A Sleep and a Forgetting

I'm uploading some older maps which for one reason or other I never got around to before, so quality may vary a bit.

This one comes from the “What If” collection as well, Robert Silverberg’s A Sleep and a Forgetting, in which the effects of close approach to the sun by a exploratory probe allows telepathic radio contact with a Genghis Khan inhabiting an alternate past in which he was kidnapped as a child and ended up as an officer in the Byzantine army. (Whew! Clearly ASB wasn’t a big concern back in 1989).

A linguist puts it into his head that he takes the lead of the Third Crusade when Barbarossa dies, and after contact is broken said linguist waxes rhapsodical: “But I’ve got this Temujin all fired up now to be a Christian Genghis Khan. He got so Christian in Byzantium that he forgot what was really inside him, but I’ve reminded him, I’ve told him how he can still do the thing that he was designed to do, and he understands. He’s found his true self again. He’ll go out to fight in the name of Jesus and he’ll build an empire that’ll eat the Moslem power for breakfast and then blow away Byzantium and Venice and go from there to do God knows what. He’ll probably conquer all of Europe before he’s finished.”

Now, I like Bob Silverberg, and he usually puts some research into his historical stories, but here he seems to be seriously overestimating the capacities of Byzantine armies and 12th century German armies compared to those of horse nomad armies. Conquer all of Europe? Hell, no. On the other hand, Genghis was a genius, and Byzantine emperors had risen from the ranks to overthrow their predecessors before. Therefore…

It’s a multi-polar world, with a number of good-sized powers and quite a bit of international competition, intrigue, and shifting alliances, but it is kept on a mostly civilized level. The Empire of Rome in the East is one of the world’s great powers, and is tied to the Russian state ruled from Kiev by dynastic marriage and ancient alliances. Europe and the Middle East are largely recovered from the devastating war of the 1960s, when Byzantium and its allies faced off against the “Iron Triangle”. The Deutsch League has quite civil relations with its neighbors, there is little pressure for the reunification of the territories of the House of Jagiellon, and France is moving back towards democracy. (On the other hand, in the Khanate of Persia, military junta rule remains the order of the day.)

The Northern Russians expanded into Siberia after the breakup of the short-lived Second Grand Principality, and the Empire of Vladimir at one point extended to the Pacific: but that was a while ago, and the Republic is now a mid-size power, while the mineral-rich Uralsk Principality is a major producer of industrial goods, if hampered in its ambitions by a relatively small population.

Due to various complications arising from an earlier arrival of Russians on the Pacific coast and the messy breakdown of the Latter Jin dynasty, the current rulers of Cathay, and many of their subjects, are followers of Greek Orthodoxy, which only confirms the now millennial (only briefly interrupted in the 15th century) north-south division of what in our world would be China. Japan, having gone through another period of political instability in the 19th century, became a serious pirate-producing nuisance, and the Most Christian Emperor conquered nearly a third of the country (the rest surviving by putting itself under the protection of the Kingdom of Scotland and Engeland): his descendants question his wisdom.

The Central Realm is more like OTL China, but more south-oriented, more mercantile, and practicing a rough-hewn peasanty Buddhism big on demon-smiting (Jesus counting as a demon: the Emperors support it as an antidote to northern missionary activity). Currently, the country is suffering from unrest as the Neo-Legalist regime that took power after the previous military ass-kicking at the hands of the northerners seems incapable of carrying out the necessary structural reform needed to catch up technologically and economically with more modern nations. More successful on the front are the Princes of Liu-Sung, thoroughly Sinicized Filipinos only very nominally vassals of the Imperial Council since the aforementioned ass-kicking of 1921. The Vietnamese, pushed southward by the Chinese, have largely assimilated the Cambodians and blotted them out as a separate people.

Due to dynastic complications, most of Australia is ruled by a Greek Emperor with claims on the Throne of Byzantium. Formerly French India is a bit of a mess; given French divide-and-rule methods, there have already been two wars to Unify the Hindu People, and since the Dacca Alliance will be a tough nut to beat, the Vijayangarans and the Baratis have spent a couple decades arguing about how the two “unionist” powers will unite: many expect them to decide the issue by force before very much longer, or at least before either of them can develop a nuclear deterrent.

The Khanate of Persia and the Khanate of Kashgar are legacies of a Genghis-equivalent who arose about a century after he did OTL: he was less successful, in that his empire extended merely from the Don to the borders of Jin China, and south to north Persia and Afghanistan. OTOH, it did hold together in one piece for nearly a century and a quarter after his death.

An earlier intrusive Christian presence in North Africa (some parts of the NW are still Castilian and mostly Catholic) sent a fair number of Arabs and Berbers seeking their fortunes in the Faranji-free Sahel, accelerating the Islamicization of the area and bringing earlier literacy and use of gunpowder weapons. As a result, the Anglo-Scots expanding inland from Senegal decided going to war with the Sultan of Gao was more trouble than it was worth, compared to trade, and Gao is today perhaps the strongest nation in Africa, if still a bit backwards by Mediterranean standards.

The Americas (here the Portuguese-discovered “Antilles”), with no overweening Habsburgs to keep out competition, were subject to an undignified and violent land-scramble from the start. OTL Latin America is mostly Castilian, Portuguese and Saxon-German, while the best bits of North America were divvied up between Scotland-Engeland and the French monarchy (now the independent nations of Williamsland and the Republic of Sylvania.) No American nation is as overwhelmingly powerful as the OTL USA, although Sylvania is definitely counted as one of the Great Powers (Williamsland and Equatorial Saxony are more marginal cases). As OTL, the Castilian-speaking Andean nations are the poorest of the South American states, although the Latin American region is overall wealthier.

France is an oddball left-nationalist dictatorship, and lost quite a bit of its empire in the aftermath of post-war revolution. It is relatively more densely populated than our France, and is slowly moving to a more democratic system. Scotland-Engeland is led by a Scottish dynasty, as a result of their expulsion of the Holy Roman Empire (long story): Ireland is smaller than OTL, although most of its population still speaks a Celtic tongue, and the multi-cultural mélange of Aragon-Austria-Milan somehow hangs together, and is the richest per capita and perhaps most innovative state in Europe.

Byzantium, or Rome as they call themselves, endures. It is perhaps a bit backwards compared to Sylvanians or AAMs, but the Empire remains a great power. A magnificent new statue was unveiled in 1992 to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the coronation of Emperor John ‘The Tatar’, generally considered the greatest Emperor since Augustus. The Empire is a quite tolerant place, and has genuinely cordial (if occasionally a little stiff) relations with its former Muslim colonies. Visitors should be warned that Greeks still love a theological argument, and anyone asking an inhabitant of Constantinople if they have accepted Jesus into their hearts must be prepared to defend their case for their version of the Trinity.

If Orthodoxy is doing better than OTL, the Catholic Church is weaker and more decentralized than OTL with councils dominating Popes (for one thing, there was a Pope-Anti-Pope split longer-lasting and more devastating than OTL). The current Papacy (which holds a Vatican City fief hardly larger than in our world), what with Protestant Hungarians and Germans, and the atheistic French, is grateful that the British Isles have at least always remained loyal to the Mother Church.

Art and architecture is a bit florid and ornate by our standards. The Sylvanians are considered on the cutting edge of architecture (although travelers from our TL might grumble that Art Deco called and wants its style back). Technology is mostly on a 1950s level: atom bombs but not ICBMs, computers as big as rooms and tiny little black-and-white TV screens. On the other hand, radio astronomy has been a big thing for a couple decades, and there seems to be an odd fetish for hovercraft, which several countries are trying to make into The Vehicle of the Future, in spite of that pesky “no friction braking” issue.