Alternative History Lesson

The Shield Of Time, PART SIX, 18,244 B.C.

Everard and Denison summarize what they have learned about the history of the alpha timeline:

Roger II and his oldest son died at Rignano in 1137;

their successor could not cope;

Rainulf, allied to Pope Innocent II, took all their mainland possessions;

African conquests were lost;

anti-Pope Anacletus died;

Innocent reigned unopposed;

after Rainulf's death, "'...the Papacy became the real power in southern Italy...'" (p. 364) while retaining the papal states;

Innocent's aggressive papal successors acquired the rest of Italy and Sicily;

Frederick Barbarossa restabilized the Empire but was less successful against the Papacy;

so the Empire turned west;

the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople and imposed a Latin king;

by 1250, the Orthodox Church had been forcibly Romanized;

Barbarossa failed to conquer France but prevented its unification;

the English imposed an Anglo-French state which overshadowed Spain and Portugal;

civil wars wrecked the Empire because Frederick II was never born, his mother having been a posthumous daughter of Roger II;

Germany became de facto papal states;

"'...the Mongols penetrated far into Europe...'" (p. 366);

Germans colonized the wrecked eastern Europe after the Mongols withdrew;

Italy conquered the Balkans;

the French got control of the Anglo-French state;

the Church, suppressing all dissent, prevented the Renaissance, the Reformation and the scientific revolution;

Italian city-states picked clerical rulers;

"'...secular states decayed...'" (ibid.);

religious wars were schismatic, not doctrinal, and the Papacy prevailed;

the Pope became like a Caliph over European kings;

Europeans reached North America in the eighteenth century but their colonists were tightly controlled at the expense of enterprise or exploration;

printing, when invented, became a Church-state monopoly with a "'...death penalty for unlicensed possession of a press...'" (p. 363);

in 1980alpha, Mexicans and Peruvians were resisting conquest and Muslims were intervening;

in 1989alpha, the Russians were close to the Rhine and Muslims were penetrating the Alps;

Denison projects that Russians and Muslims would overrun Europe, then fight each other.

It sounds like one of the emulations in Genesis and I have suggested elsewhere on the blog that the Time Patrol timeline could be an emulation.