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The flipped Coin - The Story of a surviving Western Roman Empire

It all began between 300 and 500 A.D. When the Germanic tribes tried to raid the Western Roman Empire (later only called the Roman Empire or the Eternal Empire). A new type of soldier emperor raised to power, promising to defend the Rhine boarder and to push back the Barbary. At the same time some of the Germanic tribes, namely these that have been long term allies, friends or vassals of Rome were resettled as a buffer along the Rhine, while the soldier Emperors build the Great Limes, a fortified wall along the Rhine Boarder with watchtowers and castles. Unlike former attempts to fortify and secure the Rhine boarder the Great Limes connected all former fortifications and walls and was build out of stone everywhere. Later travelers and traders would only compare it to the great wall of the Han Empire. A simulair fortification was propagate and build along the Danube boarder but was just a few walls and castles that were not everywhere connected and never covered the whole boarder there. The Frankish storm against the Rhine and the Anglo invasion of Briton where the greatest treats for the Western Roman Empire but these attacked were stopped and the lost lands soon freed from barbaric hordes.



In the East the Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantian Empire had not such luck. It all began, when the Gothic German tribes settled along the Crimea to form a Gothic Kingdom there. These Gothic Germans later split into two factions, the Western Gothic and the Eastern Gothic. The arrival of the Huns in 375 A.D. let to the Hunnic-Gothic War in with the Gothic defeated their homelands of the Regnum Ostrogothorum against the Huns and forced these nomadic warriors to change their course of invasion. As the western Gothic tribe settled as a foederati of the Eastern Roman Empire along the Danube to defend these boarder lands against other barbaric invaders and tribes they created the Regnum Visigothorum right next to their eastern Gothic tribe. The Huns meanwhile feared to engage the fearsome Gothic warriors after their defeat again and avoided the Regnum Ostrogothorum on their warpath. They themselves split into two factions, the smaller, northern tribe later known as the White Huns that would ride north to plunder the forest lands or the Russian steppe up to Scandinavia before they get wiped out by the Nordmans (a early form of Vikings). And there where the Yellow Huns, the far greater tribe that traveled, plunder and conquer the Caucasian region.



The Yellow Huns would conquer the lands of the Lazika, Iberia and Albania, forcing these people and other tribes to flee from their slaughter. In 410 A.D. the Yellow Huns had weakened the Sassanian Empire by raiding Mesopotamia but where stopped before they could sack the capital of Ctesiphon. Their attack at first weakened the Sassanian Empire and allowed the vassal of Persian Armenia to become free and conquer Roman Armenia from the also strongly weakened Eastern Roman Empire in Anatolia and become Greater Armenia. The Barbaric Invasion hit the Byzantine Empire hard, advancing trough Anatolia and along the Balkan. The Province of Pontus rebelled and became independent, only to be later annexed by the Regnum Ostrogothorum whose Fleets would rule the Black Sea. In the west of the Byzantine Empire the Regnum Visigothorum annexed parts of Macedonia, Dacia, Thrace and Moesia while the Greek provinces of Achaea, Athenae and Epirus declared themselves independent under their own ruler.



Even if they where also weakened by the Yellow Huns, the Sassanian Empire recovered faster than the Byzantian Empire that had to fight the barbaric invasions in the Balkan and Anatolia at the same time. Soon the Sassanians conquered all of Mesopotamia, Syria, Judea and even Egyptus and Cyrenaica in four wars against Byzantine. The Byzantine Empire never recovered from this losses and after the fall of Byzanz itself in 476 A.D. Nothing much was left of the former great state. As Egypt later rebelled against the Sassanian Empire the Alexandrian Empire managed to conquer Cyprus and Creta and for a short time dominated the trade in the eastern Mediterranean thanks to it's Fleets.



At the same time the stronger Western Roman Empire (the only Roman Empire after the Byzantine Provinces of Bithynia, Asia, Pamphylia, Cilicia and Cappadokia split into independent states after the fall of Byzanz) under Julianicus II (later called the Conqueror) used his centralized and strengthened Empire after he pushed back the Barbaric Invasion attempts to conquer part of the former region of Hellas and the Cyrenaica. Later he started pushed the German tribes out of Raetia to shorten the Rhine-Danube boarder and started a failed first invasion of Hibernia (Ireland). His son Augustinian I would later conquer all of Egypt, Creta and Cyprus as well as annexing Hibernia after his invasion of the Isle. Augustinian would be called the Lucky Emperor, because under his reign the Bulgarian tribes would conquer the eastern Danube and weaken the Theodorics Alliance between the two Gothic Empire and the Hellenic Kingdom, that should prevent his ambitions to reunite the former two Roman Empires. Thanks to the now weakened alliance Augustinian managed to annex all of Hellas, parts of Jazyges/Dacia and even Macedonia. His strongest enemies in the east remained the Sassanian Empire even if some central Asian tribes as well as Arabic tribes removed most of the pressure against his Roman Egyptian borderlands. Augustinian died as his luck ran out while he was on a war against the Regnum Visigothorum and besieging Byzanz at the time of his dead. His death thanks to an illness helped the Visigots to survive with the often plundered and weakened Byzanz as their new capital. In the next decades the most barbaric tribes in the former Eastern Roman Empire would become Christians (the state religion of the Western Roman Empire), Zoroastrianism/Mazdayasna (the state religion of the Sassanian Empire) or some of the smaller eastern faiths in the region. It was the year of the lord 900 and in the Danube region the Bulgarians had become a new rival as the Hungarians arrived in the Carpathian in 895 A.D.



In the east the Sassanian had other problems than the Romans as the Arabian tribes, driven by a new religion called Islam expanded in the Arabian peninsula and formed their own empire since 622 A.D. But the Sassanian strong from the conquest of Syria managed to withstand the Arabian raids, even if they lost Egypt to rebels and later to Rome in the process. The fear pf the Yellow Huns had managed some of the subject tribes and vassals to stick with the Sassanian Persian dynasty to get protection from the barbaric tribes of the north rather than to rebel against the heavy taxation. As the Yellow Huns had raided and destroyed most of the infrastructure in central Asia, the southern Silk Route brought the Sassanian new economic growth. The Sassanian Counterattacks against the Arabian tribes managed to secure the coast of the Arabian peninsula and even conquer Petra and Mecca in the west as well as most the coast of the Red Sea. Slowly but steady the Emperor of Persia adapter parts of the Islamic faith for his own Zoroastrianism, fascinated how this religion under Muhammad managed to unite the Arabian tribes so that they presented a danger for his own Empire for a few decades.
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