Winnabago
Banned
@Yorel
By “status quo”, I meant no Christianity. The Byzantine version of Christianity was quite willing to kill people, unlike your peacey early Christian who would just sit down and get eaten by lions. I find it a little hard to call the late Byzantines Romans, but you’re perfectly correct there.
I think of Zoroastrianism as kind of its own monotheistic religion (even though there’s two gods): you have a good guy and a bad guy and which guy you pick determines consequences. Almost Christian, in a way. So while I don’t think Buddhism would overthrow the Zoroastrians immediately, it would conflict with them and be an increasing annoyance on the Sassanids’ eastern front. What do you think would be different in the new timeline that would cause the Eastern Romans to lose?
Roman mythology isn’t just gods: there’s also little protective spirits (the lares and the penates) who protect your house. Almost like Germanic kobolds. There might be some difficulty, but not any more than what the Romans usually had with foreign religions.
In the East, groups like the Umayyads besieged Constantinople twice. This would seem to the Byzantines as a bit more of a threat than Lombards in Italy. But what if there had been no epic Byzantine defeat to the Muslims earlier? What if the Byzantines were already running off earlier victories on the Sassanids? What if the East was stable enough for radicals/visionaries like Justinian to continue looking west?
It’s a cool idea, anyway.
By “status quo”, I meant no Christianity. The Byzantine version of Christianity was quite willing to kill people, unlike your peacey early Christian who would just sit down and get eaten by lions. I find it a little hard to call the late Byzantines Romans, but you’re perfectly correct there.
I think of Zoroastrianism as kind of its own monotheistic religion (even though there’s two gods): you have a good guy and a bad guy and which guy you pick determines consequences. Almost Christian, in a way. So while I don’t think Buddhism would overthrow the Zoroastrians immediately, it would conflict with them and be an increasing annoyance on the Sassanids’ eastern front. What do you think would be different in the new timeline that would cause the Eastern Romans to lose?
Roman mythology isn’t just gods: there’s also little protective spirits (the lares and the penates) who protect your house. Almost like Germanic kobolds. There might be some difficulty, but not any more than what the Romans usually had with foreign religions.
In the East, groups like the Umayyads besieged Constantinople twice. This would seem to the Byzantines as a bit more of a threat than Lombards in Italy. But what if there had been no epic Byzantine defeat to the Muslims earlier? What if the Byzantines were already running off earlier victories on the Sassanids? What if the East was stable enough for radicals/visionaries like Justinian to continue looking west?
It’s a cool idea, anyway.