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Elfwine, I'm getting increasingly uninterested in carrying on a discussion with you because you insist on chopping up every post I make into little tiny pieces and discussing each little one. Playing quote-war is just a variant of argumentum ad nauseam; whoever runs out of patience first...

Try Warren Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society, if you can't get Birkenmeier. I'm honestly surprised you haven't found it yet, since it's a far better foundation for one's understanding of Byzantine history than is Norwich. Sure, but Karia doesn't really qualify on that...

That's a mistake, or a deliberate decision to make the map look prettier at the expense of the truth. Ioannes never took control of the interior of Karia, which was left for Manouel to do. There was a strip of territory connecting to Pamphylia, probably going along the road near Lake Karalis...

Which you can do without ever venturing onto the actual plateau. What made the errors even more grievous was the fact that instead of doing something useful in the mountains, the Byzantines - especially under Ioannes and Manouel - focused on Kilikia and the Crusader states. They continually...

Nah, not by the 1860s. Russia's stronger than Austria and the Baltic states are too low-payoff compared to Germany. Five or six decades earlier and you might have something.

Austria did not have any annexationist interests in the Third Germany, certainly not in northern Germany. The most that Mensdorff and the rest were willing to entertain was Upper Silesia; only a few of the fire-eating generals wanted to take the whole of that province.

Sure. Manzikert itself wasn't intrinsically crippling, anyway, or even all that damaging; the civil wars of the 1070s were. Hell, it's possible to save the Byzantines after those, too. Fundamentally, they still retained control of the richest and most important regions of the Empire as it was...

It'd be awfully absurd. Plus, the Prussians would never stand for it.

I tackled this in a recent thread, albeit under somewhat different circumstances. Systemically, a united Central Europe is just too problematic for France in too many ways for them to be allied. Großdeutschland would be hegemonic by its very nature, but France as of 1848 would be completely...

You mean, other than Mazzini's thing from 1848 and the one that happened during the Council of Florence? ;)

I think this is a reasonable goal, but in order to say how things might develop that way in alternate history, we would have to understand how and why things developed that way in the small, hesitating steps they did historically, most famously in the Achaian and Aitolian leagues. And I don't...

Those are rather radically altered circumstances. The French abandoned their age-old struggle with the British for supremacy in Europe because they fought a twenty-year war, with considerable devastation in France itself (not to mention a helluva lot of dead Frenchmen), and eventually most of...

I agree with Blackfox. The central question is Athenian resource mobilization. You can't conquer the world with just Attike behind you. The empire gave Athens prosperity, but not stability, and the Athenians' resource extraction (in terms of manpower, ships, and cash) was more predatory than...

You mean, what happened historically? You know, the war that Prussia ostensibly won in a month but morphed into a vicious slog against the entire French country? The dress rehearsal for Volkskrieg? That war? Historically, the French military underwent significant reorganization and reform in...

Easy. Iran was the catspaw of several of the Diadochoi in the years before the beginning of the Seleukid Era. Let's start with Triparadeisos. You had Peithon, who ran Media, and who was generally opposed to a collection of the Upper Satraps, in loose alliance with Peukestas, satrap of Persis...

The point was that you implied that Hindenburg was utterly useless in a military sense (actually, you didn't imply it, you straight-out said it: "just [...] used for PR work to rally the civilians"). It seemed like you were saying that he was only useful for Christmas cards and the other...

This is not actually true. Hindenburg was extremely useful in a tandem with Ludendorff for his imperturbability and calm. Ludendorff may have exhibited periodic levels of tactical virtuosity, but was so nervy and antsy that he frequently lacked the confidence to follow through with his plans...

I don't know if that was the sticking point about mystery religions. After all, Christianity also relies on initiation rituals. I always thought it was more because mystery religions were sort of a gentleman's club, complete with fees to keep out the riffraff.

The French Revolution was an event contingent on circumstance, and eminently avoidable. Other states faced equally fissiparous, revolutionary circumstances in the same period (some monarchs, like Leopold II of Austria, had it even worse than Louis XVI did), and managed to overcome them. As such...

I like how he flips the bird at Ukrainians.