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POD: Neither Christianity nor a Christianity analogue emerges in the Roman empire. Of course there will be mystery cults and such, but none of them receive patronage as the official imperial religion, or if they do they lack the missionary zeal that led to Christianity's spread into Northern Europe IOTL. Also, the Western Roman empire still collapses under similar circumstances to OTL.

This is a pretty huge POD obviously, but I want to focus on how it affects the cultural development of Northern Europe. Christianity served as a vector for the transmission of parts of the Roman cultural package into Northern Europe- the most obvious example being the Latin script. Following this, Western Europeans shared a common religion under a unified(well, some of the time) Church, a common script, a shared Latin-centric high culture, and some degree of cross-cultural standardization.

OTOH you might say that this resulted as much or more from geography as from Christianity. Given Northern Europeans had a much lower population density then the Mediterranean region, and were cut off from other high-density civilizations, it may have been inevitable for them to adopt aspects of Roman culture. But perhaps less could have been adopted? For example, without missionaries serving as vectors for the spread of Latin script perhaps it's more likely that the that Germanic peoples would have retained the Runic Alphabet?
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