Change one ruler s mind on something to make the world better

You can influence a single leader in history(exception: the years 1900-2016 to make it more intresting) to make a decision.Who do you influence and in what way in order to make the world today a better place?

I would have to choose Mehmed the Conqueror.

No. This doesn't mean he converts to Christianity or that he magically is this noble leader like we see today. But it means that he takes considerable inspiration from the Romans,and takes religious tolerance as the norm. No jizya tax or selling Christians into slavery like in real life. In fact, he later puts his successor that tried to kill him for going against an idea.

This sends a precedence for religious tolerance and plurality in the Ottoman Empire akin to the Mongols and beating the Dutch to the punch. While Ottoman leadership wasn't as much intolerant, taking down this particular mindset would make things far more complicated and interesting. Not to mention it would be a completely new precedent in the Islamic world [at least in centuries] that a major Islamic power is more resembling Western values.

Would Vlad the Impaler be willing to kill Turks if they offered help against foreign interventions from Germans and other groups that consisted of the Boyars? I don't believe he'd really care what he did as long as he didn't turn against the Turks and made Romania a sort of autonomous region within the Empire. Same would basically go for anyone else. Protestants would likely flock more as well as any other groups such as the Jews.

Orthodox Christians wouldn't feel much animosity against this new government and Turks in general as this anti-non-Muslim behavior would over the centuries would be frowned and looked down upon, if not prosecuted, as persecution against other religions in the West would be as well. Ethnic tension that later disintegrated the Empire would be less of an issue because the flavors of it would be see as uncouth or uncultured. I wouldn't say that all intolerance would be wiped out, but it wouldn't be something that would be an overall problem.

In our timeline, the Ottoman Empire was one of the very first nations to recognize the United States because it wasn't something that was barred to theocratic rule. They even recognized the sovereignty of the various tribes as well. An Ottoman Empire culminating from this tolerance and pluralized tradition would do so as well. This is probably the only way the Ottomans could realistically survive until the modern era.
 
Have Napoleon decide against reinstating slavery in Haiti. That certainly improves things for the Haitians- they're spared the civil war and foreign depredations of OTL, and potentially are later integrated into metropolitan France as their other Caribbean colonies were- but it also opens the door to the French instigating slave rebellions in the British colonies(why not, if the British can't retaliate in kind and you've taken an ideological position against slavery?). Which in turn could potentially change the outcome of the Napoleonic wars, if Napoleon tries a similar-to-OTL gambit of drawing the British fleet into the Caribbean, since the odds of Nelson falling for it are probably increased if the French have been actively sponsoring Caribbean slave rebellions.

YMMV on whether a Napoleonic-ordered Europe would be better then OTL's Concert of Europe, could go either way overall IMO. But at the very least this probably improves things for the Haitians, and leads to an earlier abolition of Caribbean slavery in the British and Dutch colonies. I'm wondering whether it might also give momentum to the abolitionist movement in the USA?

This sends a precedence for religious tolerance and plurality in the Ottoman Empire akin to the Mongols and beating the Dutch to the punch. While Ottoman leadership wasn't as much intolerant, taking down this particular mindset would make things far more complicated and interesting. Not to mention it would be a completely new precedent in the Islamic world [at least in centuries] that a major Islamic power is more resembling Western values.
Those certainly wouldn't have been recognized as "Western values" at the time.
 
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Have Empress Dowager Cixi decide that modernizing China is the answer. So much tragedy would have been avoided, for China and East Asia as a whole.
 
Have Napoleon decide against reinstating slavery in Haiti. That certainly improves things for the Haitians- they're spared the civil war and foreign depredations of OTL, and potentially are later integrated into metropolitan France as their other Caribbean colonies were- but it also opens the door to the French instigating slave rebellions in the British colonies(why not, if the British can't retaliate in kind and you've taken an ideological position against slavery?). Which in turn could potentially change the outcome of the Napoleonic wars, if Napoleon tries a similar-to-OTL gambit of drawing the British fleet into the Caribbean, since the odds of Nelson falling for it are probably increased if the French have been actively sponsoring Caribbean slave rebellions.

Certainly, keeping Toussaint Louverture in power in Saint-Domingue would have been preferable for both the French and Haitians. While desiring personal power, he remained officially loyal to France and had restored part of the island's economy. Napoleon remarked in his memoirs that this was one of his biggest mistakes.

There could be significant butterflies for Louisiana then. Napoleon doesn't necessarily need to sell it if Saint-Domingue is under French rule.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Needless to say, I'm going to influence Alexander the Great. First off to make him see to it that Hephaistion actually listens to his physician after getting that infection and doesn't, you know... die. And then to maybe not drink quite that much (which would be easier because Hephaistion is still around, and his OTL demise pretty much wrecked Alexander and made him increasingly self-destructive).

With my luck, Alexander still dies in his first battle during the Arabian campaign (which he was planning when he died in OTL). But I really want to take that risk, just to have a chance see a world where Alexander conquers Arabia and the entire western Med. I want to see that world. I crave it.
 
Wilhelm II over-rules Moltke, demands his resignation if he refuses to deploy to the East at the last minute, and who knows what then

If France has to declare war on Germany and Germany doesn't advance in the West or invade Belgium, then Britain probably does as Cambon feared they were doing and stays out of the war
 
Seriously nobody is going to pick Stalin, Pol Pot, or Hitler? If there's any single person in the timeframe required that by changing that person you can make the world a better place it is Hitler. Just convince him to stick with painting, kill himself, or still be a maniacal empire building but without the antisemitism would make the world better. Thought this thread was about making the world better, not creating a bigger or better specific empire or nation.
 
Make Timur choose to be a farmer.
Or Temugin to keep his goals modest and became a monk. :)
Oh my....there are so much possibilities... starting with the Roman emperors, the Byzantine ones, up to the Russian ones. Every country had at least one guy in charge who could have being done much better....
 
Stalin puts his people and their needs and welfare ahead of his philosophy. Oh, wait, this is pre-1900. In that case, The Tsar after Pyotr reverses Pyotr's 'boys only rule and girls only if there aren't any more boys' decree.
 
I would go up to Aella of Northumbria in 865 and yell straight to his face "Don't you dare kill that old man Ragnar that you just captured!" Then, the Vikings will be more interested in becoming settlers in Russia and Ireland and places instead of just burning England.

Or, for a funny option - telling Queen Victoria to just get over the loss of her husband and go back to leading the country instead of sitting in a room crying for 40 years. Granted, this probably wouldn't have any real effects on the world.

- BNC
 
Tell Henry VIII about Catherine Howard and Francis Dereham as soon as she comes to court, so he doesn't think she's a rose without a thorn and poor Dereham doesn't get a traitor's death for simply having the girl first.
 
Seriously nobody is going to pick Stalin, Pol Pot, or Hitler? If there's any single person in the timeframe required that by changing that person you can make the world a better place it is Hitler. Just convince him to stick with painting, kill himself, or still be a maniacal empire building but without the antisemitism would make the world better. Thought this thread was about making the world better, not creating a bigger or better specific empire or nation.

I thought the rules on the tin specifically excluded post-1900 rulers.
 
Make Andrew Johnson a radical abolitionist anti racist

Yeah but then he would never have been elected and wouldn't have made any difference anyways. Your best bet is to make him still a little racist against Natives but not as much as he was.

Have Empress Dowager Cixi decide that modernizing China is the answer. So much tragedy would have been avoided, for China and East Asia as a whole.

This. This. This.


Seriously nobody is going to pick Stalin, Pol Pot, or Hitler

Yes but OP said no post-1900 and while some of the people you mention were alive then their acts were definitely after 1900 so I wouldn't put them here.
 
Columbus obeys
Yeah but then he would never have been elected and wouldn't have made any difference anyways. Your best bet is to make him still a little racist against Natives but not as much as he was.
Or you could have him simply respect the Supreme Court, meaning the Bank of the US gets renewed and no Trail of Tears.
 
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