Could the Byzantines have eventually reasserted control over central and eastern Anatolia if the 4th crusade either didn't happen or invaded Egypt as planned, or were they destined to be overrun by the turkic migrations and become an irrelevant polity?
>>18485127No, the second they lost Anatolia to the Turks was the second they were doomed to eventually be destroyed. The only way to make them survive is for the Turkic migrations to never occur.
>>18485127Could they? Yes, it's entirely possible, but not inevitable. Though they would have never brought things back to how they were before Manzikert, they could have very much reasserted control. Turkish expansion west was a product of the chaos caued by the Frankih invasion and its consequences.
>>18485127They were heading for disaster after Manuel died. The Komnenos princelings were intent on ripping the empire to shreds for their own gain, the only reason they hadn't done so before was because John and Manuel were powerful enough to strangle their ambitions. If somehow they survived that period of chaos, they would be weakened, but nowhere near like after the 4th crusade. More than likely they would persist in parts of western and coastal Anatolia with Bulgaria and Serbia missing from their European lands from then on, unless they somehow got their shit really together.
>>18485127Yeah if belisarius deposes justinian and moves the capitol to rome then there’s a chance that some of the worse fighting of the gothic wars doesn’t happen and neither does the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628 either which really seems to be where the focus on the east for the next few hundred years starts but if belisarius is able to also centralize religious power at rome then the schism between the eastern and western churches might not have started and the 4th crusade would not then have probably sacked that town or something like that
>>18485134No 4th crusade plus Timur makes it entirely plausible.
>>18486015>Byzantine-Timurid alliance exterminates Turds and then slaughters Arabs back into the desert kinoooo
>>18485885This is a good counterfactual. I think Justinian's reign is fun to play around with. My issue here is how awful the campaign was run prior to capturing Rome. The East Roman army was destroying Italy while claiming to be their liberators. What I would have preferred was stabilizing North Africa instead of even going to Rome right away. There was no threat of any German warlord asserting hegemony over the entire West. Take at least a year They also don't have to sack Naples.
>>18485127No. Every time they made gains they quickly lost them + extra when a usurper took the throne
