Roman successor state in Mauretania and Morocco

ar-pharazon

Banned
Morocco and Mauretania were on the fringes of the Roman Empire and were very much on the periphery but how could a Roman successor state emerge.

Could we see a Roman general holding the region against Berber incursions and ensuring its survival and independence?

Is this possible?
 
Morocco and Mauretania were on the fringes of the Roman Empire and were very much on the periphery but how could a Roman successor state emerge.

Could we see a Roman general holding the region against Berber incursions and ensuring its survival and independence?

Is this possible?

The way you've described, unlikely.

I personally love the idea, but crucially, you need to have.

1) A good relationship with the Visigoths
2) A good relationship with the Berbers,
3) Be Roman.

I actually think a 'Exarchate of Ceuta' could fit the bill here. It is ostensibly the remnant of the Empire in the West / Justinian. What I think you need is a unexpectedly successful pair of PoDs.

You need a unified Berber community/North African community. Not necessarily politically, but an alliance of sorts after a slightly more successful (for the defenders) second invasion of the Maghreb. That should be able to amass a large enough force to kick the Caliphate out.

But, I think that could lead to a major restructuring of the Exarchate so that it was economically based in the western fringes. So increased trade with the Visigoths and Britons, stronger city, etc.

Third invasion could be a rout that reorganises to halt the Caliphate at Melilla, and effectively leaves the Middle and High Atlas mountains as the border between the Caliphate and the Exarchate - the latter inviting all Christian Berbers to live in the region.

At which point your Exarchate is pratically a Romano-Berber state that can consolidate and expand its fortunes via the salt-gold trade, and based in a potentially very defensible "Constantinople in the West" at Ceuta.

But yeah, my PoD would be to have the Romans prepare the Moroccan region in case of a second invasion. Many alliances, lots of trade, beg Constantinople for gifts to give them to solidify the position.
 
Any Roman successor state would be a Romano-Berber state, as any Roman state would be as doomed as Syagrius's state (conquered by the Berbers instead of a Germanic group). It's a fringe area of the Roman Empire, and not very Romanised to begin with--I think it's most likely any Romance language in Mauretania would have the same fate as the Dalmatian language of Europe, to slowly lose prestige and die out over the centuries.

But, that said, remember that the Romans never penetrated much further south than the region around Volubilis. I think that up to the Crisis of the Third Century, any Roman Emperor could have dispatched a decent-sized force and subdued the remainder of modern Morocco and brought it into the empire. It probably would have been permanantly garrisoned by one legion--you could safely remove one of the British legions to Mauretania I suspect. The Berbers didn't seem to be too hard to keep peaceful, since Rome only devoted one legion to everything west of Cyrenaica. This probably also means a Roman Canaries, or at the very least, the Canaries developing like the Irish due to increased contact with the Roman Empire.

Since Mauretania is now much larger, much more subdued, and more culturally Roman (at least in urban centers like Ceuta, Volubilis, and whatever cities get established due to the Roman conquest), you have a very solid base for a successor state. It might not even be Romano-Berber, it might be another Germanic state or even a more purely "Roman" state.
 
It’s an interesting thought. It all depends on what the estimated population of Roman Mauretania was in the 400s. If it’s too small, there’s no way the region could unify to hold off the barbarian tribes or the North African tribes unless a past pod eliminated them (unlikely in my opinion). If it’s large enough to support a modest sized army that remains a true Roman model of fighting then I thinks small kingdom could form.

Maybe have the Vandals stay in Spain or be defeated by invading Visigoths and absorbed into their kingdom. This leaves the need for a Roman Governor/General to abandon the empire as it crumbles. Any army would then have to be solely focused on the berbers. If the ERE decides to still turn west in this scenario in the 500s I don’t see why the kingdom wouldn’t either be reincorporated into the empire, become a client kingdom, or fall without too much resistance. That being said, any surviving kingdom will inevitably be wiped out in Morocco by the future Islamic caliphates if they still rise.
 
Morocco and Mauretania were on the fringes of the Roman Empire and were very much on the periphery but how could a Roman successor state emerge.

Could we see a Roman general holding the region against Berber incursions and ensuring its survival and independence?

Is this possible?
Perhaps through Gallienus and/or Aurelian being unable to successfully combat the Germanic intrusions into Italy and the Balkans before 271? If both of these regions are lost to them, then i can see Carthage in North Africa becoming the refuge of the rump Roman Empire.
 
Now I want to see a TL where one of the pre-476 emperors establishes himself at Tingis or Septem and turns it into a "Second Rome" a la Byzantion. Maybe Constantine himself does it (for whatever reason) and Byzantion never receives the massive build-up it received IOTL.

The rich farmland in the Gharb or in the Guadalquivir basin can serve this Straits-of-Gibraltar-Rome the same way Thrace or Asia Minor served Constantinople. The potential trade routes for this position aren't nearly as developed as those of Constantinople but with a pinch of intrepidness this state could turn a considerable profit. Weathering the onslaught of Vandals, Visigoths, Berbers, and maybe Arabs will be difficult, but probably no more difficult than it was for the Byzantines to weather the Slavs and Arabs.

Perhaps the whole Iberian peninsula could be analogous to Byzantine Asia Minor with the Pyrenees serving the same function as the Taurus Mountains. With enough clout, this Western Roman remnant could possibly claim St. James's rumored presence in Hispania justifies a Patriarchate of its own.

Meanwhile, whatever's in the place of Constantinople will be bickered over by the Bulgarians/other Slavs/Avars/Khazars in control of their square of the Balkans and the Persians/Arabs/Eastern Romans/Armenians/also Khazars/Martians in control of Asia Minor.

Riding this further, maybe an Ottoman analogue based in Tunisia takes Ceuta/Tangiers the same way the Turks took Constantinople, ending Christian Central/Eastern European access to the Mediterranean-Atlantic Silk Road and prompting them to look further East, sending horse-borne explorers and conquistadors into the Pontic Steppe, Siberia, Central Asia, etc.
 
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