AHC: Keep Europe Down

I am a bit surprised by the viewpoints on this thread. Everyone seems to be viewing history very teleologically, maintaining the idea that europe was almost "destined" to be advanced. Frankly (pun intended), when you look at Eurasia around 700, Europe was relatively not very advanced. Written culture had disappeared, there was virtually no central authority with staying power or bureaucracy/government administration of any kind, things had really fallen apart compared to the height of the Roman world.

Eastern Roman Empire. Enough said. Only example of a European state like that, but...

And I don't think its so much destined as...with any POD after the rise of Rome, the odds that Europe will be meaningless forever will happen are very poor. More equal with the rest of Eurasia, doable. But more by having the rest of Eurasia also progress as far towards modern (19th-20th century) technology the way Europe did than by Europe collapsing and staying collapsed.

Compare this to the advanced polities in the Middle East and East Asia, and it is pretty easy to imagine a very non-Eurocentric world. The way I see it, the best POD that creates a "recognizable" Europe in terms of ethnic placement and such is one that prevents the rise of more centralized states (well, centralized at all) in Europe during the High Middle Ages (I'm thinking way before, around 700-800) and Carolingian Renaissance, while also sustaining the Islamic Golden Ages. I mean, jesus, the Franks didn't even use cavalry before Charles Martel!
I know, this is a little late for the OP, but just my thoughts.
Scipio
There is no real POD that can prevent that from happening anywhere in Europe. That's the problem. With China we just need an incompetent emperor or five, and that sort of thing, and we've damaged the place. You can easily relatively speaking break any given state, but breaking "Europe" requires something where Europe on the whole can be influenced by any given event - which is extremely hard, especially with events stalling progress because most of them require a someone (not necessarily a Great Man, but a pope or an emperor or a king or something) able to influence a given area. And there is no figure - including the Pope - with that level of influence over all of Europe.

Now, you could easily have the nonEuropean polities remain strong, and European polities doing less well than OTL, but there's only so far you can go with that. I suppose with a really, really early POD you could do this, but with a POD that far back, the world would become unrecognizable, not just the western subcontinent.

Not sure on the cavalry thing but that's not the point, so I'm going with it for the sake of discussion.
 
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