AHC - Worst possible timeline for post Roman Europe?

What is the worst possible timeline that European civilisation could have had, with a POD during the final decades of the Roman Empire? How could Europe have had a worse fate through just bad luck? This is what I thought

1 - More dramatic Roman collapse, or the Huns do better. Huns could conquer Gaul and Italy, burning down cities, massacring thousands, destroying records and equipment, essentially causing so much damage to these areas over a few decades that all remnants of an advanced civilisation are lost, and the population is reduced to poor peasants in small villages and towns, ruled by Hunnic lords and warriors with an iron fist.
2 - The Hunnic Empire then leaves or collapses in the 600s, causing more disruption, and those in Western Europe are left to fend for themselves. The Byzantines see no reason to conquer the former Roman land as it has lay an empty, impoverished backwater for two centuries. The Europeans are left to themselves for a short while, a number of small kingdoms arise, while some revert back to the Gallic or Italic tribal system of the pre-Roman days.
3 - The weakened state of Western Europe then falls to the Umayyads a few decades later, who steamroll all of Gaul and Italy, establishing puppet kingdoms and converting the population to Islam. This corrodes the Christian unity of the Europeans and makes them culturally, politically and economically dominated by the Arab/Muslim world. Western Europe as a separate identity and civilisation ceases to exist in the coming years as it merges with Islamic civilisation. Eastern Europe could remain pagan or could be converted to Islam by missionaries
4 - The Mongols still arise and conquer the open steppes of Russia and Ukraine, bringing their murderous campaigns and bubonic plague with them, further weakening Europe.
5 - The poorer, more isolated European states of this timeline see no reason to conquer new lands or explore new trade routes, neither do the Muslim states as they already control trade over the Mediterranean and Atlantic coast and have plenty of land for resources as they can exploit their European puppets. The Scientific Revolution begins its early days in Arabia or North Africa, and the Chinese, Indians, Japanese and Malays also have their own scientific revolution The discovery of the Americas is delayed, and thus Europe never comes to dominate global trade or gain the military edge against other civilisations. The Aztec and Inca are given more time to develop and flourish.
6 - As global population increases, industrialisation begins in Asia and in the Middle East, with Europe lagging behind and remaining poorer.
 
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Option one: The mountain ranges near Hungary are easier to cross, resulting in multiple nomadic groups conquering the region and in turn being conquered over the ages. At the same time, the rivers in Germany are easier to cross as wel, and with easy access to Europe, there will be nomadic groups who will raid from Croatia to Brittany. From the Avars to the Magyars to whichever Tartar group are able to hold on the Hungarian basin for a century or two.
The Ummayads are able to conquer all of Spain. They are able to do this because of the movement of settled tribes who are forced to immigrate to the other side of the Pyrenees due to constant threats from raiders. These settled tribes convert to Islam and help the muslims take over the finla christian strongholds.
Some of the settled tribes immigrate to England as well and clash with the Anglo-Saxons or whichever tribes control the British Isles as they are attracted to the fables of Irish and english wealth and the belief that they will be safe from raiders.

Option Two: no black death
 
Maybe China or Japan ends its isolationism and decides to colonise Europe or at least attempt to. At the same time as this they would side with The Vikings forging an uneasy alliance allowing them to soften up European forces. Seeing how Europe is ripe for colonisation perhaps other Asian nations decide that they want to carve up Europe. In turn Europe would be forced to form an alliance with each other in order to fend off any invasions. However, this uneasy alliance could result in a three way war between China, various European armies and The Vikings?
 
@Beacon: All nice ideas in option one, but rather ASB...
Also why no black death is a bad timeline?

@Tmckay: At the time where it could have happened, Europe has both the technological and population advantages.

I think the worst possible POD would be some sort of a Mongol-esque horde in late Dark Ages/early Middle Ages, crushing any sort of civilizations that tried to rise after Roman Empire fell (so no Charlemagne and no HRE), no cities because they're nomadic, no merchants or scientists because they don't appeal to the Mongols... basically stuck at the "immediately post-Roman" level for centuries, at which point the Muslim world will definitely have an advantage at the point when the Europe and the Muslim world unavoidably collide...
 
Negotiations betwen pope Leo and Attila fail and Attila kills the pope. Then Huns sack Rome nd kill pretty much everybody betwwn Alps and Napolis/Naples who dare oppose them and basically destroy most of churches and monastries and most of records. Then they or Ostrogoths invade succesfullty Constantinople and Byzanine collapses completely. Western Europe not rise and Merovings are not ousted and replaced by stronger dynasty and so their empire just decline and decline until someone eventually unite Franks some centuries later. Same thing happen with Visigoths and when Islam is butterflied away, there is not cultural revival.

So this causes much longer Dark Ages and very few of records between 450 and 1200 if then Mongols not still rise and conquer Europe which would make Dark Ages even longer ending by Black Death on 14th century.
Maybe China or Japan ends its isolationism and decides to colonise Europe or at least attempt to. At the same time as this they would side with The Vikings forging an uneasy alliance allowing them to soften up European forces. Seeing how Europe is ripe for colonisation perhaps other Asian nations decide that they want to carve up Europe. In turn Europe would be forced to form an alliance with each other in order to fend off any invasions. However, this uneasy alliance could result in a three way war between China, various European armies and The Vikings?

This is really ASB. There is not way how China or Japan could colonise Europe.
 
There is ONE way for China to colonize/coquer Europe.

Make some group of Chinese peasants and other folks create a Chinese version of Cossacks and dominate the Eurasian steppe and take over the role of the Mongols. Horse nomadic traditions can emerge from scratch in a short period of time.
 
You can't really define history in clear-cut terms like "good" and "evil", except in really obvious cases like WW2. Therefore, this question is fundamentally flawed.
 
One issue that I have, the Huns are not necessarily the antithesis of cultural and civilizational development. It would simply be an even more Germanic and less Romanized Europe, perhaps with the end of Christianity in Western Europe, wherein we have still, a large Merovingian Frankish kingdom, alongside a Gotho-Hunnic imperial zone dominating the Balkans north of Greece, Northern Italy, southern, central and eastern Germany and southern Poland. I suspect if the Huns can rule the region for around 200 years, this will develop a trend wherein we have a constantly reiterating Germano-Hunnic kingdom within the region. I have compared such a kingdom possibly to the effect thatwas seen with the Arsacid kingdom or the Kushan empire within Iran and the Indus Valley.

So, no, I do not feel that the destruction of the Roman empire would necessarily be a poor prospect for Europe and in fact would be the impetus for new cultural expressions of European life to flourish and gain prominence. Just as in every conquest into India brought about new expressions, so too would Europe, experience such a change and renewal in different forms.

Option Two: no black death
I do not understand this one.... This decimated European population to such a degree that most countries affected did not recover until a full four or five centuries later, not to mention the destructions of existing outposts of 'European' settlement in during the phase of cooling, famine and Bubonic Plague. The crisis of the Plague also threw what many believe the most literate part of society, aka the clergy, into shell shock, alongside the peasantry who were devastated and the fabulous food production ground to a halt.

Without the Bubonic Plague and the demographic nose dives that Europe took in the centuries from 1300-1800, Europe would be more similar to India or China in terms of population. Neither of these countries are doing poorly and from a civilizational model, possessing a larger population in your base territory is not a bad strategy for the survival of a culture or people.
 
I do not understand this one.... This decimated European population to such a degree that most countries affected did not recover until a full four or five centuries later, not to mention the destructions of existing outposts of 'European' settlement in during the phase of cooling, famine and Bubonic Plague. The crisis of the Plague also threw what many believe the most literate part of society, aka the clergy, into shell shock, alongside the peasantry who were devastated and the fabulous food production ground to a halt.

Without the Bubonic Plague and the demographic nose dives that Europe took in the centuries from 1300-1800, Europe would be more similar to India or China in terms of population. Neither of these countries are doing poorly and from a civilizational model, possessing a larger population in your base territory is not a bad strategy for the survival of a culture or people.
No black death or no plague means that a one of the moments of the cornerstone that led to the ending of the feudalism is gone ,wages don't rise for the peasants and they don't get more power in a sense the church is also not scared but slowly it would continue to evolve in to it's anti technological phase .

Also with the a lot of clergymen dead and therefore if and most likely when the pope returns to rome it can mean that the western schism never happened or is less severe which if I remember correctly the black death ( via killing the priest hood ) and the schism that went on did a lot to damage the church reputation .

Ok short no black death or things like that is according to some a scenario were you can prevent the rise of the west.

How ever as you said they could be like India or china sure not the europe of our timeline were they conquered the whole world but still an ok place if we compare it to it's contemporaries.
 
No black death or no plague means that a one of the moments of the cornerstone that led to the ending of the feudalism is gone ,wages don't rise for the peasants and they don't get more power in a sense the church is also not scared but slowly it would continue to evolve in to it's anti technological phase .
Feudalism was already declining by the late 14th century and in any case it's a bit of made up pop history narrative that the plague "ended" or even accelerated the end of feudalism, sure wages rose but in terms of liberties it was not really a radical departure, what were the peasant rebellion in the 16th century HRE about then?

Also why do you think that the Church was evolving in an "anti-technological" phase?

Ok short no black death or things like that is according to some a scenario were you can prevent the rise of the west.
I never seen anyone actually provide a good argument for it, I can write any kind of scenarios incorporating a "no black death" element with an array of different outcomes, but to really say that the black death singlehandedly cause the "rise of the west" requires one to have more than a thought experiment.

I do not understand this one.... This decimated European population to such a degree that most countries affected did not recover until a full four or five centuries later,
Are you sure about this? Every demographic model I saw showed that for virtually most countries recovery happened by 1500 or at the very most 1600.
[/QUOTE]alongside the peasantry who were devastated and the fabulous food production ground to a halt.[/QUOTE]
While it's true it was a shock that was bigger than necessary to adjust to the cooling, I think the cooling period will and did indeed cause famines and regional decline from time to time, the dynamic could be different ending up with bigger populations by the 16th century when OTL Europe just recovered from the waves of plagues but it would require further technological or technical breakthroughs which may or may not happen.

Without the Bubonic Plague and the demographic nose dives that Europe took in the centuries from 1300-1800, Europe would be more similar to India or China in terms of population. Neither of these countries are doing poorly and from a civilizational model, possessing a larger population in your base territory is not a bad strategy for the survival of a culture or people.
Didn't the bubonic plague start in China? Why do you think they escaped it(if you think so)?
 
Feudalism was already declining by the late 14th century and in any case it's a bit of made up pop history narrative that the plague "ended" or even accelerated the end of feudalism, sure wages rose but in terms of liberties it was not really a radical departure, what were the peasant rebellion in the 16th century HRE about then?

Also why do you think that the Church was evolving in an "anti-technological" phase?
Not by much the medieval warm period made feudalism was popular for the most part since it was time of plenty and we're there was many workers this changed when the climate cooled but it was still the economic system .

As for more rights in some parts they did for one Manorialism never did recover

And copyhold as in both a Lord and peasant made their best business deal and the peasant got use of the land and the Lord got a fixed annual payment and both possessed a copy of the tenure agreement.
Which was something not coming in the high middle ages also inheritance laws changed so that not only the eldest son inherited the father's land .

Of course not all europe had these changes but some did and some the reaction especially in eastern europe was crackdown ( and they had not success at it )

As for the pesent revolt To this day no one knows the exact reason

Historians disagree on the nature of the revolt and its causes, whether it grew out of the emerging religious controversy centered on Luther; or if the peasants saw their own wealth and rights slipping or whether peasants objected to the emergence of the centralization

As for the church ever since the high middle ages a trend was growing in the church ie the rejection of new ideas this was not universal rather local though but it can be attributed to many things
One of the most popular examples are the Condemnations of 1210 to 1277.

This also is the period were the inquisitions began against the new heresies

The black death created a big mess and the events that followed with the schism the hussites and made the church even more worried but not fully anti science or science yet

That all happened in the years after the reformation were they went full bonkers

So I say even with no black death and maybe if we prevent the western schism and the hussites there is still going to be this trend as seen by the 13th century specially if there are more heresies that prop up that make the church weary of new things
I never seen anyone actually provide a good argument for it, I can write any kind of scenarios incorporating a "no black death" element with an array of different outcomes, but to really say that the black death singlehandedly cause the "rise of the west" requires one to have more than a thought experiment.
I have also never seen some body argue that say the Black death is responsible for it
In fact the most common and the one I subscribe to is thar europe had more checks and balances that any other civilization and since no true side had the ultimate power this lead to many things that made the west rise .

How ever the black death could delay by keeping feudalism alive and even possible due to butterflies have the french church win at the end .
 
Are you sure about this? Every demographic model I saw showed that for virtually most countries recovery happened by 1500 or at the very most 1600.
Various new models display the effect on certain rural locales. For instance the numbers of children listed in English villages in year 1250 compared to year 1450, display upwards of a 80% decline of children in many villages across southeastern and southwestern England that is not likewise displayed in the increasing size of urban areas. The assertion as I see it, in the new trends within demographic studies in Medieval Europe, is that countries such as England had much larger populations than what was prior predicted. Such as, one paper, that I can dig up for you, suspects that in year 1250 was as low as 6 million and as high as 9-10 million. For comparison, 1500-1600 England was around the range of 3-4 million. This makes a great amount of sense when we think of it; England in the year 1250 had far greater influence and power than in 1500 within Europe and held an esteemed role in comparison to France or the Empire, despite if we take old models from the 1950s, that place English population in 1250 at 4 or 5 million, would only make up a tiny percentage of the more than twenty million population of France or the Holy Roman Empire. Rather, England was a populated region with high agricultural production by the later High Middle Ages with a warmer climate and a greater ranger of agricultural products to produce, many of whom in 1700 could only be found in the Mid East or the Mediterranean Coast.

While it's true it was a shock that was bigger than necessary to adjust to the cooling, I think the cooling period will and did indeed cause famines and regional decline from time to time, the dynamic could be different ending up with bigger populations by the 16th century when OTL Europe just recovered from the waves of plagues but it would require further technological or technical breakthroughs which may or may not happen
It depends. Famines were not as terrible in Medieval Europe due to the decentralizing nature of the climate and the redistributive process of manorialism and similar systems across Europe. These permitted the peasantry to generally redistribute goods among themselves in a sort of communalist fashion and after having given the dues to their lords. This is what in my view, in coordination with the warming climates, led to the rapid increase in population that far exceeded the Roman imperial growths. The peasantry possessed less restraints to the production of children, namely less economic/caloric burdens which lessened the rates of birth in other countries, such as Byzantium, the Islamic world, old Imperial Rome, etc...

In fact, it was a custom in Medieval Europe, that once a village reached a population of over 300, families would break and leave each other and form new villages. Due to then, the rules of the Church, that mandated that men must leave their villages in search of wives who were not close to them in relation, a blanket of expanding colonization emerged across Europe within the Germanic parts. This is not at all dislike the initial population booms that occurred in the Zhou dynasty and very much mimics the population growths in the Han and Ming dynasty China. Namely, expanding villages with new populations broken from larger villages, that all lacked much tax/due burden and as such could readily afford larger numbers of children (and all dependent on the climate mind you).

Didn't the bubonic plague start in China? Why do you think they escaped it(if you think so)?
In Europe, there was still a lingering battle between what some call the Medieval gift economy that was common post-Rome and that of a profit based proto-capitalist economic system. This conflict is most seen in the observations of clerics and learned men in the regions of Europe north of the Alps.

Peasantry that were less accustomed to the concept both of 'money' and also to the idea of loans, were taken advantage of by lenders, merchants and other similar occupations that had emerged without state mandate or regulation in market fairs in the newly emerging European cities. These lenders would come into medieval villages and promote loans to peasantry for the purchase of 'creature comforts' such as fine clothing or other frankly frivolous consumer goods. The European peasantry north of Italy, were frankly not adapted for such a lifestyle or concept. They were raised in a world where from cradle to the grave, their lives were managed by a set of customs that had no way of preparing them for such ventures of profit or of economic exchange that were not based upon gift exchanges.

These lenders who came to expose the peasantry to predatory lending, came upon ignorant populations (I do not mean that offensively, they simply had no understanding of the concepts used to grasp resources from them) and acquired vast numbers of their community in debt to urban merchant-lender guilds within the towns and cities. Papal records from major bishoprics indicate something completely amazing to them and novel in the 13th century for instance, wherein peasantry in wide areas of France had simply ceased the production of consumable food stuff and exchanged their entire production to wool and wine, exporting their foodstuff production to marginal outlying territories that could not produce wine or similar products. The records suggest that the peasantry exchanged their production to consumer products to be shipped to the cities of Europe in order to pay off debts.

What this means is, the old way of manorialism, wherein the peasant payed a small due to the feudal lord and then shared the rest of the produce among his/her community of 100-300 people was changed. Instead, that community, which would inevitably share the loads of debt (this is before the innovations of individualism in financial sense in Europe among the peasantry), would have to pay their feudal due to their lord, then they would have to pay their tithe to the Church and then the larger amount, they paid to end their communal debts that they owed to the emerging mercantile interests within major cities such as Lyon, Paris, Brugge, London, Cologne, Trier, Frankfurt, etc, etc, etc... This caused a crisis of production wherein peasantry where peasants were producing solely to pay off various types of payments and having less and less to provide for themselves and their community as was custom in the sharing of the produce.

This system caused the massive rise in anti-Semitic and anti-merchant sentiment across Europe and was a major cause for the unease of the peasantry that led to the rise of populism in the later High and Late Middle Ages. Regardless, this situation of exporting the food production to outer less prosperous villages worked as long as the climate remained very warm and favorable. However, as the climate cooled, many of these outlying areas became unfeasible for farming and this was noted across Europe for a period of rising levels of snow fall in the winter and frigid winters. This meant that come 1302, the food production dropped off exponentially as peasants in higher producing areas remained producing high value cash goods like wine or wool were unprepared for needing to farm large amounts of agricultural foodstuff.

The result was a massive famine much akin to the Great Leap Forward in China of recent memory. Rural communities in order to meet expectations of their urban creditors and also to pay their feudal dues, overestimated their production output and overutilized cash exchange goods like wine. This led to an enormous famine that lasted for two decades and lingered in many areas into the beginning of the Black Plague. The famines alongside the Plague contributed to a mass die out of the peasantry and the traditional ruling class of Europe, the conservative clergy of the Catholic Church and thus a complete and total reconstructing of Europe along a more mercantile and less ecclesiastically dominated lines and a completely new and different religious experience focused upon the urban Church, rather than the rural shrine.

China on the other hand did not have these comingling effects. For one, market profit based economic systems had developed in China with significant government regulation and protection of the rural peasantry. In Europe, these systems were decimated after the Roman Empire and were rebuilt without any state of governmental regulation; precisely because there was only a few forces that could regulate markets in Europe effectively. The nobility who often lacked the willingness or know how or the Church, which always entertained the idea, but typically failed and often indirectly assisted such lacking of regulation or simply put, the Holy See and Church had other things to consider. Whilst China near always possessed what can be seen as a sole civilizational model and position of authority, Europe lacked such, yet struggled to attain it, leading to the wars of conflict of universal kingship between the Holy See (the Pope) and the Holy Roman Empire, this power struggle snuffed out many of the needed reforms to protect the rural peasantry and brought about the disaster of the later High Middle Ages.

One other point to note, within the Chinese system of governance, it was difficult to get to the point wherein the peasantry were overburdened with taxes and debt, due to the governing ideology and also the state protections against the ability of certain merchants to access the rural peasantry. Though this is a long, long topic.
 
Zod
Negotiations betwen pope Leo and Attila fail and Attila kills the pope. Then Huns sack Rome nd kill pretty much everybody betwwn Alps and Napolis/Naples who dare oppose them and basically destroy most of churches and monastries and most of records. Then they or Ostrogoths invade succesfullty Constantinople and Byzanine collapses completely. Western Europe not rise and Merovings are not ousted and replaced by stronger dynasty and so their empire just decline and decline until someone eventually unite Franks some centuries later. Same thing happen with Visigoths and when Islam is butterflied away, there is not cultural revival.

So this causes much longer Dark Ages and very few of records between 450 and 1200 if then Mongols not still rise and conquer Europe which would make Dark Ages even longer ending by Black Death on 14th century.


This is really ASB. There is not way how China or Japan could colonise Europe.
Sorry
 
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