Byzantium, with OTL's Hungary borders? Yet, I feel compelled to overlook it because of the sheer awesomeness of the Byzantine flag...
Map Thread V
- Thread starter Ian the Admin
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Basically,the Byzantines lost the Battle of Manzikert even worse than in OTL which leads to Greece seperating to form its own empire.Southern Italy,Sicily,Crete and Cyprus are swiftly conquered.
Meanwhile,the papacy is outraged that Orthodox Greece is able to subjugate Catholic Southern Italy.The rest of Italy unites to fight of the Greek menace
.Sardinia and Corsica join the Italians.
The Byzantines retreat to the Danube,greatly weakened.However,they are able to hold no to the northern Anatolian coast.This is possible mainly because the Greeks had launched an invasion of western Anatolia and much of the Seljuk army was efectively pinned down in that area.
Taking advantage of a greatly weakened Byzantium,the Bulgar Khanate starts to expand...
Meanwhile,the papacy is outraged that Orthodox Greece is able to subjugate Catholic Southern Italy.The rest of Italy unites to fight of the Greek menace
.Sardinia and Corsica join the Italians.The Byzantines retreat to the Danube,greatly weakened.However,they are able to hold no to the northern Anatolian coast.This is possible mainly because the Greeks had launched an invasion of western Anatolia and much of the Seljuk army was efectively pinned down in that area.
Taking advantage of a greatly weakened Byzantium,the Bulgar Khanate starts to expand...
Greece... separated... from Byzantium?
Did I read that correctly? Because it's still not making sense... it almost seems like saying America separated from the United States...
Well, Greece didn't really exist at the time: they were just Greek-speaking Byzantines - if the Byzantines thought of themselves as anything, it was Romans. A less confusing way to put it would be "the western, peninsular and Illyrian provinces broke away and formed their own empire", although I would think they would be rather more interested in reunifying the Empire under _their_ rule rather than going on adventures in Italy.
Bruce
Inspired by this thread
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=118205
and probably having little or nothing to do with the actual Friedman book, a silly map and scenario, just for my fun.
(PS - sorry about stealing the "Unionist" name from you, oh mighty Ian)
It’s 2101, and President Nehemiah “Big Daddy” Featherstone, after his successful challenge to the 2-term limit, has been elected President for the third time, triggering an exodus of liberals, gays, people who don’t like guns, etc. to rich, democratic Mexico. This is not altogether to the President’s liking, since Mexico is already a major source of memetic attacks on the legitimacy of the new, post-Warming US “neo-neo-conservatism”: especially with the Southwest being by 2101 second only to New England as a center of US liberalism. Why, they even still allow gays to marry in California!
Although the US swung left for several decades after the start of the Long Slump (with the brief and messy blip of the Palin Presidency), with the adjustment of civilization to global climate change [1], fears of the Unionist Menace and the rather chaotic decade of the 2050’s [2], the balance once again swung the other way, and what with the Third Great Revival and the crazier plutocrats tossed by the wayside, the New Conservatism swept back into office by the late 70’s, and has clung to power ever since.
The EU began its downhill slide when its members badly botched efforts to come up with a joint plan for dealing with the Long Slump, and collapsed entirely when Unionism spread to Italy and later France.
With the US rather inward-turned at the time, the Poles for once managed not to be heroic losers, and managed to organize most of the eastern bits of the former EU into a defensive alliance against the Russian Unionists. Nowadays the top US allies, the Alliance of Krakow has managed what the French historian said was the most important part of state-building: forgetting. (Romanians and Hungarians actually get along with each other nowadays).
The German-dominated League of the North is rich, very neutral, and is finally adjusting to the fact that as a result of the long “birth dearth” (finally ended by the extension of the human lifespan, greater wealth, and six decades of increasingly effective pro-baby propaganda), about a third of its population is of African or Latin American ancestry.
Russia once again has brought a new form of totalitarianism into vogue, and once again, it’s not working out too well. Unionism started out with a bang, with nice public executions of Social Parasites, Putin‘s head on a stick, etc., and the niftiest propaganda methods yet, but things have gone sour in the last few decades.
The World Unionist Movement has fallen apart, with Brazil going its own way, and the Franco-Italian Final State really can’t be called Unionist at all anymore (the post-humanist, gene-tweaking, microchip-implanting, depths-of-the-planetary-crust-burrowing collectivists are generally considered the scariest people on the planet). The Second Cold War has gone tepid as the Russians and their North Chinese allies struggle to keep up technologically with more open societies, and increasingly suffer from East European and East Asian memetic attacks through their computer nets: the usual forms of propaganda and mind control aren’t working too well, especially since Russian women started to get pissy over the whole “your wombs belong to the state” attitude of the government (the Unionists did manage to reverse the Russian population decline, but laid up some social dysfunctions that are going to be a bitch for any post-Unionist government). They’re also worried about their Chinese allies, who are making noises that anti-missile tech has finally improved to the point where they can fight the War of Reunification without reducing East Asia to ashes: Russian scientists are not as confident.
China has had another bad century: the Communist regime was brought down by a combination of incompetent response to the Long Slump, poor management of the end of cheap oil, [3] and environmental disasters both global and local: the shaky democracy that succeeded them was unfortunate enough to have to deal with the global-warming induced desertification of N. China, and the silting up of the Three Gorges Dam, and didn’t last. After the second Chinese Civil War, China was divided in three, and stayed that way because each soon found a superpower, nuke-wielding sponsor: the Russians for the Unionist N. Chinese, the Japanese for the democratic east coast, and the US for the “Christian-socialist” SW. The Christian People’s Republic has become increasingly Taiping-whacky over the years: its conquest of Burma (formerly Myanamar, further back to Burma again) as a result of anti-missionary violence has strengthened military ties between the members of the West Pacific Alliance.
The West Pacific Alliance started when the Japanese (which had remilitarized under the “government of national emergency” which took over during the Long Slump) decided it didn’t want either the rather apocalyptic-noise-making Christians or the Unionists taking over China, and joined Taiwan in sending massive military support to the government centered in the SE. The temporary alliance became a permanent one as the N. Chinese allied with the Russians and started talking trash about the Japanese. Korea joined in the 2050’s, after the Chinese conquest of N. Korea (which oddly enough was still around: the third dictator of N. Korea had solved the issue of too many mouths, not enough food by simply rounding up the “disloyal” elements of the population and shoving them over the border): it has since expanded into SE Asia.
The WPA is presently on poor terms with the US, after the “space war” of the 2080’s, when the US played rough in claiming stakes to mining rights in the Belt. [4] This has led to the militarization of WPA space forces, which in turn has done nothing to improve the hostility level.
India basks in the pleasant news that it has recently become the world’s largest economy. The business of India is business: although not yet as rich as Americans or Europeans by per capita standards, the economy is booming, and Indians are interested in making money, not international politics. India is currently largely isolationist: as long as trade remains substantially free, the rest of the world can go hang. (Well, there are those crazy Chinese Christians next door. But there’s crazy and crazy, and attacking Mighty India would be waaay crazy.)
The middle east is still a bit of a mess, although the formation of the Turkish Federation has helped bring some stability. Israel went a little bugfuck after the Seventeen Minutes War with Iran [5], but they’re much better now. (They’re even starting to build some houses above ground nowadays). The Palestinians have adapted after the Second Expulsion, and have managed to build a functional state on the ruins of the old Kingdom of Jordan.
The Turks have done pretty well for themselves since the arrival of democracy in central Asia in the 2050’s, and are in a bit of a cultural renaissance at present: Samarkand is actually looking pretty golden nowadays, and Istanbul is one of the three or four more magnificent cities on earth. They have friendly historical ties to the US, but have begun distancing themselves a bit lately (the Turks historically have looked upon Religious Enthusiasm with a bit of suspicion). A new interest in the old Ottoman empire is part of the renaissance, and the nostalgic Turkish tours of the Balkans are beginning to freak out the southern members of the Alliance.
North Africa is doing better: Egypt has gone from corrupt semi-socialism to religious rule and on to largely secular corrupt capitalism over the last century, with only four violent changes of government in the interim. The Mahgreb, trading with the Americans and the Turks and the democratic bits of Europe, are fairly prosperous by end-of-the-21st century standards, although they suspect the Turks are looking down at them. The rest of Africa, after various social collapses, mass migrations, wars, etc. has managed to modernize up to early 21st century Latin American standards of living, and at least AIDS is now curable with cheap pills. [6] The Congo™ has done OK since the international corporations took over from the money-starved UN in the 40’s, although of late there has been some grumbling about the dress requirements.
Australia has grown greatly in population in spite of water shortages, (relatively) cheap fusion having made large-scale desalination feasible. Unfortunately, the Australians somewhere in the 2070’s came to the conclusion that were tired of a historical portrayal as either being cute, funny, or genocidal, and decided they wanted some Respect, darn it! However, 60 million people is still too few to actually count in a world which in spite of the Birth Dearth still has nearly 8 billion people, so they have allied with the US, embarked on a terribly expensive program of space colonization, and put several of the worlds top PR firms to work…
Mexico, after a very bad patch in the early 21st century (the Palin Intervention didn’t help), managed to restore internal stability in the late 20’s, and managed several decades of good economic growth, during which it came to replace the US as the largest economic force in Central America. Still, this generally took place in a climate of good relations and close economic ties between Latin America and the US. It wasn’t until the early 70’s, stung by an increasingly pushy US attitude towards its economic relations with Latin America, that Mexico, joined by Cuba (always game for thumbing its nose at the US, even after Castro’s death in 2020), Colombia, Costa Rica, and a couple other countries, broke off talks on Pan-American economic union, and began organizing a purely “Latin” economic block. There had such efforts before (the words “humiliating failure“ comes to mind), but by this point Mexico was approaching first-world living standards, and had the economic muscle to pull it off.
By 2101, a close economic-military-and-a-dab-political union of Spanish-speaking countries had emerged, and was widely recognized as a Coming Power. The US government, accustomed to being dominant in the Western Hemisphere, is not happy with this. Its not happy with the Latin’s support for liberal elements in the US. Its not happy with the fact they are Catholic [7]. And its not happy at _all_ with the fact that the Latin arms industry is now producing “genius” class anti-missile-missiles and anti-missile laser arrays as good as anything the US produces. Trouble is brewing…
[1] Just a few hundred million excess deaths.
[2] “The 1960s were even wilder, man!” a few patchouli-smelling 100+ year-olds will inform uninterested audiences.
[3] A case of people crying “wolf” once too many times. And then it eats you.
[4] Not that asteroid mining is actually profitable yet: until the still-building “beanstalk” reaches the ground in the Congo, getting the stuff back down is still too expensive.
[5] Nobody deliberately started it, but when you have two nuclear-armed countries only a few minutes missile flight time apart, both of which are convinced the other side is ravening for their destruction, people will get overly excited and accidents will happen.
[6] “Now in orange and cherry flavors!”
[7] After the Catholic Church moved its quarters to Portugal, it began a process of liberalization ending in the election of Pope Beatrice in 2093, leading to a breakdown in relations between Catholics and the Protestant religious right in the US. Some US Catholics follow the conservative anti-Pope in the Cameroons, but they’re a small remnant.
Bruce
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=118205
and probably having little or nothing to do with the actual Friedman book, a silly map and scenario, just for my fun.
(PS - sorry about stealing the "Unionist" name from you, oh mighty Ian)
It’s 2101, and President Nehemiah “Big Daddy” Featherstone, after his successful challenge to the 2-term limit, has been elected President for the third time, triggering an exodus of liberals, gays, people who don’t like guns, etc. to rich, democratic Mexico. This is not altogether to the President’s liking, since Mexico is already a major source of memetic attacks on the legitimacy of the new, post-Warming US “neo-neo-conservatism”: especially with the Southwest being by 2101 second only to New England as a center of US liberalism. Why, they even still allow gays to marry in California!
Although the US swung left for several decades after the start of the Long Slump (with the brief and messy blip of the Palin Presidency), with the adjustment of civilization to global climate change [1], fears of the Unionist Menace and the rather chaotic decade of the 2050’s [2], the balance once again swung the other way, and what with the Third Great Revival and the crazier plutocrats tossed by the wayside, the New Conservatism swept back into office by the late 70’s, and has clung to power ever since.
The EU began its downhill slide when its members badly botched efforts to come up with a joint plan for dealing with the Long Slump, and collapsed entirely when Unionism spread to Italy and later France.
With the US rather inward-turned at the time, the Poles for once managed not to be heroic losers, and managed to organize most of the eastern bits of the former EU into a defensive alliance against the Russian Unionists. Nowadays the top US allies, the Alliance of Krakow has managed what the French historian said was the most important part of state-building: forgetting. (Romanians and Hungarians actually get along with each other nowadays).
The German-dominated League of the North is rich, very neutral, and is finally adjusting to the fact that as a result of the long “birth dearth” (finally ended by the extension of the human lifespan, greater wealth, and six decades of increasingly effective pro-baby propaganda), about a third of its population is of African or Latin American ancestry.
Russia once again has brought a new form of totalitarianism into vogue, and once again, it’s not working out too well. Unionism started out with a bang, with nice public executions of Social Parasites, Putin‘s head on a stick, etc., and the niftiest propaganda methods yet, but things have gone sour in the last few decades.
The World Unionist Movement has fallen apart, with Brazil going its own way, and the Franco-Italian Final State really can’t be called Unionist at all anymore (the post-humanist, gene-tweaking, microchip-implanting, depths-of-the-planetary-crust-burrowing collectivists are generally considered the scariest people on the planet). The Second Cold War has gone tepid as the Russians and their North Chinese allies struggle to keep up technologically with more open societies, and increasingly suffer from East European and East Asian memetic attacks through their computer nets: the usual forms of propaganda and mind control aren’t working too well, especially since Russian women started to get pissy over the whole “your wombs belong to the state” attitude of the government (the Unionists did manage to reverse the Russian population decline, but laid up some social dysfunctions that are going to be a bitch for any post-Unionist government). They’re also worried about their Chinese allies, who are making noises that anti-missile tech has finally improved to the point where they can fight the War of Reunification without reducing East Asia to ashes: Russian scientists are not as confident.
China has had another bad century: the Communist regime was brought down by a combination of incompetent response to the Long Slump, poor management of the end of cheap oil, [3] and environmental disasters both global and local: the shaky democracy that succeeded them was unfortunate enough to have to deal with the global-warming induced desertification of N. China, and the silting up of the Three Gorges Dam, and didn’t last. After the second Chinese Civil War, China was divided in three, and stayed that way because each soon found a superpower, nuke-wielding sponsor: the Russians for the Unionist N. Chinese, the Japanese for the democratic east coast, and the US for the “Christian-socialist” SW. The Christian People’s Republic has become increasingly Taiping-whacky over the years: its conquest of Burma (formerly Myanamar, further back to Burma again) as a result of anti-missionary violence has strengthened military ties between the members of the West Pacific Alliance.
The West Pacific Alliance started when the Japanese (which had remilitarized under the “government of national emergency” which took over during the Long Slump) decided it didn’t want either the rather apocalyptic-noise-making Christians or the Unionists taking over China, and joined Taiwan in sending massive military support to the government centered in the SE. The temporary alliance became a permanent one as the N. Chinese allied with the Russians and started talking trash about the Japanese. Korea joined in the 2050’s, after the Chinese conquest of N. Korea (which oddly enough was still around: the third dictator of N. Korea had solved the issue of too many mouths, not enough food by simply rounding up the “disloyal” elements of the population and shoving them over the border): it has since expanded into SE Asia.
The WPA is presently on poor terms with the US, after the “space war” of the 2080’s, when the US played rough in claiming stakes to mining rights in the Belt. [4] This has led to the militarization of WPA space forces, which in turn has done nothing to improve the hostility level.
India basks in the pleasant news that it has recently become the world’s largest economy. The business of India is business: although not yet as rich as Americans or Europeans by per capita standards, the economy is booming, and Indians are interested in making money, not international politics. India is currently largely isolationist: as long as trade remains substantially free, the rest of the world can go hang. (Well, there are those crazy Chinese Christians next door. But there’s crazy and crazy, and attacking Mighty India would be waaay crazy.)
The middle east is still a bit of a mess, although the formation of the Turkish Federation has helped bring some stability. Israel went a little bugfuck after the Seventeen Minutes War with Iran [5], but they’re much better now. (They’re even starting to build some houses above ground nowadays). The Palestinians have adapted after the Second Expulsion, and have managed to build a functional state on the ruins of the old Kingdom of Jordan.
The Turks have done pretty well for themselves since the arrival of democracy in central Asia in the 2050’s, and are in a bit of a cultural renaissance at present: Samarkand is actually looking pretty golden nowadays, and Istanbul is one of the three or four more magnificent cities on earth. They have friendly historical ties to the US, but have begun distancing themselves a bit lately (the Turks historically have looked upon Religious Enthusiasm with a bit of suspicion). A new interest in the old Ottoman empire is part of the renaissance, and the nostalgic Turkish tours of the Balkans are beginning to freak out the southern members of the Alliance.
North Africa is doing better: Egypt has gone from corrupt semi-socialism to religious rule and on to largely secular corrupt capitalism over the last century, with only four violent changes of government in the interim. The Mahgreb, trading with the Americans and the Turks and the democratic bits of Europe, are fairly prosperous by end-of-the-21st century standards, although they suspect the Turks are looking down at them. The rest of Africa, after various social collapses, mass migrations, wars, etc. has managed to modernize up to early 21st century Latin American standards of living, and at least AIDS is now curable with cheap pills. [6] The Congo™ has done OK since the international corporations took over from the money-starved UN in the 40’s, although of late there has been some grumbling about the dress requirements.
Australia has grown greatly in population in spite of water shortages, (relatively) cheap fusion having made large-scale desalination feasible. Unfortunately, the Australians somewhere in the 2070’s came to the conclusion that were tired of a historical portrayal as either being cute, funny, or genocidal, and decided they wanted some Respect, darn it! However, 60 million people is still too few to actually count in a world which in spite of the Birth Dearth still has nearly 8 billion people, so they have allied with the US, embarked on a terribly expensive program of space colonization, and put several of the worlds top PR firms to work…
Mexico, after a very bad patch in the early 21st century (the Palin Intervention didn’t help), managed to restore internal stability in the late 20’s, and managed several decades of good economic growth, during which it came to replace the US as the largest economic force in Central America. Still, this generally took place in a climate of good relations and close economic ties between Latin America and the US. It wasn’t until the early 70’s, stung by an increasingly pushy US attitude towards its economic relations with Latin America, that Mexico, joined by Cuba (always game for thumbing its nose at the US, even after Castro’s death in 2020), Colombia, Costa Rica, and a couple other countries, broke off talks on Pan-American economic union, and began organizing a purely “Latin” economic block. There had such efforts before (the words “humiliating failure“ comes to mind), but by this point Mexico was approaching first-world living standards, and had the economic muscle to pull it off.
By 2101, a close economic-military-and-a-dab-political union of Spanish-speaking countries had emerged, and was widely recognized as a Coming Power. The US government, accustomed to being dominant in the Western Hemisphere, is not happy with this. Its not happy with the Latin’s support for liberal elements in the US. Its not happy with the fact they are Catholic [7]. And its not happy at _all_ with the fact that the Latin arms industry is now producing “genius” class anti-missile-missiles and anti-missile laser arrays as good as anything the US produces. Trouble is brewing…
[1] Just a few hundred million excess deaths.
[2] “The 1960s were even wilder, man!” a few patchouli-smelling 100+ year-olds will inform uninterested audiences.
[3] A case of people crying “wolf” once too many times. And then it eats you.
[4] Not that asteroid mining is actually profitable yet: until the still-building “beanstalk” reaches the ground in the Congo, getting the stuff back down is still too expensive.
[5] Nobody deliberately started it, but when you have two nuclear-armed countries only a few minutes missile flight time apart, both of which are convinced the other side is ravening for their destruction, people will get overly excited and accidents will happen.
[6] “Now in orange and cherry flavors!”
[7] After the Catholic Church moved its quarters to Portugal, it began a process of liberalization ending in the election of Pope Beatrice in 2093, leading to a breakdown in relations between Catholics and the Protestant religious right in the US. Some US Catholics follow the conservative anti-Pope in the Cameroons, but they’re a small remnant.
Bruce
Nice. You could overlap your map with a world map of 800 CE.
Very nice and original.
You could delete the post and repost the map with the edit.
The Chinese there still make up a large majority of the government, and yes they would. Why? Because they are democratic, and currently, the Chinese Civil war rages on in Continental China, which pushes the republican Chinse to prun off to Formosa.
But if they're democratic, why use the symbol of a single political party? The use of the symbol on the flag of the Republic of China today symbolizes the dominance of the Nationalist Party. If they were run by the Kuomintang or something one would think they would probably seek unification with China as per OTL, to provide a base for the Nationalists in the CCW... (as the Nationalist Party tended to be, er, Nationalist)
that's the thing, though. the controlling party usues their flag as the flag of formosa, so in this case, the Chinese unionists are crruently controlling Formosa.
1700. Hopefully you can start to see some of the actual changes that have taken place.
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