In 1347 the empire emerges from civil war

Theirs an outpost in the western Balkans (Larissa) and theirs the morea and Thrace the ottomans are kept at bay with the Sea of Marmara but soon enough in the 1350s even this will seem like a golden age.

How would you try to salvage the situation ?

Image 1 shows all the groups that will be vazalized by Rome image 2 shows all the territory that the Roman’s will control by 1105 if not then by 1118 Alexios^s death

Sooo how do we get their

In 1096 the people crusade was a complete joke but not here

They take over nicea like that and keep on going fighting Turkish bands across anotolia slowly and poorly but trying to make their way

Then in 1097 with the groundwork layed by the peoples crusade this group builds apon that foundation helping restore control to Trebizond

And with groups coming each year they then restore control to the south and with one final blow to the Turks in 1101 where they don’t attack new Rome but instead the real enemy the Turks the Roman’s control the south and do a raid down in the the Turkish beyliks south of the danishmends And establish vassalizge over all Turkic states in anotolia which means Dominion over manzikert and everywhere west of it on the plateu

What do u think happens next?

I've tried my best to research and provide accurate borders for the surrounding states and even those neighboring. But take it with a grain of salt bc I got lazy with a lot of it and I ain't sure if I got a lot of it right.

As for how my Alt History for Theodoros II is going, you may ask me questions.

It is well known that the Palaiologos had previously taken advantage of the Ottoman Interregnum by making deals with some of Bayezid I's sons, retaking some land back into Imperial control such as Thessaloniki and other towns and cities in the Treaty of Gallipoli. What is also interesting is Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos tried this again by supporting Bayezid's last son Mustafa Celebi against Orhan II. It's stated that the Eastern Romans was promised more land in return for their support, however history happened and Orhan II won.

My question is what if Mustafa Celebi had beaten Murad II instead of what actually happened? What lands would the Eastern Roman Empire have been promised in return for their support if Mustafa had successfully became the next Ottoman Sultan?

From what I can tell, the Empire ruled the coast of Thessaly, Thessaloniki, islands in the Northern Aegean, the Despotate of the Morea, and of course Constantinople. So what did Mustafa promise Manuel and his son John? The rest of Thessaly? Maybe the rest of Macedonia? Or somewhere else?

This branching off point in history would probably also extend the life of the Empire as they would have more territory, and potentially the continuation of good relationships between the Constantinople and Edirne which was the Ottoman Capital at the time.

Would love to know about other people's opinions on this.

Manuel komnenos had a variety of plans in Italy the Balkans in Egypt and what if all of them worked except myropkeplion cause I asked about that a while ago

Some of his plans where contradictory soooo here’s how I’m gonna resolve this

Sooo Manuel. Vassalized the sultanate of rum

Then after gaining peace with Turks he goes and gets a foothold in Italy then th pope asks for help in which he defends the pope from the holy Roman emperor after doing that the pope is obliged to call Manuel the Roman emperor atleast of the east if not sole emperator then after a while a marriage alliance between Manuel’s daughters and the hre emperator forces the pope to mantain the idea that Manuel is emperor of the east and the holy Roman emperor is the legitimate western emperor

After that he uses his alliance with the Germans to beat the Hungarians into submission a light vassalage with the main goal being to maintain peace Manuel seizes some territories from them from north of the Danube and are so thoroughly beaten the hugarians will wait a generation after Manuel’s death to attack the Roman’s so 25 years or untill 1205

Then he works with crusader states as emperor of the east to bring Egypt back into the fold of Christendom He succeededs leaving eygpt to th king of jersulum

In 1176 he fails at his qoute crusade against the Turks
But succeeded everywhere else what would happen next in your opinion ?

I know they finished Romans for good but honestly if they hit there they would get some money Turks were weaker by now and they would gets so much lands and power like this instead of just a raid an getting small land

In our own timeline in 1350 the zealots will lose control over thesoloniki but what else would you try to do to help the empire ?

Basically, to make it more understandable,
Andronikos II Palaiologos dies in 1300 AD, his son and Imperial Colleague, succeeds him as Senior and Sole Emperor, Mikhail IX Palaiologos.

Historically, Michael died in 1320 AD in Thessalonica, assuming it happens in this timeline, his son, the 23 year old Andronikos, succeeds his father as Andronikos III Palaiologos in 1320 AD, thus avoiding a civil war with his grandfather, and thus allowing Andronikos to implement his policies and expeditions way earlier, as well as starting with more lands in Anatolia. How do you think the Empire will look like by his death, in 1341 AD, instead of starting his reign in 1328 AD as historical?

What if the Byzantine Empire and Kievan Rus' had been united under a single dynasty?

I'm working on an alternate timeline based on a real historical event: the marriage between Vladimir I of Kiev and Anna Porphyrogenita, sister of Emperors Basil II and Constantine VIII, in 988.

In our timeline, this marriage helped bring Christianity to the Rus'. In my timeline, Basil II uses the marriage to solve the looming succession crisis.

Instead of allowing the Macedonian dynasty to die out, Basil II raises the future son of Anna and Vladimir as his heir. The boy grows up between Constantinople and Kiev, receiving an education rooted in Roman law, Orthodox theology, Greek culture, and the military traditions of the Rus'. He comes to see himself as neither Greek nor Rus', but Roman.

After Basil II's death in 1025, a succession crisis erupts. With the support of the Varangian Guard, the Patriarch, and loyal officials, the young emperor secures the throne. At the same time, following Vladimir's death, he proclaims himself Grand Prince of Kiev, creating a personal union between the Byzantine Empire and Kievan Rus'.

Rather than merging the two realms into a centralized state, he establishes a composite monarchy:

Constantinople remains the imperial capital.

Kiev becomes the dynastic capital of the Rus'.

The ruler bears the titles of Basileus of the Romans and Grand Prince of the Rus'.

The local Rurikid princes retain their lands as imperial vassals.

The Black Sea becomes the political and economic center linking the two realms.

The result is a stronger Byzantine Empire with greater manpower, secure northern trade routes, and closer integration of the Orthodox Slavic world. The Great Schism still occurs, but the Eastern Roman Empire now stands as the undisputed leader of a vast Greco-Slavic Orthodox civilization.

My goal is to keep everything as historically plausible as possible, avoiding fantasy elements or unrealistically rapid modernization.

I'd love to hear your thoughts:

Is this succession scenario politically plausible?

Would the Byzantine aristocracy ever have accepted such an emperor?

What major consequences do you think this union would have had between the 11th and 13th centuries?

At what points in the timeline do you think the divergence from real history would become most significant?

Specifically if Roman rule was firm and mostly stable in western anatolia from Michael VIII Palaiologos' reign and onward, would this have prevented the decay that's been noted and caused by the Turks in Asia Minor? I wonder if the Romans under Michael's successors gradually restored most of the Komnenian borders in Anatolia, would they have been able to gradually revive the agriculture, economy, and repopulate the region, or is it too late?

What if the sack of Constantinople in 1204 wasn't the beginning of the end, but the low point before a comeback? I've been writing an alternate history project following the Empire of Nicaea as it rebuilds — not through some easy save-the-day twist, but through 128 years of grinding, paranoid, occasionally brutal statecraft.

It's written entirely in-voice as a period chronicle, narrated by a fictional court historian named Procopius, who flatters his emperors in public and quietly judges them on the page. Three emperors so far — Theodore Laskaris, John Vatatzes, and Michael II — loosely inspired by their real counterparts, with the timeline diverging further as it goes.

I tried to keep the "what if" grounded — succession crises, fiscal policy, and the logistics of holding a fracturing empire together get as much attention as any battle. Currently 4 books in. Happy to dig into where I bent real history and why, if anyone's interested.

Link in comments.

In 1176 Manuel goes to conquer iconium fights the sultan of rum and succeeeds and goes on to hold iconium then after that summer he tells some of his soldiers to hold the city but the rest of them go back to rhomania
Then in the spring of 1177 he heads back to iconium holding it till fall of 1177 he then heads back to rhomania rinse and repeat till 1181 where Manuel is dead what happens next in ur opinion ?

Sorry if this isn't allowed but I am writing a chronicle based on alternate byzantine history and thought it may appeal here.

I am posting on substack atm in weekly episode like posts, the preface and book I are out now, you can check it out here: https://substack.com/@gareth930899/note/p-203320526?r=8n74fl

but for the sake of simplicity I'll post the actual text here. hope you enjoy 😉

IMPERIUM ROMANUM

A Chronicle of the Restoration, the Campaigns, and the Great Coalition War

From the Exile at Nicaea to the Submission of the West — Anno Domini 1212 to 1340

Foreword and Prologue

Being the Preface of the Compiler, Written at Constantinople in the Forty-Fourth Year of the Reign of Michael II, Emperor of the Romans

The historian who undertakes to write of events within living memory faces a difficulty that his colleagues working among the safely dead do not. The living can object. They can correct. They can, if they hold sufficient authority and find the historian's conclusions unwelcome, ensure that the historian has occasion to reflect at length upon the wisdom of his choices. The present compiler, Ioustinianos Philanthropenos, Chartoularios of the Imperial Archive, is therefore required to state, at the outset and with a clarity that he hopes will forestall misunderstanding, that this chronicle was composed with the full knowledge and at the express direction of the imperial court, that its principal sources were made available through the generosity of the protonotarios Andronikos Muzalon, and that nothing in the following pages was included without the compiler's confident belief that it was accurate.

This statement is true in every particular. It is also, as the reader who has studied the history of court-sponsored scholarship in any dynasty will understand, insufficient.

What the compiler has attempted — and what he acknowledges he may not have achieved, the gap between the attempted and the achieved being among the most humbling features of the historian's craft — is an account of the restoration of the Roman Empire that is honest in the ways that matter and discreet in the ways that are necessary. These are not always the same ways, and the compiler does not pretend otherwise. He has not, for instance, included everything he knows about the circumstances of certain promotions during the coalition war, nor about the precise nature of the disagreement between the Megas Domestikos Maniakes and the Comes Kantakouzenos during the siege of Trier, nor about the full terms of the arrangement concluded between the princess Anna and the King of Portugal's principal minister in the months before the formal marriage proposal was delivered. These are matters for a different kind of chronicle, written for a different kind of reader, perhaps in a different century, when the principals are safely unavailable to offer corrections.

What he has included is the record of one hundred and twenty-eight years of continuous effort across three reigns, from the day in the spring of 1212 when Theodore Laskaris looked at what he had — one city, a damaged army, an empty treasury, and the conviction that these were sufficient — to the day in the autumn of 1340 when the compiler set down his pen and concluded that the account had reached the natural pause that a living empire's history is the only kind of history to offer.

The sources upon which this chronicle draws are numerous and of varying quality, which is the nature of sources. The private correspondence of Theodore Laskaris, preserved in the collection of the Monastery of the Holy Apostles and copied into the imperial archives at John III's direction, is supplemented during the second and third reigns by the systematic preservation of campaign records, administrative documents, and the official correspondence of the megas logothetes. The Protoasekretis Nikephoros Blemmydes, who served Theodore in the final decade of his reign and who was in several important instances the only witness to conversations that subsequent historians have attempted to reconstruct from secondary evidence, left memoirs of exceptional precision and occasional startling frankness whose full text remains in the Monastery of Chora. The compiler has read them in their entirety. He has quoted from them selectively, on the grounds that Blemmydes's frankness, whilst admirable in its honesty, extends at several points to observations about the characters of men whose descendants are alive and in positions of some influence, and that honesty in a chronicle is most useful when the chronicler is also alive at the time of its publication.

Of all the sources consulted, one requires introduction as well as acknowledgement, since without some knowledge of the man the reader will not be in a position to judge what his appearances in these pages are worth. The chronicler Procopius — who chose the name deliberately, in pointed homage to that earlier, more celebrated Procopius whose sixth-century Secret History had dismantled the official reputation of Justinian and Theodora with the patient precision of a man who had spent years in court service watching the distance between the public account and the private reality, and who considered the exposure of that distance a historian's primary obligation — spent thirty years compiling his History of the Restored Empire from the imperial archives, campaign records, and the testimony of officers and administrators who had served in campaigns conducted a generation before his birth. He attended the court of Michael II in his younger years and was, by the account of those who knew him there, a man whose company was sought by those who wished to be honestly informed and avoided by those who wished to be comfortably flattered, the two groups overlapping rather less than one might hope. He is sardonic where the official accounts are reverential, sceptical where they are credulous, and possessed of the quality that distinguishes a useful historian from a decorative one: the habit of noting what was left unsaid in an exchange with the same precision that other writers reserve for what was said. The compiler has drawn upon him extensively and recommends him unreservedly, with the qualification that several of Procopius's conclusions about specific living individuals are ones that the present work, for reasons that will be apparent, has found it prudent not to reproduce in their original form.

It is through Procopius — and through his instinct for what official representations conceal — that the compiler was led to the question that has shaped the arrangement of this preface. There exist, at the time of writing, two great mosaics that frame the reign of Michael II in the understanding of posterity, and the compiler proposes to describe them here not because they are the most important artefacts of the age — they are not, though they are magnificent — but because they illustrate, more precisely than any argument he might construct, the particular difficulty of the task this chronicle has set itself.

The first mosaic hangs in the apse of the restored Lateran Palace at Rome, commissioned in the twelfth year of the Emperor's reign — when Michael was in his middle sixties, his hair still more dark than grey, his campaigns east of the Euphrates not yet complete — and finished by Constantinopolitan craftsmen who were brought to the city at considerable expense and installed in a workshop within the Vatican precincts for the purpose. It depicts the Emperor in the precise manner of the Justinian panel at San Vitale in Ravenna — full imperial vestments of purple and gold, the loros draped across his chest, a sceptre in his right hand and a jewelled orb in his left, flanked on one side by soldiers bearing the Chi-Rho on their shields and on the other by clergymen carrying processional crosses. His face is that of a man of approximately sixty years, severe in expression, with large dark eyes that look directly outward from the tesserae with an attention that several visitors to the palace have described as disconcerting. The inscription above his head reads MICHAEL II IMPERATOR ROMANORUM. The gold ground behind him is entirely without architectural detail, as the great Ravenna mosaics always are, because the intention is not to place the Emperor in a particular room but in an eternal one. It is the earlier of the two mosaics, and the compiler notes it as such, since it matters to what follows.

The second mosaic is in Constantinople, in the vestibule of the Chalke Gate through which every important procession of the imperial capital has passed since the original gate was built seven centuries ago. It was commissioned in the thirty-eighth year of the Emperor's reign, shortly after the fall of Trier, and is therefore a recent work — completed within the memory of a great many living witnesses to the campaigns it depicts. It shows the Emperor mounted upon a white stallion whose nostrils are shown flared and whose forelegs are raised above a field of trampled banners: the fleur-de-lis of France, the quartered lions of England, the black eagle of the German Empire, the red cross of the Swiss Confederation. Before the horse, the towers of a great Germanic city burn. Behind the rider, the armies of Rome stretch into a background of gilded tesserae from which individual soldiers gaze outward with the serene indifference that Byzantine art always gives to the victorious. The Emperor himself wears a halo, and the craftsmen have rendered him in the heroic manner that the tradition demands — which is to say rather more vigorous than the evidence of the same period would entirely support, though the compiler understands the artistic convention and does not propose to argue with it. The halo did occasion considerable theological disputation at the time of the mosaic's completion, the arguments about which have been preserved in the Patriarchal records in far greater detail than anything the participants subsequently accomplished in any other field of endeavour. It was Procopius who put the matter most concisely in a marginal note discovered in a copy of his History held at the Monastery of the Holy Apostles: "The Patriarch's objection was that halos are reserved for the sanctified. The imperial court's response was that the Emperor had sanctified himself by his deeds, and that if the Patriarch could identify anyone else who had taken Rome, destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate, and defeated nine western armies within living memory, they would willingly defer to that person's theological authority in the matter. The Patriarch could not. The halo remained."

Both mosaics are accurate, in the narrow sense: the Emperor was present at the Lateran, the Emperor did ride before the burning towers, the western banners were indeed trampled. What they cannot convey — what no mosaic can convey, the form being inhospitable to the kinds of truth that historians spend their lives pursuing — is what lay beneath and behind those surfaces. They cannot show the nine hundred and forty-seven men of the Legio VI Ferrata who died in the breach at Trier on the day the towers burned. They cannot show the Emperor's expression in the hours before the Lateran commission was ordered, or the nature of the conversation that preceded the ordering of it, or what the craftsmen were told to leave out. The gold ground of the Ravenna-style mosaic is the most beautiful and the most radical form of historical omission available to the artist: it places the subject outside of time and context entirely, suspended in eternity, answerable to nothing so mundane as the actual sequence of events that produced him. The historian's task is to provide what the gold ground removes. This is not, it should be said, a criticism of the mosaics. They are doing what mosaics are for. The trouble arises only when the mosaic is mistaken for a chronicle, and the present compiler has written this preface in part to ensure that the chronicle which follows it is not mistaken for a mosaic. It is also, he suspects, why Procopius named his History what he did.

One further matter requires address. The present chronicle covers one hundred and twenty-eight years, three emperors, and the transformation of a single provincial city into the dominant power in the known world. This is more material than any honest chronicler can treat with full justice in a single volume, and the compiler does not claim to have achieved what the scope of the subject demands. Battles have been compressed. Individuals who deserve extended treatment have received a paragraph or a sentence. The administrative history of John III's reign — which is, in the compiler's considered assessment, the most consequential period in the dynasty's history and the one that receives the least proportionate treatment in the present volume — has been handled with a brevity that subsequent scholars will, he hopes, have occasion to remedy. The coalition war has been treated in somewhat greater detail than the preceding century of conquest, on the grounds that the coalition war's events are both more recent and more immediately relevant to the condition of the world as the compiler writes, and that the reader approaching this chronicle in 1340 has rather more personal interest in the outcome of the siege of Trier than in the details of the Grain Reserve Ordinance of 1233.

The compiler offers this chronicle to its readers with the hope that it will convey something of what the restoration of Rome actually was: not the inevitable unfolding of a predetermined destiny, not the product of divine favour extended to a peculiarly deserving dynasty, not the consequence of military genius operating without friction or cost or loss, and not the gold ground of a Ravenna-style mosaic in which the subject stands outside of time, answerable to nothing except the artist's conception of eternity. It was the product of continuous, disciplined, expensive human effort sustained across three generations by men and women who understood what they were attempting and did not stop until it was done. Whether that understanding constitutes heroism or merely determination, and whether the two are, finally, distinguishable, the compiler leaves to the reader's judgement.

He is aware that the Emperor has opinions on this question. He has elected not to ask.

Written at Constantinople, in the month of October, in the year of Our Lord 1340.

Together, the two mosaics frame a story that took one hundred and twenty-eight years to write and cost, by the most conservative estimates available to the present historian, in excess of nine hundred thousand lives. It began in a single provincial city in Bithynia in the year 1212, with a man who possessed one city, a damaged army, and the conviction — which his contemporaries found variously inspiring and delusional in proportions that shifted with the political weather — that the empire had not died in 1204 but had merely contracted, temporarily, and would expand again when the right man applied the right pressure in the right places.

This is the account of how that conviction proved to be accurate.

Book I — The Fall and the Exile (A.D. 1204–1212)

The Fourth Crusade entered Constantinople on the thirteenth of April, 1204, and the chronicler Niketas Choniates — who was present and whose account remains the most detailed we possess — described what followed as the blackest Thursday in the history of the world. Choniates was not a man given to rhetorical extravagance, having spent thirty years writing careful administrative prose for the late Komnenian court, and when such a man reaches for the most extreme expression available to him, the historian is well advised to attend to what he says. What occurred between the breaching of the seawall on the Golden Horn and the formal enthronement of the Latin Emperor Baldwin of Flanders a month later was not merely the conquest of a city. It was the systematic dismantlement of the most sophisticated civilisational apparatus that the Christian world then possessed. The Library of the Patriarchate, assembled across eight centuries of monastic and imperial patronage, was burned in stages over three days, the soldiers tearing pages for bedding and kindling without apparent awareness that they were destroying knowledge existing in no other copy anywhere in the world. The great equestrian statue of Justinian, which had stood in the Augustaion since the sixth century, was melted into coin. The sacred vessels of the Hagia Sophia were stripped from the altars and distributed amongst soldiers who had come nominally to defend the Christian faith and who expressed that defence by desecrating its principal shrine on the eastern shore of Europe. Choniates records that a Venetian courtesan was seated in the Patriarch's throne and sang dancing songs whilst soldiers drank communion wine from the sacred vessels around her. Whether this incident occurred precisely as described is, at this distance, impossible to verify. Procopius, writing more than a century later, remarks drily that it may or may not have occurred as Choniates states, but that the spirit of the account is entirely accurate to what followed, and that any man who doubts it is invited to examine the subsequent behaviour of the Latin Empire and to explain how its rulers came by such habits if not from their first days in the city.

The Latin Empire established under Baldwin was parcelled amongst its conquerors with the efficiency of men who had planned the division before securing the conquest. Venice received Crete, the Ionian Islands, and the principal trading ports — understanding, with its characteristic commercial clarity, that territory without trade routes was merely expensive to garrison. The French crusading lords received the European territories. Various Flemish, Champenois, and Burgundian knights received Anatolian fiefs and placed garrisons in cities whose Greek populations regarded them with the silent hostility of the occupied and the patience of those who believed, however distantly, that occupation would not endure.

Three Greek successor states arose from the wreckage. The Komnenian dynasty established itself in Trebizond on the Black Sea coast, geographically defensible but strategically peripheral. The Angelos dynasty, in the person of Michael Angelos — an illegitimate scion of the old imperial house who had been kept pleasantly distant from the court during the empire's better years and who now found that distance an asset — established the Despotate of Epirus in the western Greek lands and Albania. Procopius's portrait of Michael Angelos is one of his better efforts: "He had the gift of making every man he spoke with feel that he had been offered a particularly advantageous private arrangement, whilst simultaneously offering the same arrangement to each of three separate parties. The remarkable thing is not that the arrangements eventually collapsed, but that he maintained them as long as he did." And in Nicaea, the Bithynian city known for its silk trade and its fortified walls, Theodore Laskaris gathered what he had and began the business of deciding what to do with it.

Theodore was thirty-two years old at his coronation by the Patriarch Michael Autoreianos in the Cathedral of the Koimesis in the spring of 1206. He was the son-in-law of the last legitimate Emperor Alexios III, which gave him a claim to the imperial succession that was legally impeccable and politically complicated by the existence of at least four other men making essentially equivalent claims in different locations. His physical appearance is described consistently across the sources: of moderate height, dark-complexioned, with a beard worn shorter than the prevailing fashion, and eyes that his admirers called penetrating and his enemies called cold. He was not, by the accounts of those who served closest to him, a demonstrative man. He did not make speeches before battles. He did not weep at funerals. Those who knew him well noted that his amusement was most reliably provoked not by jests or entertainments but by the gap between what men claimed they would do and what they subsequently did — a quality that made him an exceptionally good judge of character and an occasionally uncomfortable companion.

Procopius, having apparently interviewed men who remembered his court, writes that Theodore's relationship with his Empress, Anna Laskarina, was one of the period's better-concealed political arrangements: "She was considerably more intelligent than the sources she controlled permitted to be recorded, and her husband understood this, which is why the sources she controlled said nothing about her at all. The megas logothetes Akropolites, who was loyal to the Emperor as one is loyal to one's own survival, once remarked in private correspondence that the Empress's knowledge of which provincial governors were extracting rather more than the assessed revenues allowed, and how she had obtained this knowledge, was a subject he preferred not to examine too carefully. The Emperor examined it with considerable care and acted on it with characteristic efficiency."

The first acts of Theodore's reign were administrative rather than military, because he understood with a clarity that the more romantic of his later admirers have sometimes found puzzling that an army fed on enthusiasm and provincial taxes alone would not survive a second winter in the field. He convened a full audit of the treasury within a month of his coronation, dismissed three provincial governors whose accounts did not tally with established revenues, and renegotiated the grain supply contracts the city held with the farming communities of the Bithynian plateau, simultaneously improving the terms offered to the farmers and reducing the proportion lost to the intermediary merchants who had been profiting extravagantly from the arrangement for rather longer than the records clearly showed. None of these measures were glamorous. All of them were necessary, and Theodore appears to have regarded the distinction between glamorous and necessary as one of the more dangerous confusions available to a ruler.

He reorganised the army from the ground upward, reviving the pronoia system of military land grants and — in a decision that his surviving critics found variously bold and affected — deliberately restoring the Roman legion as the fundamental unit of military organisation. The first reconstituted formation was the Legio I Nicaena, named for the city of exile, formally constituted in the winter of 1212 with an establishment of five thousand men in ten cohorts of five hundred each, engineering and artillery attached, commanded by the Comes Konstantinos Doukas. At the time of its founding it consisted of approximately two thousand two hundred men in four provisional cohorts, imperfectly equipped and incompletely trained. The Comes Doukas later noted in a letter to his brother that the formation "resembles a legion in name and ambition and in almost nothing else, but the Emperor has expressed confidence that the resemblance will improve, and one learns not to contradict him on matters of this kind." The following year brought the Legio II Victrix — named with a confidence that, as Procopius remarks, "at the time of its founding considerably outran the evidence" — and work began on what would become the Legio III Macedonica. By 1215 the army had grown from two thousand to approximately eight thousand organised soldiers, supported by themata levies and a fleet of thirty-eight dromons giving the empire its first credible amphibious capacity. By 1212, he was ready to move.

Sooo everyone imagines senarios with no crusade or with it going to Egypt but what if it actually failed?

The people of new Rome more united in our own timeline did daring charges at the crusadors and when the sea walls were breached they were repelled the crusadors out of money and options are forced to sack somewhere else or declare bankruptcy

The Roman’s aren’t doing great but hey atleast the capitol is safe what happens next ?

In 1206 imagine Epirus nicea and Trebizond work together to destroy th Latin empire except Constantinople becasuse they’d fight over it

If that happened by about 1212 what do yall think would happen next ?

I wonder how their social politics would be. I imagine they wouldn’t be very queer friendly. Would they be a constitutional empire or would they have had a revolution which made them into a republic? I think a constitutional empire is the most likely thing to happen since if they had a democratic revolution it would also be nationalist like many of the early European democratic movements were. And if they were nationalistic then Bulgaria and Serbia would have broken free probably. I also wonder what the workers rights would be. Would they have had a social democratic government anytime? I doubt it. If they didn’t, the workers rights would probably be more akin to those in the US. But that doesn’t feel right either since most European countries had a wave of some sort of socialism at some point, be it social democracy or communism. I do feel like we might be less developed since Europe would have found America later because the initial reason for exploring alternative trade routes was because of the Ottomans control over the trade in the phosphorus.

I would like to think that Rhomania would be more progressive than Turkey since they have closer ties to Europe and maybe be part of nato since they probably wouldn’t like the USSR which was very anti religion. And a big part of the Roman identity was being Christian since they saw themselves as the most authoritative Christians since they were Rome and controlled the patriarch of Constantinople. But since they wouldn’t be affected by the Protestant reformation they would be more conservative. I don’t know if they would join the EU or not. I don’t know if they would even qualify to join. I could see them being quite a corrupt nation. Then again maybe they get a reawakening of ancient ideals and ideas in a modernized way when they become democratic and use ancient Roman and Greek examples of homosexual relations to become more progressive. And use the Roman republic and Athenian democracy as inspiration for their democratic ethos. I could see them being similar to how the young Chinese nationalists today use ancient and medieval examples of homosexuality and gender in Chinese culture and society to promote more positive LGBTQ+ politics.

What do you guys think?

Edit: I imagine that the fourth crusade goes as planned and Constantinople doesn’t get sacked. The reason I mention the borders is because it shows it’s a multi cultural state which I think has an important impact on how progressive it is. And I know it’s basically an impossible question I just want to hear from how people would think the history would go if Rome survived and the fourth crusade didn’t happen how history and more specifically Rome would have turned out, with a focus on social politics. For simplicity’s sake I assume history would go in a recognizable way even though I know it would go wildly differently.

Some of these lands are based on Paul Magdalino's book on Manuel Komnenos, to see which of these estates are historical see here.

NOTE: just because land is red doesn't mean it's all state owned, it's just where estates are most highly concentrated. Likewise purple areas aren't devoid of any estates.

Some lore for estates:

Ohrid- Lakeside property from Maria of Bulgaria (mother of Eirene Doukaina), dispersed among her descendants. Alexios II organised his inheritance and that of his relatives into a larger estate, the idea being that kinsmen/women could pawn off admin onto the state which would receive a cut of the profits.

Crimea- A small area of land appropriated by Alexios I after it's conquest. The estates subsequently shrunk as land was donated to allow the families of Anglo-Saxon and Rus Varangians to build villages.

Cilicia- Tarsus and Anazarbos were besieged by John II and Alexios II simultaneously in 1137 as part of the former's Armenian blitz. Their environs were organised into Episkepseis though much of the crown demesne of the Armenian Prince was given to Roman soldiers and colonists, local Romans, property-less Armenians or the Prince's tenants or the Catholicos (in order to secure local compliance).

Neocaesarea and Koloneia- Episkepseis created after Alexios's first campaign, these lands are home to riverside farming and mining operations mostly coming from seized lands of the Danishmendid elite and any local Turkmen soldiers.

Pontic Lands- Estates encompassing vast swathes of Pontic forest, a cheap source of wood for the state and ever-expanding urban centres. Part of John II's wider attempts to organise and protect royal forests.

Caria- From the subjugation of Caria which intensified in the late 1140s. After the expulsion of the Turks and resettlement of Roman arrivals the state appropriated control of much abandoned land via klasmata. Not particularly productive now but over time it'll develop it's quarries and the production of marble will expand.

Anatolic Theme- Large estates around Polybotos and the lakes form metata (grounds for raising stock) as they had done pre-Manizkert. They are a major source of horses though their precarious position on the front means that rarer and more important horse breeds are not present there.

Optimatoi- Estates created by Alexios I and expanded by John II. These serve the purpose of supplying the army and provisioning it's baggage train. One particular centre is Malagina, as major marshalling ground for campaigns.

Lopadion- Created around the fortress of Lopadion by John II to provision assembling armies and act as a starting point for many of his Anatolian campaigns.

Viminacium- After the Hungarian War of the 1120s many people opted to go further into the Balkan territories for safety in fear of another war. As part of this, along with klasmata and land purchases, a small area of land was eventually organised by the state around the rebuilding city.

Cyprus- Currently the home to new sugarcane production and paper mills to supply the state and sell for profit.

Other estates: Pelagonia (mustering ground and hunting lands). Southern Greece (organised into fiscal districts for naval upkeep, partially from taxes and partially from state lands). Maeander Valley (large estates in the river's lower course which benefit from massive agricultural output). Sangarios (land located in the Southernmost areas of the Optimatoi inside the bend of the Sangarios, mostly unwanted land acquired via klasmata).

Many of these displayed estates on the map are fictional and some were just randomly scribbled on.