Can Rhomania not catch a break?
Yes, but not now. This is like one of those periods in OTL where thing after thing just keeps piling up. Many historians refer to this time period IOTL as the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century.
The reason in-TL-context why the above update is that there just hasn’t been a break for Rhomania really since the late 1590s (whenever exactly the Great Uprising and Eternal War kicked off). People react to that kind of pressure and that leads to consequences.
The Romans will get a break. The last-third of the seventeenth century will be much quieter for the Romans, but we’re not there yet. Lots of things have been building up in Roman society over the past decades and they’re coming to a head.
Roman Population: I did say the Romans would have more people than the OTL Ottomans. But I still stand by my assertion that Rhomania, as a great power, would be a 1913 France in that club. Still certainly a great power, but by that standard, has a population on the lower end of the scale.
Much of Rhomania is just not good agricultural land. There are some good spots but they are the exception, but just look at a topographical map of Greece and Turkey; it’s mostly hills and mountains. Rhomania is a Mediterranean country like Italy or Spain; compared to the likes of France, England, Germany, or Russia, it’s not good agricultural land, especially in pre-industrial times.
Importing food in pre-steam engine days doesn’t help much in this regard; see the updates about transportation early in the Context series. IOTL Ottoman Constantinople consumed about 500 tons of grain a day, while at the same time the grain trade in Danzig exported between 150,000 to 200,000 tons of grain a year. So the entire Vistula grain trade would be just about enough, with a little extra, to feed Constantinople, but just Constantinople. The grain imports from Scythia and Egypt are what enables the big Roman cities (Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Antioch, Smyrna) but given the transportation limitations of the day are not enough on their own to power a Roman population boom. The Ottomans had Egypt after all IOTL.
Also again Rhomania is a country in the eastern Mediterranean, which also means a different and more deadly disease pool than the likes of northern France, England, or Germany. Southern Italy faced a significantly heavier disease burden than northern Italy, a strong cause for one of the reasons why the South fell behind the North. Another OTL example is the American South compared to the North. If your population has to deal with hookworms and more malaria and your neighbor doesn’t, your neighbor has an edge. Also western Europe stopped getting hit by the plague with an outbreak in Marseille at the beginning of the 1700s as the last hurrah, but the disease kept hammering the eastern Mediterranean for at least another century. Reasons why plague disappeared in western Europe at the time are still unclear, but in Balkan and Anatolian highland rodent populations were acting as a plague reservoir, that would impose an additional disease burden. (This entire paragraph inspired and informed by Kyle Harper’s new book Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History.)
That’s all OTL stuff that I think is applicable both to the OTL Ottomans and also to the TTL Romans, even if there might be some variance in degree. Now let’s get to TTL factors. A lot of this is going to be aftereffects of the current crisis unfolding ITTL but at this point I’m just going to stop caring about spoilers.
Rhomania is going to be a rich and prosperous society by the standards of the time. It’s not going to be like the Ottomans or the various Balkan countries (which were certainly not rich and prosperous in the 1800s). With a strong subset of wealthy peasantry who practice partible inheritance, there’s going to be strong cultural inclinations to limit reproduction. Basically the Roman peasantry go the route of the post-Revolution French peasantry. This is one argument I’ve seen for why French population growth slowed massively in the 1800s. Poorer peasants tend to have more kids than rich ones.
Plus the urban demographic black hole effect is still very much in place (see earlier updates in the Context series as well). To use an example from said earlier update, London at this time IOTL had a significant surplus of deaths over births. So just to maintain its size, much less grow, London had to constantly import people from the countryside (and would then often proceed to kill them, meaning new imports, and so on). The number needed to make good the difference between London’s deaths and births every year was equivalent to a 0.25% annual growth rate for the population of England at the time. So if England’s population really grew at 0.5% a year, London’s urban demographic black hole swallowed half of that.
Now Rhomania doesn’t have any cities as big as London or Paris, but it’s much more urbanized than France or England, so the overall demographic urban black hole effect is bigger, just spread out more rather than concentrated in one megalopolis. This is also, by the way, an argument I’ve seen why the Ottomans’ population didn’t rebound from Little Ice Age period at the rate of western Europe or Russia.
This is from Sam White’s The Climate of Rebellion in the early modern Ottoman Empire, which argues, along with Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, that the Ottoman Empire was both hit especially hard by this period and also took longer to recover than its contemporaries. The reasons for both the hard hit and the slow recovery vary, with a mix of political, cultural, and environmental. Some of these reasons do not apply to the Romans; the Ottomans really needed to install a revolving door in the Topkapi Palace considering the number of Sultans and Viziers they went through during this period. It won’t be that bad for the Romans. But many of the reasons still apply to the Romans, especially the environmental and ecological ones.
So, in short, to have the Romans have a comparable population growth to the likes of western Europe or Russia requires numerous assumption, many of which I do not consider to be accurate.
In terms of population, the Romans will do better than the OTL Ottomans. But there is still a gap between that and ‘comparable to Triunes or Germany’. To tie back into the Victoria mod conversation that started this, the Ottomans have a population deficit issue compared to the other would-be great powers. Whatever that deficit is, the mod Romans would have that halved, but there would still be that deficit. The issue would be smaller, but it would still be there.
Note that the details are extremely inchoate, with any numbers used meant to be illustrative of proportion, but the idea of modern Rhomania being a great power but one that’s weaker on population is heavily baked into my plans going forward.
Addendum: The population talk is focused specifically on the Roman heartland (Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Turkey, Crimea, northern Syria). Having a Roman Indonesia would change the population dynamic, but the changes would be determined first by how Indonesia develops. Indochina, Indonesia, and the Philippines were lightly populated at this point IOTL; that whole area had a population that was comparable just to the HRE around 1600ish. The massive population boom is a product of the 1800s and 1900s. Plus there’s the matter of how a Roman Indonesia relates to the metropole. It’s going to have its own interests and concerns, much as how Australia considered defending Malaya a lot more important than reinforcing the Middle East in 1941.
Militarist plans: From my POV, I don’t think all their plans are insane, in isolation. Trying to combine them all though is. They could get away with the Balkans, but not that and Italy. And there’s the issue of defense. I remember reading a seventeenth century Spanish minister complaining about how they (Spain) was the target at which the whole world loosed its arrows. Being widespread does mean more room for others to attack you, and likely a longer list of those who want to attack you. I sometimes wonder how Spain would’ve fared if it never ended up being combined with the Netherlands and HRE under Charles V and focused exclusively on its American and Mediterranean holdings.
EDIT: Of course, I don't mean to say I want despotates in at any cost, like oppressed subjects. That's obviously worse than dominion/despotate route. You somehow need to make them feel citizens of Rome, feel involved. Which is the hardest part of realistic timeline.
That’s the key, and the stumbling block. The Roman model says you need to speak Greek and practice Orthodoxy. The Copts of Egypt are 0 for 2 for that, and trying to turn the Copts into Orthodox would likely go about as well as the English trying to forcibly convert the Irish to Anglicanism.
Sicily’s a weird mix where part of the population is 2 for 2, and the rest is 0 for 2. And the Sicilian Vespers is becoming a big part of their national mythos.
With Rhomania-in-the-East, it’s just a matter of geography. Interests are going to diverge simply because they’re so far away, just like how Canada’s and especially ANZAC’s geopolitical interests are not that of the UK.
That said, I recently had an idea spurred on by my comment of comparing Rhomania-in-the-East with the eastern Mediterranean under the classical Roman Empire. Picture a scenario where RITE gets a cadet branch of the Imperial dynasty and becomes the new Eastern Roman Empire, with the ‘Byzantine heartland’ becoming a new Western Roman Empire, with the two cooperating like the classical versions combined with the Bourbon family compact.
Absolutely not guaranteed, but a thought I had to square the ‘want to keep Roman, but recognize local aspirations and interests and not be brutalizing to provincials’.
I feel that the party of Tourmarches was partly inspired by commenters in this thread badgering our Basileus hahah. Are we witnessing the birth of the military-industrial complex in Rhomania? Is Leo a member of this party?
Has the number of women serving in the army declined since then? Regardless, I look forward to seeing a viable opposition to the Tourmarches arise who prioritise responsible administration and diplomacy.
Not declined. They’re gone. The women were mostly women who dressed up as men to fight in the war, with some of their number getting discovered. This was inspired by examples from the American Civil War. The only women who served openly as women was the artillery unit Athena commanded during the siege of Thessaloniki, which was very much a special exceptional case restricted to that one time and place.
The story has progressed quite well. I am hoping perhaps we get to see someone finally claim Australia since the WU abandoned it. Perhaps Rhomania establishes Nea Rhomania or the Notia Edafi as a name for it.
I doubt it. Australia is still a hell hole to visit, much less colonize while the Wu remnants are inhabiting the most valuable parts of the continent as the Aboriginals are dying off. This is bad for the colonizers as they're going to be dealing with a far more advanced and numerous enemy than a bunch of hunter-gatherers. Coupled with the Little Ice Age and the lack of important trade goods within the continent, it's very unlikely anyone is going to find Australia appealing enough to settle.
Either Australia becomes a ‘new Wu’ state consolidated by the Wu who stayed, or it will eventually end up Roman. But the Wu who remained would be a significantly greater challenge than the aborigines. Much higher disease resistance combined with iron technology, so I consider them comparable to some of the more powerful sub-Saharan African realms fighting colonization in the late 1800s. So an invader can beat them, but they need to show up with breech-loading rifles, not muskets, to do so, so that’s a ways down the road.
I really like the flag but haven’t considered what I would call a Roman Australia. Part of me really likes the idea of naming it Antarctica. That’s because I can then have the Grand Army of Antarctica, and that makes me imagine a great host of penguins marching on the enemy demanding ‘give fish or die’.
And that image gives me joy.
Anyone have a link for the latest military structure? The last I seem to recall is from Niketas’ time!
Can’t remember the last time I had a specifically military structure only update. There’s been some redrawing of the borders, but there’s still the various themes that produce the regional tagmata, plus the guard units usually stationed at Constantinople. The big change is that they’re all compensated in cash, rather than in money and land grants.
