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Hello, I'm new here in this forum and I'd like you help me with an alternate timeline I have been thinking about. Sorry if my English is not good enough, because I'm not a native speaker/writer.

I have read here several timelines and alternate histories about expanded and long-surviving Roman Empires that, despite containing amazing stories, challenge the concept I have about the absolute difficulty of ruling such distant and diverse lands as a centralized entity, especially at the early Middle-ages.

If I'm not wrong, I remember some comments about the possibility of this based on the hypothesis that a political stable Empire/Republic, which would allowed some sort of pioneering liberal democracy, would have avoided most of the problems that undermined the Empire and finally caused its fragmentation.

As a biologist, I'd like to add that the crisis that caused the decline of the Roman Empire was not only social and political, but it also had an environmental issue that would have handicapped a stable Empire anyway. So, a single PoD changing a political event couldn't save the Empire to suffer big troubles to keep it united, or even in two or three parts that would reunite sometimes. The climate changes, some of them produced by the impact of the Roman civilization, are an important key to understand the decline of the civilizations in the Western part of Eurasia by that time.

However, I have hypothesized about the viability of some kind of confoederatio comprising four entities, at the time of the end of the Classic Empire, possibly introducing a PoD right before or right after the reign of Diocletian.

The four entities would encompass what have been the four areas of civilization that were developed in OTL during the middle ages. My proposal would be based on these four entities:

- Northern Roman Empire. It would be the Roman-Germanic branch. It would had the origins in the Rhineland to later expand into the Baltic and Scandinavia, and later to the Arctic and the Atlantic coasts of North America, like the OTL Norse did. It would have embraced the Northern Church, a Germanic-influenced Christianism that, after some centuries, would have evolutioned into a form of Christianism resembling the OTL Reformed Churches.

- Western Roman Empire. It would be the Roman-Latin branch. It would expand later into West Africa and maybe America. It would stick to the Catholic Church or Western Church, being more conservative than the Northern Church.

- Eastern Roman Empire. It would be the Roman-Greek-Slavic branch. It would expand later into the OTL Russia and Ukraine, encompassing the Slavic nations. It would stick to the Orthodox Church or Eastern Church, a unified form of the Greek and Slavic Orthodox Churches in OTL.

- Southern Roman Empire. It would be the Roman-Semitic branch. It would have the origins in the Monophysite Egypt and Levant, expanding later into Arabia and the Upper Nile, until reaching the Indian Ocean. It would have embraced the Southern Church, similar to OTL Coptic Church but more influenced by Judaism, Arabic beliefs and Zoroastrianism. The coexistence with other religious communities would make it the most tolerant Church.

Those four Empires would have been de facto sovereign, but they could have share two things in common: a common Emperor reigning over the four Caesars, maybe only as a referee for their disputes, and a kind of synod of the Patriarches of the four Churches that would rule the Holy Land, an area surrounding Jerusalem not attached to any of the Empires.

However, I have not decided yet which PoD I could use to transform the late OTL Roman Empire into this confoederatio of four Empires. Any suggestion?

Thanks.
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