Better Years: Creating a better timeline than "The Years of Rice and Salt"

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?
 
I could see maybe the Basque, Sapmi, and other minorities benefiting from the plague in a way, since they live in areas that the plague might not hit as hard.
 
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?

When is the exact POD?
 
When is the exact POD?
Probably sometime in the early 1410s. The book’s first section coincides with Zheng He’s voyages.

(Responding to the OP) If you are going for a more realistic YORAS TL, kick the technology back a a few centuries. Right around the time that Europe was going through the Renaissance, the Chinese and Islamic world stagnated. The Plague radically altered European society in ways that did not occur in other parts of Eurasia, even though in many places lost similar percentages of their populations.
You could still have similar things occur compared to the book, but more spread out instead of the same rate of progress as OTL.
 
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Sorry for my silence, I scraped the original idea and decided to start fresh. I am currently reading up on Polish history during the years between 1340-1450 ish. Despite making this slightly ASB I decided to make the plague undergo a mutation in Central Asia which made the bacteria have a higher infection rate but very weak to extreme temperatures. I also read that some scientist thought the plague was airborne but I feel like I can't do that without killing off too many people (I'm trying to make the majority of Eurasia see 75% of the population die). Here are some of the ideas I had in the old draft.

-I had an entire thing for the Scandinavian people in which the Norwegian royal family gets word of the plague ravaging Europe and them escaping to Iceland resulting in centuries of isolation until Muslim invaders attacking the island which resulted in the people building a navy to find the legendary "Vinland" resulting in the discovery of the new world in 1800.
-Morocco undergoes a civil war and one of the Berber tribes takes over resulting in Islamic expansion into Iberia in the 1500s.
-Mali survives thanks to Morocco and both regions try to unite the Islamic world not as one nation but as economic and military partners against a newly growing Christian threat (Poland, Norway, whoever is surviving)

These were some of the old ideas but I felt like I didn't work out the way I would have liked. That's why I'm redoing it. If any of you have some ideas that may or may not work please let me know. Especially for China and the rest of Asia because I feel like just making China Ming after the black death is lazy. Thanks and I will try to keep people posted on progress in the future.
 
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.
 
Poland will get back Silesia in this TL since Bohemia will suffer in this plague and you could have Occitan have better odds after the plague against the French.
 
I was wondering if anyone could help me with this part of this project. The Americas in this timeline will not be reached until near the end (1900) but I really don’t know how the people and civilizations of the region would progress without Spanish and European colonialism. Any thoughts on the matter. I thought about an eventual Incan takeover of South America but I really don’t know how feasible that is since I don’t know much about the military strength of the Incans. After doing even more research it seems that the Aztecs would have fell even without the Spanish. Who would take over Mesoamerica? What would happen to the Native Americans of the OTL USA and Canada?
 
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.
 
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.

In this timeline I’m not trying to kill off European culture but instead make it along with the rest of Eurasia undergo a major population drop and see who grows out from there. Europe won’t be completely gone in this timeline but with events such as the hundred year war that pop up in Europe, many major players will become weaker. England and France especially but this is subject to change as time goes on with my research and planning.
 
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