It's been a while but I'm glad I caught up! What happened with the Angeloi TTL? There should have been some internal conflict around this time, also many of the nobles who formed the Byzantine successor states should still be at large.
Very interested to see how Dalmatian ascendency in the Adriatic will affect everything!
A lot of us were piling onto the author with some of these questions--what will happen to the whole Eastern Empire, what will the OTL 4th Crusaders do in France having been sent home without ever heading east at all, etc. Bearing in mind the focus of the TL is in the Adriatic, we should not tax the author with expected highly detailed accounts of the east or the west. In the first few posts of the TL I had no idea what the time scale would be either--the above most recent canon post is thread post 200, and we have covered about two years since the crucial divergences. Someone deeply invested in a TL about Constantinople or 13th century France might already have discerned knock on divergences from a return in shame of the 4th Crusaders back to France in the latter case or the blithe and blissful ignorance in Constantinople what a terrible bullet of fate they have recently been spared allowing the Angeloi soap opera to unfold uninterrupted might well be able to discern divergences of lasting importance downstream likely to result in a mere two year period, maybe. But how obligated is the author to trace every possible divergence in regions that are distant, albeit obviously involved in shaping what happens on the immediate stage of the Adriatic? Details of what happens in Constantinople do not matter, but obviously the plain differences between a Latin Kingdom of OTL and the continuing Angeloi dynasty left alone does, insofar as either had active designs in the region of Italy. But we know the Eastern Empire involved itself in Italy by this late date, and even the eastern shore of the Adriatic, only sporadically and weakly, the very events we are focused on represent the period when the city-state powers and inland kingdoms on these shores are starting to operate as free agents on their own without much concern for what the Eastern Emperor might do--directly. Clearly the more successful Dalmatia is the more Dalmatian interests will intrude into regions the Eastern Empire does control. Clearly the involvement of Dalmatia with upholding the central power of the Hungarian dynasty entangles Dalmatia at second hand with the adventures of that complex of kingdoms, this Latin-rite near-empire of Hungary's, with whoever borders them on the east and south--and those powers in turn have Byzantium right at their backs. We shall be very very interested in the question of whether the avoidance of the infamous sack and conquest by the 4th Crusaders will pretty much come out in the wash, prolonged Angeloi incomptence (that is the impression I am getting from other commentators anyway) will run the Empire down quite as much as the Latin did, or whether they either get better or are replaced with some completely ATL dynasty that pulls the city and its empire together for another phase of ascendency--even if that too is doomed to stagnate and collapse, it will change the overall pattern by at least delaying OTL stages of inexorable decay to later decades or even centuries, and perhaps buy enough breathing room for another cycle of ascendency and thus sustain a direct and Orthodox run succession traceable straight back to Augustus Caesar and thus the Roman Republic based state in operation this very day; I specified the religion because it is possible to claim the Ottomans took up that succession OTL which takes Rome straight to the Great War, wearing at least three crowns (Sultanate, Romanov and Hapsburg) all decapitated at pretty much the same time in the debacle of the postwar chaos. It would be the job of someone deeply entwined in knowledge of Byzantine society and culture and the general situation of the early 13th century to discern whether the Latin intervention was a fatal act that doomed an otherwise viable system to die prematurely some centuries later, or just another incident in a checkered act that was bound to come to an end well before the second CE millennium ended. And the more we deviate from the OTL pattern, the more out on a limb we are in terms of judging plausibility. For all I know the author has quite as much interest in a Byzantium wank as in putting Dalmatia as a continuing entity as distinct and relevant as say Scotland is today on 21st Century maps, and is manfully restraining himself from that temptation.
Similarly we could go to town completely butterflying the history of Western Europe by supposing the contingent of returning non-veterans of an ignominiously aborted non-Crusade shall create all sorts of cascading deviations versus the OTL that saw them off the French stage to go far away and never return save in the form of history and legend. This was, according to my texts in a class focused on the Crusades as such, one of the major goals of the whole Crusade movement as foreseen and planned by Latin rite Catholic Church leadership in the person of several successive Popes--further their general project of reducing disruptive violence in Western Christendom by draining off surplus knights who stirred up trouble scrounging for opportunity, channeling their capability into a focused tool of collective western Christendom to hammer away, hopefully at completely non-Christian foes, but not too many tears were shed over the fact that Byzantium was Christian--but the wrong kind of Christian! This might have scandalized Urban and Clement who called for the first Crusade a century and more before, because they did seek a serious detente with the East and coordination of efforts as allies as part of a more logically consistent version of the Peace of Christ, not to mention the pragmatics of avoiding conflict with and securing the aid of a quite strong Eastern Empire. But a century hence, with much bitterness on both sides developing from the actual developments of the first several Crusades and the outcomes of each--Latins using their success to usurp and shut out Eastern imperial authority, said Imperials having desires to use and use up Latin Crusaders with more self-serving interests in mind--quite on top of older dissensions between the branches atop developing deep conflicts of interest, the West pretty much lumped together all divergences from Roman Catholicism, whether nominally Christian or otherwise; the great touchstone between friend and foe being whether the local rite submitted to the authority of the Pope or not, and I suppose this too was as much a matter of which locals it was convenient to offer to coopt as agents and which were deemed simply in the way, whether the Latins would offer the option or not I mean!
So, failure to drain off this particular batch of contentious second sons and other ambitious troublemakers might quite derail OTL history and put us on a different path entirely. So now to write the TL with maximum "plausibility" in contingent events going down a different path and avoidance of the mysticism of supposing OTL is especially probable, we need to eventually mastermind the comprehensive history of the whole sweep of both branches of European Christendom, ranging from Iceland to the Urals, down to Iberia and via the Muslim impact on both Iberia and the Mediterranean world in general, to the Sahara to Egypt, the entire Med shores in fact, and consider carefully how divergences anywhere in this vast system might tip balances in systems all around--in Central Asia, in the heart of the Islamic heartland, in all the Maghreb, possibly in West Africa, and via Central Asia, India and China too.
Or, the author could choose to keep something simple somewhere and figure more conveniently that France at least reshuffles to perhaps change some names, obscure and terminate some illustrious families of OTL and elevate others obscure to us, but the basic pattern of development of the development of France and interaction with neighbors and peripheral subjects like the Plantagenets settles down more or less as OTL, so we can take the history of that which is west and north of the Adriatic at least as a given template to play off divergences on the east and south scrupulously worked out, albeit in soft focus versus the practically day by day focuse on Zara we have had thus far.
It has only been two years, how much drama should we expect in either France or Constantinople over this time anyway?
I trust the author will make hard decisions among these options and seek a plausible outcome of ATL events that makes historical sense.
I expect the time scale to change now that we have gotten past the foundational crisis of ATL Dalmatia as I suppose the author envisages it; we may expect lapses of decades, generations, even centuries now that the course has been set on a firm keel. In that context it is reasonable to expect and require updates on both how Constantinople's status and that of Western Europe in general has diverged from OTL insofar as these are relevant to Italy and the west Balkan shore and all the waters between. But this should not overly haunt or burden the author; surely he would not mind various suggestions to weigh and weave as seems reasonable.
Mine is, let's have an ATL East and convergent West; others might desire the opposite. Indeed another pet notion of my own, inspired entirely by the early posts of this account, is to have Hungary become the hegemon of a long lasting imperial domain, preempting and eclipsing Austria, and have this persist to modern times unbroken--challenged, subject to ebbs and flows, but nothing quite so awful as the near total erasure that happened OTL in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. I think this version of Hungary will evolve to be quite different in habits and inclinations that the kingdom we know OTL.
It looks to me like the author is indeed laying some foundations of such a persistent Magyar status as bulwark of Latin Christendom's southeastern frontiers, a job that might be complicated by but also assisted a more robust legacy of the Orthodox Eastern Empire not critically broken by the Latin treachery here butterflied away. But how much of my own suggestions the author may find suitable is entirely up to his discretion, and I bow to his far superior understanding of the situation on the ground in the region of interest!
After all, until reading this TL I never gave any thought to a Magyar imperium!
. Dalmatia is at peace at long last. Fortunately form them, Bulgaria is far away and the war is unlikely to affect them.
