Ellis MacVey
Donor
Okay, so, so far this map doesn't have a timeline attached to it, but I'm working to fix that. It's called "Orthodox Germany" because the original idea of the TL was "what if Germany was Orthodox". After that, I just sort of ran with it and made a map. Sorry for the border gore, especially in the Middle East.
This map doesn't show the state religions of the nations (some of them don't have a state religion), only the religion the majority of the population follows.
The Religions:
- The Orthodox Church - Pretty much the same, but it's much larger, has an additional religious capital in Berlin, and its relations with the Catholic Church are more... interesting.
- The Catholic Church - Pretty much the same as OTL, but with a smaller influence.
- The Celtic Church - TTL, for whatever reason, never unified with the Catholic Church, but is on relatively good terms with them. Its ecclesiastical capital is Armagh, Ireland, and its "sacred languages" are are Church Gaelic (a language similar to an extremely archaic dialect of Irish Gaelic) in Ireland and Scotland and Common Brittonic in England (the only nation with a Celtic Christian majority that doesn't speak a Celtic language), Wales, and Brittany. In TTL, England was never conquered by the Normans, and English culture was even more heavily influenced by the Brittonic Celts, so the English language's Latin and French influences are replaced with Brittonic and a few Gaelic Celtic influences. It is worth noting that it was never called "the Celtic Church" until the late 18th Century, when Celtic Nationalism and Pan-Celtism first started to emerge. It's also worth noting that Ireland, the United Kingdom (sorry for the uncreative name) and Brittany are three separate countries.
- The Dutch Reform Church - Quite honestly, I did not know whether to make the Netherlands Catholic, Orthodox, or perhaps even Celtic, so I decided to instead make them TTL's much more laid-back equivalent of the Anglican Church. I don't know much about it except that it's not much like Calvinism at all and only sort of resembles Protestantism (and it's kind of laid back). Yes, I am aware that the Netherlands would probably be utterly be crushed by either whichever German state was the most powerful or France if it separated from the Catholic or Orthodox Church, but it was a bit of fun.
- Islam (both of them) - Since I don't know which regions follow which varieties of Islam, and this was mostly a map of Christian denominations anyways, I figured I'd just combine them to save myself some headaches. In this timeline, it stayed in Iberia (except Portugal for some reason), but has much less influence in the Balkans and everywhere west of Iran (I also don't know why).
- Ásatrú - To be honest this was just a bit of fun, and I don't know why Norse Paganism survived in Iceland. In this timeline, Ásatrú is now a lot more of an Axial Age-ized religion, though it's still polytheistic and retains a lot of Norse Cultural Traditions. It has some rather large minorities still following it in Norway and Denmark, and some smaller but growing communities in Sweden and Finland.
- Zoroastrianism - In this timeline it remained the majority religion in Persia and Azerbaijan. I have no idea how far it's spread.
- Tengrism - Mongol Paganism basically. I figured that, since Islam had been much less successful spreading east, TTL's much smaller equivalent to Kazakhstan would be majority-Tengrist. Also, I apologize for accidentally labeling it "Tengism" on the map key.
- In General - Since, for whatever reason, Protestant-esque movements in the various religions are much rarer, technological and cultural advancements happen at a somewhat slower rates, but religions often go through phases where they have to liberalize to compete, a sort of "internal" protestant reformation, if you will. This was just so I wouldn't have to come up with an Orthodox equivalent of Protestantism. Sorry for being lazy. The world is currently at about early 1980s-level technology.
Last edited:
