No plague of Justinian, can the ERE reconquer the west?

@Russian, the Avars reaching the gates of Constantinople had absolutely nothing to do with the Plague of Justinian...

@Katchen, I highly doubt the Persians can do any better than they did OTL against the ERE-again, little to do with the Justinian plague, more to due with the Romans were going through a bloody civil war while fighting off an invasion from Persia simultaneously with an invasion of the Balkans. Everything hit them all at once.
 
what caused the Arabs to blow out of Arabia (that's what it is called at this time right?) anyway?

IIRC, population pressures, combined with the devastation in the Byzantine-Sassanid War (and hence easy pickings) of both Persian Mesopotamia and the Roman Levant combined with the organisation brought about by Muhammad's creation of what would coalesce as Islam.

That comes around a century after Justinian, though.
 
Their biggest advantage in this era wasn't disease resistance. As far as I know that wasn't the case or anything they had that made them special. Their biggest advantage was that they had one of the greatest Persian emperors ever. Probably second only to Cyrus the Great in terms of how well remembered he was (I really like the guy). They didn't have much advantage beyond much more effective leadership.

I agree with this: Khusro I really was something quite special. That said, so was Justinian, so it all balances out.

Justinian and Belisarius might have re-established Mare Nostrum. But the Sassanids eventually would have fought Rome to a bloody draw as OTL. Maybe even beaten them altogether if not damaged by the Plague.
The truly interesting question is: If no plague, might someone (the Sassanids? Axum? have conquered Mecca and butterflied Islam? And if so, what might have replaced or not replaced Islam if Persia and Byzantium had fought each other to a draw in the 7th Century Crisis. Turks converted to Buddhism a century or two later perhaps?

Why "would" they have done? The fact that there was no serious Iranian breakout between 300 and 600 suggests to me that there was nothing inevitable about the events that occurred after 608: rather, it was simply bad luck and human error intervening, as happened after 405 in the Western Empire. Iranian success after 608 depended on several different factors, which are exceedingly unlikely to line up in the same way with a 540s POD.

IIRC, population pressures, combined with the devastation in the Byzantine-Sassanid War (and hence easy pickings) of both Persian Mesopotamia and the Roman Levant combined with the organisation brought about by Muhammad's creation of what would coalesce as Islam.

That comes around a century after Justinian, though.

I think Muhammad deserves a hell of a lot of credit, the guy was clearly a visionary politico-religious leader even if he was not, as you suggest, really a "Muslim" as we understand the term. The Arabs enjoyed a happy combination of an excellent leader at a time when the superpowers that had dominated their world for centuries were busily engaged in destroying one another. No Muhammad probably means no Arab breakout.
 

Dorozhand

Banned
The plague never happens, Justinian and Belisarius use the manpower and economic might of the ERE at its apogee to launch a reconquest of the Roman world. After the conquest of north Africa, a campaign against the Visigoths places Iberia under Roman control. The conquest of Italy is quick and clean, with the effect that Italy can now stand economically on its own and contribute to the wars, and Rome is preserved as major urban centre. From Italy and Iberia, Belisarius launches a successful two-pronged attack on the Franks, bringing Gaul under Roman rule. When the Avars decide to attack, the empire can defend itself with a butterflied Sassanid invasion, and allies with the Sassanids when the Arabs explode out of the desert, driving them back. Muhammad establishes a stable Arab state, but its expansion is halted.
 
The Sassanids were the fundamental problem even before the plague struck. No plague would certainly strengthen the Empire, but I'm not sure taking it away would result in more than a complete conquest of Italy and the ability to hold onto to it.
 
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I think Muhammad deserves a hell of a lot of credit, the guy was clearly a visionary politico-religious leader even if he was not, as you suggest, really a "Muslim" as we understand the term. The Arabs enjoyed a happy combination of an excellent leader at a time when the superpowers that had dominated their world for centuries were busily engaged in destroying one another. No Muhammad probably means no Arab breakout.

I didn't mean anything Islamophobic by suggesting that he wasn't a Muslim as we understand the term- I just feel that Islam only really concretised as a religion in the generations after Muhammad's death, just as Christianity only did generations after Jesus' death.

I don't know about no breakout, though- Rome and the House of Sassan were both pretty punch drunk at the time. I suspect the Levant and Mesopotamia looked like obviously easy pickings to the Arabs. I agree that proto/Islam probably gave them more organisation and staying power than normal raiders/nomad conquerors.
 
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I don't know about no breakout, though- Rome and the House of Sassan were both pretty punch drunk at the time. I suspect the Levant and Mesopotamia looked like obviously easy pickings to the Arabs. I agree that proto/Islam probably gave them more organisation and staying power than normal raiders/nomad conquerors.
This is true, but would they have become assimilated into the regions of the lands they conquered if they had maintained their pre-Islamic religion? IIRC the Muslim military camps in the early days were set up outside the cities to keep cohesion and reduce mixing in part for this reason. What if this doesn't happen?

I've been reading Hugh Kennedy's The Armies of the Caliphs and he suggests that had the Arabs suffered a major loss or two and corresponding reduction of their army, it's unlikely they would've broken out even with the weakened state of the empires. This is based on the projected population of the region. So even if everything is as OTL absent Islam, one very bad instance of bad luck might have ended it.
 
I didn't mean anything Islamophobic by suggesting that he wasn't a Muslim as we understand the term- I just feel that Islam only really concretised as a religion in the generations after Muhammad's death, just as Christianity only did generations after Jesus' death.

Oh no, you misunderstand me: I was fully agreeing with you. Islam as we understand it is as much a result of the conquests as it is a cause of the conquests, from what I've read.
 
If justinian had been a more trusting person, he would have been able to reunite italy. He had the opportunity to have Theodoric rejoin Ostrogoth Italy with the ERE before the war even began, but he wanted subjugation rather than alliance.

He also later had the opportunity to have Belisarius named the King of italy, but recalled him (and iirc, sent him to the eastern front) because he didn't want a rouge general. The plauge was probably the final nail in the coffin, but even with it, some much better choices (at least in hindsight) could be made.
 
For a start on this question of the effect of the Plague I recommend picking up Warren Treadgold's A Concise History of Byzantium. He includes some fairly striking demographic data, along with some compelling analysis of just how big an impact this had on Byzantine manpower and tax receipts. For a more scholarly set of treatments, pick up Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541-750, ed. by Lester K. Little.

Best estimates now are that the Plague at least 25-30% of the Byzantine population, and more than that in some urban centers like Constantinople. It would be hard to overstate just how serious an impact this had on the Empire's ability not only to sustain the western campaigns of conquest, but to resist incursions of the Persians and Slavs. Even allowing for Justinian's parsimony in supporting Belisarius's Italian invasion, I think there is an excellent argument to be made that without the Plague, the Gothic Wars would have been wrapped up considerably more quickly and at less cost, and that most of Spain, rather than merely a small littoral, would have been secured.

The longer term butterflies are harder calculate. But just looking at the data we have - and how long it took for Byzantium to recover from the population and economic losses - there's little question but that Byzantium would have been in better shape to resist not only the Lombards in the 560's and 570's, but the Sassanids and the Arabs in the 7th century as well.
 
@Athelstan: I agree with you that Treadgold's book is useful, and the statistics he uses I reproduced for my dissertation and find to be broadly reasonable estimates for the hammer blow of the plague.

That said, we know the plague spread throughout Europe and Iran, so I think that all settled peoples would have really been hurt more or less equally by it. I don't therefore find it particularly convincing to argue that Rome was weakened by the plague, thus allowing the Iranians and Goths to do better.

For sixth century fans, I'm doing a mini "Timeline In A Day" about a successful Nika revolt here.
 
That said, we know the plague spread throughout Europe and Iran,
Although possibly not to the Anglo-Saxons, who at that date seem to have had little if any trade with mainstream European civilisation. Allegedly the Romano-British didn't want much contact with them, and the plague therefore hitting the Roman-British rather harder than it did the Anglo-Saxons was what allowed the Anglo-Saxons to start expanding rapidly after being limited to just a few areas for a couple of generations.
(However I'm not entirely sure now where I read this, and if it was where I think then I gather that some historians dismiss John Morris(?)'s writings as too speculative...)
 
@Athelstan: I agree with you that Treadgold's book is useful, and the statistics he uses I reproduced for my dissertation and find to be broadly reasonable estimates for the hammer blow of the plague.

That said, we know the plague spread throughout Europe and Iran, so I think that all settled peoples would have really been hurt more or less equally by it. I don't therefore find it particularly convincing to argue that Rome was weakened by the plague, thus allowing the Iranians and Goths to do better.

For sixth century fans, I'm doing a mini "Timeline In A Day" about a successful Nika revolt here.

The Arabs seem to have been less affected by it, thanks to desert isolation; for that matter, the plague spread more quickly in urban agglomerations, which means that it likely had less effect on, say, Slavs, Lombards, Franks, etc.

In a sense, Byzantium had more to lose. It had a bureaucracy and infrastructure to support that no other entity, save possibly, Persia, had to service; and its soldiers had to be maintained through pay, not merely plunder, and had to man fortifications that barbarian powers did not generally employ.

I don't see how it can be seen as anything other than a net negative - especially coming as it did as Byzantium was reaching a new zenith, undercutting its ability to regain lost provinces in the West just when it was in the best position to reoccupy them.
 
I think He could possibly take all of Italy,Spain,Southern France and North Africa. I don't think They would go beyond that.
 
The Arabs seem to have been less affected by it, thanks to desert isolation; for that matter, the plague spread more quickly in urban agglomerations, which means that it likely had less effect on, say, Slavs, Lombards, Franks, etc.

This is a good example of why the plague is a deus ex machina. byzantium lost? Plague. Franks decentralized? Plague. Romano-Britons collapse? Plague.
 
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