The Studying Erudite
Banned
make the frankish empire colonize parts of America BEFORE they split in three. what's the POD, what happens when frankia splits in 3 and how does that effect the future?
Chalenge: a frankish america
- Thread starter The Studying Erudite
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I don't think you know how alternate history works.
I respectfully ask you to stop gennociding the poor butterflies that didn't deserve this.
The Studying Erudite
Banned
i must say i did not understand the second sentence, but yeah, except for watching 3 youtube chanells i have come into althist in the last few days.
Any change to history creates the butterfly effect - changing stuff. Such a massive change would displace a whole host of butterflies, unless you purposefully held them back - killing them.
The point is, one does not simply say 'have X do Y' regardless of context, especially technology and geopolitics.
As others have pointed out already, there's a number of flaws with the post, the most important being the "butterfly effect" - one event causes another, so changing one means the other is sure to change as well. If Duke William chokes to death in 1065, the Normans aren't going to conquer England in 1066. The other is the length of your post - generally a little more is expected from an opening post, often giving a suggested POD and a bit of background info to people less familiar with the topic, and raising the questions you are actually interested in - if you are killing off William, are you interested in the line of English kings or how the Anglo-Saxon people continue to live? This thread (which is just one I pulled from the front page) has a good opening post that you could use as a guide: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/how-would-a-surviving-roman-republic-carry-on.462024/
But don't worry, a little time here and you'll get the hang of it
I like the idea of the scenario, so here's my take on it:
To get the Franks to America, you're going to need two things. One is the Franks themselves, headed by some member of the Karling lineage. The other is a way to get to America. When you say "before Francia splits in 3" I'm assuming you mean before the 843 Treaty of Verdun (there were other splits throughout the kingdom's history). If that's the case, we already have a problem. In 843, no-one had the means to get to America from Europe. The Viking longship was the most advanced design of its day, and it didn't take the Vikings to Iceland until sometime in the 980s (partly because they have no reason to randomly sail off west, and partly technical limitations - the longship would have seen marginal improvements over the 300+ years it was being used). Not only that, but the Franks from what I understand didn't really have a navy at all - Charlemagne used a few ships on the Rhine and other rivers in his conquests of Saxony, but those aren't going to survive a voyage in the North Sea or Atlantic, and the Royal Frankish Annals make no mention of a blue water navy.
To get a serious Frankish naval tradition going ready for 843, you're going to need a PoD way earlier than Charlemagne becoming emperor. I believe the longship was first used sometime around 700-730, but a PoD in 700 butterflies Charlemagne's birth for sure, and likely Pippin's birth as well. In 700, Charles Martel was 12, and it was far from predetermined that he would effectively take control of the kingdom from the inside that early. So I'll write that TL off - there's no way to predict what a 9th century Merovingian realm would look like.
So forget 843. If I take your post literally, "before a split in 3" means that as long as no Karling heir has two brothers, or better yet if Pippin says screw Karloman in 754 and establishes some sort of primogeniture as the norm (ignoring the inertia sure to result from such a move), then the scenario is fine if it takes until 1500 as long as there are still Franks and no tripartite divisions. But that's cheating a bit.
Let's drop the split in three then. I think Franks in America, by itself, is doable. But I'm going to go to Charles the Fat in the 880s to do it. Between 876 and 885 all the other legitimate Karling lines died out and he ended up getting control of the whole empire. Such an occurrence was rare but had happened in the past, Dagobert I being the best Merovingian example. If Charles only has one son (lets call him Louis IV), a united empire could exist until at least 900, probably another couple of decades beyond. If Louis has kids, all but one of them die (like Louis the Pious' brothers did). That's 960. Two more generations and the Vikings have made it to Vinland (Newfoundland). Or the empire splits up when Charles dies, and at some point in the later tenth century reunites again. It doesn't matter which. OTL Charles had a son, Bernard, but he was illegitimate and no-one would accept him, so I'll kill off Richardis, Charles' wife. Charles remarries in c.880 and his wife gives birth to Louis in 882. The succession is safe.
During Charles' reign, the Viking chief Godfrid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfrid,_Duke_of_Frisia) became his vassal, although by 885 his inaction against another Viking raid caused him to be murdered. Let's say that second raid doesn't happen, Godfrid retains his Scandinavian contacts somehow, and that this semi-Danish semi-Frankish region in Frisia stays in that situation until the tenth century. At some point longships are imported to the territory, and quite likely a merchant station of some sort would be set up there. When Vinland gets discovered, a few Franks from the region might decide to come along.
To get a lasting Frankish presence in America from that, you need to keep Vinland alive (there's a number of issues that need to be solved to achieve this, but plenty of threads have been made about that, just search "vinland" to find them). A Frankish outpost there could turn into a Frankish colony if things go well, but more likely nothing gets accomplished and it becomes an even more random footnote in history than Vinland itself is.
From there? In America nothing is going to change much unless Vinland becomes quite important. In Europe, another century of Frankish rule is going to alter things a lot more than the fact that those Franks have a hundred people living across the Atlantic. In this era, changing a king is going to have a rather random impact upon history (think about how crazy Europe went just because HRE Charles V inherited a bunch of stuff). All I can say for certain here is that the Frankish part of Vinland would not be ruled from Aachen or anywhere else in Europe - Charlemagne's way of governing was basically "ride around to the homes of all the important people in the empire and yell at them if they aren't doing what you want" (actually its a bit more complicated than that, but when the king wasn't riding around, his messengers were). There's no way to maintain a constant stream of messengers going across the Atlantic and back.
- BNC