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With the latest possible POD, create a time period lasting at least 25 years in which the US and Soviet Union view each other as strong, ultimately trustworthy allies with minimal geopolitical rivalry. The US must remain a free market country and the Soviets cannot lose to the Germans.

Historically, the Portuguese had a clear head start in the overseas colonial game, developing the caravel, exploring Africa and India before anyone else, and building a vast, trading empire despite their small territory and population. What if their rise was even more meteoric? Let's say John...

If he doesn't control Nicaea he could still call for reinforcements. Maybe something like this. The Turks are close enough to Constantinople to still be a serious threat, but subsumed Norman principalities give the Byzantines a decent control of southern Anatolia.

Still means better road network/less Seljuk presence in Anatolia.

By the 1090s though, with the continuous Seljuk advance, the surviving Norman principality in Anatolia would probably ally with or swear fealty to the Byzantines. Otherwise it wouldn't have survived.

If Norman adventurers (e.g. Roussel de Bailleul) retained control over central Anatolia, then there would be an intact road network and safe land path for the crusaders. In that situation, the Crusader states could last indefinitely.

The Romans could be tolerant of the Greeks without becoming Hellenistic themselves. They did so for most of their other non-Latin subjects.

That's who modern Aromanians are.

Is it possible for the Roman Republic to take over the Mediterranean without adopting Hellenization as their own, seeing the Greeks the same way they saw the Carthaginians or Gauls? Could a Romance language become the primary language of Greece? What if the 279 BC Celtic invasion of Greece...

The year is 998 AD, one year before the War Between Romes. Eastern Rome is more Arabic and Slavic, and Western Rome more Germanic, than one might expect. Since Nikephoros I's decisive victory at the Battle of Pliska in 811, the Bulgars were defeated and brought into the Byzantine fold...

Koine Greek subsumed the other dialects of Greek, so a Koine Latin could probably subsume the other dialects of Latin.

What if some Norse warlord with the military genius of Attila, Temujin, or Alexander united most of Scandinavia during the rise of the Vikings in the 9th and 10th centuries? Even if his realm is split among his sons, would Viking raids be larger in number during this era?

The Wisconsin Supreme Court declared the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional in 1855. They could have provided sanctuary to freed slaves and maybe did on a small scale.

Well my point is that you can go back farther than 1204 and find a Greek church that has already gone through many of the crises shaping Eastern Orthodoxy. In the 900s, Arianism and Nestorianism had already come and gone, the Oriental Orthodox church broke away, the Miaphysites and Monophysites...

The fate of the Byzantine Empire wasn't sealed until 1204 at the earliest, though. There are plenty of PODs after the end of the first iconoclasm which could have brought the Byzantine Empire to Mediterranean hegemony once again, including any PODs involving the Macedonians or Komnenids. And...

Even so, they'd be more like 1500s Orthodoxy than 1500s Catholicism.

The eastern half of the Roman empire could raise troops just fine even in Rome's darkest hour. Give the western empire a good economy again, and it'll be able to recruit a Roman army. For one keep the Vandals out of Carthage.

If an Eastern Orthodox country colonized the new world, how would its policies differ from Catholic and Protestant colonization of the Americas? Is it any better or worse for the native empires and confederations? Some scenarios for Orthodox colonizers: Surviving Byzantine empire retains or...

Not sure, but I would be up for a succession game. No Conclave or Horse Lords though.

Ireland predominantly spoke Gaelic and was Catholic. Only after the Potato Famine did it predominantly speak English, and that same, partially engineered famine ruined relations between Great Britain and Ireland for decades. Scotland was quite different from England (and equally distant from...