Hm... which prominent westerners were killed by BD? Certainly there were several...
Edward the Black Prince was notably killed by the plague, kickstarting the events of the Wars of The Roses.
Hm... which prominent westerners were killed by BD? Certainly there were several...
I’m pretty much done with the European, Middle Eastern, and North African side of things but now I have an issue. Should I kill off Timur in this timeline? If I do then there will be no Mughal India and quite possibly no Safavids and new empires will rise in their place but if he somehow survives then we might see a similar scenario to the OT. Any thoughts?
Probably sometime in the early 1410s. The book’s first section coincides with Zheng He’s voyages.When is the exact POD?
Why?I am currently reading up on Polish history during the years between 1340-1450 ish.
Poland will become a major player in Europe seeing as how the plague didn't do much in the region but since the king of Poland at the time was the last of the dynasty and Louis of Hungary came after him, I am trying to understand how the kingdom functioned and who led it. I considered letting Louis of Hungary die from the plague seeing as how this plague is killing many leaders in my timeline but that would change a lot in Poland hence why I am reading up on it. Plus I want to start in the 1400s to show the aftereffects of the plague and not have a paragraph of just people dying off.Why?
This is a bit deep in the thread, but I think commentators are getting too hung up on the plague that starts the "Years of Rice and Salt". The book is a literary exercise that looks at how history would have unfolded if there were no white people (actually if white people had been removed in the 14th century). The mechanism that gets rid of the white people is unimportant, Robinson just comes up with something semi-plausible and rolls from there.
If you really want something more "realistic", maybe change the climate post Ice Ages by getting rid of the Gulf Stream or something so that most of Europe is Artic tundra that can't support a large population. Greece and Southern Italy would be unaffected, so you still get something like classical Hellenic culture and the Byzantine Empire, which you need because they both affected Islam. But you get rid of medieval and modern northwestern European civilization this way along with Russia. So you wind up with a situation like the book, outside of European being an empty continent open to Muslim settlement but the Middle East never produced the surplus populations needed to take over an empty continent anyway.