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Would Columbus have worked for a Muslim anyway? Islam was not exactly tolerated in Europe at the time, especially in Spain, where they had only just that very year finished conquering all the Muslim lands in Iberia and were in the process of forcing all Muslims to abandon Islam or leave Spain...

814, eh? So right after Charlemagne's death? Well, once Scandinavia itself was united, it would be a piece of cake to take over the British Isles, where I think they'd have gone first. If the Vikings had a fanatical religious drive to conquer rather than just raid and leave, then I don't think...

Which would make a great stage name for a female singer who specializes in beautiful arias about the classical world. :) [/thread hijack]

Right. Then we go to war to keep the commie nudos out of southeast Asia and make the region safe for textiles. Does Stalin also grow out his beard and play folk guitar? I suppose if the ASBs or the April Fools Fairies or whatever can manage to make the Soviet Union ruled by the iron fist of...

How about if Alexander's empire had remained intact longer? Suppose he lives long enough to establish a stable succession, so that instead of fragmenting after his death, the empire holds together as a cohesive unit. Then Buddhist teaching spreads westward across the empire and is firmly...

The "Norse"? Columbus was way too late for that, but I suppose the Kalmar Union could have done something. I don't know enough about it to speculate. The Chinese? No way. They had already had their great voyages nearly a century before, but influential Confucianist elements had already put...

A Tlaxcaltec vassal state sounds a lot more reasonable to me than a sudden acceleration of the Aztecs into a world power. I don't think it would have been too much of a stretch for that to happen. One question I have concerns the diseases. I'm aware that the vast majority of the indigenous...

A horrendous plague with a 100% mortality rate spreads across the world. All the earth outside Scandinavia, Cornwall, Utah, Greece, and Japan is left empty of people, and for some reason the peoples of those named regions are immune. They rush to fill in the gaps. Okay, seriously. This is...

The same reason Cortes wanted to conquer the Aztecs in the first place: Gold, God, and Glory. If they found out how rich a prize the Aztec Empire was, they may have decided to try to take it regardless of Cortes' bungling. They might conclude that it was worth the effort, considering all the...

Okay, I give up. What are we looking at? I see a Soviet Union that has lost control of a few islands, and a United States that has taken over a small portion of Canada. Otherwise, there's nothing here to tell us what's going on.

It's got nothing to do with the fact that they were Aztecs or Native Americans or non-Europeans, or any other gibberish like that. It's got everything to do with the fact that they were pretty far behind their opponent technologically, and their opponent was both very powerful and very...

When Japan modernized in the 19th century, they didn't just examine one of Perry's guns and figure out the modern world from that. They brought in experts from Europe and America to teach them how modern powers did things. As has been said before, just because you've captured a few horses and...

They would have had to eventually. International opinion was too much against slavery for the CSA to be able to sustain it indefinitely. They probably could have kept it up a few more decades, and maybe even into the twentieth century. But eventually pressure from the rest of the great...

I'm not sure there would have been any effects. The Romans already had limited contact with India, and though they didn't know much about China beyond "it's where silk comes from"--Pliny wrote a bit about how silk was made--they were aware that it existed. Marcus Aurelius even sent envoys...

I've never heard of any. Even Spartacus wasn't trying to free all the slaves of Rome. Just himself and his buddies. There just wasn't anything in the ancient Roman worldview that would have suggested to them that slavery is, in and of itself, wrong.

I think we can't deny that, even had Cortes failed, the Aztecs were at the mercy of the Spanish. Their survival or destruction in the 16th century would have entirely depended on what the Spanish decided to do. The real question is whether the Spanish crown would have considered a full-scale...