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As was the near splintering when Muhammad died.
Khalid ibn al-Walid sounds like someone playing with cheat codes, for example
Alt History ideas, rec and general discussion thread
- Thread starter Teen Spirit
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As was the near splintering when Muhammad died.
Khalid ibn al-Walid sounds like someone playing with cheat codes, for example
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Honestly, a lot of the collapse of the Sasanian Empire is a lot less wild when you seriously research the empire. It had just had two brutal civil wars, exhausted itself completely in the war against the Romans, the King was essentially a compromise candidate between two noble factions because they got of fighting and nobles - and to a degree the high priesthood - had completely lost willingness to buy into the system after a series of reforms in Khosrau I and II's reigns. In addition, the professionalized service bureaucracy based on lower priests (moghan) and village notables (dehqan) organized around obedience to the King basically stood in a perfect place for the Muslims to just step in. At least in my opinion, once Mesopotamia was lost, a Sasanian resurgence was either impossible or would be extremely reduced to the point of negligibility. Mesopotamia accounted for one third of the state's entire revenues, contained the capital and had so many of the state's investments, which makes it especially funny that the Muslims essentially just took it by accident because they wanted to establish a secure borderland against the Romans and Sasanians. In fact - to go on a bit of a tangent - a lot of Late Antique Muslim history is really a lot less like the Muslims pouring out in some kinda endless death attack and more the Muslims giving it a good go and punching hard, without realizing how fragile the Sasanians and Romans had become as a result of their own troubles and then just accidentally ending up with such a huge empire. This is also part of the factors in why the Umayyad Caliphate gets such a refutation for Arab chauvinism; it doesn't just decide one day to become racist, there is an acute economic problem in its beginning for how to allocate spoils and a huge amount of (predominantly Arab) veterans from the enormous Muslim campaigns.
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Yes, but on the other hand the Byzantines actually survived, so let's not praise the Sasanians too highly for winning a tactical victory and then losing the war.
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It is not praise, just pointing the fall of the Empire wasn't a "woot poff" scenario.Yes, but on the other hand the Byzantines actually survived, so let's not praise the Sasanians too highly for winning a tactical victory and then losing the war.
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It really sounds like a perfect storm situation. Like had the Wars between the ERE and Persia been far less devastating, had the Plagues of Justinian's era somehow not happened and the early history of Islam would be radically different.
BBadolato
Experiencer of Bij
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I mean you could say the same of Oda Nobunaga's rise to power, and continued consolidation.
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Most of rapid conquest or collapse are like that.
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It really is one of the few points in history where you can reliably say "if X didn't happen Y would be drastically different or not happen at all."
Say the last war OTL between the ERE and Sassanids somehow been avoided or was over quickly (e.g. the Sassanid early victories snowball into a full eviction of Rome from the Middle East/Egypt) the invasions of the early Caliphate would probably be contained and the Muslims would have to look elsewhere to expand, perhaps resulting in an invasion of OTL Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa.
Just a really interesting point, though I think most Byz-wanks start around the period so it can be seen as done too much.
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Could this lead to a Roman - Caliphate alliance?
Lord Vesporeon
Heamding To Spamce
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I remember reading something once about how the Caliphate, before beginning the massive invasions, sent letters to Constantinople telling them about Islam (Because Rome was Christian and Islam has protocol regarding how to treat People of the Book (Jews and Christians, oh and Sabians but I don't think we know who exactly they were supposed to be) in various situations) and due to a mixture of miscommunication and misunderstanding, the current Emperor thought Islam was just a new variant of Christianity (As many in the early days thought Christianity was just a new variant of Judaism) and actually spoke warmly of cooperation
Of course on the truth of the divergence and the rival imperial ambitions came to the forefront, such ideas quickly became forgotten by mainstream Christian thought
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Well, I can see the alliance holding as long as the Persians are between them.
Personally I would expect continuing Roman-Sassanian wars with the Caliphate bouncing between the two depending on the vicissitudes of diplomacy and which of the major empires was more powerful and thus most in need of being jumped up and down on.
Though I would expect that Islam would spread aggressively in the Roman Empire at some point. One of the reasons why Syria and Egypt fell to the Arabs in OTL is because of the tensions between the different Patriarchs of the Roman Empire and the large numbers of "heretics" in those provinces. A Muslim ruler who treated all Christians with the same degree of respect (even if it was limited respect) was better than being ruled by the Emperor of Rome who might very well kill you for being the wrong kind of Christian. There's going to be a window of time when Islam is an "out of context problem" for the Romans and Christian "heretics" will buy into Muhammad's claims of being the second coming at least in part because being a Muslim will be less persecuted than being the wrong kind of Christian.
And all kinds of Christians in both empires (Sassanian Persia was probably about 40% Christian) will have some amount of people who buy in simply because they find the message convincing.
I'm less sure what would happen with Zoroastrianism absent an Arab conquest, largely because many of the Zoroastrian sects in existence at the time were wiped out with barely a trace left after the Arab conquest since they were the beliefs of the common people, not the beliefs of the Kings or powerful priestly clans.
A believe that Ethiopia has special protections in Islam, due to the King of Ethiopia being an early protector of Islam. But I may be wrong about that, or it may be a poorly-supported Hadith.
But I suspect that the Arabs in this scenario would be much more focused on mercantile endeavors. The Arabs were already hugely important in trade in the Indian Ocean, so I can imagine state support from a pan-Arab Caliphate that wasn't distracted by conquests and traders becoming more organized due to Islam forming a common bond between more Arab traders than ever before would result in a significant Thalassocracy which would then spread Islam to Egypt, East Africa and India (as happened in OTL, but only moreso due to less resources being diverted to armies).
fasquardon
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I think a Roman-Sasanian alliance is far more likely, which is what they tried historically to evict the Muslims. The Romans and Sasanians were heavily interdependent on each other and conceived of themselves as "two eyes of the earth" that had dual responsibility to secure peace in the world. It's honestly a shame that they're remembered as constantly fighting each other, when the reality is far closer to a kind of cold war with no iron curtain in-between, and then a brutal breakdown of relations in Khosrau II's war (which I'll note, didn't start as an existential unlimited revisionist war, simply a war to reinstate a Sasanian-favoured candidate to the Roman throne) after which relations begin normalizing. During the massive Arab expansion, the Romans sent an army to fight on behalf of the Sasanians for example, and we have evidence from earlier that the Romans extended the notion of the "ecumene" - the civilized, inhabited, Christian world - to the Sasanians in a uniquely privileged position that framed them both as essentially two halves of the same universal world. Similarly, both made a big deal of mentioning the other upon the accession of a new monarch - usually to drop a note about how the other totally paid them tribute - to ensure that the permanent embassy that either held in each other's capital was aware of the current state of their relations. There are even cases of the Sasanians and Romans making bilateral agreements to ensure the protection of Zoroastrians in the Roman Empire and Christians in the Sasanian Empire, along with mutual interventions in subject states precisely because of the constantly shifting blocks in the Sasanian-Roman cold war. For example in the sixth century, Qobad I wrote to Justin I that "It is crucial that we, who are brothers, speak to each other in friendship and not let these dogs make a laughing stock of us." because he discovered that Zilgibi - a Hunnic king - had tricked them both and was receiving subsidies as a client ruler from both the Sasanians and the Romans.
Well, in reality Heraklios was probably just too busy dealing with other things, though it's definitely clear that as you say he was probably deeply unsure about what Islam really was. To a degree that's also true for later Christians under Muslim rule who never really seem to figure out how to treat Islam, even when ruled by Muslims but - and this is the important, much cooler part - we do actually have significant records of the Sabians now, so we know a bit more about them. We know that at least one group called Sabians were a kind of star worshippers from the city of Harran, who were either Neoplatonist or a kind of Hermeticist tradition, we have records of one from the court of Baghdad, one Abu Ishaq Ibrahim bin Hilal bin Ibrahim bin Harun al-Sabi. He worked there as a scribe and courtier and constantly refused to convert to Islam, to the point of even being offered the Grand Vizierate if he would convert and turning it down. In reality of course, the fact that he wouldn't convert was part of giving him influence and it's likely that people at the time also knew this, but it became something of a social game since he was fairly assimilated into Muslim norms. This is a poem that he wrote:
These are both strange claims, and I'm not entirely sure what your sources for them are? I cannot find any source that claims 40% of the Sasanian Empire's population was Christian, especially not with the immense success of Manichaeism in the East, the large Jewish diaspora as well as several other religions, which would leave an almost comically small minority left to be actually Zoroastrian. The majority of Zoroastrians converted, not after the Arab Conquest, but during the Sasanian and Qajar dynasties. The majority of modern Zoroastrian texts were compiled and written down in the Islamic period and the majority of Zoroastrian "sects" were more likely wiped out in the Sasanian period as part of the royal project to create an orthodoxy to rival the Romans.
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I know you are being jokey, but be very careful with that, because in the long term the 'Divine Will' argument will turn against the initial recipient.*Shifty Eyed*
Almost as if... It was divine will?
Like, is the current state of the Middle East a sign of Divine Will? There are people in RL who seriously claim that.
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I am not sure where I read the claim that 40% of the late Sassanian population was Christian. Most likely Encyclopedia Iranica?
Given that the majority of the population of Iran's population was in the densely populated west, especially Mesopotamia, it seems not unreasonable to me that Christianity might have had many adherents by % of the population while also being not terribly widespread.
Now it is possible that I read something about Christians being 40% of the Mesopotamian population and have misremembered that as being the figure for the whole empire.
And yes you are likely right that it was the late Sassanian efforts to homogenize Zoroastrianism that was most responsible for the particular form of modern Zoroastrianism. But we can't be sure about that. There are a number of features of the Islamic conquests which help to obscure some of the details of the Sassanian period, most importantly the informational bottleneck. Zoroastrianism went from the likely dominant faith of greater Persia to the faith of a small group of people living in and around Bombay and some scattered villages in Iran itself. Most of the actual literature we have is from that small community in India.
Hence: little trace left after the Arab conquest. But the Arab conquest itself probably wasn't what obscured the full history of Zoroastrianism.
You may be right. I wasn't aware of the Roman aid to the Sassanians during the Arab-Sassanian wars. In my previous post, I had been assuming that there would be a great Roman-Sassanian war before the rise of the Caliphate as in OTL, meaning that Roman-Sassanian relations would be rather poor for a century or two after the war and the Arabs just wouldn't get as lucky.
Relations between the Romans and the Sassanians were complex, and they cooperated maybe a little bit more than they fought, but inevitably some idiot (usually a Roman idiot) would think they could get away with pushing things and set the two empires on a downward spiral towards war... And as Armenia and the Hunnic polities were important in the North, inevitably I think the Caliphate would be an important ally/vassal/enemy to both in the South.
It would be interesting to see how the Khazars might do in a world like this. In a world where Islam had less political power and where Zoroastrianism was still a major faith, the religious situation on the Western steppe would be very interesting. I suspect the Khazar Khagan would be less likely in this scenario to convert to Judaism, but it might be that Jewish traders would still be as important as the were OTL when the Khazars were a major power, so Judaism might be as important in the empire. (Just a note for those who don't know much about the Khazars, they were very diverse in the faiths they adhered to, and while some Khazar Khagans do seem to have been Jewish, not all were, and certainly Judaism was never a majority faith for ordinary Khazars, though as much as 1/6th of the population may have been Jewish.)
fasquardon
Baron Steakpuncher
Hopeful Idealist
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I recall listening to some history podcast, basically the sum of it was that in Mesopotamia the Sassanids actively cultivated having Christians opposed to Roman doctrine (Nestorians etc), Jews (to the point of having an official Exilarch) and so on and so forth. This is additionally suported by the fact that until about the 9th-10th centuries, upper Mesopotamia was majority Christian. Iraq was essentially Sassanian Egypt in terms of importance, as it grew most of the food, so the Sassanids liked playing the "we're more tolerant than those romans so don't support them if they come around" card.
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- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
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This is more 'Weird History' than anything, but I've been going over an old setting of mine, Himikoku, which was basically a Magical Girl version of the history of Japan. It starts with the Queen Himiko actually existing instead of likely being made up by Chinese legend, has the figure of Takiyasha being a rebel seen as one of the first Samurai and guardian of what would be Tokyo (instead of her father Masakado in real life), and has Western magic, like Alchemy and Kabbalah but also Witchcraft, becoming big in the Sengoku Era instead of guns (but those come over too). I originally pictured it version of the Sakoku being the casting of some Gensokyo-esque Veil, but now I'm thinking I'd go with the whole country hiding underwater or in the clouds until steampunk submarines or airships are invented.
However, the big issue comes with how to handle WW2, like right now I'm tempted to just end recounting the timeline before then, or keep going but skip over it altogether (which just raises its own issues).
However, the big issue comes with how to handle WW2, like right now I'm tempted to just end recounting the timeline before then, or keep going but skip over it altogether (which just raises its own issues).
BBadolato
Experiencer of Bij
- Location
- The Netherworld
How do you work with the Imperial family in this TL, because if they actually have some degree, you could make the World War's have magical stakes, or even an entire ATL world set up, if you want to handle the subject matter appropriately.
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- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
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I was thinking this world would see a closer blending of the role of Emperor, or rather Empress, with the Grand Priestess of Ise Shrine (or its equivalent). Beyond that and Himiko/Jingu though I hadn't thought much about the Imperial family I admit, since they tend to remain on the sidelines of history with the exception of Meiji and Hirohito.
I did have the idea that, rather than claimed descendants of her, that an immortal Amaterasu could just flat out have been the Empress for all history, or at least human forms of her to also explain Himiko being a thing. It would offer an explanation as to why she stays out of most conflicts, i.e. being too powerful.
I did have the idea that, rather than claimed descendants of her, that an immortal Amaterasu could just flat out have been the Empress for all history, or at least human forms of her to also explain Himiko being a thing. It would offer an explanation as to why she stays out of most conflicts, i.e. being too powerful.
BBadolato
Experiencer of Bij
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- The Netherworld
Out of curiosity would this bit also include Emperor's, if only because I'm curious about a gender fluid Amaterasu. I think you could explain WW2 with the fact that maybe Amaterasu has to contain themselves within a person, and they can only do so much. Although that is a scary thought if Amaterasu finds themselves either ignorant of the scale of horrors going on, or aware but powerless to stop those that are killing in their name.
- Location
- Cascadia
But then Emperor Julian (the Apostate) had already tried the same thing, and it miserably failed - according to our sources, with "fearful balls of fire" and attacking the workers.
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- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
Yeah, but he tried that in the Christian Roman Empire. I doubt the Sassanid would care, especially the Chalcedonians who they will see as conquered enemies.