Recent content by Draeger

Napoleon was willing to sacrifice every ship and sailor available to him in order to get his army across, so confident was he of his ability to break the British at home, and he had loads of reasons to believe it would work.

This necessitates that the nobility don't directly fund/form the foundation of that class from the get-go. Enlightened Paternalism, or Egalitarian Monarchy, which I think you're describing, is interesting though. Requires competent nobility, though.

I'm back

Not if you smash everyone hard enough, and make them all economically/militarily dependent on you. Napoleon's France in 1812 does not have the ability to subsidize industrialization across Europe, such that the Continental System could be effectively self-sufficient. Britain (and thanks to...

Sigismund von Luxembourg has a male heir who's every bit as competent and pursues his reforms. Boom, Hungarian Renaissance.

Try telling a Serb that there's no ethnic difference between him and a Bosniak lol

There's an entire TL that was based on this premise, somewhere on here.

This is about what it would take; Germany would basically have to never unify, never have the Kulturkampf, and never industrialize to the extent it did. You probably have to butterfly away the Kingdom of Prussia, which could lead to a much more fractious 'Germany' by the turn of the 19th...

Impossible, I think, given how completely broken Mercia was by those invasions---not quite as bad as Northumbria, but still pretty bad. Can't rule England when you can't rule yourselves. Beornwulf has to survive and preferably win at Ellandum, and after that Wessex has to be soundly defeated...

LSCastilina still dropping in with those savage knowledge bombs as per always. The actual impact of the influx of silver into the European economy, as was said above, wasn't felt until China starting spending the silver it had traded for from the Spanish on European finished goods in the late...

Considering smallpox was the biggest killer of new world populations, you have to somehow inoculate American native populations against it. For that, geographical/ASB changes are required, plain and simple.

Talk of the Ottoman ascendancy necessarily involves the Byzantine death-spiral, so this is good discussion. However, I'll ward against fatalist thinking with regard to either 'empire'. Neither was 'doomed' to succeed or fail. Byzantium post-1204 was not nearly as mortally wounded as a...

Palmyra -> Syriac Empire WHEN? also Found the Muslim, guys! (duh---I get the point, at the time it would have been pointless information, but now it might be interesting; just like it's interesting to hear from modern Christians in Syria, who are still somehow alive despite centuries of...

Looks like an Umayyad colonial empire, though I'm not sure how they blobbed into the Lowlands and elsewhere in Europe. Controlling the *Philippines without controlling (hardly) anything in between seems a bit farcical, maybe they only briefly controlled them? Maybe the Eastern Caliphate remains...

Grünwald, led to P-L hegemony replacing Teutonic primacy in the Baltic/Eastern Europe. Had it gone the other way, PLC likely is a nonstarter, and Baltic/Eastern Europe looks a lot more German...