Any plausible way for the Byzantines to hold onto the Levant, Egypt and Africa with a POD of 565?

Fabius Maximus

avernite said:
So which Islam did the Mongols, Manchu, Greeks and Germans (in multiple iterations) use?

It seems to me that tribes/cultures on borders of empires have a pretty recurring tendency to unite, even if that unity is fragile. Islam helped stabilize the Arab conquest so that they didn't fall apart into Arabia+Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, and whoever else immediately after the conquests stopped, but that's not the same as being needed for conquest in the first place.
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Arabia had been on the borders of various empires for millennia (literally the first empire in history was Sargon of Akkad's in Mesopotamia) without ever showing any real signs of uniting to go on a conquering spree. That they only did this after converting to Islam suggests that Islam was indeed an important factor.
 

avernite

Fabius Maximus said:
Arabia had been on the borders of various empires for millennia (literally the first empire in history was Sargon of Akkad's in Mesopotamia) without ever showing any real signs of uniting to go on a conquering spree. That they only did this after converting to Islam suggests that Islam was indeed an important factor.
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The Germans were also on the border of Rome for a few centuries before uniting properly, the Greeks on Persia's for about two, and I think the Mongols/Manchu had been on China's border for quite a while. I'm sure my analysis is missing some factors (population density?) necessary for unity to occur, but religion/Islam certainly isn't the only possible answer.
 

darthfanta

avernite said:
The Germans were also on the border of Rome for a few centuries before uniting properly, the Greeks on Persia's for about two, and I think the Mongols/Manchu had been on China's border for quite a while. I'm sure my analysis is missing some factors (population density?) necessary for unity to occur, but religion/Islam certainly isn't the only possible answer.
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The Germans never united.Even in the 400s,it was several groups of Germans.The Mongols and Manchus were only unified for some periods of time and then largely broke up in others.
 

chrnno

John7755 يوحنا said:
Thus my view that it was an Arab tactical victory as opposed to Byzantine incoherence or weakness.
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And I think here lies the source of some the disagreement. It was an Arab victory that leveraged their martial superiority and Byzantine weakness to force the Roman Empire in a position that by the time they recovered enough for another round the Arabs had fully established their controls of the regions and were prepared for it. We can discuss if it was 50/50, 40/60, 70/30 or some variation of but both were major factors and history would have been very different without either.

I find it weird the tendency people have to say one single factor determined everything when it is a myriad of things coming together. Maybe pushing the Arab events a few years forward would mean stronger and better prepared Romans so they wouldn't have conquered as much or maybe facing more resistance would have further unified them and thus while the conquest could have cost more in the long term less internal divergences would have them stronger. Maybe pushing it a few years back would have allowed them to conquer more at lesser cost leaving them in an even stronger position or maybe the ease of conquest would meant the internal differences between the recently united tribes would have caused more problems. And maybe either would have made no difference at all.

There is a multitude of possible paths, some might be more plausible than others but history isn't about what would probably happen, it is about what happened. I believe the timeline of a world that followed only the most likely events would end up in the ASB forum rather than this one.
 

Fabius Maximus

avernite said:
The Germans were also on the border of Rome for a few centuries before uniting properly, the Greeks on Persia's for about two, and I think the Mongols/Manchu had been on China's border for quite a while. I'm sure my analysis is missing some factors (population density?) necessary for unity to occur, but religion/Islam certainly isn't the only possible answer.
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The big German confederations (Allemanni, Franks, Goths, etc.) start appearing in our sources during the third century, so about three hundred years after they started sharing a border with Rome. The Greeks united, as you say, about two hundred years after the Persian conquest of Lydia. The tribes north of China periodically united from at least the time of the Han dynasty. Arabia, on the other hand, had been around powerful empires for literally millennia by this point without ever unifying -- until Islam came along.
 
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