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Description
An apology in advance, to all those who are sick and tired of Byzantine-wanks.

A map forVasilas 's "Out of the Ashes ", a world where the Byzantine Empire successfully expands against Islam and becomes again the dominant power west of China. (Call it Roman, though: they don't care for the term "Byzantine.")

A couple points of clarification: the Empire has a very ugly past, in which it brutally imposed the Greek language and Eastern Orthodox Christianity with often genocidal methods, which it is currently eager to shove under the rug. It is still very hostile to Muslims, either eastern Old School ones, or *American Rumi Islam. It is rivals with the rather more democratic Russian superpower, which a combination of Byzantine claims to overlordship as true leader of the Church and border conflicts has annoyed to the extent of pretty much permanent hostility: fortunately, the Roman Empire can count on the support of the Chinese and the Scandinavians, both of which have bones to pick with Russia, in containing said power.

The Rumi Muslims, which fled to the Americas by way of Islamic Spain, where they intermixed with and converted the locals, are a product of centuries of Roman oppression of their conquered Muslim populations: their faith is an attempt to answer the question of the failure of Arab Islam, which they have come to seen as an error: not Mohammed, but the later Caliphs, lost sight of their true mission, to convert the Romans, and were therefore rejected by Allah. In some ways they are closer to Ebionite Christians than OTL Islam. (There are also a fair number of more "traditional" Muslims who also fled to the Americas, but they have always been in the minority and frequently badly oppressed. And then there are the Islam-Rumi Islam-Native American faiths syncetisms... the New World is a diverse place)

Northern Europe, aside from far-from-the-front-lines Scandinavia, was screwed over by the Roman conquests of the Mediterranean shortcircuiting the Renaissance, and things have been complicated further by large scale migrations of Mediterranean Catholics north, the turn to Angry Protestant Fundamentalism, and after the Muslims became seen as allies in the struggle against the Romans, a sizable immigration of Muslim (predominantly Rumi, but also more traditional, particularly from Spain) refugees. (That hasn't been so much of a problem at first until the modern era, when the development of more coherent national identities has led to very nasty arguments as to who is or isn't a German, an Englishman, etc.)

Here's the map: the Americas and Africa are highly speculative, and my apologies to Vasilas if I depart too far from his vision here and there. Also, sorry about the unusually massive set of notes, but I wanted to avoid doing a full writeup.

Anyhoo, here it is.

Description
An apology in advance, to all those who are sick and tired of Byzantine-wanks.

A map forVasilas 's "Out of the Ashes ", a world where the Byzantine Empire successfully expands against Islam and becomes again the dominant power west of China. (Call it Roman, though: they don't care for the term "Byzantine.")

A couple points of clarification: the Empire has a very ugly past, in which it brutally imposed the Greek language and Eastern Orthodox Christianity with often genocidal methods, which it is currently eager to shove under the rug. It is still very hostile to Muslims, either eastern Old School ones, or *American Rumi Islam. It is rivals with the rather more democratic Russian superpower, which a combination of Byzantine claims to overlordship as true leader of the Church and border conflicts has annoyed to the extent of pretty much permanent hostility: fortunately, the Roman Empire can count on the support of the Chinese and the Scandinavians, both of which have bones to pick with Russia, in containing said power.

The Rumi Muslims, which fled to the Americas by way of Islamic Spain, where they intermixed with and converted the locals, are a product of centuries of Roman oppression of their conquered Muslim populations: their faith is an attempt to answer the question of the failure of Arab Islam, which they have come to seen as an error: not Mohammed, but the later Caliphs, lost sight of their true mission, to convert the Romans, and were therefore rejected by Allah. In some ways they are closer to Ebionite Christians than OTL Islam. (There are also a fair number of more "traditional" Muslims who also fled to the Americas, but they have always been in the minority and frequently badly oppressed. And then there are the Islam-Rumi Islam-Native American faiths syncetisms... the New World is a diverse place)

Northern Europe, aside from far-from-the-front-lines Scandinavia, was screwed over by the Roman conquests of the Mediterranean shortcircuiting the Renaissance, and things have been complicated further by large scale migrations of Mediterranean Catholics north, the turn to Angry Protestant Fundamentalism, and after the Muslims became seen as allies in the struggle against the Romans, a sizable immigration of Muslim (predominantly Rumi, but also more traditional, particularly from Spain) refugees. (That hasn't been so much of a problem at first until the modern era, when the development of more coherent national identities has led to very nasty arguments as to who is or isn't a German, an Englishman, etc.)

Here's the map: the Americas and Africa are highly speculative, and my apologies to Vasilas if I depart too far from his vision here and there. Also, sorry about the unusually massive set of notes, but I wanted to avoid doing a full writeup.

Anyhoo, here it is.