Make Italy considered a part of Eastren/Central Europe

Make most, if not all of the Italian peninsula and nearby islands considered to be a part of Eastren Europe rather than Westren Europe. Make it majority orthodox too and the Catholic Church can set up its headquarters in Spain or France instead.How would culture and society change? How might the Reninsance, age of discovery, the napoleonic wars, the world wars and the Cold War end up with this Eastren European Italy? Use any POD you like.
EDIT: You can also make some parts of the Italian peninsula eastren european. That way Rome could still be the headquarters of the Catholic Church.
EDIT#2: You can also put it in Central Europe if you prefer, just not Westren.
 
Last edited:
This is pretty hard when countries well to the east of Italy insist they are in central Europe:
GUEST_df3dacb5-d92d-4205-a0ec-cda5c4067f6b
 
Culturally, if southern Italy is dominated by Greeks and northern Italy by Slavs, you are kind of there, but geographically, most of Italy is in Western Europe.
 
The Byzantines hold onto the Italian peninsula somehow. "Eastern Europe" comes to mean Eastern Rome and the countries immediately north of it, or the Orthodox-majority states, whilst "Western Europe" is the Catholic (or post-Catholic) states.
 
The Venetian mercantile empire conquers the Balkans, and Genoa the Black Sea. Due to immigration from their massive colonies the city state republics have large populations speaking South Slavic languages and others across the Eastern Mediterranean. A hard fought French conquest of Italy occurs and is reversed by Croatian elites from the Venetian colonies, re-centering the empire for a time around Dalmatia. Venice and Genoa are rebuilt by Slavs, Greeks, and Albanians. When France becomes Huguenot and Spain a secular socialist republic, Catholicism is most often associated with Albanians, Poles (who rule a very Ruthenia-centered commonwealth), and a Venice that remembers its past in the east.
 

Albert.Nik

Banned
Italy is like the Core and Soul of Western Europe. Its just impossible beyond any measure to have it as a part of the Eastern Europe.
 
Not really actually.
Is almost ASB as Rome and Italy were the center of the Roman Empire.
You can not have the Catholic Church taking seat in another place because if they are not based in Rome we will not have any reason for a split between the Orthodox and the Catholic Church.
Take Rome and Italy out of the Western Europe and it will never exist
 

Albert.Nik

Banned
Even in the slightest glimmer of chance where this could happen would need an Empire beginning from Gaul instead of Italia but Italia would soon be absorbed. The possibility is quite remote as the population shift needed for this is too huge. Eastern Europe is adjacent to Steppes and Italy and hench you have pouring migrations from both sides but mainly from the East. In fact,Steppe ancestry forms the big part of Hungary,Serbia,Bulgaria,Croatia,Bosnia,etc.
 
Is almost ASB as Rome and Italy were the center of the Roman Empire.
You can not have the Catholic Church taking seat in another place because if they are not based in Rome we will not have any reason for a split between the Orthodox and the Catholic Church.
Take Rome and Italy out of the Western Europe and it will never exist
Maybe the Byzantine empire can keep Sicily and Southren Italy and Slavs could conquer the North. That way Rome would still be the headquarters of the Catholic Church, but other parts of the Italian peninsula orthodox and Eastren european.
 
But quite long in history the Elbe river was considered the east/west divide, Italy would fit neatly in there.

It is true that for a time the Elbe was a boundary between Christian Germans and still-pagan Slavs. But I don't think that ever led to the Elbe being considered the start of "eastern Europe"--except in the Cold War era, when the term was simply used as a synonym for "Soviet-bloc Europe." Even then, some journalists would note that some Warsaw Pact nations were not really in eastern Europe: "Czechoslovakia is the only Communist state in central as apart from eastern Europe, except the German Democratic Republic; its western tip is only 250 miles from the Rhine." John Gunther, Inside Europe Today (1961), p. 314. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.143275/page/n305

The concept "eastern Europe" is simply too new for everything east of the Elbe ever to be considered part of it (except as I noted for Cold War purposes):

"The term “Eastern Europe” suggests a self-contained world of kindred regions. This is a fiction, and to some extent we can reconstruct precisely how it originated. It may be founded on older images of Russia, but it goes back primarily to the French Enlightenment.

"For centuries before that, the only cultural and political axis of significance had been the north-south divide. Following the Renaissance, the “barbaric” regions north of the Alps sought to appropriate the political and cultural legacy of the Roman Empire. This led to the development – in parallel with colonialism – of competing notions of what constituted the center of the “civilized” world.

"The impetus for a shift to a west-east cultural axis came from Paris around the middle of the 18th century, when French Enlightenment thinkers pronounced the orient – which combines the geographical “east” with proximity to the “orient” – to be that region that remained closed to the French or European Enlightenment. In Voltaire, for example, we find the term “Orient de l’Europe”. This refers to an in-between zone that is geographically part of Europe but has yet to benefit from the new philosophy.

"This provided a vector for how the differences within Europe were perceived. In his book Inventing Eastern Europe (1994), the historian Larry Wolff showed the extent to which, after Peter the Great’s Europeanizing reforms, Russia became a space onto which fantasies of influence could be projected, as if onto a blank surface.

"The east-west axis marked out a descent from the center of enlightened civilization into less and less civilized zones. For travelers, the road to the East, from its supposed beginnings in Poland, Hungary, or Galicia, [my emphasis--DT] became a voyage into increasingly Asiatic zones. In the process, perceptions were adapted, sometimes in highly fanciful ways, to fit in with the preconceived expectation of encountering a lower level of civilization. Barbarism was now located in the East..." https://www.unibas.ch/en/Research/U...pt-of-Eastern-Europe-in-past-and-present.html

(Yes, I know that Konrad Adenauer in the 1920's when taking a train to Berlin would supposedly mutter as the train crossed the Elbe bridge "Now we enter Asia." But that was just the product of a Rhineland Catholic's dislike of Protestant and "red" Berlin, and was not meant to be taken seriously.)

In any event, Rome was Catholic long, long before the Slavs were converted from paganism. So even if the once-Wendish areas of central Germany were ever spoken of as "eastern Europe" (which I doubt, outside the Cold War context) it would be infinitely harder to apply that term to the very homeland of the Roman Catholic Church.
 
I agree with the previous posters, I don't think all of Italy can be considered to be part of Eastern Europe since it's home to both the core of both Western Civilization and the Catholic Church. Probably Friuli and a part of Veneto is more likely if Carantania survives longer and expands into that part of OTL Italy.
 
I have an idea: have Protestantism (or something similar) take hold in France and Iberia, thereby making "Western Europe" a synonym for "Protestant countries."
 
Those countries were certainly considered Eastern Europe during the Cold War.

As I noted above, in that era "the term was simply used as a synonym for 'Soviet-bloc Europe.' Even then, some journalists would note that some Warsaw Pact nations were not really in eastern Europe: '"Czechoslovakia is the only Communist state in central as apart from eastern Europe, except the German Democratic Republic; its western tip is only 250 miles from the Rhine.' John Gunther, Inside Europe Today (1961), p. 314. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.143275/page/n305 "
 
Have West Europe = Atlantic-facing Europe and East Europe = Eurasian-facing Europe.

If you account for how countries like Genoa and Venice made their wealth by trading with the east, whereas other nations made their wealth by taking advantage of the Atlantic, you could get a meaningful East-West divide that puts Italy in the east.
 
As I noted above, in that era "the term was simply used as a synonym for 'Soviet-bloc Europe.' Even then, some journalists would note that some Warsaw Pact nations were not really in eastern Europe: '"Czechoslovakia is the only Communist state in central as apart from eastern Europe, except the German Democratic Republic; its western tip is only 250 miles from the Rhine.' John Gunther, Inside Europe Today (1961), p. 314. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.143275/page/n305 "
Actually, there was one more meaning: part of Europe that was under strong Byzantine, Orthodox, Ottoman cultural influence. Which is, again, rather vague and imprecise. For example, the PLC would end partially as Western and partially as Eastern Europe.

Anyway, the term (short of the Soviet time meaning) is pretty much meaningless: so Italy is designated (by whom?) as Eastern Europe and so what? The rivers will start flowing in an opposite direction?
 
Top