Alternative Historythreadi: Nohammad

[The Mad Monk]

India would not have shed Pakistan, and Imran would probably have different first and last names.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Muhammed Ali would as well

[Lorizael]

Not sure what would have happened WRT the arts and sciences, except we wouldn't have words like "algebra" and "alchemy."

If the West loses more than just the words "algebra" and "alchemy," then Newton loses both the capacity and desire to achieve anything of note, and the world never progresses to the Industrial era.

[The Mad Monk]

Muhammed Ali would as well

Cassius Clay?

[Sava]

I think the answer is that there is an eastern church despite the best efforts of the Catholics to kill them all.

Catholicism

[C0ckney]

good thread elok.

the arabs were unified at exactly the right moment. byzantium and persia had just exhausted each other in a war and they had a new, universal and militaristic religion. without these things i would say that the arabs, while not being irrelevant, would have been peripheral in terms of history.

i'm not convinced that byzantium would have tried to (re)conquer western europe. justinian's italian conquest had proved a lot more trouble that it was worth and they couldn't hold on to the small part of south east spain they controlled against the visigoths. much of northern europe wouldn't have been worth conquering anyway. the simplification of material culture after the fall of the western empire was quite dramatic.

it's interesting to think about how byzantium would have turned out without the arab conquest. byzantium underwent an enormous reorganisation in the 7th century after losing its richest provinces. this changed the character of the empire in a number of ways. the capital shrank, the aristocracy became militarised, provincial organisation changed, the empire became mostly greek speaking. with no arab conquest, it's likely that the empire would have continued, for some time at least, with the same model as in the 6th century.

i think christianity would have remain a much more (middle)eastern religion. of the five patriarchal centres of christianity, three of the four greek speaking ones were conquered by the arabs and their influence on the christian religion declined a great deal. with continued byzantine control, i don't think there would have been a split between east and west. however, i think other splits would have emerged in the east. the eastern christians loved a good old christalogical debate. there wasn't much appetite for that kind of thing in the west.

[Elok]

Brief responses since I have responsibilities:

MB: There's no theological division between Greek and Russian Orthodoxy. The only thing keeping me from communion at a Russian church is the fact that Russian priests have a reputation for being very intimidating to confess with. Or were you wondering if they would fall under the influence of the Greek Patriarchs vs. the Russians in terms of politics?

C0ckney: I was under the impression that we'd already gone through just about every imaginable Christological controversy by the time the Muslims came around. Did Christ have one nature? Oh. Okay, then, did he have one will? Okay, so did the two wills agree with each other all the time, or was the human one totally enslaved, or what? Oh. So then blah blah blah...and they did plenty of damage, but I have a hard time thinking how much further we could have split hairs and still had people getting angry. The last two big controversies, AFAIK, were over iconoclasm and hesychasm, which are only peripherally related to the nature of Christ.

You're right about the reforms; we got our **** together right around then, and I was thinking of that. It hadn't occurred to me that it was in response to Arab conquests, but wouldn't the theme system, etc. be valuable anyway, after the near-disaster faced by Heraclius? I imagined we'd want to retake the West simply as a matter of "Roman" pride, after whomping the Persians like that. But then, that was around the time the Empire began rapidly Hellenizing, wasn't it?

The rest of you: there's really no reason to argue with BK here.

[Elok]

What role did Islam have in the refusal of the eastern churches to kowtow to the Bishop of Rome's self-proclaimed world dictatorship?

An indirect one, in that they probably inspired the Iconoclast heresy. But it was still a foregone conclusion for purely cultural reasons.

[Dr Strangelove]

But there's an interesting choice of what they might have been converted to- Greek Orthodoxy, Nestorianism, Russian Orthodoxy, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, or a salad of the above.


I seem to recall that the Mongol sack of Baghdad was urged on by the Nestorian Christian Turkic wife of a commander, who helped save Christians in Baghdad.

The Mongol sack of Baghdad was provoked by the unwise beheading of the Khan's ambassadors by the governor of Baghdad.

[Dr Strangelove]

I don't think Byzantium was ever going to really rise again after their disasterous war with Persia. They became too paranoid and obsessed with their own internal politics. Remember Bug's article about the Catalan mercenaries who were too successful for their own good?

[Elok]

Only vaguely, TBH, and I wouldn't extrapolate too much from any one incident. The "disaster" with Persia was only a disaster because it left them both exhausted and wide open for Muslim conquest; sans Islam, Heraclius took them from near-defeat to a triumphant victory, and recovered the True Cross in the process. Afterwards, they had a mixture of good, bad and mediocre rulers, same as before. And some, like Manuel II (IIRC) who were a mix of all three, and in his case a little too good at external politics. By which I mean he was a backstabbing ********er who overreached.

[Imran Siddiqui]

C0ckney: I was under the impression that we'd already gone through just about every imaginable Christological controversy by the time the Muslims came around. Did Christ have one nature? Oh. Okay, then, did he have one will? Okay, so did the two wills agree with each other all the time, or was the human one totally enslaved, or what? Oh. So then blah blah blah...and they did plenty of damage, but I have a hard time thinking how much further we could have split hairs and still had people getting angry. The last two big controversies, AFAIK, were over iconoclasm and hesychasm, which are only peripherally related to the nature of Christ.

Well, even after Chalcedon you still had Miaphysites and Dyophysites (though they were already minimized after Ephesus) hanging around - the Muslim conquest tended to minimize any future influence they may have on the rest of Christendom.

[C0ckney]

C0ckney: I was under the impression that we'd already gone through just about every imaginable Christological controversy by the time the Muslims came around. Did Christ have one nature? Oh. Okay, then, did he have one will? Okay, so did the two wills agree with each other all the time, or was the human one totally enslaved, or what? Oh. So then blah blah blah...and they did plenty of damage, but I have a hard time thinking how much further we could have split hairs and still had people getting angry. The last two big controversies, AFAIK, were over iconoclasm and hesychasm, which are only peripherally related to the nature of Christ.

i think you may be right here. i'm not an expert on early christian theology.

You're right about the reforms; we got our **** together right around then, and I was thinking of that. It hadn't occurred to me that it was in response to Arab conquests, but wouldn't the theme system, etc. be valuable anyway, after the near-disaster faced by Heraclius? I imagined we'd want to retake the West simply as a matter of "Roman" pride, after whomping the Persians like that. But then, that was around the time the Empire began rapidly Hellenizing, wasn't it?

they might have wanted to, but desire isn't the same as ability. the empire wasn't strong enough to retake the west. justinian's reconquests left the empire on the verge of bankruptcy and his successors were plagued by constant money problems. there were also new threats, in particular from sclavenian groups moving into the balkans.

in 500 a minority of the empire's population spoke greek and the official language was still latin the empire was hellenising, justinian was probably the last emperor to speak latin as a first language and soon greek became the language of the ruling class. after the arab conquests, and the loss of all the syriac and coptic speakers, meant that greek was now dominant.

the changes were massive. the arab conquests deprived byzantium of about 2/3 of its lands and 3/4 of its wealth, although really an argument can be made that these were really lost in the 610s - the empire was devastated after the civil war and the persian wars. constantinople lost its right to free grain in 618 (after the persian conquest of egypt) and its population fell by around 9/10ths (not a typo) in the following years. the reorganisation into themes (although this in itself was a long process, not completed before the end of the 9th century), meant that taxation was spent locally. the fiscal integration of the empire mostly comes to an end and urban society disappears in some parts of the empire. army payment is made largely in produce rather than money and anatolian society becomes very militarised, as a result of arab raiding. i suppose the point i'm trying to make is that these changes were made for the empire's survival, as a direct result of the situation caused by the arab conquest (and the wars proceeding it). it's hard to see them being made without such a background.

there's a lot to say about this, so i'll try to find some time tomorrow to type up some more.

[Elok]

No it was Manuel I that I was thinking of. Slippery SOB who kept breaking his word and getting away with it, until he didn't. But he died before it all hit the fan. Definitely entertaining, if nothing else. Basil II was a strong emperor too, as was Alexios. One of the Constantines in there was pretty good too, IIRC. Aside from the last one, who just had the guts to go down swinging. But I get them all mixed up.

[C0ckney]

heraclius still gets a very good press these days, which i find strange. he was a great commander, but, taken as a whole, his reign was probably the most disastrous in roman history up to that point.