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Old 03-21-2014, 06:43 PM   #31
patchwork
 
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Default Re: New Reality Seeds

On Chambord: rather than do a complete brain transplant on Henri late in life, surely it's a bit more realistic to give him a wife and young son? when 1870 rolls around, the Third Republic ignores the crotchety old fossil and offers the throne to the young prince (most likely named Charles). This is a quibble, and the overall idea is good.

On Kara Mustafa: conquest of Vienna does not get you Italy, nor does it make the rest of the HRE collapse in dysfunction. A lot of promise here, but also a lot of work still needing to be done.
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Old 03-22-2014, 01:42 PM   #32
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On Chambord: rather than do a complete brain transplant on Henri late in life, surely it's a bit more realistic to give him a wife and young son? when 1870 rolls around, the Third Republic ignores the crotchety old fossil and offers the throne to the young prince (most likely named Charles). This is a quibble, and the overall idea is good.
Good point. A charismatic (or said to be so) young prince would have been very attractive in many quarters of 1870's France.

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On Kara Mustafa: conquest of Vienna does not get you Italy, nor does it make the rest of the HRE collapse in dysfunction. A lot of promise here, but also a lot of work still needing to be done.
Agreed, but the Ottoman state was very powerful in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Civil strife completely absorbed all that power, with a successful prince an Ottoman "Indian Summer" would be possible.
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Old 03-22-2014, 01:58 PM   #33
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In the 1890's Germany successfully gets Great Britain to agree to an Anglo-Germman defence pact (as a means of controlling and counter-balancing Russian expansionism).
A vital element of this would be limiting the Imperial German Navy so that it could not threaten the dominance of the Royal Navy. The easy way to do that is to let Wilhelm II play with the RN enough that he doesn't feel the need for one of his own.
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Old 03-22-2014, 02:05 PM   #34
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A vital element of this would be limiting the Imperial German Navy so that it could not threaten the dominance of the Royal Navy. The easy way to do that is to let Wilhelm II play with the RN enough that he doesn't feel the need for one of his own.
That's one way. I'm certain other folks will have different ideas.
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Old 03-22-2014, 02:07 PM   #35
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Robert Guiscard offers and interesting possiblity. Let the man live to be seventy-five or eighty.

More later time's up.

Guiscard nearly united the thrones of Byzantium and Sicily. Only his sudden death from illness stoped him. Unifying those thrones and perhaps the Holy Roman crown of the Western Empire as well (he nearly got both crowns), Guiscadr could have created a neo-Roman empire. The possibilities for adventure run so many directions from there.
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Old 03-26-2014, 07:13 AM   #36
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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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Old 03-26-2014, 09:29 AM   #37
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Robert Guiscard offers and interesting possiblity. Let the man live to be seventy-five or eighty.

More later time's up.

Guiscard nearly united the thrones of Byzantium and Sicily. Only his sudden death from illness stoped him. Unifying those thrones and perhaps the Holy Roman crown of the Western Empire as well (he nearly got both crowns), Guiscadr could have created a neo-Roman empire. The possibilities for adventure run so many directions from there.
To say he almost 'united' Sicily with anything is to understate. The man built the kingdom of the two Sicilys from scratch.

I don't know that he could have ruled the byzantines though. He lived during the point of no return in the east-west schism and was a hated enemy of the Byzantines. The Byzantines are famous for their court intrigue, and no line of rulers stretches more than four generations. his son Bohemond's presence on the crusades is credited for the byzantine non-involvement by some authors (though that may have been Bohemond's status as former aspirant to the crown).

He may have been able to end the east-west schism by absolute conquest though. THAT would have a massive ripple effect, though I don't think the early death of Byzantium would have helped Europe in the long run at all. A strong and major state in Italy and Greece might though.
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Old 03-26-2014, 12:58 PM   #38
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One that I used on AlternateHistory.com (in the form of a Double-Blind What-If, meaning the participants pretend to be characters in the universe created by the divergence) was that the Tunguska meteor hit Paris, instead of Tunguska, and the knock-on effects of that, such as the formation of an International Asteroid Tracking Service, an early craze for 'scientifiction', and a retreat from Metropolitan France to the colonies.
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Old 03-27-2014, 07:05 AM   #39
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For a festival of cool reality seeds read the book I'm reading. It's The History of Venice by John Julius Norwich. It's a great read and it's full of possiblities.
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Old 03-31-2014, 07:09 AM   #40
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To say he almost 'united' Sicily with anything is to understate. The man built the kingdom of the two Sicilys from scratch.
Giving a guy like that ten more years and a semi-competent heir is a sure way to radically change history.
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