The better-armed and warlike Vikings would have overpowered the resistance of the dispersed and poorly-armed ‘Skraeling’ tribes (the ‘Athabascans’) along the East coast, with a larger amount of manpower available to them than that which they possessed when they tackled the area under Leif Erikson around 1000. In real life their frequent clashes with the locals (possibly around the site at L’Anse-aux-Meadaux in Newfoundland) discouraged a long-term commitment. Blockage of their European ambitions by Rome would have provided more manpower to overcome this, even without a Roman conquest of Denmark or Norway. There was nothing to stop the Viking navigators rounding Cape Cod and experimenting with farmland in Massachusetts or Connecticut, whose forests would have been familiar from their Scandinavian homeland; their probable numbers and enthusiasm for battle would have made them as able to take on local tribesmen as the seventeenth century settlers of New England. Technologically, they would have lacked the advantage of muskets that gave the seventeenth century settlers a major advantage; but they would have been more used to prolonged fighting than the largely peaceful Pilgrim Fathers.
By 1000 there could have been a High King of Ireland backed up by Roman troops, Roman reoccupation of Britain, Romano-German settlers in Denmark and the Oslo plain, a number of pro- and anti-Roman warlords fighting over the rest of Norway, and a substantial Viking empire of independent émigré settlements stretching over the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, and eastern Canada around the Atlantic provinces down to Massachusetts. The improved climate of the northern Atlantic islands around that time seems to have been able to sustain a larger Viking population in Greenland than is now possible, and it would have been an obvious staging-post for settlers en route to Canada. The Niagara Falls need not have impeded Viking exploration of the Great Lakes area, given that they had light ships that could be carried round it and they were used to portage round the rapids on the lower Dnieper in Russia. The forests of eastern Canada would indeed have been a familiar environment to the Norwegians, reminiscent of their homeland; they were more used to woodland fighting than the real-life seventeenth century French invaders had it come to a conflict over land with the ‘Hurons’. The ‘Five Nations’ of the Iroquois to the south do not seem to have been united this early and so would have been easier to tackle than the Europeans found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Given the survival of the Western Empire and a prosperous and politically united Western Europe benefiting traders, it is likely that some captains would have sought out routes to the rumoured Viking discoveries in America too. The Empire, if animated by traditional Roman opportunism and a missionary Catholic Church, would have followed them with official expeditions, on a more southerly route than the Vikings used. The prevailing winds would have taken them via the Canaries, possibly known to some classical sailor, to the Caribbean, which Rome would have equated with the Hesperides of classical legend as a distant paradise reachable by sea from the Pillars of Hercules. Did St. Brendan’s Irish voyagers find an American Land of Promise in the mid-sixth century? In both cases sceptics have claimed that these stories’ accounts of western lands are coincidental and do not reflect real voyages; but the case for St. Brendan discovering Iceland is strong with or without Tim Severin’s re-creation of his voyage to Canada being used as evidence that it was feasible.4
Rumours of distant and colonisable lands like these, reinforced by the hints gained from traders who had dealt with the Vikings of their new lands, could have inspired ambitious captains by circa 900 to endeavour to follow the currents west via the Canaries to the Caribbean. The voyage of six weeks or so between the continents would have been well within the capabilities of sailing-ships, and if the right impression of opportunities of empire, trade and Christianization had been made on the Imperial court expeditions would have been backed (with more resources from a Roman Emperor than Ferdinand and Isabella could give to Columbus). Given the continuance of peace and prosperity in Western Europe under one polity, this could easily have occurred well in advance of 1492, possibly before 1200 given the optimal climate and a growth in population and mercantile trade-seekers. The likeliest position for early Roman settlement, given the climate, fertility of the land, and harbours, would have been the Greater Antilles. Propaganda at court could have made the most of ‘emulating the labours of Hercules’ in an officially sanctioned expedition to the West.
Rome and the civilizations of Mexico
It is also probable that further voyages would have followed. Then the new settlements would trade with the continental mainlands within decades, and stories of vast quantities of gold would have been as alluring to the central Imperial government and to individual captains as they were to the Spaniards. It is possible that the early Maya and Aztecs had come by sea to Mesoamerica from the Caribbean, the ‘old red land’ to the East being Cuba, though the former do not seem to have had any seaborne contact with the Antilles by their Classical period (circa 400 to 800) and the sketchy and mythologized references we have in sixteenth century records to Aztec migrations make it impossible to locate their whereabouts circa 800 to 1200.5 (Their original home, ‘Aztlan’, has been hopefully claimed as Atlantis.)6 Any Roman expeditions to the mainland would probably have been opportunistic exploration rather than a result of information gleaned from the few scattered residents of the Antilles, whose cultural level was lower than that of Mesoamerica when Columbus arrived. The local tribal Caribs do not seem to have created recognisable polities or been aware of the mainland by circa 1500; unlike Aztecs, Maya, and Incas they were obliterated with relative ease by the Spaniards.
And from that arises the intriguing possibilities of what the Romans would have made of the equally belligerent Aztecs if the clash of civilizations had occurred in the fifteenth century, or the Toltecs or Mayas if it had occurred earlier. The dating of the Toltec culture in Mexico is vaguer than that of the Maya, whose deciphered records show that their feuding citystates were in decline by the ninth century and largely abandoned to the jungle by 1100. But they would seem to have been active around 900 to 1200, based at Tula near Mexico City.7
The half-known civilization of the Toltecs (and before them that of the massive city of Teotihuacan, built on the scale of Rome) indeed served a role for the Aztecs similar to that of the Etruscans, and before them the lost ‘golden age of Saturn’, to Rome, as their inspirational legendary forebears. The Aztecs looked back to the era of the Mexican culture-hero from overseas, the legendary and godly founder Quetzalcoatl, as the Romans of Augustus’ era did to their own semi-divine founder from distant lands, Aeneas from Troy, who was made the son of the goddess Venus and ancestor of Augustus’ family. Some past historians have sought to portray the bloodthirsty, dynamic Roman conquerors and their peaceful Etruscan forebears as the Italian equivalent of the Aztecs and the Maya. That myth has now been exploded by decipherment of the Mayas’ own alphabet, which shows them to have been as predatory and fond of human sacrifice as the Aztecs.8 The Romans did however have a long-lasting myth of a foreign, Trojan, origin like that of the Aztecs, who had wandered across Mexico for centuries before settling in the great valley of Mexico City circa 1325.
According to the scanty accounts preserved after the Spanish conquest, the early Aztecs settled at Tenochtitlan were supposed to have been looked down on as a band of servile vagabonds by their more urbanised neighbours, who they duly conquered, as ‘Romulus’ Rome had served as a refuge for runaways, stateless brigands, and other undesirables. Both civilizations were built on dynamic warfare, and both had an emblem of an eagle. In the Aztecs’ case it survived onto the national flag of Mexico, and in the Romans’ case it was adopted as the Imperial emblem of Roman, Eastern Roman, and later ‘Holy Roman Emperors’, and hence was taken up by the Second and Third Reichs. The double-headed eagle of the Russian Czars (apparently used by the Byzantines from circa 1325) has now been brought back into use as a patriotic pre-1917 emblem for Putin’s Russia.
Would the Roman
s have recognised similarities between themselves and the Aztecs as they conquered them? Unless the Church had been allowed to develop its doctrines of religious superiority over godless pagans untrammelled in Rome as in medieval Europe, the destruction of Aztec, Maya and other South American culture by the conquerors may have been less than in real life. The Christian Roman Empire of real life from circa 324 was a civilization on the defensive, and so had no record of conquest and assimilation. Peoples beyond the frontier of the Eastern Empire were to be converted to orthodox (and non-orthodox) Christianity by missionaries throughout its history, from Armenia and Georgia in the early fourth century through Ethiopia to the Bulgars, Slavs, and Russians. Armenia, the first to be evangelised, was converted by private initiative while the Roman state was still pagan; Axum/ Ethiopia was converted circa 330 via a local request to the Church in Alexandria. A community of nations culturally and religiously aligned to the Empire – what Dmitri Obolensky calls the ‘Byzantine Commonwealth’ – was created. But this did not involve military conquest, so we cannot tell what the attitude of a militarily triumphant Christian Roman Empire to conquered ‘pagans’ would have been. It would seem probable that local culture would have been thoroughly Christianised and all traces of pagan religion blotted out, as with the newly Orthodox Slavs in Eastern Europe under Eastern Roman missionaries. Destruction of idols was a centrepiece of Christianization from the time of Theodosius I and Cynegius, long before Charlemagne and St. Boniface vandalised Saxon idols in Germany. But politically the Roman Empire had long been used to allowing native rulers to survive as Imperial allies, as with British and German tribal leaders from the first to the fourth centuries. Thus Aztec and Maya princes ruling dependant territories were more likely to be tolerable to a distant Roman Emperor than they were to the Spanish monarchs, and land-hungry local Conquistadors to be under closer Imperial military control than were Spain’s autonomous grandees Cortez and Pizarro.
The Romans, like the real-life Conquistadors, would have had the advantage of numbers, weaponry, and Christian zeal against the primitive ‘savages’, with their evaluation of culture on the grounds of urbanization meaning that had they arrived too late to encounter the large Maya cities in Yucatan (or Tula?) they would have rated the local tribes as no more advanced than they rated the rural German tribes in the first century. Like the Conquistadors, they would have been vulnerable to the climate. The Mayan city-states in Yucatan (as violent and competitive as fifth century BC Greece) appear to have collapsed to over-population and famine by circa 900.
The conquest of Mexico and North America. Rome versus the Vikings?
The Roman adventurers should certainly have been able to secure the Caribbean islands, settling them as the Spaniards did in reality but with a larger state behind the enterprise. European diseases would have assisted them by decimating the local population, but deliberate genocide is less likely. Land-hunger would duly have taken the Imperial forces on to the North American mainland, with large-scale settlement of people moving from a peaceful, prosperous, and probably well-populated Europe. The lands of the southeastern U.S. would have been an obvious first choice, with the existence of a powerful central authority in Europe meaning that there should have been Roman military assistance on a larger scale than the reallife military aid given to British settlers there. Until the post-1700 ‘world wars’ against France, England’s military commitment was minimal, and the only political centralization of all the colonies was by James II. Unlike reallife colonial settlement in the Americas, there would have been one European state directing it and hence no diversion of time and resources to inter-state wars.
The local Native American tribes would have been met with force and stood no chance, but Rome would probably have pursued its usual policy with ‘primitive tribes as in Scotland and granted them treaties as vassal allies once they submitted. Romanised client-chiefs would have been backed against their rivals and efforts made to create stable polities on the Empire’s borders, as on the barbarian frontiers in Europe in the first centuries AD; the Church would have been encouraging missionary activity and denouncing the Aztecs and Mayas for their human sacrifices. The Church’s attitude would probably have been broadly similar to that of the Spanish clergy’s in the sixteenth century. The Aztecs and the Mayas may well have been regarded with the uncomprehending revulsion for their cultural practices that the Romans showed to the Druids in Britain and Caesar showed in Gaul.9
If the authorities in Rome were only interested in this strategic backwater as a source for trade goods rather than for creating a well-organised set of Romanised provinces, it is likely that only commercially valuable areas such as Mexico’s goldmines would have been prime targets for conquest and strict control. Expansion of settlements elsewhere would have been piecemeal and disorganised, subject to individual initiatives. But gold-rich Mexico could have turned into the same sort of fertile site for greedy merchants, tax collectors, and land grabbers as wealthy Asia Minor became in the later second and early first centuries BC, with some ambitious local Mayan or Aztec client-king eventually seeking to channel discontent to throw out the invaders like Mithridates VI of Pontus did in Asia Minor in 88BC. As with Mithridates, Rome could not have allowed its prestige to suffer and any such revolt would have been followed by major state military intervention, with outright annexation and provincial organisation. The same process could have happened on a smaller scale in North America, with a native American rising against Roman land grabbers (probably likeliest in the fertile ‘Old South’) being punished. As with Andrew Jackson’s policies in the 1830s, Indian survivors would have been deported.
Land-seizure and exploitation in North America in the manner of what Rome did to the Iceni in the late 50s AD was as much in prospect as with the real-life British settlers in America, as was the development of large landed estates as ‘latifundia’ worked by slaves once this became economically attractive. It is unlikely from what we know of the Roman slave-system that the Empire would have resorted to systematic deportation of West Africans as a slave-labour force, as there is no evidence that they regarded any peoples as inferior on the basis of colour (as opposed to culture and civic development); the use of prisoners-of-war as slaves would have been more normal.
Once the Roman presence had expanded northwards there was the prospect of a clash (perhaps in the New England area) with the Viking settlements there. Any isolated Viking settlements further south would have been powerless in the face of larger Roman numbers and superior weaponry, and been subject to attacks by the Roman navy from the Caribbean. Distance and the unattractiveness of the poorer soil to Roman settlers would have helped the more northerly Viking possessions beyond Maine to survive.
There could have been a campaign fought over the Great Lakes area, as in real history between Britain and France in the eighteenth century, between Rome and the Vikings several centuries earlier. The Romans would have been using the Lake Champlain ‘corridor’ and the mouth of the St. Lawrence for a two-pronged advance on the Quebec area, as Britain did in 1759. They would have prevailed due to more manpower and better modern weaponry despite fierce guerilla fighting with ambushes in the thick forests if they had won the initial open battles against the Vikings. It would have been particularly crucial if the export of gunpowder westwards from China had enabled their armies to use muskets by this date.
The timing of this is uncertain, given that a prosperous and peaceful Europe in the years of the twelfth and thirteenth century climatic optimum could have enabled westwards adventuring by individual captains and then colonial expansion to commence well before it did it reality. But a substantial Roman presence could have been possible in North America before the loss of population and planning delays caused by the Black Death from circa 1350, while the worsening of the climate in Greenland would have driven Vikings living there South-West into Canada and/or New England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Thus, it would not be unreasonable to postulate a Romano-Viking war over the area
by the mid-sixteenth century.
The outnumbered (and outgunned?) Vikings would have been overrun, with or without the use of hit-and-run tactics against the Romans in the thick forests aided by local Native American tribes, and Quebec and Ontario would have been annexed to the Roman Empire. But it is possible that some Vikings preferring independence would have escaped along the Great Lakes (as useful a route for longships as the Russian rivers were to real-life Viking adventurers) into the hinterland, which their fur-traders and adventurers would have been exploring for centuries, and set up new jarldoms based on fur-trading on the plains of Manitoba.
As Roman numbers and prosperity in America increased, the trajectory of expansion would have followed the real-life American expansion westwards over the Appalachians into the Mississippi valley with a probable major settlement at the river-mouth around New Orleans and another at a strategetic river-junction site upstream around St. Louis. Farming would have begun on the Great Plains, with adventurers probably escaping the bureaucratic control and taxes of the settled Roman provinces to move into the Native American tribal areas without official direction. Given the vast distances that official orders and personnel would have had to cross to reach the Americas and the cost of sending troops, it is probable that however much the Roman officials in the new provinces were legally under European orders substantial autonomy would have developed in practice.
If Rome Hadn't Fallen Page 16