Proposed 9th Century Scenario

[John Fredrick Parker]

So I'd been thinking about a few 9th Century scenarios, and have been talking about them in various threads -- only, in the back of my mind, I generally saw them as being part of the same ATL. So I figured it was worth looking into how, if at all, these might play off each other:

• PoD #1 -- Judith of Bavaria fails to produce another son for Louis the Pious -- we can say OTL-Charles-the-Bald is born a girl TTL, and any subsequent efforts at a son fail. This means that the Carolingian Empire remains united for longer, which has all kinds of fun implications.
• PoD #2 -- Caliph Al-Ma'mun doesn't die in 833, and lives a few years longer. This has two major implications -- one, he would eventually get around to attacking the "Roman" Empire in Anatolia, which means the Byzantines have a far harder 9th Century than they did OTL; and possibly more notably, it means the series of events that lead to the Decline of the Abbasid Caliphate and the Fall of Mutazilism as a major theological and philosophical school in Islam is completely changed.
• PoD #3 -- Less solid idea here -- either the Huichang Persecutions don't happen, or they're changed such that the Nestorian Church in China doesn't go into decline. Either way, the subsequent history of the Tang Dynasty and China generally is altered.
• PoD #4 -- This one might be the trickiest, since it's so long after the rest; but, to the extent that Viking attacks on the British Islands during the 9th Century are still an issue (and I don't see any reason they wouldn't be), TTL could still very well have some equivalent to the Great Heathen Army invading as well. If that is the case, TTL would differ in that the Kingdom of Wessex falls to the Norse as well as the other Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms.

So to the extent that discussions on these scenarios so far are more or less on the right track, how might they interact with one another? How would a more unified "Latin Christendom" interact with a stronger Caliphate, as the Byzantine Empire between them continues to decline? How would interactions across Central Asia between China and these powers be affected? How might "world history" as a whole develop from there?

Thanks.

 

[Evil Crusader]

One is the reductionist approach, where things tend to conflate back to OTL trends within reason (the United Kingdom is more or less the same except it emerges possibly earlier out of a shared Norse, and not Anglo-Saxon, identity; the trajectories of the HRE and Hispania are roughly the same just shifted a bit around in time, except the HRE includes Francia and doesn't have the pre-Ottonian interlude; there eventually is a split between Rhomania and Persia that leads to a split that ends up mirroring the ancient Byzantine/Sasanid and much later Ottoman/Safavid ones).
The other is the divergent approach, where stuff escalates into different trends from OTL which tends to yield all sorts of wonky maps. From there, you have a few possible choices: authorial (somebody makes a TL focusing on one area, which receives most of the 'new content', making change easier to grok out and working as the lynchpin other trends more or less realistically react to), collective guess (you keep doing threads like those four ones and linking them together, until we get the JFP AHU as a note of respect for you that have sparked all the discussion people contribute to), generic (we acknowledge there's many roughly similarly likely trends this could move forwards, such as a more insular Christianity that never has a split and cements even further on a caesaropapist model or an eventual west/east Islam split, but in the end no coherent vision gets extracted, just interesting rumination on the whole situation).
By the way, the Nestorian POD is arguably the weakest of the four. The Vikings can pretty much work outside the system as long as nobody has vested interests in Britannia, but the Nestorians have a very long road between 'survival in China' and 'impact beyond the cosmetic or popcultural in China'.

 

[Starkforlufe]

Personally I would prefer PoD #3 it's rare and interesting.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

generic (we acknowledge there's many roughly similarly likely trends this could move forwards, such as a more insular Christianity that never has a split and cements even further on a caesaropapist model or an eventual west/east Islam split, but in the end no coherent vision gets extracted, just interesting rumination on the whole situation)

Actually, the bolded part is a pretty good start to the conversation as is.

 

[Evil Crusader]

Actually, the bolded part is a pretty good start to the conversation as is.

My point is, with the fall of Byzantium there almost literally only is one Christian Kingdom (plus Asturias and the Irish Clans), so the Church would be even closer to the Frankish monarchs out of necessity.
As for Islam, the more it succeeds, the faster it splits, and the conquered Rhomania likely houses one half in some form or shape.