An Age of Miracles Continues: The Empire of Rhomania
- Thread starter Basileus444
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Yeah, the tough part.
Honestly I think since despotates are mostly independent since Time of Troubles (BTW what would be Greek term for that?) the ship has already sailed for US style "federation but pretty much a unitary state" or some other form of unitary government. Since they are more or less independent for a long time I don't see why would they agree to something dominated by Constantinople (by which I mean something approaching control Washington has over US states).
Some sort of early EU / Imperial Federation is more likely, if imperial states have something to fear or see other states outpacing them. So a voluntary federation (more confederation honestly) with some coordinated military and foreign policy, which perhaps unifies more and more with the passage of time (like EU). Some NATO/EU hybrid.
That's why I was sad to see despotates go in Time of Troubles - I think there are much more mechanisms to keep realm united if it is a unified state during all that time.
Firstly, inertia and loyalty to the Emperor - if the same regime rules you for centuries (even if it's an exploitative rule) you will get some sort of inherent loyalty in population. Habsburg even at the end had a lot of people loyal to them just because they ruled so long, even though it was pretty obviously rule in favor of Germans/Hungarians. People can be inert and unwilling to disturb something that works for centuries.
Second, co-option of ruling classes. There is often a class loyal to a ruler that they don't share language/ethnicity with. Compare it with Baltic Germans (loyal to Tsar even while Russia was at war with Germany) or various "loyalist" families in Habsburg Empire. For example, part of my girlfriends family was a noble family in former Habsburg empire that produced an continuous line of Habsburg generals and marshals - they had a deep loyalty to the Empire and were unwilling to switch that to new states formed after WW1. All such classes of course knew the proper "ruling" language.
Other example can be the buy-in of Scots in the British Empire. I'm not that sure about that, but I've read on several places that many many administrative/ruling positions opened in British colonies had an effect of tying Scots into a wider state - since they had a piece in the pie it obviously made them more loyal to the pie owner. I've read a nice timeline where such thing was used to somewhat tie even Irish into the empire.
Of course, tying ruling/administrative class to you only works before mass democratization. But since that comes only in 20th century and there are indications that Rome will not be a traditional democracy, that is something that we can worry about when we come there. And even then despotates would have centuries of tradition being part of empire and would have a some layer of loyal administrative/higher class.
Too much pacifism from them, it wasn't through peace and diplomacy that saved Rome countless times. It was through sheer determination of the Romans that has kept the empire alive for a thousand years.
More than usually this was done through blood and steel. I agree the need for peace but this collective thought of being passive defence will never work out. They can't just rely totally on that.
Though I don't fully agree with the tourmarch faction, I see that it is necessary to have total control on the east of mediterranean to protect the core territory of the empire. Going west though, is another quagmire they shouldn't bash their head in. Better to go east and control that area.
More than usually this was done through blood and steel. I agree the need for peace but this collective thought of being passive defence will never work out. They can't just rely totally on that.
Though I don't fully agree with the tourmarch faction, I see that it is necessary to have total control on the east of mediterranean to protect the core territory of the empire. Going west though, is another quagmire they shouldn't bash their head in. Better to go east and control that area.
Maybe that’s how the purple will eventually position to appease both of extremes.
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Yeah, if this was an EU4 game I’d be all about going out and conquering. My last playthrough ended with a list of Roman provinces including Jamaica, Mogadishu, Samoa, and Osaka…
But this isn’t an EU4 game.
Interesting. Thanks for the information.
For OOC reasons though, I want ‘modern Rhomania’ to be one of the great powers, but one of the smaller ones demographically. This is for stylistic reasons; I find this concept much more interesting to write about when it comes to Roman foreign affairs. A too powerful Rhomania I find frankly boring to write about.
Well, at the end of the Time of Troubles the Empire’s reputation and abilities were completely shot. If Egypt and Sicily had decided to just up and walk, Constantinople would not have been in a position to stop them. So to keep them even nominally Roman, they had to be given lots of autonomy to convince them to stick around.
As for your other policies, I think they’d be much more useful and effective in Rhomania-in-the-East, since Despotates aren’t a thing there.
At the end of the day, realism trumps ‘more purple on the map’. And in many ways, trying to get ‘more purple’ involves brutality and coercion, which means I have one of two options. First, show that brutality and coercion, and goes where it leads. Second, pretend that it doesn’t exist. The first is unpleasant; the second is offensive.
(And I know I preach on this. But I feel that there are a lot of historical blind spots regarding brutality and coercion involved in building and maintaining empires, especially regarding certain empires such as the British and historical Roman Empires. And I find those blind spots deeply problematic.)
If the defensivists are pacifists, then Caesar Augustus was a pacifist when he established a ‘no more expansion’ policy after the Teutoberg forest. They’re denouncing the conquest of territories that they do not consider rightfully Roman, not the use of military force.
It would help if proposed conquests were more practical, feasible, and sustainable long-term. Most of the conquest proposals though make me think of early 17th century Spain, a state with considerable resources and capabilities, but which accumulated an even greater share of commitments, fronts, and enemies. It became ‘the target at which the whole world shoots its arrows’ to quote (not exact words, but faithful to the sentiment) a 17th century Spanish official. And so Spain exhausted itself and drove into the ground.
Frankly, I don’t think Rhomania needs more territory around the heartland, and I think that Roman efforts to get more security via more territory are counter-productive. Because those efforts would trigger responses by other powers that would endanger Roman security more than the gain from the buffer. (I’m pretty sure there’s a political science term for this, where a state does A, triggering a response from B that ends up undermining the reason A was done in the first place, but I can’t remember it.)
Mogadishu is absolutely essential, you need to control that East African trade!
Yeah, they were lucky to keep anything at that point. I hope you don't see these comments as a criticism of timeline or something, when I'm saying stuff like "I'm sad they didn't keep despotates" I'm only commenting as a sports fan - "if only they drafted/traded..." sort of way, not saying something is implausible.
I think it’s called the ‘security dilemma’ but that is going back to my IR days at uni.
I agree here! My favourite borders personally are the Basil II borders (with Sicily) with maybe the odd vassal chucked in. Makes a far more interesting narrative (as you have nailed down).
I wonder whether the Tourmarches will end up with a Napoleon figure whom will have immediate success until it all unwinds catastrophically. Historically Rome has had its fair share of hopeful Alexander’s resulting in despair for all involved.
I don't think my projection of a population of ~40-42 million breaks this? That puts the empire at about the level of OTL France in a world of multiple powers at this or much higher levels...
I'm partial to Sicily to the extend it is ethnically Greek, at least to a large degree but that's just me.
The thing that will in the end determine the power of the roman state in the ittl modern era is the economy..i mean if you look at turkey and france today while turkey has a larger population than france but no one will say that turkey is more powerful than france..
Mogadishu is absolutely essential, you need to control that East African trade!
Yeah, they were lucky to keep anything at that point. I hope you don't see these comments as a criticism of timeline or something, when I'm saying stuff like "I'm sad they didn't keep despotates" I'm only commenting as a sports fan - "if only they drafted/traded..." sort of way, not saying something is implausible.
Actually, I grabbed it because it’s part of the Gulf of Aden trade zone, and if you can feed the late-game India trade up through Aden-Alexandria-Constantinople that’s a lot of money.
Don’t worry; I wasn’t taking those comments as criticism.
That was a deliberate ‘what could have been’ moment on my part.
Sounds right. I remember reading about it in one of Azar Gat’s work but don’t feel like digging the reference out.
Agree on the borders. If I were to go for borders on purely aesthetic grounds, it’d be the 1025 Empire plus Sicily, all of Crimea, and Aleppo. If I were to rewrite this TL, the Romans wouldn’t get past northern Syria, and the Middle East would be divided into Rhomania (Anatolia and northern Syria), Mamelukes (southern Syria, Palestine, Egypt) and Ottomans (Iraq and Iran). The three constantly butt heads and have frequent border wars and temporary alliances, with 2 ganging up on 1 for a little while, before concerns about one player getting too powerful causing alliance shifts, so the wars are constant but never really change much on the ground. Rhomania is the strongest individually, but also has to watch its European frontier, so those two factors cancel out. Andreas Niketas gets famous by winning TTL version of Italian Wars (imagining him interacting with the Borgias and Caterina Sforza is fun) and conquering all of Italy, but the Romans end up losing everything north of the Neapolitan frontier afterwards.
But I wanted Romans putzing around in Indonesia.
That doesn’t. I got distracted by the concept of Rhomania having as many as Germany, which is definitely more than I want for aforementioned reasons.
It’s been mentioned before, but I’m picturing something like in TTL’s 1913 equivalent, Rhomania is what you’d get if you took 1913 Germany but with 1913 France’s manpower and material resource levels.
The Contexts of Roman Society, Part 14: A Diverse and Divided Empire
The Contexts of Roman Society, Part 14: A Diverse and Divided Empire
Rhomania on a political map is represented by a blob of purple, a mass of sameness that implies uniformity, but the Rhomania of 1650 was a diverse realm. It embraced many different land types and ecological zones, with the inhabitants mirroring that diversity. There were the rich and the poor, the rural and the urban, the settled and the nomadic, and even these broad labels contained multitudes within themselves.
This diversity could also breed division. By 1650 most inhabitants of the Roman heartland had at least a vague sense of shared Roman-ness, but this sense was secondary to local identities and issues. For most Romans, the concerns of the village and the Kephalate were of primary importance. The Emperor was far away; the neighbors were always there. Much of this was a function of the difficulty of travel, especially away from the sea. Now Romans did travel, for work, for pilgrimage, and for other reasons, but newspapers flowed more easily and more often than people. For many Romans, their impression of other Romans would be from paper, not from experiences in the flesh.
This was not unique to Rhomania. Roman administrators might look on the French with envy, as their populace was comparable in size but concentrated in a much smaller area. But then the Persians could do the same with Rhomania. Roman difficulties with broad territories spread out over rugged terrain, with pastoral conglomerations interspersed and rubbing with settled zones, were all present in Persia, and to a greater degree. The Romans at least had the Aegean Sea.
These divisions and frictions though are inevitable in practically any society of sufficient size; even modern states with transportation and communication technology unimaginable to their 17th-century ancestors see them.
But Rhomania in the mid-1600s was facing some more unique sources of division. There was growing pressure on the environment due to population increase and overexploitation of natural resources. Given that, by far, having access to one’s own land was the best means of support, this growing strain had a drastic effect on the health and lives of many Romans. The effects can be shown literally in the bones of the Romans who lived then; in a massive survey of Roman skeletal remains dating back as far as the late reign of Andreas Niketas himself, the Romans of the middle third of the 1600s were the shortest of all generations.
This was exacerbated by the growing commercialization of society. Peasants in debt to their neighbors could usually find a way to survive, and even make good their losses. The life of a peasant village was hard; cooperation was essential for survival. But a peasant in debt to a moneylender could expect no such relief. And their situation frequently was made worse by their location. In rural areas, often somewhat or seriously isolated, with very limited sources of credit, the available moneylender was almost certainly a loan shark, with the concept of just interest being a sad joke.
Those who lost their land, whether through partible inheritance practices paring down holdings into unviability, or through debt, made their ways to the cities. There they swelled the masses of destitute urban poor, with little opportunity or hope to better themselves. The Bothroi might become rich, but the cesspit drainers they employed certainly did not. But for many it would not be a problem for long. The press of poor populations, underfed and under-cleaned, with limited sanitation and rural immigrants underexposed to endemic diseases rife in urban environments, was a toxic disease cocktail.
And yet next to them were great townhouses and marketplaces. There were riches and prosperity in plenty, but while many shivered in cold tenements with precious little to no fuel for heating, a few could have heated lavatories where they relieved themselves into literally golden chamber pots. Many Romans, and not just those freezing, thought that there was something wrong with this system.
A surfeit of university graduates ensured that there was a constant and usually-critical conversation about the state of realm. They might be well-enough off to heat their homes at night and enjoy kaffos and monems down at the local kaffos oikos, but they too rumbled dissatisfaction. As with the land, so it was with offices and government positions: too many people and not enough availability. And in both causes, monopolization of large portions by small groups exacerbated an issue, although it should be noted that the monopolization did not create the issue, nor would its removal have completely resolved it.
Again, these issues were hardly unique to Rhomania. Environmental strain, distress caused by growing commercialization, and a surfeit of ‘angry learned young men’ were apparent all across the Mediterranean. The ‘angry learned young men’ phrase was coined by a Spanish minister in 1649, regarding issues in his own land.
Another issue lay in what might be called a crisis of identity, of wondering what Rhomania’s place in the world was. While people and nations cannot be psychoanalyzed as if they had one mind, generalized observations can be made provided one remembers there are always exceptions.
It has been said that Romans never truly feel secure or safe, and that even in the midst of great glory there is always an undercurrent of fear, even if only subconscious, but ever present. Romans though are not offended or surprised by such observations; to them it seems logical. Roman history shows that fate is fickle, the wheel constantly turns, and that the time and space between glory and ruin can be distressingly small. One who in their youth saw the splendor of Justinian could in their old age see the disasters of Phokas. The triumph of Herakleios over the Sassanids was followed by the humiliation of Herakleios under the Arabs. One who in their youth saw the might of Basil II could live to see the Turks conquer most of Anatolia. Their grandchildren could see the glory of Manuel I Komnenos, commanding Hungarians and Turks and Crusaders, and then in their old age see the Venetians storming over the sea walls of Constantinople. Andreas Niketas was followed by the Time of Trouble.
One Roman historian once said, “The problem with the Latins is that they have not much history and remember little of it. The problem with us is that we have a great deal of history, and remember most of it.”
Yet while it could be said that this undercurrent of fear is always there, never truly exorcised, for some scars never completely fade, this undercurrent’s strength is not static. It can and does wax and wane. And as many of the defensivists noted, this undercurrent seems to have been especially strong in the mid-1600s.
That can be largely explained by the strain of the War of the Roman Succession, following as it did the Great Uprising and the Eternal War. The German offensive had been defeated, but at great cost, and the westerners had displayed a degree of power that could certainly not be ignored. And it was clear to many Romans knowledgeable about the Latin west that it was growing more formidable and organized, which naturally made concerns about Roman security more acute.
There were two responses to this fear. One was a path of military aggression, to secure buffer zones and resources to bolster Roman defenses. The other sought a more diplomatic approach. This was not pacifistic; the defensivists would exert all their strength to defend Rhomania against assault if necessary. But the Latins, while many, were also diverse and divided. Rhomania needed to defend itself in a dangerous world, but that could be done by developing the resources, both material and moral, already possessed and cultivating key allies where possible.
This dispute might seem abstract, an intellectual disagreement, but the undercurrent of fear made that very much not the case. Both sides naturally felt that they were right, and the other was wrong. And in this case, the price for being wrong could be the doom of all. The question was existential, and error therefore could not be tolerated.
Even here, Rhomania was not quite unique. In Arles, there were debates about the future orientation of the state, whether to look to Spain or to look to France. But these debates were limited to a smaller subsection of the Arletian population and were never as vitriolic as its Roman counterparts.
These tensions of varying sources thus all predated the height of the Little Ice Age and were unconnected to it. The Little Ice Age did not create the General Crisis that would shudder much of the world. But it did take the many pre-existing tensions and sharply accelerate and exacerbate them.
But while some sort of crisis might have been inevitable, in as much anything can be historically inevitable, that does not remove the agency of people. How the Crisis in Rhomania began, the form it took, the way it played out, and the nature of the repercussions were all determined by Romans, by their fears and hopes, hatreds and loves, cruelties and kindnesses, and stupidities and wisdoms. The circumstances in which they do so is seldom of their choice, but in the end, it is people that make history.
I see a lot of OTL Russians here, with the West characterizing them as The Other, a part of Europe but also Asian, standard bearers of a different type of Christianity, and the Romans/Russians walking around with their scars and bearing the slings and arrows of numerous wars and invasions.
Excellent series - assuming it is done, this felt like a coda.
Excellent series - assuming it is done, this felt like a coda.
When you put it this way, Roman society must have gone through generations of whiplash. I guess right now they're going through a (superficial) high with Odysseus's campaigns still in fresh memory - I'm guessing once Athena is out of the way and Herakleios III is ruling in his own right we'll see the military faction get out of control and knock the Roman's down a peg.
Same here. It's a level of detail and love for the story unseen even in this site, one that does have dozens of really good ATLs.
Really appreciated these past updates, and I wouldn't mind myself a few more, even though I understand folks who want the story to go forward, I feel it has been a really necessary "interlude".
And, frankly, while it could have been more "realistic" to have a Empire with 1025 borders ish, I really liked the feeling of a epic that Andreas Niketas gave. It is one of my favorite fiction characters, and I do not say this lightly. Sometimes there are those oversized man and women in history who thrive in doing the impossible, like Alexandros, Bonaparte ... and Andreas Niketas, for his legend is a necessary part of the Roman Ethos nowadays, even if his deeds are now in the ATL history books.
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As far as the long term prospects of the Empire go, when we reach modernity, I can very much see a niche for them within what I presume to be a Russian lead international order. Without the backwards policies like serfdom and autocratic political traditions holding back education and industrialization, TTL Russia is poised to live up to the hype of MacKinder's Heartland Theory, but they'll have to overcome the classic Russian obstacle of a lack of warm water ports and access to open waters.
Rhomania's geography makes them literally indispensable to address that shortcoming, and won't look weak enough for the prospect of Russia seizing the straits themselves to be on the table (and if you're a constructionist the shared religious heritage and lack of a history of hostile relations probably helps). With control over the straits and the Suez Canal, a Moscow-Constantinople axis has the potential be a modern day superpower (Better yet, make it Moscow-Constantinople-Kyoto and that's looking like a US level hegemon). Rhomania is decidedly #2 in that bloc (maybe #3), but it's way more indispensable to the hegemon than the UK was to the US in post WW2 foreign policy.
Rhomania's geography makes them literally indispensable to address that shortcoming, and won't look weak enough for the prospect of Russia seizing the straits themselves to be on the table (and if you're a constructionist the shared religious heritage and lack of a history of hostile relations probably helps). With control over the straits and the Suez Canal, a Moscow-Constantinople axis has the potential be a modern day superpower (Better yet, make it Moscow-Constantinople-Kyoto and that's looking like a US level hegemon). Rhomania is decidedly #2 in that bloc (maybe #3), but it's way more indispensable to the hegemon than the UK was to the US in post WW2 foreign policy.
Not entirely, the Bosphorus is open to the Russian merchant traffic. The Black Sea theater is entirely safe for the Russians.