AHC: Have Provincia Britanni As A Place Allow For The Western Empire To Survive

So I've always interested in Rome's stay in the future world power and of it's decline.

Thus my challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to have this distant province become part of the Roman world in such way that when the collapse of the West starts, Britain can pull off a 'eastern' scenario. (In other words, having a direct line of descent that connects to the West/Original Empire in the same sense that Byzantine was.)
 
Mostly Impossible

The best you could do with a state that's only as large as Roman occupied Britain would be some sort of successor state with significant and deliberately maintained Roman traditions and trappings.

However, the big problem is that you couldn't really call such a state the ''Western Roman Empire''. Remember that Britain was a backwater province at the time and was only even part of the Roman world for the tin.

Unless you're going for some sort of Arthurian angle? If that's what you had in mind, you have something a lot more plausible.
 
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Well, ERE managed to survive because most of its fiscal revenues survived mostly untouched.
You'd need Britain being the same before any other factor : giving the vulnerability of the province against basically everyone (Gaels, Picts, Saxons, Jutes, etc.), it's gonna be hard to have at the same time collapse of WRE because of these movements AND Britain being somewhat protected from it.

Even with a magical shield, Britain simply doesn't have enough ressources to pull off a separate roman entity : too few urban centers, too few population, too few agricultural development even before the epidemics of the Late Empire.

In spite of an historically romanized population (giving that romanisation isn't about making all provincials exact copy of Rome's Romans), they simply didn't began with enough ground to survive as such.

Maybe if, for some reason, you end with a Northern Gallic/Britannic entity, it may survives as an imperial remnant. It wouldn't fill the OP (being more Gallo-Roman than Britton), and would ask a PoD where western germanic leagues simply fail to unite enough to represent a regional power (maybe an harsher roman answer in the IIIrd century?).

Such entity could be based on an unmofidied Itus Saxonicum, but even there we're talking of a WRE with an important germano-roman presence (Saxons, Alains, Franks) would it be only as letes and foederati.
 
The best you could do with a state that's only as large as Roman occupied Britain would be some sort of successor state with significant and deliberately maintained Roman traditions and trappings.

The big problem,however, is that you couldn't really call such a state the ''Western Roman Empire''. Remember that Britain was a backwater province at the time and was only even part of the Roman world for the tin.

Unless you're going for some sort of Arthurian angle? If that's what you had in mind, you have something a lot more plausible.

Both would do for my idea-after all, Byzantine contained many elements that were not part of the original empire but still saw itself as still the Roman Empire.
 
Preventing the usurpation of Constantine III in 407 AD would probably do it, you could have an isolated Roman Garrison in Britannia while the rest of the Empire falls to various Barbarians, leaving a "Roman" Britain fighting off raiders from the continent and picts to the North.
 
Both would do for my idea-after all, Byzantine contained many elements that were not part of the original empire but still saw itself as still the Roman Empire.

If the Arthurian approach is what you're interested in, then would you have this successor state take inspiration from the ideal of Rome or be an actual cultural remnant?

For the former, you could have it come from a Roman general waxing nostalgic about old republican virtue from 500 years earlier and deciding to try and build something along those lines when the legions are recalled during the collapse. With this tack, you can get the thing started on a wave of blind idealism.

For an actual legitimate remnant, you have a much harder time making something plausible. Pretty much the only thing that could work would be the legions not leaving when they were recalled and opting to settle in Britain permanently to try and run the place.

Even if you take that, you have a whole host of problems to deal with if you want to have this Roman remnant survive until the Carolingian Renaissance.

If you do this anyway, one thing that has to happen is that the Roman-British need to absorb both Wales and Scotland is they are to repel the Saxons and later the Danes. Remember that the Romano-British did not do so historically for a reason.
 
Both would do for my idea-after all, Byzantine contained many elements that were not part of the original empire but still saw itself as still the Roman Empire.
Which ones? On many regards, ERE was more fitting on roman criteria such as urban centers, more important christianisation, less barbarian inlfuence (as, for example, no Ricimer equivalent), etc.
They felt Roman for a good reason, after all they were so.

As for legion remaining in Britain, don't forget that Late Imperial armies were mainly composed of romanized barbarians (laete or foderati). It's not like these armies had a real political unity, or that important ties with the provincial system (a system that was only superficially identitarian, and mostly an administrative structure). Eventually, they'd differ little from the armies present in Gaul, maybe serving either to local rulers or simply disbanding and settling their own.
 
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