Your challenge is relatively straightforward: have the Samaritans do significantly worse than they did IOTL. Bonus points if you can somehow get them to have a population of less than a thousand.
DBAHC: Screw the Samaritans
- Thread starter Mort the Reaper
- Start date
There was some real anti-Roman sentiment amongst some Samaritans during the reign of Justinian and his successors. I'm not entirely sure how popular this frustration was, but the Samaritans did enjoy a somewhat privileged status in the Eastern Empire at that time and later (they were useful against both the Persians to the East and the heretics in Syria).
Maybe have they stage a revolt, or a series of revolts against the Romans during this time? I mean, knowing the Romans, you'd probably see a replay of the Jewish revolts of centuries earlier. Not sure if this would include expulsion, but it certainly wouldn't be good.
A bit later on, I could see the Kingdom of Samaria not forming when the Eastern Romans lost control of their Egyptian and Syrian holdings during the 9th century (or was it 10th? Sorry - I'm a bit Rusty on my Rhoman and Middle Eastern history, despite a vacation to Constantinople this past summer). If Samaria was controlled by the Kingdom of Syria instead, I could see them being oppressed for not being Church of the East Nestorian and for their privileged role in the Empire previously.
I mean, such a tiny population is very hard, and I'm not sure it necessarily counts as a "screw", but I've always wondered about reversing the roles of the Jews and Samaritans, leaving the Jews in Samaria ("Judea", I guess) while the Samaritans spread out into a global diaspora. Honestly, it makes way more sense, anyway, considering how absurdly centralized Judaism was at the time of the Temple, compared to the looser style of Samaritanism.