An Age of Miracles Continues: The Empire of Rhomania
- Thread starter Basileus444
- Start date
pls don't ban me
Monthly Donor
i though so but i got confused since i think that David Komnenos was orthodox
My god, it's been 800+ pages in the making but I finally caught up to this awesome timeline.
I do feel bad that I caught up just as when D3 is on his last legs, since he's such an interesting person.
Odysseus definitely seems like he is the opposite of his father though, and I don't think Ody can possibly handle the day to day operations of the Empire unless it's something like kicking the Ottomans out of Jerusalem. A competent Athena alongside Odysseus would be a very fun duo to follow, one that could bring the Roman Empire back from the lull that it's experiencing right now.
Since the Romans got actual Rome back, I wonder if there's still a lingering sentiment towards the actual city of the old Empire or if it's permanently tainted by the Papacy and the occupancy of the Latins.
I do feel bad that I caught up just as when D3 is on his last legs, since he's such an interesting person.
Odysseus definitely seems like he is the opposite of his father though, and I don't think Ody can possibly handle the day to day operations of the Empire unless it's something like kicking the Ottomans out of Jerusalem. A competent Athena alongside Odysseus would be a very fun duo to follow, one that could bring the Roman Empire back from the lull that it's experiencing right now.
Since the Romans got actual Rome back, I wonder if there's still a lingering sentiment towards the actual city of the old Empire or if it's permanently tainted by the Papacy and the occupancy of the Latins.
For now their memory of the city is tainted, but over time that will be fixed once Roman culture is more widespread over the coming centuries. Eventually alot of people will like to look back at history and will genuinely be attracted back to the eternal city.
Imo arent we Romanophiles/Byzantonphiles here? That just proves how far we love another culture that has been instrumental for shaping world history. We all have even different cultures right?
They don't follow Catholic Christianity, the Mexican empire follows Avignon Christianity.
He was an orthodox but most of his fellow conquestadors were of Avignon Christianity. Which would result into a more syncretic version of Avignon Christianity.
Well, Avignon Catholicism as opposed to Roman/Mainz Catholicism, with each side of the schism claiming to be the legitimate Catholic Church (though I suppose it's a distinction without much of a difference compared to how you phrased it). IIRC they're one of the last Avignon holdouts, with everyone else either going Bohmanist, returning to the mainline fold, or getting conquered by a non-Avignon power.
I don’t see anyone answering number 2 for you so I will. Yes that is Kongo. And while I’m a bit hazy I think last I heard that they’re an ally with Ethiopia and maybe friendly with Rome? Not sure in that last bit. They’ve been fairly quiet mostly though.
pls don't ban me
Monthly Donor
TY, will it convert to orthodox or coptic in this TL? in OTL the country became catholic under portoguese patronage.
I believe they are already Coptic actually. It would be very interesting to see an update focused on them in a hundred years or so after they've developed more
Man, that is a tall Mexico. Any chance of us getting a glimpse of what's happening over in the New World in the near future, @Basileus444 ?
At this point mainly force of habit. The Red Sea route is very familiar to the Romans and the infrastructure is set up. They aren’t familiar with the Cape Route and its waters, so there would be a learning curve (and extra losses, increasing expense) until that issue was fixed, while all the while the competitors would be going business as usual. They could fill the market niche while the Cape Route merchant is getting the kinks out. Plus the higher losses in crew on those long voyages would scare away prospective sailors.
It could work, but it’d be a gamble.
To quote Martin from SG-1: Never ask a writer where they get their ideas.
The 3 financial scandals idea has been on the board for a while, but I don’t know how long. I know I alluded to them several months ago though.
Yeah, Rhomania is going to be rabidly anti-free trade. I am planning for OTL laissez faire free-trade capitalism to develop in Latin Europe ITTL; the OOC reason is so Romans can be poking holes in it.
The issue would be is that the Ethiopian merchants certainly haven’t broken any Ethiopian laws. Regarding Roman law, it could be argued that they’re accessories to tax fraud, but Ethiopia and Rhomania don’t have an extradition treaty that covers that. (I figure they have an extradition treaty of some kind, but that covers political offenders like rebels.)
Now while Constantinople and Gonder could be autocratic and do this anyway regardless of legal niceties, Gonder would look on these Ethiopians that did everything and have everything in their jurisdiction and say “we’ll hand the persons over as a gesture of goodwill, but we keep all the assets”.
I think the Chinese expression about lighting a furnace to burn a hair applies here. Ethiopia would lose some money here, but they can take it. Meanwhile they can retaliate by massively upping the export duties on kaffos, so that’s a large portion of the Roman upper and middle classes that are now enraged at the Roman government responsible for this. And if things escalate, Ethiopia can always form a naval alliance with the Triunes similar to the one the Ottomans have, or even start fomenting rebellion amongst their co-religionists in Egypt.
They’ll get a break once I shift my focus onto other areas (why, hello there, Triunes!). If the Romans had been smart, they would’ve been a favored supporting character like Ethiopia or Georgia rather than the main one that gets all my attention.
That said, some of the knocks coming Rhomania’s way have been escalated because the tenor of pro-Roman exceptionalism and jingoism needs a corrective. That is why I’ve been emphasizing the agency of non-Romans in these eastern updates. Because Rhomania is not the undisputed master of all it surveys, and if it acts like it is, it will get punched in the face, and deserve to be punched in my opinion.
Red Sea State Transport Company: I admit I didn’t think of that. That could work, but the Ethiopians would expect a good share of it. The partnerships have consistently been 2 Romans and one Ethiopian in the middle, and they like that arrangement. They won’t be muscled out.
State capitalism OTL&TTL: I’m not consciously modeling TTL Rhomania after an OTL state’s policy. I have ideas flowing from TTL viewpoints and events, which may end up looking like OTL actors, but that’ll be unintentional.
Yeah, Odysseus is definitely the wrong guy to be working on these economic problems. Athena is a much better fit. Fortunately, she’s someone to whom Odysseus would be willing to delegate that power.
Nope; Carthage is the only Christian enclave.
Georgia and Ethiopia will lose that status; Rhomania will want to close those loopholes and will negotiate some sort of arrangement with Tbilisi and Gonder.
There’s favored nation status and I know buried in the TL have been references to reduced tariffs for particular countries, sometimes across the board and sometimes for specific products. So Rhomania is willing to adjust tariff rates, but not to wipe them out altogether. The precedent is the Venetians in the 1100s and the Romans want no part of that again.
The Scots have been muttering and grumbling. They feel isolated, ignored, and their issues aren’t being addressed by a geographically, culturally, and even increasingly religiously distant metropole.
Taking over Scotland is harder than it sounds. For all the English-Scottish fighting, and the massive demographic and economic advantage of England, the English could never make a conquest stick. The only exception I can think of is Cromwell (Edward I’s always seemed rather tenuous) and he was helped immensely by the Covenanters being utter morons (firing many of their veteran troops and officers before battle because they’re ungodly, then ignoring the remaining veteran commander to order an attack anyway against said commander’s advice). Too many logistical problems. Note that political unity came when the Scottish monarch inherited England.
He’s the wrong time period though (early/mid 1400s).
Mexico and Kongo: Mexico is Avignon Catholic and Kongo is Coptic, although the local version is syncretic with native traditions so a more fundamentalist cleric of either church would have lots of issues with what they saw in Mexico or Kongo.
Demetrios III still has a few tricks up his sleeve before he goes…
Your query about Rome prompted me to put a little bit into an upcoming update on Italy. There’s a little attachment to Rome as the ancestral city, but it is very faint and among the more historically minded. For the common people, Rome is very much the lair of the Papacy and that drowns out pretty much everything else.
I think once I’ve tied up the various story threads currently active we’ll take a look over there. But I want to wrap those up first. The mid-1600s are the point where the colonies, having gotten through their nasty early phases, really start to take off demographically. (The obvious and painful exception being the native Terranovans.)
Laissez faire economics and free trade aren't the same thing. One hasn't been part of mainstream economics in decades (though there's significant disagreement about the kind and amount of regulation is appropriate), the other is more or less universally agreed upon as being good policy among disparate schools of economists, with a degree of expert consensus approaching that of climate scientists consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. [1] There are of course reasonable non-economic reasons to place limits on free tree trade in certain sectors, particularly those related to military production, and historically the US has an awful track record when it comes to implementing effective policies to mitigate the impact of frictional unemployment that resulted from free trade agreements like NAFTA. But in most cases, the benefits of free trade greatly outweigh its detriments, hence the near universal support for free trade among economists of all political persuasions.
Countries of course can and do get away with protectionism, particularly if they have an enormous internal market like China or a privileged market like with the US (via NAFTA) or Germany (via the European Union), but its almost always a net loss. Sometimes that loss serves a higher geopolitical purpose, but in many sectors protectionism is just a self inflicted economic wound, see most of the Trump administration's protectionist policies or the CCP dragging its feet on certain aspects of economic liberalization. To remain globally relevant with middling natural resources and a population smaller than modern day Russia, Rhomania would either need to participate in some sort of supranational union like the EU (where it could occupy a position somewhat like modern day France), or have really shrewd policies that make the best possible use of the comparative advantages they have going for them.
[1] https://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/free-trade/ (This is actually quite striking given how little economists of different schools tend to agree with one another on most other questions, as you can see on polls regarding other hot button economic issues. The Princeton economist Alan Blinder noted that “Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most vehemently.”)
Last edited:
It's fairly possible that modern Rhomania could act somewhat similarly to OTL Russia, having aligned nations it can trust like the Russian polities, Vlachia, Ethiopia, Japan, and etc. in a sort of Orthodox trade bloc where it can dictate trade with each other while similarly discouraging trade with the Latin nations and other foreigners.
I just finished binge reading the entire TL and I have to say that you are doing an amazing job Basileus. Keep it up man!
The main reasons are historical and psychological. The events of 1203-04 and the events leading up to those are the most intensely studied events in Roman history, to ensure that such a cataclysm can never happen again. And an important through-line in these studies is the granting of free trade rights to the Venetians by Alexios I Komnenos. The grant did not cause 1204, but it was an important enabler. To give anyone free trade rights is to give away a critical aspect of national sovereignty, and one that might not be easily reclaimed. When Ioannes II tried to revoke the Venetians’ free trade rights, they responding by raiding Byzantine lands and killing Byzantine people until Ioannes II gave in to their demands.
Free trade is opening a door that might not be able to be shut again, and the last time the Romans did so it ended up nearly being fatal. Preferential tariffs are possible, because the Romans still have that control over national sovereignty, but the Romans are not opening that door again.
Relations between the two are cool. They don’t interact much. No Muscovy Company.
Thank you.
The House of Iron: A Creed All Must Believe
The House of Iron: A Creed All Must Believe
No one knows when the first one appeared, but it was clear by late summer 1638 that there was a serious problem. Imperial bank certificates were not fiat currency, paper money of the type familiar to the modern individual; no establishment in Rhomania had to take them as payment. However they were often used as a form of payment, particularly for large transactions where handling bags of hyperpyra would be inconvenient or insecure. The Roman government regularly paid large private contractors providing bulk material for the war effort in bank certificates, allowing it to use its coins to pay soldiers, auxiliaries, and small contractors. Had the White Palace been forced to pay them all in coinage, it would’ve been utterly impossible to do so.
Imperial bank certificates (IBCs for short) had a paper value. If one deposited 100 hyperpyra at a branch, one in theory got an IBC with a paper value of 100 hyperpyra. However the actual value did not always match up with the paper value. The reason for that is that it actually wasn’t as simple as depositing X in coinage and getting an IBC of X value.
When one deposited money with the Imperial Bank, one had to pay a deposit fee, which was a percentage of the amount. The conceit behind this is the fee was a payment to the bank to compensate them for keeping your money secure rather than you just burying it under your bed. Furthermore IBCs had a ‘release’ date. Some were ‘pay upon presentation’, which meant they had no release date. They could be presented at any time to a branch and the paper value paid out in coin, thus their paper value matched their actual value.
These though were rare. Most IBCs had a release date of varying times, before which the bank would refuse to cash it out. If one had an IBC worth 100 hyperpyra with a 6-month release and an issue date of February 1, it couldn’t be cashed out until August 1. But if it was March and one needed ready cash now and couldn’t wait, they might have to sell it to someone for 80 hyperpyra on the spot. The actual value is thus less than the paper value.
Most IBCs are of the delayed release type because the Imperial Bank wants them that way. With the money secured till a known date, this gives the bank greater security in issuing loans for its own profit without having to worry about untimely withdrawals. To encourage those types, money deposited on a delayed release earn interest, and the longer the delay the higher the interest; money deposited under a ‘pay upon presentation’ gets no interest. Furthermore the longer the delay, the lower the deposit fee.
The Roman government regularly participates in this. Bullion reserves are kept under the direct control of the government but a lot of revenue is deposited in the bank with the government getting IBCs in response. Since the White Palace has the ability to secure its own bullion, there is little need for ‘pay upon presentation’ IBCs, although some are used to expedite mass cash transfers throughout the Empire. There are more short-delay IBCs, but the bulk is comprised of long-delay IBCs. In peacetime with normal expenditures, this is viewed as the best use of the government’s revenue. The maximum interest is secured, while the government knows its pay schedule for its officials and soldiers and sailors and the IBC releases are tailored accordingly. [1] If an unexpected expenditure occurs, there are the bullion reserves, the ‘pay upon presentation’, the short-delay IBCs, and in the worst case scenario long-delay IBCs can be cashed out on the Constantinople exchange.
This expansive flow of capital is made possible by the new fractional reserve system used by the Imperial Bank. Instead of the paper value of all IBCs being an even match for the amount of coinage in the Imperial Bank’s vaults, the paper value is triple that of the bullion. The Imperial Bank can make many more loans now than it could previously and the flow of extra IBCs was vital for funding the war effort.
Yet for all its necessity, the concept is regarded very warily by many individuals. Using a paper note as a convenience rather than carting the equivalent in coinage is understood and accepted; the note is a stand-in for the real money. But everyone knows that is not the case now. A 60 hyperpyra IBC has only 20 gold coins behind it, which leads to the question: what are the other 40 hyperpyra? Just some scribbles on a page that are only worth that much if people pretend that it is worth that much. The entire concept seems entirely unethical, fabricating ‘money’ out of thin air when it doesn’t really exist.
The Metropolitans of Athens, Ephesus, and Ikonion are all particularly against this innovation, viewing it as unchristian and immoral, built entirely on a lie. They criticize it as a way for the rich to conjure fake money for themselves while the poor are destitute for lack of real money. The Hypatos of the Philosophers, an honorary but highly prestigious title granted to the most gifted intellectual in the Empire, also comes out against it, describing it as “a false creed that requires everyone to believe in it for it to continue to be. The moment that it is doubted, it crumbles, for it has no physical reality.”
Demetrios III is also one of those people who are skeptical of the concept, but who agreed to it because he recognized the necessity of expanding the supply of capital for funding the war effort. As a compromise he ordered the Imperial Bank to restrict the IBC value to bullion value be kept at 3:1 at most, even though some, including the Bank directors, had urged a higher ratio.
The knowledge that the ratio is capped is a commonly known fact, which is what clues people that something is wrong in summer 1638. The amount of coin in the Imperial Bank vaults is not common knowledge, for security reasons, but people have made educated guesses and based on those can estimate how much the value of IBCs should be. In the summer of 1638 there is a growing sense of unease; the value of circulating IBCs seems to be too high based on those estimates. But it could just be that the estimates are too low.
By mid-August though it is clear; there are way too many IBCs circulating for them to be keeping at a 3:1 ratio. The only explanation seems to be that someone is counterfeiting IBCs and putting them out on the market. The problem is that whoever is doing so is very good at their job. Nobody can tell a would-be counterfeit from a real IBC. The Hypatos’ words turn into a prophecy, for as belief fades and doubt spreads, the edifice crumbles.
By September 1, the word has spread throughout the entire Imperial heartland, from Arta to Aleppo, from Theodoro to Tyre, and people are horrified. This is a very widespread concern as during the war Roman propaganda urged people to invest their coinage with the bank, where it could be used as part of the basis of loans for the war effort. Many people whose parents would’ve had coin hoards instead possess IBCs. Except now nobody trusts their IBCs to be worth what they’re claimed, because their authenticity is now extremely questionable. Those who can release their IBCs flood their branch office, demanding to cash them out, but as more come in with the same demand people grow even more alarmed, especially when rumors (that are true) that there is not enough coinage to go around get started.
In four cities, literal runs on the bank trample 17 people to death and injure well over a hundred more. In Thessaloniki, Antioch, and Smyrna these all escalate to riots. Many of the rioters have lost practically everything. This is the 17th century, where the margin between affluence and destitution is rarely small and easily breached, and where destitution can easily be a death sentence. So the rioters rage with the fury of ones who know they are already damned. In Smyrna it requires elements of the Thrakesian tagma to arrive before order is restored.
In Constantinople an appearance of quiet is maintained by having all of the guard tagmata out patrolling on the streets, an unprecedented act, but underneath the capital is seething. Per capita, the Queen of Cities is the hardest hit by these financial upheavals. In Constantinople, the bank office was closed quickly enough that there is still coinage in the vaults, with a system set up to allow those who can prove ‘extreme need’ to release their IBCs for currency.
People who can’t release their IBCs because the release date hasn’t arrived yet are desperate to get rid of these worthless pieces of paper in exchange for at least some hard currency. Frantic, they offer them at values far below the paper value. Furthermore, the sheer number of people doing this at the same time and flooding the market further devalue the IBCs, driving them through the floor.
This is especially a problem for the Imperial government. As mentioned, a good portion of its wealth is in the form of long-release IBCs. The White Palace maintains large stockpiles of coinage but that is overwhelmingly for paying the salaries of the military. No one has tried to pay them with paper money and now is obviously a really bad time to try. To preserve the coinage for that task, which is a major and continuous expense, most other transactions are done with IBCs.
Yet even IBCs from the Imperial government are no longer trusted, with contractors demanding significant markups because of the insecurity. For example, an order placed with a shipyard in Sinope for building replacements for the green ships of the Trebizond Yard scandal is valued at 250,000 hyperpyra, except the shipbuilder will only accept an IBC as payment if its paper value is a half million. As a result of these expense issues, plans to replace the green ships are shelved indefinitely.
Demetrios III has been putting all effort into finding a way firstly into distinguishing counterfeits from real IBCs, with absolutely no success. Secondly, he wants those responsible so he can make an utterly spectacular example of them. On September 19, Leo Sideros delivers an extremely detailed and confidential report to his uncle.
[1] One example is a 6.1 million hyperpyra IBC with a release date three months before the expiry of the Demetrian Truce with the Ottomans. Demetrios III specifically set it up to finance the increased expenditure once warfare resumed.
