AHC Europe under a single king

SATOR

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Vastly easier said than done, and a much more long term project than the heir of Ludwig's lifetime.
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As i said, this requires allmost everything going right from 820AD to 1000AD at least. This implies either multiple kings or Ludwing's fantasy son being a Lich:D. While the latest option would make for a nice ASBTL, i was thinking more about the possibilities of the former.
 
As i said, this requires allmost everything going right from 820AD to 1000AD at least. This implies either multiple kings or Ludwing's fantasy son being a Lich:D. While the latest option would make for a nice ASBTL, i was thinking more about the possibilities of the former.

The former would too.

Even OTL France from Philip II to the end of the Capets (148 years) - which is as good an example of success at "making a kingdom work" as history illustrates - didn't have everything go right, didn't have everything stable past all doubt, and certainly weren't in a position to manage more than France.
 
Good luck consolidating any two of those as one's core (hell, OTL indicates consolidating any one is a great accomplishment), let alone all four. Europe is "blessed" with the fact that historical polities like France or Spain (or the Netherlands or England) were able to assert and maintain their independence from rulers with such ideas.

Fair. But how about the more limited core of Charlemagne's Empire, with a better administration?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...g/792px-Frankish_Empire_481_to_814-en.svg.png

If you manage to hold that together when Northern European agriculture takes off, you're in a very strong position.
 
Fair. But how about the more limited core of Charlemagne's Empire, with a better administration?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...g/792px-Frankish_Empire_481_to_814-en.svg.png

If you manage to hold that together when Northern European agriculture takes off, you're in a very strong position.

France, alone was a mighty challenge. "Better administration" is going to be a big challenge to set up and maintain.

What could be done in good circumstances is far from certain to last through the inevitable bad ones.
 
France, alone was a mighty challenge. "Better administration" is going to be a big challenge to set up and maintain.

What could be done in good circumstances is far from certain to last through the inevitable bad ones.

As had been mentioned however, you could have a variant of the mandate of heaven developing so that even if you have a fragmentation of the empire, eventualy, someone will tries to rebuild it.
 
As had been mentioned however, you could have a variant of the mandate of heaven developing so that even if you have a fragmentation of the empire, eventualy, someone will tries to rebuild it.

As has been mentioned before, Europe is not China.

Even if you somehow have the idea of "restore the Oversized Polity", that does not make it a feasible project.

Otherwise, the Low Countries would have remained in possession of the Habsburgs, the German princes would have been docile subjects of the same family, England and France would be under friendly rulers, and so on and so forth.

It wasn't for lack of desire to do those things that the Habsburgs failed at their "bid for mastery".

It wasn't for lack of immense resources that they failed at that. It wasn't even an unusual bad set of rulers or a uniquely feeble administrative system (within the territories they did manage to hold).

To quote Kennedy:

"To say that Europe's decentralized states system was the great obstacle to centralization is not, then, a tautoloy. Because there existed a number of competing political entities, most of which possessed or were able to buy the military means to preserve their independence, no one single one could ever achieve the breakthrough to the mastery of the continent."

Italics are his.
 
As has been mentioned before, Europe is not China.

In modern time, no. But we are talking about 1500 years ago. the "competing" nations at the time would have been no different then the various states that were unified under the Qin. The real difference between europe and china is not one of inherent disunion but simply not enough history to build upon. Have charlemagne present himself as just another dynasty of "The Empire" with previous ones simply having been pagan and then have a hundred years or so of continued rule by his scions so that even after a break up of the empire, you will eventualy get a new dynasty get the mandate from the pope to be The Emperor.
 
In modern time, no. But we are talking about 1500 years ago. the "competing" nations at the time would have been no different then the various states that were unified under the Qin. The real difference between europe and china is not one of inherent disunion but simply not enough history to build upon. Have charlemagne present himself as just another dynasty of "The Empire" with previous ones simply having been pagan and then have a hundred years or so of continued rule by his scions so that even after a break up of the empire, you will eventualy get a new dynasty get the mandate from the pope to be The Emperor.

So, OTL, except for Charlemagne pissing off the Byzantines.

Seriously, you have done nothing to address the ways this is not like China and are actually muddling the issue by treating it as something where all you need is some sort of equivalent to the mandate of Heaven to erase the vast differences between Europe's fragmented state of affaris and China.

But hey, who cards how hard a time OTL rulers had even managing to consolidate power in "merely" France? This is alternate history, where if we want to ignore the problems faced we need to graft on a concept from another culture a continent away and wave our magic wands so that the chosen dynasty is favored by the most powerful God of all, the pen of the historically ignorant writer.

Europe has had plenty of history to build on if that was enough. It isn't - as the fact the Byzantines failed to hold Italy might indicate to someone more concerned with studying the problems faced by OTL rulers than the people who start and encourage these "What if Europe wasn't made up of a multitude of competing polities able to acquire the means to defend their independence from those who want unification?" threads are.

Seriously. The Holy Roman Emperors in the Middle Ages claimed authority over other kings. Did this actually matter? Effectively, no.

And that wasn't for lack of history or a lack of ideology or a lack of any of the "We just need to pretend fragmentation is an unnatural state of affairs" beliefs that empire-wankers always advocate in defiance of any limits on imperial expansion or even internal imperial power.
 
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Seriously, you have done nothing to address the ways this is not like China and are actually muddling the issue by treating it as something where all you need is some sort of equivalent to the mandate of Heaven to erase the vast differences between Europe's fragmented state of affaris and China....
Europe has had plenty of history to build on if that was enough. It isn't - as the fact the Byzantines failed to hold Italy might indicate to someone more concerned with studying the problems faced by OTL rulers than the people who start and encourage these "What if Europe wasn't made up of a multitude of competing polities able to acquire the means to defend their independence from those who want unification?" threads are.

Seriously. The Holy Roman Emperors in the Middle Ages claimed authority over other kings. Did this actually matter? Effectively, no.

And that wasn't for lack of history or a lack of ideology or a lack of any of the "We just need to pretend fragmentation is an unnatural state of affairs" beliefs that empire-wankers always advocate in defiance of any limits on imperial expansion or even internal imperial power.

For once I agree strongly with you, Elfwine--Europe clearly has been difficult to unify; in the two thousand years since the Romans planted the seed of the idea of unifying it, dozens of ambitious and powerful entities, some like the Roman Catholic Church with staying power on the scale of those two millennia, have tried to pull it all into one centralized polity--and generally failed, and the handful that came close to succeeding--Napoleon and Hitler come to mind--have seen their systems fall apart in their own lifetimes, leaving it as divided as ever in the aftermath.

I'd be very interested in your analysis as to why this is so, rather than merely heaping scorn on those who obviously underestimate the nature of the challenge they are taking on. But how do they underestimate it? What exactly stands in the way of a would-be Napoleon to not only break the opposing states one by one and assimilate them on his own terms but then set things up so the thing is stable?

Europe is not China, you observe. Quite obviously so. But what are the salient differences, what distinguishes European civilization from Chinese so that we can see why it is that emperors of all Europe are few and brief exceptions and a shifting balance of power between strong rival states the rule, the reverse of China's history?

When I want to give a hard and fast answer to this myself, I falter. The most obvious and apparent difference, I'm tempted to say, is geography. Han civilization cohered about the Yellow River. In my ignorance of the nuances of Chinese geography I don't see barriers comparable to those dividing the nation-states that formed the basis of the Westphalian system of nations. Those barriers in Europe in turn guaranteed (or appear to have, anyway, in hindsight) divergent cultural developments, divergent language systems for instance, as well as alternate trade routes that fed into each other but remained distinct. It seems that Europe has many natural nuclei of separate centers--Britain for instance being a set of islands, Scandinavia is across a sea (except Denmark of course bridges that sea...) There are many ports, giving access to separate river systems. There are lots of peninsulas, lots of broad systems of valleys divided by some serious mountain ranges, and so on.

Which raises the question--how then could Europe be in any sense a set, a system that makes some meaningful kind of whole that we are then tempted to imagine uniting? If politically unifying Europe is a chimera, why then does it nevertheless seem so clear Europe is in some sense nevertheless a distinct place?

I've seen the geographic argument attacked as oversimplified and debunked.

I wonder if you have some other approach to the paradox of Europe somehow unified in its stubborn diversity, that would shed light rather than heat on this argument here.
 
I'd be very interested in your analysis as to why this is so, rather than merely heaping scorn on those who obviously underestimate the nature of the challenge they are taking on. But how do they underestimate it? What exactly stands in the way of a would-be Napoleon to not only break the opposing states one by one and assimilate them on his own terms but then set things up so the thing is stable?

I'm going to use a larger font this time, because it underlines the core of the problem with "What if X was more successful?"

Elfwine said:
To quote Kennedy:

"To say that Europe's decentralized states system was the great obstacle to centralization is not, then, a tautoloy. Because there existed a number of competing political entities, most of which possessed or were able to buy the military means to preserve their independence, no one single one could ever achieve the breakthrough to the mastery of the continent."

This isn't some obscure fact known only to the most dedicated scholars of political science. This is something that any study of the period between ~500 and ~1945 shows over and over again.

And any study of the history of say, France, shows how hard it is to build up the apparatus to consolidate control within one area - there just aren't very good tools available to do so when communications and distances limit how much control can actually be exercised, and neither the men or the money for an organized bureaucracy which can manage things beyond the limits of one man's attention and energy can just be created Ex nihilo.

These are colossal issues with no easy or quick solutions, and yet over and over again people treat it as if it was just a failure to select the right advances in a game of Civilization.

Which raises the question--how then could Europe be in any sense a set, a system that makes some meaningful kind of whole that we are then tempted to imagine uniting? If politically unifying Europe is a chimera, why then does it nevertheless seem so clear Europe is in some sense nevertheless a distinct place?
Because politically uniting Europe being a chimera and the sense that Europe is distinct from the rest of western Eurasia come from entirely different things.


So to answer your question on how do they underestimate it: The same way people usually underestimate the difficulty of something - ignorance.

Continuous, persistent ignorance.

And when it comes to alternate history in particular, people seem to have a tendency to believe - and I'm not excluding myself here - that the outcome they want to make happen was denied by a perverse fluke, where all you need is a stroke of luck and everything falls into place.

Certainly, luck plays a role in events. But the course of events in (for example) 1519 to 1659 was not one where luck alone would have compensated for the problems - manmade and otherwise - faced by the Habsburgs in their attempts to turn a considerable advantage in resources over (almost) any given adversary to a position of dominance on the continent.
 
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1) rome, if it continued its expansion. Probably low probability.
2) charlemagne. Changes succession laws so empire isnt split. Might still not be viable in the long run.
3) napoleon. Quite possible.
4) a german based empire in the twentieth century?

5) maybe a centralized HRE, note not HREGN
 
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