Recent content by heraclius

A note which may be relevant to the selection of authors here - Harold N was best known at the time of publication as a Foreign Office diplomat, eg in then British client Iran, who retired early to become an MP and diarist; he later became more famous as a Conservative statesman and husband...

I take it that in this timeline the Comnenus emperors of the Bulgar-Roman empire are the actual OTL emperors of Trebizond in 1204 - 1463, that is the descendants of Andronicus I of the OTL Eastern Roman Empire (ruled 1183-5). His son Manuel's sons Alexius and David were the founders of that...

Three cheers for another Joan Aiken fan; I started reading her unusual 'Alt History' novels as a teenager and found them mildly weird but incredibly imaginative and thought-provoking. The 'Jacobite not Hanoverian dynasty' idea was one I'd had myself and developed, cf my own Alt Hist ebooks...

The politico-ideological dynamic for the way that the First Crusade was launched came from alarmed reports from returning Western pilgrims to Jerusalem in the early 1090s of how the Seljuks had been mistreating them and local Christians since they took over Jerusalem from the Fatimids . This...

A few more thoughts on different Byzantine lines of development after Manzikert, based on ideas from my own published and not-yet-published ebooks for Sealion on the Alt Hist possibilities for the Byzantines . (NB: some of the real life Byzantine rulers of both sexes will be appearing in my...

The way that the Turkish invasions of or raids across Anatolia pre-Manzikert developed show that it was more of a general exploratory movement by semi-autonomous tribal groups 'testing the waters' for exploiting a weak Byzantine response, and if possible settling in Byzantine territory, than...

There is a story that was recorded by Herodotus in the fifth century BC (he was a citizen of what is now SW Turkey near Bodrum, then a Greek state near the Achaemenid Persian empire's border in W Anatolia, and travelled across the Middle East as far as Egypt))of an attempted Persian...

Clodius Albinus had stronger personal links to the elite than Septimius Severus, also being from a North African resident family of Italian origins and equestrian not senatorial descent/ rank but having served in more senior and crucial posts under Commodus than him. Had he either been in a...

You can try the method of creating an Alt Hist cultural or political situation that does not look like it's got any modern relevance but in fact has a lot of relevance, by drawing in modern parallels , to expand the number of people who will be interested. For instance, I've tried the theme of...

I will be watching how this develops with interest; the main problem I have faced as a published AH author has been of publisher after publisher claiming that doing lesser-known periods of history s 'too risky' or 'too niche'. Any way round this commercial tilt in production and publication is...

There might be a Juan Carlos situation if the regime has already been shaken by large but not terminal riots and mass strikes hitting the economy, which do not spiral into outright rebellion as there are a lower number of flashpoints plus a more hesitant (as he is having drastic medical...

You can also do a 'What If' with huge butterflies based on the premise that either the King of Jerusalem Amalric I, father to Sibylla and (by a different, Byzantine wife) to Isabella, does not die as in OTL in 1174 - when he was aged under 40 and had had a vigorous and militarily competent...

If Richard is killed in a skirmish in Cyprus or has the same sort of fate as in OTL, ie shot by a crossbow bolt during the siege of some castle or town, then presumably John has no real challenger as his late elder brother Geoffrey (k 1186)'s posthumous son, Arthur, Duke of Brittany, is only...

I've covered the issues regarding the Tripartite Indenture in one of the chapters of my Alternative History of Britain: The Hundred Years War (Pen and Sword, 2013). Briefly, I don't think a formal division of the state of England between three equally ranked powers - Owain Glyndwr to have all...

Russia was already deeply divided between a series of more or less equal-resourced princedoms run by shifting alliances of princes within the Rurykid dynasty (and a few non-dynasts) well before the Mongols arrived in 1220 for one attack on the steppelands of the lower Don and the main invasion...