I think you mislabeled one of these factions, they're both going for the Tourmarches.
Thanks for catching this; it’s fixed now. The Anatolikon and Syria are for Sophia.
Is there any precedent in history for a wife to lead a rebellion against her husband like this? If not then that might itself lend credence to the claims of incapacity.
Eleanor of Aquitaine? And there's Catherine the Great who deposed her husband to rule an empire she had no claim to whatever. Of course the latter hasn't happened TTL yet (I'll be very disappointed if no analogue of Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst turns up).
Catherine the Great got started like this. Her husband was an imbecile who actively sabotaged Russia because he was a fan of Frederick the Great of Prussia, so she led a palace coup against him and took over.
There’s also the example of Isabella ‘the She-Wolf of France’, rebelling against her husband Edward II. He’s a good example of the problem with monarchial favorites, when the monarch has bad taste in favorites.
It was a sad remark. Tragedy can only follow in its wake.
A parliamentary system along the lines of British government seems hard to establish in Rhomania, especially in the short term. It took centuries of conflict and concessions between the nobility and the king to the point where it is today where the monarch is functionally a figurehead. Considering the central position the Emperor is placed in Roman society compared to Britain, I'm not sure if anyone is willing to take away any portion of the Emperor's absolute power for the sake of political stability.
While I've always imagined the modern Roman government to resemble Prussia or the German Empire in some way, where the monarch retains a measure of political power while there remains a strong legislative, judicial, and executive body, that might not be satisfactory for the Romans, given their large distrust of plutocrats (especially under Konon's eyes) and of democracy/republics. Even if the Senate is elevated in the aftermath of the Tourmarches, it should always be subservient to the Emperor.
What's funny is that Konon's idea of a non-hereditary monarchy could be the way to go, where the position is elected based on merit (perhaps among the Senate, but still maintains near absolute power). In a way, we would be going full circle, as the Roman Kingdom millennia ago
elected kings from the Senate. It would be absolutely hilarious to see this kind of system be realized in Rhomania, but how that would work for the modern day is going to require a lot of thought to make that government function.
I suppose this civil war is going to hinge on the existing Roman army's success against the Ottomans, which is honestly quite grim. I'm sure the Ottomans will want an alliance with the Loyalists if they are able to reach Sophia, but we will see if that materializes.
At this stage I’m not consciously planning that TTL Rhomania will end up looking like [insert OTL example] here. Earlier in the TL I was thinking the Second Reich might be an exemplar, but now I’m much less sure. I have some concepts for how I want the future modern Roman government to work, but the devil is in the details which I haven’t worked out yet. There will likely be a significant portion of ‘making it up as I go along’, but I tell myself that since that is how history is made IOTL, that makes the TL more realistic.
I’m going to address the geopolitical items topically given the number of people involved at this point.
Terranova (New World): If one looked at a map of the OTL Americas in 1660, the idea that the thin English strip on the east coast would dominate the area would seem absurd, when compared to the mass of Spanish possessions. Current political configurations are not guaranteed to stay intact (see early Latin American independence).
Mexico also has some special issues. It is extremely lightly populated for its size; at one point I said that its north Terranovan holdings have a population of 2 million. (IOTL Mexico had about 1 million inhabitants at this time.) Also, it has a stupidly high amount of silver, so the trend is to just use said piles of silver to buy whatever they need rather than go to the effort of building up local industries (whose initial wares would be worse than whatever they can buy from more established places).
Even if uber-Brazil became a great power, it’s far enough that it wouldn’t cramp the development of alt-US. Each can dominate their own continent and become big players before they would start running into each other. And I would note that I have absolutely no plans for alt-US to reach a relative level of superiority over all other powers that it achieved post-1945, much less post-1991. My plan is for a multi-polar world with many great powers, but with noticeable variations among the great powers.
Africa: Outside of the Carthage enclave, I don’t remember what I’ve said about various other European holdings in Northwest Africa. Considering the course of events in the area (longer Al-Andalus, greater political cohesion), I bet there aren’t any existing now, although there may have been some interludes here or there.
The Marinids did some expansion south of the Sahara, the TTL equivalent of the Moroccan expedition that broke Songhai. But trying to control an area with that ocean of sand in the middle is difficult, to put it mildly. As for Ethiopia, they’ve taken Aden and control the Straits, so there’s no reason to push into the interior of Yemen unless one likes being harassed by the Yemeni.
The blue in west-central Africa is the Kingdom of Kongo, which went Coptic ITTL rather than Catholic. It is holding together much better than its OTL version during this time period, which is what is keeping European colonization at bay. (And I would note that the Portuguese colonization in Angola was a hard-fought and bloody business.)
Rhomania-in-the-East: I agree that the Romans have handicaps here compared to the likes of the Triunes, Spanish, and Lotharingians. To use a relatively-recently-coined expression I’ve used a little, the key here is turning Rhomania-in-the-East into Rhomania-of-the-East. Building up local bases of support from people who feel genuinely like fellow Romans, as opposed to colonial subjects, is key. At this point ITTL, this is very much a work in progress.
This, I consider a key difference between the classical Roman Empire and the modern European colonial empires. Provincials of the former could actually become and be accepted as fellow Romans provided they adopted the proper cultural models. Whereas with the latter, the Europeans would make the claim but in reality the response was ‘that’s cute, but you’re still a [insert racial expletive]. I’d put TTL current Rhomania as somewhere in between, but closer to the classical model. The proper cultural model is more exclusionary because it has a key religious component-Orthodoxy-but there aren’t any racial connotations.
Russia in the Far East and Alaska: An obvious way to boost the Russian Far East is for the Russians to get control of the Amur valley, which is a lot easier when the Manchus aren’t also the lords of China. The resulting ‘Russian East’ would be politically Russian but mostly Manchu ethnically. Principalities of Manchuria and Alaska joining the Federal Empire?
I really like the idea of an enduring Russian Alaska, but this Alaska could be comparable to OTL Alaska. If the Russians control the Amur, they’d have an easier time supporting Alaska, but power projection issues still exist, which would limit the possibilities of expansion. (For added weirdness, the Russians could get Kauai as they tried to do IOTL to provide food for Alaska.) Even this buffed-Russia would have a really hard time defending a Russian Oregon from a Mexico or US, but would have the resources to keep holding on to Alaska, especially once gold and oil are discovered.
Ottoman naval power (OTL): I’d argue quite strongly that the Ottomans were a major naval power, at least through the 1500s. Lepanto says hi. After that, it gets a lot more questionable. But for the Ottomans, they were powerful but had a lot on their plate. They were fighting the Habsburgs and Poland to their north and northwest and Safavid Persia in the east, and maintaining a major Mediterranean fleet. The Indian Ocean simply had to take a back seat to these, since a failure on the Indian Ocean is annoying, while failure on the other fronts was potentially existential. (I recommend
The Ottoman Age of Exploration for people who want to learn more Ottoman activities, because there was some, in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.)
I’d also argue that the reason the Romans are able to put more effort into the Indian Ocean and have more success is that, for all their persecution complex, the pressure on them compared to the OTL Ottomans is less. Though there is a lot of fighting with the Latins, it isn’t an absolute constant wave like OTL, where truce and treaties only meant the main armies would stand down while local border forces would keep at it. The Ottomans and Byzantines are rivals who have fought a lot, especially since the start of the 1600s, but there isn’t a ‘you’re a vile heretic’ element that existed between Sunni Ottomans and Shi’a Safavid Persia. If the Romans were fighting as much as the OTL Ottomans were around their metropole frontiers, they wouldn’t have the resources to do much in the Indian Ocean.
Roman-Russian relations and the Orthodox Sphere: With Roman-Russian relations, I feel that I could go in any particular direction and it would be justified. Crimea I don’t see as an automatic deal-breaker, since the situation is completely different from OTL. TTL Kaffa isn’t a slave market that in one year ‘processes’ at least 17,500 slaves (and where do you think those slaves came from?).
If the Russians, for whatever reasons, started looking south, then Roman-Russian relations would break down pretty quickly. But if the Russians prefer to focus on central Asia, or eastern Europe, or the Far East instead, there’s no reason to clash with the Romans. (IOTL the Russians couldn’t, even if they wanted to, ignore the Ottomans and the Crimean Khanate because of the aforementioned slaving.)
Ideology has been mentioned, and also Vlachia (which will be very important later in the century). There is also the matter of how gracefully the Roman leadership can accept that Russia is now the bigger one in the relationship. So there are issues and I don’t wish to minimize them, but I think they can be charted without necessarily exploding.
Roman-Russian relations will fluctuate from time to time, but I don’t think war is guaranteed. They are two great powers that border each other, but really not much. There’s the Roman enclave of Azov (and frankly, I think that does need to go to avoid this issue) and the short land frontier of the Crimea with the mainland.
Probably the greatest fault line in the Orthodox zone would be a Russia expanding in the Far East running into Japan. A powerful expansionist Russia that controls Korea is a clear threat to Japan, even if both countries are Orthodox. And then where does Rhomania go? (This won’t be an issue for at least another century, but it is there.)
‘Evil’ democracy:
so just this timelines USA lol
[Important Note: Everything I am about to say about far-future events ITTL is provisional and I receive the right to change any and all of it. Until it appears in a proper update, it’s not official.]
I don’t know if these comments are serious, but I like the idea of the US being the ‘evil’ democracy. I want a US that in many ways is actually quite similar to OTL (not identical, but similar), but the story of the US is told from an outside perspective that has absolutely no reason to buy into the self-serving and self-righteous exceptionalism that OTL Americans far too often present (and which personally annoys me, and I am American).
Yes, this US likes to present itself as a champion of democracy but is convinced of its moral superiority and highly racist and militaristic, with its foreign adventures typically designed to serve the interests of corporations like [United Fruit], with human rights and democracy being deployed as a cynical screen. And there’s no Nazi Germany or Stalinist USSR or Maoist China around. Sure, other powers do similar things (because such behavior is hardly unique to one people or nation) but there is no clear unquestionably ‘worse guy’.
Since I’ve been reading a lot about the US in the late 40s and 50s, this is one idea I had. (Again, note the disclaimer.) Imagine a US that where the Progressive Era is seriously neutered, with the Gilded Age continuing strongly. To distract lower-class Terranovans, the elite use racism and imperialism to give those lower-class Terranovans someone to punch down on. But those Romans meanwhile have this ‘controlled capitalism’ with their maximum profit margins and maximum interest rates, and that is just an affront to property rights. Those purples (purps for short) clearly are a menace that must be dealt with… (Again, this is amused speculation on my part, and as far as I’ve gotten with the concept.)
