How could have Rome survived until present day ?

or Islam non-existent?
Ye, with Islam butterflied away Rome(s) could have survived until present day (or almost present day).
It could have been preserved like the Chinese entity(-ies).

Only Islam could bury the Roman tradition, the Roman statehood, the idea of Rome and replace it with a different paradigm.
Without Islam invaders would come and get assimilated into the Roman world, like they got assimilated into the Chinese world.
 
If the Vandals did not sack Rome. The only way to avoid this is to see into their motive.

After some research, I found that they saw Valentinian III's assassination as a violation to their peace treaty. So if the motive of his assassination (a.k.a Flavius Aetius being assassinated by Petronius Maximus) is stopped by Flavius not being present at the meeting then we are set. Valentinian dies of old age, appoints a heir (Gaudentius with Aetius as regent) and no Vandals.
 

Deleted member 97083

You missed the most obvious, the Ottoman emperors claimed the title Sultan of Rum when they captured Constantinople and lasted in that capacity until 1922.
They didn't really care about the title. It was sort of like how Victoria was Empress of India.
 

Deleted member 97083

That's true, but they were still more of a Roman successor state than Russia or the HRE.
Not really. By those standards, the US would be an Iroquois successor state, and 18th-century Spain would have been the Bourbon Dynasty of the Aztec Empire.

The Ottomans made the former Romans into a subject people. The Rum Millet or Roman Nation were a lower oppressed class with limited rights, while Ottoman Turks didn't call themselves Romans.
 
What do we mean by "Rome" here? As a government or as a civilization? After all, China as a civilization preceded Rome and still exists. It might not be ruled by Emperors (for now; one never knows about the future), but it is still China.

That's not really true. China has never been a continuous unit any more than the HRE is a legitimate successor to the ERE. The idea of a continuous China is mostly propaganda by successive Chinese empires who wanted to add to their legitimacy.
 
That's not really true. China has never been a continuous unit any more than the HRE is a legitimate successor to the ERE. The idea of a continuous China is mostly propaganda by successive Chinese empires who wanted to add to their legitimacy.

China is a geographic area that lends itself to unity, unlike Europe and the Med. Rome became what it was because it was the linchpin of the Mediterranean, and "surviving" requires Rome itself (the city) remaining in that linchpin role. I tend to believe that the 3rd Century was the point that the Roman empire and Rome became two different things, and for a longer lasting Roman empire you need to have Rome remain central.
 
Those are not adjectives that I would spend with someone that gave up Egypt, Mauritania, Africa, Syria, and Asia Minor.

None of those ares are really defensible compared to the Alps and Balkans, espicially with a huge Persian Empire launching a campaign into those regions every 10 years.
 
None of those ares are really defensible compared to the Alps and Balkans, espicially with a huge Persian Empire launching a campaign into those regions every 10 years.

I don't want to be rude or condescending, but there are some reasons to my thought:

1 - Those regions are rich, populous, and resourceful. They pay the legions and the ships of Rome.
2 - Being rich, populous and resourceful these regions are going to pay the armies and navies of someone else, so they are going to be dangerous when part of another (Persian) Empire or independent.
3 - Italy and the Balkans will starve for many years without the grain of North Africa and the East. If it ever recovers, Italy will be poor and weak.
4 - You are going to destroy the commercial network of the Mediterranean.
5 - Piracy will be even more abundant.
6 - There is no existential threat to Rome coming from the south. Sahara is a good barrier.
7 - Sometimes less territory means bigger borders. If you want to keep Spain, better keep it entirely, defend Spain on the Pyrenees.
 

Deleted member 67076

Constantius III ruling for a decade or 2 would stabilize the empire enough to recover from its drastic weakness in the early 400s, probably enough to weather the storm of the invasions.
 
I don't want to be rude or condescending, but there are some reasons to my thought:

1 - Those regions are rich, populous, and resourceful. They pay the legions and the ships of Rome.
2 - Being rich, populous and resourceful these regions are going to pay the armies and navies of someone else, so they are going to be dangerous when part of another (Persian) Empire or independent.
3 - Italy and the Balkans will starve for many years without the grain of North Africa and the East. If it ever recovers, Italy will be poor and weak.
4 - You are going to destroy the commercial network of the Mediterranean.
5 - Piracy will be even more abundant.
6 - There is no existential threat to Rome coming from the south. Sahara is a good barrier.
7 - Sometimes less territory means bigger borders. If you want to keep Spain, better keep it entirely, defend Spain on the Pyrenees.

Absolutely none of this matters if you can't defend it. You have Persians from the west attacking Syria, Anatolia, and the rest of the Levant; later enough, Arabs attacking Egypt and the Levant; while Rome is distracted, Nubia could easily raid Egypt along with Moors from Mauretania. The Romans can't keep on fighting them off forever, they are going to falter at some point.
 
Absolutely none of this matters if you can't defend it. You have Persians from the west attacking Syria, Anatolia, and the rest of the Levant; later enough, Arabs attacking Egypt and the Levant; while Rome is distracted, Nubia could easily raid Egypt along with Moors from Mauretania. The Romans can't keep on fighting them off forever, they are going to falter at some point.

Berbers and Nubians are not existential threats, but if they are given Egypt and North Africa Rome will elevate them to the existential threat class very fast. Judging by OTL the Persians are a risk, but letting them take the rich provinces of the east is stupid, you want to make your enemies less powerful, not the contrary, BTW IOTL the Roman Empire was capable of maintaining those regions by 7 centuries, or even 10 for Anatolia, hardly something that I would call indefensible.

Mountains and Seas are almost never going to fight for you, Italy is incapable of maintaining the fleets and legions to defend itself without the taxes and crops of the provinces.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Slightly better luck might have allowed the late Roman Empire to survive along a Italy-North Africa axis.

Keeping the entirety of the western Roman Empire is probably too much to ask for
 
So we would get this?
old_works___the_imperial_soldiery_by_purgatory2010-d59uoa5.jpg
 
The idea of a continuous China is mostly propaganda by successive Chinese empires who wanted to add to their legitimacy.
That's because they were far more successful than any claimant of Rome.

How about a no-Islam, or much-less-successful-Islam timeline? That would allow the entire Mediterranean basin to be united, a must to create a China-style precedent of dynastic succession.
 
Not disagreeing with anything you said, but I believe that Mental_Wizard himself was just pointing out that those are clichés commonly seen in Eternal Rome TL's, he was not actually arguing that any of these could allow a surviving Rome.

I wasn't saying that. I was just giving my analysis of the various cliches, as Agricola did just a few posts above.
 
Slightly better luck might have allowed the late Roman Empire to survive along a Italy-North Africa axis.

Keeping the entirety of the western Roman Empire is probably too much to ask for
Not necessarily. The Western Roman Empire does have natural, rather than arbitrary, borders-the Danube, Rhine, and the Sahara desert. Now, I agree it's unlikely that these borders could be maintained consistently throughout the 2 millenia between Augustus and today. They will certainly recede, recover, maybe even expand, and recede and recover again, in a cycle over centuries, much like China's borders have, ultimately to end up to roughly where they were at their OTL height. It's entirely possible that the western half of the empire could recede to only de facto cover Italy and North Africa on more than one occasion throughout Roman history and still recover to its Danube and Rhine borders.
 
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