Uhh discussion time, I love it
@Leviathan's 1st post
I gotta say I think that considering that the turks didn't really have a chance to make any inroads into anatolia in this timeline, and that there hasn't been any cilician-armenian state this time around, I have no problem accepting that a majority of the population would be speaking greek by now, and certainly by the time EU3 comes around and the entire area have enjoyed a long time of common history and cultural evolution. If nothing else greek would certainly have become a "lingua franca" of the time.
@Leviathan's 2nd post
The reason the east was so divided as to how to worship wasn't because of any bias against hellenistic thinking (Alexandria was home to the largest school of platonic thinking outside of the Academy) but more because different versions of christianity happened to evolve simultaneously several different places.
As far as the Orthodox church being okay with other people setting up their own hierarchies, that isnt really true. The Syriac and Coptic churces, evolved at the same time as the mainstream "Constantinople church" did, and the russian and slavic churches were either simply too far away or else sitiuated in the lands of the empires enemies (remember that the church in the empire was little more that another part of the bureaucracy), and in any event the "Constantinople church" certainly did its level best to impose its version of the true faith upon the other branches of christianity. Thats part of the reason why the islamic conquest was so easy; the monophysist copts were tired of persecution from Constantinople, and it didnt hurt that Islam is so fiercly monophysist itself.
And I think lumping Gaul into the same catagory as Germania is just wrong. Gaul was a highly urbanised and romanised (the spoken language was vulgar latin) society by the time christianity began to spread there.
Also, the pre-islamic egyptians wern't semetic: they were copts, and coptic isn't a semetic language. And Iconoclasm dosn't pop up untill a century after Syria and Egypt is lost.
Ps. I agree with everything in the 3rd post... strangely enough.
@Leviathan's 1st post
I gotta say I think that considering that the turks didn't really have a chance to make any inroads into anatolia in this timeline, and that there hasn't been any cilician-armenian state this time around, I have no problem accepting that a majority of the population would be speaking greek by now, and certainly by the time EU3 comes around and the entire area have enjoyed a long time of common history and cultural evolution. If nothing else greek would certainly have become a "lingua franca" of the time.
@Leviathan's 2nd post
The reason the east was so divided as to how to worship wasn't because of any bias against hellenistic thinking (Alexandria was home to the largest school of platonic thinking outside of the Academy) but more because different versions of christianity happened to evolve simultaneously several different places.
As far as the Orthodox church being okay with other people setting up their own hierarchies, that isnt really true. The Syriac and Coptic churces, evolved at the same time as the mainstream "Constantinople church" did, and the russian and slavic churches were either simply too far away or else sitiuated in the lands of the empires enemies (remember that the church in the empire was little more that another part of the bureaucracy), and in any event the "Constantinople church" certainly did its level best to impose its version of the true faith upon the other branches of christianity. Thats part of the reason why the islamic conquest was so easy; the monophysist copts were tired of persecution from Constantinople, and it didnt hurt that Islam is so fiercly monophysist itself.
And I think lumping Gaul into the same catagory as Germania is just wrong. Gaul was a highly urbanised and romanised (the spoken language was vulgar latin) society by the time christianity began to spread there.
Also, the pre-islamic egyptians wern't semetic: they were copts, and coptic isn't a semetic language. And Iconoclasm dosn't pop up untill a century after Syria and Egypt is lost.
Ps. I agree with everything in the 3rd post... strangely enough.
