Could the Byzantine Empire have survived?

The empire was fine under strong rulars like the Macedonian Dynasty. If they had a continuation of resolute leadership then their chances would be much better.

Pity they had some idiots:(
 
But on the other hand, a Basil II style iron autocracy with the nobility wedged under the thumb of the Emperor wasn't the right way to go, either. Not only was such a system doomed to fail as it soon did, but it stifled the productive output of the noble class and only made Byzantium even less capable of innovating and competing with foreign merchants and tradesmen.

Well if Basil's II successor was a strong Emperor instead of a weak sick Emperor he could have held firm grasp of the nobles...
 
I would say that what the Komnenans did (by trying to merge a bunch of the leading families into the Imperial clan to make them loyal) was really a botched, desperate attempt that created more problems than it solved.

While it may have been a step in the right direction to give them a stake in being loyal to the Empire, you have things spiraling out of control due to petty personality conflict and squabbles.

Yeah, but that (underlined) would happen WHATEVER they did. Squabbling is an aristocratic tradition.

So I'm not sure we can say trying to merge the aristocracy into the Imperial clan was the reason.

But on the other hand, a Basil II style iron autocracy with the nobility wedged under the thumb of the Emperor wasn't the right way to go, either. Not only was such a system doomed to fail as it soon did, but it stifled the productive output of the noble class and only made Byzantium even less capable of innovating and competing with foreign merchants and tradesmen.

Yeah. I think the best policy is what I understand the Lascarids (or at least Theodore II and presumably his father - okay technically John III was a Vatazes, details) tried - build up the middle class.

A strong middle class, a strong emperor, and the ability for the empire to draw its administrators and so on from the first significantly limits the amount the aristocracy has to be given stuff as part of running the state. That would go a long way to strengthening the state at the expense of the aristocracy in a way that can be sustained.

Not sure if Basil II's method was really counter to innovation - but it didn't build up anything that would allow it to sustain itself without someone as fiercely determined as he was at the helm. That alone makes it a bad idea.
 
Well if Basil's II successor was a strong Emperor instead of a weak sick Emperor he could have held firm grasp of the nobles...

But then what about his successor? And his successor? And his successor's successor's successor?

Basil II's system relied too much on Basil being capable of holding the aristocracy in an iron grip. Or to put it another way, it wasn't the power of the emperor, as in being the emperor meant he could do that, it was because he - and he alone - was capable of maintaining that.

...now I'm wondering if something like the Tokugawa method of handling the aristocracy would have worked in the ERE, given its set of problems vs. the Shogunate's. Obviously some aspects of Tokugawa policy would be obviously bad, but forcing the aristocracy to spend half the year in the capital and so on would be interesting.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure it would work.
 
All well and good but how is Byzantium going to defeat the Ottomans, it has to do it more than once, they're not going to go away. Is there anyway of an intervention against Muslim Persia from India, that draws Muslim and Ottoman attention away towards the East. Can Byzantium develop contats with India and have some sort of Alliance.

What of the Mongols, i know around this time they leant towards Buddhism and were pretty sympathetic towards Christianity. Some important Mongol figures were baptised. Can a situation develop where the Mongols intervene.
Maybe introduce a Christian figure who makes a pilgrimage to the Mongol leader/s at some point, pleads for their help, tells them Christianity is in danger, and convinces them to assist Constantinople. That could be quite a story. A similar thing happened with the Huns, was it Pope Leo ?.
 
All well and good but how is Byzantium going to defeat the Ottomans, it has to do it more than once, they're not going to go away. Is there anyway of an intervention against Muslim Persia from India, that draws Muslim and Ottoman attention away towards the East. Can Byzantium develop contats with India and have some sort of Alliance.

The Ottomans are easily butterflied into nonexistence. And the Turks in general aren't necessarily going to be strong enough - the Komnenoi were doing a fair job at retaking Anatolia up until 1176, when Myriokephalon stalled that and the drive never started again.

But that was far from inevitable.

What of the Mongols, i know around this time they leant towards Buddhism and were pretty sympathetic towards Christianity. Some important Mongol figures were baptised. Can a situation develop where the Mongols intervene.
Maybe introduce a Christian figure who makes a pilgrimage to the Mongol leader/s at some point, pleads for their help, tells them Christianity is in danger, and convinces them to assist Constantinople. That could be quite a story. A similar thing happened with the Huns, was it Pope Leo ?.
The Mongols are more likely to want to take Constantinople than help it.

I wouldn't say the Byzantines couldn't play their usual political games against the Mongols once the Mongols become divided, but that's not going to save the Empire from the Turks if the Empire hasn't beaten them by that point.
 
Yes theres a difference, the reason i said Turks is because the Ottomans are just a one part of a cultural grouping, if they defeat the Ottomans, then they may well be faced by another grouping. but you didnt answer the question.

HOW ?
 
Yes theres a difference, the reason i said Turks is because the Ottomans are just a one part of a cultural grouping, if they defeat the Ottomans, then they may well be faced by another grouping. but you didnt answer the question.

HOW ?

Up to somewhere between 1185-1204, the Byzantine state is stronger than any of the Turkish states in Anatolia by a considerable margin. And that decline was far from inevitable.

So..."The same way they beat any other opponent"?
 
Up to somewhere between 1185-1204, the Byzantine state is stronger than any of the Turkish states in Anatolia by a considerable margin. And that decline was far from inevitable.

So..."The same way they beat any other opponent"?

Now, I need to preface this by saying that I see no problem with a greek state comrpising OTL Greece and Anatolia surviving up to the modern day.
That being said, I do have a problem with people saying "Well, what if Basil II had a strong emperor to follow in his stead." There were trends in the Byzantine state that dictated that, if a weak emperor emerged, that the state was going to go to seed. A form of feudalism was growing, the nobility were amassing more and more power, etc etc etc. Even if Basil was followed by a strong Emperor, there is no gaurentee that that emperor would be able to fix those problems; after all, the general trend amongst any organization, be they states or anything else, is to continue the path that has been set out and to only deviate so much.
If the Byzantines are going to survive, they are going to need a series of dynamic rulers who not only understand the problems inherit in the current system (which is hard, because the system, up to that time, was doing pretty well) but then have the energy and strength to institute real, lasting, reform.
It could happen, certainly, but its unlikely. Look at Russia, for instance. Even with a strong ruler like Peter the Great, they were only able to do so much. The same for the Ottomans in the 18th-20th century.
I'd love to see a timeline where this basic fact is accounted for, rather than the Byzantines get Great Emperor X, and everything is rosy afterwards.
 
Now, I need to preface this by saying that I see no problem with a greek state comrpising OTL Greece and Anatolia surviving up to the modern day.

Why only OTL Greece and Anatolia? Why can't the Byzantines continue to be more than just "a Greek state"?

Nationalism? Um, why is that going to break the ties of Slavs and Armenians to the state? I mean, is there a law that says multiethnic polities are fundamentally impossible (nevermind the Ottomans and Habsburgs handling that until their empires were broken by other things)

Assuming for discussion's sake that such issues are relevant in a world of a surviving Byzantine Empire.

That being said, I do have a problem with people saying "Well, what if Basil II had a strong emperor to follow in his stead." There were trends in the Byzantine state that dictated that, if a weak emperor emerged, that the state was going to go to seed. A form of feudalism was growing, the nobility were amassing more and more power, etc etc etc. Even if Basil was followed by a strong Emperor, there is no gaurentee that that emperor would be able to fix those problems; after all, the general trend amongst any organization, be they states or anything else, is to continue the path that has been set out and to only deviate so much.
The problem is that none of this is some special problem. Western Europe, somehow, managed to deal with being far more feudal than the Byzantines ever got, and well we all know how it did.

If the Byzantines are going to survive, they are going to need a series of dynamic rulers who not only understand the problems inherit in the current system (which is hard, because the system, up to that time, was doing pretty well) but then have the energy and strength to institute real, lasting, reform.
It could happen, certainly, but its unlikely. Look at Russia, for instance. Even with a strong ruler like Peter the Great, they were only able to do so much. The same for the Ottomans in the 18th-20th century.
The problem is that the Byzantine system basically worked. I'm not saying it was ideal and I'm not saying the aristocracy wasn't a problem, but assuming the state is reasonably well lead and assuming it weathers the crisis of 1185-1204, it doesn't need some kind of amazingly capable reformers to survive.

Certainly its going to need some fairly good leadership, but no better than (to pick a Western European example) Philip Augustus and his son and grandson were for France.

That's not a particularly high bar to clear, as Great Leaders go.

By contrast, Peter is working with a far more underdeveloped state (in the sense of "the state") despite the technological advances by his day. I'm not going to touch the Ottomans as I don't know enough about them.

I'd love to see a timeline where this basic fact is accounted for, rather than the Byzantines get Great Emperor X, and everything is rosy afterwards.
Maybe I'm reading the wrong timelines, but Isaac's Empire - which is about as rosy as you can get short of ASBs - hardly goes that far.

Or this:
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=169430

I should note that I agree the Byzantines need to work at maintaining the best elements of what made the Byzantine system what it was and keeping things running smoothly, and that element needs to be called out or even actively focused on (I'm not sure I can claim the latter for my timeline, at least in its present state - Alexius's attention to that is mentioned but not dwelt on), but we're not looking at something where the entire structure is fundamentally unsuited to the state's survival.
 
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The real death-knell of the Empire was the Palaiologid civil war of 1341-1347. Have Andronikos III live longer and continue his reforms with John Kantakouzenos and you could see the Byzantines manage to hold Europe.

I always thought that the symbolic "Beginning of the End" for Byzantium was the Turkish capture of Kallipolis, which was their bridgehead into Europe.

Andronikos III was also working to reverse the disastrous gutting of the navy overseen by his grandfather, Andronikos II. If he continues the reforms, the Byzantine fleet grows and relations with Venice improve at the expense of the Genovesi and Aydınoğlu Turks that came to dominate the Aegean in the chaos of the civil war.

So long as the Byzantines can hold Kallipolis and just enough of western Bithynia (or even just the eastern shore of the Bosporos like Skoutarion) they can probably reconquer the rest of Hellas. The Palaiologoi had good relations with the Trapezuntine Komnenoi, who will be good allies against the Turkish beyliks.

Other than that, Asia minor is lost. Smyrna, Nikaia and Philadelpheia are gone. In the absolute best of all worlds, they may just be able to retake Nikomedeia.

Can the Empire hold on without any lnd East of the Straits?
 

MAlexMatt

Banned
Yes theres a difference, the reason i said Turks is because the Ottomans are just a one part of a cultural grouping, if they defeat the Ottomans, then they may well be faced by another grouping. but you didnt answer the question.

HOW ?

Ehh, not all the Turkish beyliks were made equal. The Ottomans had an advantage of position that not all the beyliks will be able to match. Osman founded his beylik right near one of the wealthiest, densest populated sections of the weakening Byzantine Empire, with ready access to the crossing into Europe. The moment they captured Nicaea and Nicomedia, they were the most powerful of the beyliks.

If the Byzantines can chase off the Ottomans and recapture the area they had settled, other Turkish tribes are going to have trouble taking advantage of the Byzantines in the same way.

That doesn't mean the Byzantines are guaranteed to recapture the rest of Anatolia, but they're also not guaranteed to be over-taken by Turks.
 
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