Muezzins on the Seine

And now, the moment we've all been waiting for

Update:

For over a decade, the war between the Purists and the Ibrahmists devolved into plunder of countrysides, as neither army could gain a decisive advantage over the other. But the ascension of the Polish King Jeremy, who history remembers as the Plunderer, changed that. Jeremy took it as a personal insult that the Romans did not bend before his army, and sought to change that. With the help of master metal-casters and shipbuilders, imported from the Republic of Massilia for this cause, Jeremy built a great fleet in the allied ports in Ukraine, and loaded it with great cannons, capable of hurling one-tonne projectiles well over a mile. Jeremy loaded his fleet with an army numbering 40,000 soldiers, and sailed south down the Black Sea coast. Making port at a small fortified settlement named Pyrgos, (which he took after firing warning shots with his cannons against the walls, which crumbled before the iron balls), his army disembarked and marched the remaining 250 miles to Constantinople in just 2 weeks. They plundered the surrounding countryside until the army came to the walls of Constantinople itself. Jeremy also conscripted peasants into his army to bolster his ranks.

The siege lasted just a month, and then Jeremy's cannons fired upon the walls. After 3 full hours of bombardment, Jeremy personally led a charge of heavy cavalry through the morning fog and dust clouds that had yet to clear.

His formation was 10,000 strong, supported by 30,000 infantry behind him, men and horses in heavy plate armor charging into gaps in the walls. With the thick fog, the defenders' first warning of the assault was the noise of the hoofs hitting the ground, and the shaking of the ground itself. The Emperor's son, Theophilos, attempted to rally his remaining soldiers, but he was soon trampled by the tide of men, horses, and steel.

That day, Constantinople burned. Only the Cathedrals and monasteries were spared. Palaces, government buildings, markets, and private houses were sacked by a combination of the Poles, deserting Romans, looters, and citizens attempting to take their worldy possessions with them as they fled. By nightfall, the last resistance in the city was crushed.

When word reached Basil a month later, that Constantinople had fallen and that his son was dead, his heart failed. With the male heir dead, his dynasty terminated, and a new conflict began. While his nephew, Leo, should have commanded large portions of the Empire in the Balkans, he was just 5 years old, and his mother, Theodora, (as his father had died of food poisoning 3 years earlier) became regent. This led to a revolt by a charismatic commander in Anatolia by the name of Tiberios, who proclaimed that Theodora's rule as regent was an offense to God, citing the Apostle Paul, and, as a 3rd cousin of the late Basil himself, claimed the throne.

The Poles left Constantinople after a month in the city, in September, 1475. Jeremy didn't want to be in the city when the Romans brought their armies down on it. Theodora worked out a truce with Poland and Kiev, as she had a bigger problem in the form of the army Tiberios was marching against Constantinople. Iasi became Kievan territory, and the Poles gained portions of the Danube valley in the west. Theodora and Leo officially adopted a Purist position, declaring Ibrahmism heretical and sacking the bishops that espoused it. Despite its official loss of standing, Ibrahmism remained the dominant theological position through most of the Empire.

Tiberios himself was soundly thrashed outside Nicea in 1476, and Theodora's reign as regent continued until her son came of age in 1488.

Map (with rivers!)

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If it is ok, could i do it? I would like to poilsh you map a bit in terms of the two pixel borders

If you can, that would be nice. The border problem might have been the result of copying and pasting the borders of TTL countries onto the map with rivers, so if you could tidy that up for me, thank you.
 
I prefer the grey map, myself; there's a reason the UCS was revised.

It's good to see this alive once again, this is one of my favorite TLs on the board.
 
I prefer the grey map, myself; there's a reason the UCS was revised.

It's good to see this alive once again, this is one of my favorite TLs on the board.

Thank you. I plan to update by Thursday. This weekend is difficult because I just got back from a retreat, and have schoolwork to catch up to.
 
Update:

King Jeremy of the Poles returned to Krakow a hero, with the battle-flags of the Romans, Eagle Standards like those of their ancestors, were thrown to the feet of his horses by the dozen. The wealth plundered from Constantinople, piled high on carts, some saying, most likely in hyperbole, 3 meters tall, was paraded through the city. Once the debts of the war were payed off, Jeremy donated the rest to the Church, and prepared to implement the second part of his plan for Polish domination of Europe, the invasion of the Massilian Republic.

But it was not to be. Jeremy, while hunting in the Carpathian mountains, as was his past-time, was mauled by a lion. The beasts had been a rising threat in the continent for centuries. Long considered extinct, new feral populations emerged along the upper Danube and Carpathians, escaped from the private menageries of Roman governors and amphitheater-owners who kept them for entertainment. Sometimes through the ineptitude of handlers, sometimes because, well, when a city's sacked, no one's watching the animals, lions got out. Though there were less than a thousand in all of Europe, Jeremy had the spectacularly rotten luck to run into one while on a toilet break.

With the end of the Tiberian rebellion in Anatolia, the Roman Empire settled into a post-war calm, excepting the purge of the upper classes by the new Inquisitorial agents. Islam and Ibrahmist Christianity were targeted by judges selected by Purist bishops, recently returned to power. Judaism, however, was not explicitely threatened. However, external military threats to the Empire were largely non-existent, as the Emirates on its borders had problems of their own to deal with.

In Egypt, the Abbasid line finally died out, and the new Caliph, an Ibrahmist Muslim, was more interested in finding a way to bring the long-troublesome Coptic Christians more firmly into his rule through conversion.

Persia's troubles were a lot more dramatic. The Seljuk hordes of the Khazar steppe overran their borders, sacking the wealthy trade routes to China and driving into Mesopotamia, conquering Armenia in the process. The Seljuk ranks, formed in large part of slaves taken as children and honed into elite cavalry troops, demolished the Persian ranks.

When a city was besieged, the Seljuks demonstrated an awesome terror weapon: the balloon. A great rope would be made, longer than the shortest axis of the city, and a balloon would be tied to the center. The balloon, powered by hot air and made of any suitably fire-resistant cloth, would float upward, as beasts of burder towed the entire assembly over the city. From at least a hundred meters above his target, the pilot of the balloon would drop explosives and liquid fire on the terrified citizens. This method of assault, more accurate than a catapult and easier to transport than a cannon, won many a fortified city for the Seljuks.

On the other side of the world, another horde grew by leaps and bounds. The Cheyenne horde, under a ruler known to later generations as Ma'heo'o Hetane. Ma'heo'o Hetane expanded the borders of his domain to the Mississippi and beyond, plundering wealthy Mississippian towns in the land known to its inhabitants as "Mis-oor." In the west, he conquered the gold and silver mines of the Rocky Mountains, and soon, his throne room, decorated by gold worked by expert smiths, and towed whole by two teams of horses, became the most lavish affair in the entirety of North America. The Mississippians, to whom horses were almost unknown (except for some in zoos in towns of the Lower Mississippi, where horses descended of Arabic breeds were displayed), were thrashed by the Cheyenne war-horses, which, clad in hardened leather armor, with riders carrying 5-meter long lances, shattered all who stood before them.

In Mesoamerica, the Kingdom of Tzin-Tzuntzan conquered the Mexica and Pur'hepecha peoples in the name of their god Acatl, who spoke to their King in a vision, where he proclaimed his disgust with human sacrifice, and the divine vision he had for the King, who was to rule the world in a way that would honor Acatl. In this meeting, where the King was in a trance, Acatl handed down a series of moral regulations, such as a ban on clothing when the weather was warm ("What Acatl has made, is beautiful, and to cover, an abomination"), a ban on human sacrifice ("For I, Acatl, have made you, and you are not to kill the innocent in My name"), and punishment for crimes. The Tzin-tzuntzan conquered much of the western part of Mexico, but the King dared not strike the powerful and wealthy Maya city states, just yet. Instead, they conquered the tribes of central Mexico.

The bush elephants released by African muslim traders hoping to reduce the cost of the ivory trade expanded quickly. Within decades of their release, elephants could be found browsing the jungles as far as the Amazon and Colombia.

The Massilian Republic obtained, through a treaty over trade rights, the Cordoban islands in the Mediterranean and Atlantic.

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what happened to muslim southern england? did it become absorbed by the viking kindom in england or collapse instead?

great tl, btw
 
An interesting TL, especially with the development of Eastern Europe. How did China expand into SE Asia, and what's up with Korean Japan?
 
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