A Russia-less world?

[Valdemar II]

I've run into this in other threads. Why is pork seen as a must-have for a Northern European civilization? I understand Russia is hardly olive oil country, but surely some mixture of tallow, butter, goose fat, chicken fat, etc could fill the role. Hell, using goose/chicken fat is what Ashkenazi Jews did anyway - they called it schmaltz.

The difference was that Jews didn't make up a majority of the population in areas they lived in, there's simply a enourmous niche which are lost by not eating pigs, which means that we see their pig eating neighbours getting a bigger population density, which transform into bigger armies and bigger population surplus every generation. So we would see them being slowly pushed out by the pig eaters. Alcohol serve as easy way to get vitamins and carbohydrate in the winter.

I don't think you can just ignore those provisions they are pretty solidly embedded into Islam from an early period, though obviously I think you can finesse certain provisions (i.e. see my latest RoS update for one way mosques and churches got around usury). But that is part of an old discussion on this board.

While I don't think most Muslims will be able to do so, I think the isolation of the Bulgars from other Muslims group will let them adopt these things. Whjen they first have adopted it, foreign Muslims will condemn it, but the Bulgars seems to have been very stubborn

To go on with the main topic I agree that some sort of Scandinavian rule over a Finnic-Slav population would occur in Novgorod before they just started speaking whatever it was the Finns spoke. (Would it still be known as Novgorod?)

No that's of Slavic origin, it would likely be named Holmgaard. I'm not sure what way the language would go, the Swedish speakers in Finland and Estonia* was descendants of settlers from that age, and they have only begun to lose room in modern time. We could easily see a Scandinavian speaking state survive, we could also see the Finns winning out. Both are plausible. We could also see a mix with Swedish speaking towns and coast and but most of the countryside speaking "Finnish"

*Estonia had a small Swedish minority, a big part of which was deported to Ukraine when the Russian conquered it in the 18th century, and with the last ones (whom made up 1-2% of Estonias population) fleed to Sweden in 1944-45.

 

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No that's of Slavic origin, it would likely be named Holmgaard.

And also Ladoga (Aaldjeborg?), of course, and a couple of other locations. Even discounting the Slavic core of the Gardariki (Rostov, Gnezdovo) there were other Scandinavian trading posts along the Ilmen-to-Volga route which satellited Mescheran/Muromian/Meryan villages rather than Slavic ones...like say at Kideksha/Suzdal; or mixed from all three, like Yaroslavl/Timerevo/Medvezhy Ugol.

That said other than in Ladoga the incidence of Scandinavian burials is normally no better than 10%, so I don't know if they would ever become dominant over the natives before the natives adopted agriculture and feudalism as well.

 

[Valdemar II]

And also Ladoga (Aaldjeborg?), of course, and a couple of other locations. Even discounting the Slavic core of the Gardariki (Rostov, Gnezdovo) there were other Scandinavian trading posts along the Ilmen-to-Volga route which satellited Mescheran/Muromian/Meryan villages rather than Slavic ones...like say at Kideksha/Suzdal; or mixed from all three, like Yaroslavl/Timerevo/Medvezhy Ugol.

That said other than in Ladoga the incidence of Scandinavian burials is normally no better than 10%, so I don't know if they would ever become dominant over the natives before the natives adopted agriculture and feudalism as well.

Let's remember that the East Slavs succed in it, and the Scandinavians would be in a better position to bring it with them. Beside if agriculture are uncommon we would see large scale Scandinavian immigration, in OTL they was somewhat limited by the fact that there already lived farmers in the area. Of course border areas like the Estonia and Finns wil likely have adoped it before the Scandinavians arrive. But in more isolated areas I doubt it. Of course areas like Ukraine will already have farmers, so there's no chance for a linguistic takeover there.