calling upon a rich pantheon of heroes and ancient glories that melded well with the political message of the ascendant German bourgeoisie. One Drang nach Osten cannot be conceived of as a programmatic conquest without the other taking place centuries before; one cannot conceive of Germanic unity without the heritage of the stem duchies and the firm conception of Germanic peoples as ethnically and genetically continuous, separate from the Romans.
Other cultures have also drawn on the ambiguities of the period to create their own myths. Pavelic infamously claimed the Croats were actually Ostrogoths; Polish nobles in the 17th century claimed the mantle of the Sarmatians (although only the Croats, Serbs and Sorbs bear names with a Sarmatic etymology). Most of Europe’s peoples had, at one time, entire lineages of mythic founders, going back to the Bible.
In reality, however, one must keep in mind the ethnic heterogeneity and blurred lines endemic to all sides of the Migration Period. Unlike the Arab Muslims, whose early history and tribal lineages were generally documented by a literate culture, we do not have granular explanations of exactly who was who in the barbarian tribal confederations.
19th century ethnic absolutism is deeply ahistorical, and while we can tell which groups were what in broad strokes, there was a lot of assimilation of prior peoples that gets forgotten in the mythmaking. Forgotten too in the modern era are figures like Aspar, Ricimer, Stilicho, Areobindus, Guntharic, and others -- “barbarians” who, much like the initial barbarian kings, served the Roman state and thought of themselves as members of that civilization.
Forgotten too were Romans serving their new barbarian overlords, as affiliations that were political in the 5th century were retroactively turned into permanent blood-and-soil lineages. The various royal lineages of epics like Beowulf are also much more poetic than historic -- taking them at their word is how we ended up with the farce of Swedish regnal numbering, among other things.
While a good story may be the driving forces of the latter-day histories of not-so-yesteryear (and Game of Thrones), power is power. The peoples of the long Migration Period weren’t fighting existential blood feuds to the knife against an inextricably alien Roman (or Frankish, or German, or Eastern Roman, or Arabo-Iranian) force.
The barbarian groups can best be understood as the final form of the peoples Rome fought and otherwise engaged with for centuries. Gothic wars long predated the coming of Alaric; the Goddodin of early medieval Welsh poetry were the same Votadini staring at the Romans from across Hadrian’s Wall.
To paraphrase Ibn Khaldun, these barbarian groups had greater internal cohesion, bringing in more people under a political umbrella as they navigated the slow collapse of the Roman empire. If the barbarians were forced to fight without the help of locals, without local soldiers or collaborators, they wouldn’t have won anything. The edge conquered the center, and in time the new political affiliation became social, and cultural, relegating Romanitas to a memory (in the West.)
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- St. Just
- Word Count: 1.9k