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Old 03-26-2014, 06:13 AM   #36
Astromancer
 
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
Default Re: New Reality Seeds

Enrico Dandolo would be an interesting person to work a reality seed around (yes I'm reading a history of Venice. Why do you ask?) The sacking of Byzantium in 1205 is largely his doing. Everyone else would have let the Emperor pay them off, Dandolo wanted revenge!

Preventing the sack of Byzantium would have vast knockon effects. First, most scholars say, that of the 90% of Greco-roman classical literature, knowledge, history, ect., lost between the fall of Rome and the invention of the Printing Press, two-thirds was lost in the sack of Byzantium. Given some of the recent discoveries about what the Greeks knew, this means that if the sack is prevented, the world after the invention of the printing press changes vastly. If nothing more than the recently rediscovered text by Archimedes, which seems to have him inventing calculus, were brough to light in the 1400's, the TL might advance a few decades earlier. Try the idea of a TL5 Elizabethan England, or a TL8 Victorian England?

Secondly, an unsacked Byzantium would be able to resist the Turks for a somewhat longer time, maybe a generation or two. This would radically rework the history Eastern Europe.
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Last edited by Astromancer; 03-27-2014 at 05:59 AM.
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