(although, he might double-cross it, ally with the Greek nationalists in Greece and the Danubean Provinces, and then rebuild the Byzantine Empire in its full glory
)
I enjoy that, but unfortunately it seems to be rather cliché for me to support anything Eastern Roman. It's certainly cooler than the Catherine the Great option.
All of this Napoleon stuff looks cool; unfortunately, don't we already have a very good early 1800s althistorical NES out? Seems like it'd be a good idea to pass on most of these ideas for awhile.
I can't seem to really get up the energy to write anything substantial for that silly 1860s PoD I had going there, so I suppose I can sum up my thoughts on it here. There are a lot of tense changes in there that I'm too lazy to change, so please ignore the horrid grammar.
The basic idea was that this Franco-Austro-Spanish alliance system would end up in a very massive clash with the Brits, North Germans, and Russians over the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans. The Russians naturally want to go after the Straits, and we have already seen an vague sketch of British support, which is likely to increase after the French continue to build up their alliance's military. The French, for their part, will be wanting to use the Ottomans as a bastion against the Russians seriously breaking into the Austrians' rear, aiding the British in the Med (a rather minor concern, but still slightly significant, especially now that the Brits are assisting a minor Russian Black Sea Fleet revival in spite of the terms of the Treaty of Paris). They'll also want to use the Ottomans as a springboard to Egypt (which the British will surely go after
de jure in addition to their
de facto control) and India. On the other side of the coin, the "Northern Alliance" would be supporting both separatist movements like Bulgaria, the Danubian Principalities, and the Serbs, and also lending significant help to Greece. All of this is likely to explode a little sooner than the actual Serbian and Montenegrin war in 1876, mainly due to added pressure and increased interest; 1874 seems like a good date.
This will probably not be a rapid war. The French will be mainly concentrating on eliminating the Italians from the picture and preserving the lifeline to Austria through southern Germany. A limited offensive into Belgium is possible, mainly to distract German and British attention away from launching what very may well be a killing blow in Bavaria and Baden. Spain's main goal will be preventing war with Portugal long enough to eliminate Gibraltar. Maximilian and the British will be vying for the support of Portugal, and this is much more of a realistic contest than at any other time in Portuguese history, since the British are mildly opposing them colonially, and the King is generally split between Liberals and Conservatives, preferring to dabble with his fish instead. There will probably be a Portuguese Civil War, and this time it is unlikely that the British will beat a Franco-Spanish combination. In Italy, the French and Austrians will be able to exploit their rear position in control of the Patrimony of St. Peter, which will probably lead to a rapid fall of the north of the country. The south is likely to desire Austrian control rather than continue under the Liberal mantle from Turin, but the British will be able to, with naval superiority, seize Sicily and Sardinia at the very least and a landing on the heel or the toe of the boot is not out of the question, although they may very well get chased out of that arena as well as Iberia.
In Germany, things are a good deal more complex. Von Moltke is unlikely to take the bait the French will offer in Belgium, leaving that to the Belgians and a token Anglo-German force; instead, he will concentrate all on splitting France and Austria, to leave Austria to wither on the vine or, worse yet, fall to concentrated pummels across the Carpathians from the Russians. The French and Austrians will need to meet this force on force, as a blow through Silesia is unlikely to succeed and it will be nearly impossible to cut through Poland. Austria's only hope is to preserve the land connection to France long enough to smash Italy - which will probably take until 1875-6 - and that requires a standoff at minimum in southern Germany. The Austrians and French will have the benefit of having the South German army on their side; unlike the OTL Franco-Prussian War, the French will have had more time to integrate their army with the mitrailleuse. However, there is no real alternative to excellent artillery at this point, and now that the Austrians have had the benefit of French influence, training, and weaponry, they have a good mix of mitrailleuse and regular artillery, whereas the Prussians simply have the good artillery. On the other hand, North Germany (I know I'm using this interchangeably with Prussia, but I don't care) has the invaluable staff and reserve systems. Those will have a major effect on the outcome, such that the North Germans should be able to penetrate very quickly very rapidly, and in the first month or so we should see a battle near Ulm. I don't think that the North Germans can win that early battle though, even though they can concentrate superior numbers, mainly due to the closeness of the Austrian army and their lack of need to mobilize reserves due to their large professional army - and especially their excellent cavalry, which could help play a good reconnaissance role. After about a month or six weeks, we should see a very major battle - on the scale of Leipzig - between the North Germans and the allies in the vicinity of Augsburg, in which the North Germans are hampered by damage to their supply lines (caused by those darned
jägers, which replace the
francs-tireurs in this world) as well as the technical advantages of the chassepot and the mitrailleuse/Austrian arty combo. The inherent defensive advantages of fighting on home ground will help the allies win the battle. This is the battle that saves France, but it is too late for Austria, which basically lost the war when it started.
In the Balkans, 1874 is a rough year for France's allies, mainly because of the Russo-British command of the waves. The Russians and Brits have helped reorganize the Greeks, Montenegrins, and Danubians (soon to be renamed) and their militaries into new model armies capable of beating up on the Turks, who simply didn't have the kind of time to overhaul their military. There will be no Plevna to save the Ottoman Empire, because the Greeks will strike north for Salonica, the Montenegrins will seize Scutari and north Albania, and the Serbs will run rampant, though a small Austrian force will keep them in check in Bosnia, which the Habsburgs will occupy so as to prevent the allies from having it. Russian troops will flood over the Danube and swarm through Rumelia, and the Brits will land a small expeditionary force in conjunction with the Greeks at Gallipoli, and the Ottoman Empire will basically collapse on the fall of its capital after a Russo-British combined naval and land storming operation and the capture of most of the European portion of the Turkish military in Rumelia by the combined advance of the Greeks, Serbs, and Russians. Most of the rest of the war on this front after the fall of Constantinople in 1875 will be aimed at occupation of the remaining Ottoman territories and cleaning out pockets of resistance. The British will seize the Levant in its entirety, the Russians will grab Armenia and large chunks of eastern Anatolia, and the Greeks will be denied Constantinople but compensated with basically all of the Aegean coastline and a good deal of inland Anatolia, perhaps to Ancyra. However, most of Anatolia will remain unoccupied due to fierce Turkish resistance, and there will be Arab uprisings in the Hejaz and Libya, although those will probably be pro-British. Mesopotamia is a bit of an unknown - I think that even this huge amount of imperialism is going a bit far already, but I really don't see much of an alternative for Britain. It's really a bad idea for them to let Russia have it all, and they know that, but it's also extremely difficult to absorb this kind of territory. Ottoman survival is very unlikely at this point in time, especially since they are so much more outnumbered than in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-8, and they only barely survived that. I just don't see much of an alternative for Britain to try here, but I also know that Disraeli (who is in charge as opposed to that vexing Gladstone, but who is still (grudgingly) getting involved in the war, of course) is far too smart to try to swallow the Empire whole. Any suggestions as to the later state of the Ottoman Empire would be great.
Meanwhile, we see the Russians slowly encircling Austria. In the first year, Galicia has already fallen and Alexander II's men are already scrambling through the Transylvanian Alps; by the second, despite increasing direct French support, the combination of a Hungarian uprising and pressure on all sides slowly causes the Habsburgs to break down in the middle of their great political reorganization. By 1876, Hungary is lost, and the Russians, Germans, and Magyars will be attacking Vienna's great fortress complex early the next year. This is combined with a renewed advance by the North Germans in Bavaria, where with the withdrawal of the Austrians to defend their homeland, they finally manage to beat the French in a sanguinary contest in the Black Forest, mainly decided through French strategic encirclement and the relative lack of French troops available due to overstretch, and begin to press on towards the French borders. The French have the Italian ulcer to deal with, they have comprehensively lost the naval war in both Mediterranean and Atlantic, and save in Iberia and Belgium their allies are on the retreat. Reluctantly, Napoleon III opens peace negotiations two weeks after Algiers finally falls to the British, in early 1877. The war has been one of the bloodiest in European history, primarily because of the North German failure at Augsburg (which prolonged the war) and the continued resistance of the Turks and Austrians, who are holding out in the Tyrol and Dalmatia at war's end.
The treaty is critical. Signed in Frankfurt, it opens the door to entirely new avenues of European relations. Naturally, it is the death of two Empires, that of the Habsburgs and Ottomans, that is the primary function of the peace talks, but colonial considerations also are high on the list. Russia annexes about as much as the British would let them, including Moldavia, Galicia, and chunks of Armenia. A new Hungarian republic is set up, roughly with the borders of the OTL Ausgleich Kingdom of Hungary, with about the same political structure. Austria and Bohemia, along with the South German Confederation, are awarded to Otto von Bismarck's North Germany, which re-forms into a true national German Empire. While this is contrary to von Bismarck's initial vision of Germany, he knows that a counterbalance to Russia is necessary, and a focus on the land - i.e. against Russia - is necessary to guarantee British support, and besides, the German military and political leadership is already clamoring for a renewal of the great
Drang nach Osten. While Disraeli himself is very leery of the new German Empire, he is also very aware that Russia is growing altogether too rapidly, and reestablishing the dead Habsburg Empire is out of the question at this point. France herself loses no continental possessions, and is indeed rewarded in Italy, which is divided into a French puppet Kingdom of Italy in the north - including the Patrimony of St. Peter - and in the south, the British protectorate Kingdom of the Two Sicilies is revived under Habsburg leadership to give them something to do, although a personal union with Spain was utterly forbidden, and Maximilian and his heirs were prevented from taking the throne in Naples. Spain is forced to relinquish Gibraltar, but is allowed to annex small slices of Portuguese territory on the border - a significant fortress here, a critical town there - as well as Andorra (at this point, Napoleon III really didn't care much) and - surprise surprise - Sardinia, for which the Spanish had traded Portugal in the negotiations. The Balkans were a good deal more confusing, but they were eventually sorted out - the Serbs grew enormously, annexing Bosnia and Dalmatia, as well as a chunk of northern Macedonia, mainly as a result of Anglo-German patronage and an unwillingness to create any more small, weak states for the Germans and Russians respectively to steamroll. The Russians initially wanted to create a Bulgarian state as well as their puppet Wallachia (or the southern chunk of the Danubian Principalities), but the British didn't want them to expand any more than absolutely necessary and therefore lumped the Bulgarians in with the Greeks, about which the Bulgarians were most unhappy. Constantinople itself was a very big sticking point, the British not entirely having reconciled themselves to Russian control and the Russians wanting something for fighting in the bloody war, and of course neither would consent to Greek rule, since those silly provincials were already getting way more than they had fought for. The idea of an international "free city" was brought up, with a council of clerics - Sunni and Greek Orthodox - controlling the city, but nobody really liked that either, so the Russians and British decided to let the Russians have the city, as well as the entire European coast of the Bosphorus, but to not allow the Russians any fortifications there whatsoever. The Greeks were allowed much of their "occupation zone" (in reality, they didn't do much occupying and instead a good deal of pillaging, and even then in only a small area of the territory) in Anatolia to annex, extending as far east as Attaleia, Ipsos, Dorylaion, and Herakleia Pontika, as well as most of the Aegean Islands and Crete, but Rhodes was given to the British on a 99-year lease, and Cyprus was directly made a colony of the Crown. A Turkish Republic was establish in central Anatolia, between the British-allied Greeks and the Russians, which controlled the Pontic coast (rapidly exacting justice on the Greeks who lived there just as the Greeks, Serbs, and Rumanians were slaughtering the Turks who lived in their designated zones), Ankara, and Antioch, and which was allowed nominal control of Mesopotamia, with a similar arrangement there as had existed with Egypt previously. Egypt and the Levant were of course annexed directly to Britain. Colonially, the French were allowed to retain conquered Algeria, and the British took over Libya and established a Hejaz protectorate, but really not much had happened. The French had been entirely content to concentrate on Europe, to the detriment of their endeavours elsewhere, such as in Siam, China, West Africa, and Abyssinia, which had been more or less ignored by the British.
The end result of the war, of course, is the reversion to the condition some call "international anarchy" and what I call good diplomacy. There were no overriding alliances at the end of the Great European War (they rejected the name "War of the Eighth Coalition" because France had had her own coalition too, and besides it was too long and sanguine for one of those wars); France and Spain had very good relations, of course, but there was some trans-Pyrenean rivalry between the two, especially as Spain rejoined the search for colonies in Africa. Germany and France, while not particularly liking each other, didn't really have absurd hatred between them, since the Germans were definitely oriented east and the French were just trying to recover from the immense expense of the war in blood and treasure, and didn't want to needlessly make enemies. Russia was fairly isolated, although the Tsar had a good rapport with France, mainly due to the lack of conflicting interests. The Germans and the British got along well enough, especially since the British had no real German navy about which to worry, but the industrial colossus headquartered at Berlin was still putting shivers down various MPs' spines. The main rivalry, of course, was that of Britain and Russia. These two worked together very infrequently, and the contest between the two, later called the "Great Game", was renewed in Central Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, and even (to a lesser extent) Scandinavia.
British internal politics underwent a shift of their own. Disraeli's Conservatives had been the ones to lead Britain into an unquestionably victorious war, albeit against their collective will - and besides, they'd managed to pick up a few good new colonies here and there too, hadn't they? It cannot be said that Britain withdrew from Europe after the Great European War, but they focused much more on colonial adventures from here on out with the new power the Conservatives brought to the helm. Even Gladstone, in his eternal seesaw of power with Disraeli, concentrated more on the colonies, although his tenures were more of a look at internal British politics than anything across the waves, and when he did dabble in foreign adventures, more often than not he chose to align with Liberal-leaning powers like Habsburg Spain and - later, as we shall see - the German Empire. All in all, the next few decades were a period of consolidation and expansion in the colonial field.
In France, the Emperor held on to power, despite several coup attempts in 1877 and 1878, and oversaw a revitalization of the French economy in the 1880s following the usual postwar slump. This was quickly reinvested into colonial expansion in West Africa, where the Emperor made sure to stay out of the way of the British. Upon his death in 1881, his son Napoleon IV began to reorganize the army on German lines, especially with the general staff school, and under his reign more than any other's in Europe France advanced by leaps and bounds in the sphere of military technology and theory.
Spain, under Maximilian I, entered a little golden age. The remaining colonial possessions Spain had were quickly reorganized and the few pangs of native unrest in Cuba and the Philippines were quickly overridden by Madrid's program to Liberalize the empire. More than previously, Spain found its interests repeatedly against those of France...and the United States of America, which was doing its own little thing. Greater involvement in the Mediterranean and limited inroads into the Two Sicilies also aided the recovery of Spanish commerce.
Otto von Bismarck's Germany enjoyed its flowering as a true Great Power in these years. Germany's great industrial potential was exploited more and more each year, and in this country compared with many other workers' rights were recognized early on. Indeed, von Bismarck decided to go along with the Liberals and later the Socialists in their attempts to secure first universal male suffrage and then greater workers' rights. Von Bismarck himself didn't really care about the workers, but he wanted to have complete control over the Reichstag in order to remain unquestionably in power and to continue with his diplomatic program of keeping everyone but himself relatively isolated. The German military was reintegrated, incorporating elements of the Austrian and South German armies and concentrating more on mobility. Von Moltke's successors were, along with the French, the first to realize the effect that railroads and the increase in firepower had on the balance between defense and offense, and they made every effort to increase troop mobility to offset this.
Russia under Alexander II struggled a bit. Success in the War was wonderful, but there were still growing undercurrents of dissatisfaction in the intelligentsia. The movements of nihilism and of Marxism found the greatest purchase in the Russian intellectual elite, despite government movements to not only free the serfs but to decentralize a little (it was mostly nominal, but it was a step) by creating the regional zemstvo councils. Threats against the Tsar's life grew and several assassination attempts were foiled, until finally Alexander combined not only harsh repressive actions (including the near destruction of the People's Will organization) but also decided to give a carrot as well, creating a relatively powerless state duma, which technically only had the power to recommend courses of action but whose "recommendations" Alexander generally followed anyway, because they were mostly extremely limited in scope.
Of the Balkan countries, Greece faced a great deal of nationalistic trouble in finally uniting the realm, but the Bulgarians and the few remaining Turks were gradually brought into line following a carrot and stick combination of harsh repression and increasing Liberalization. Serbia on the other hand simply grew more repressive. Under the leadership of King Milan Obrenovic, the Bosnian Muslims were nearly wiped out, and the Croats in the realm were forced into hiding. Three Karageorgevic-led uprisings were crushed, although the last one managed to take and hold Sarajevo, second city of the Kingdom, for a month, and also showed signs of technical support from Germany. Wallachia was a nice, quiet Russian puppet, and did as it was told; Hungary, under a fairly stable Liberal government, managed to reverse most of the Austrian
Reichsföderalreform ethnic projects and reestablish a semblance of Magyar population in most of the areas controlled from Budapest. Internationally, the Hungarians generally aligned with the Russians against the Germans.
America was an interesting sideshow to the great events taking place in Europe. The Confederate States, despite the fall of Richmond in 1864, were certainly not dead, and the wraith that passed for the rebels was reformed under the leadership of John S. Mosby, Nathan B. Forrest, and J.E.B. Stuart into a council of regional
jäger groups, such as Forrest's Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South, Mosby's Virginian organization Gray Riders, and Stuart off in the Great Plains with the native-allied Freedom's Sons. Indeed, it was Stuart who wreaked the greatest havoc on the Federal effort to reestablish a semblance of order in the United States, as he helped to rally the natives in the series of Plains Wars that the federal army was forced to fight all over the western two-thirds of the United States. Lincoln ended his presidency due to exhaustion and repeated assassination attempts in 1868 - even his conciliatory attempts had been rebuffed by the Radical Republican-controlled Congress, which refused to readmit most of the former Confederacy while they were still engaging in
jäger warfare - after having come so close to victory in reestablishing national unity. His Republican Party retained power, though, electing first Lincoln's faithful Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin, in 1868, and then replacing him with war hero, prominent Plains commander - victor of the Battle of Bozeman, where a large-scale Southern/Lakota attack under Stuart's personal command was repulsed - and compromise candidate William Sherman in 1872. Sherman's Presidency saw extremely harsh repressive actions against the white Southerners (including radical measures such as allowing their former slaves to redistribute much land amongst themselves and instituting some labor laws - this of course didn't really help the agricultural output of the region, but the new inventions of the time, such as the McCormick reaper, did, and so production increased anyway) but relatively conciliatory ones towards many natives, who were still forced onto reservations - but those reservations had significantly better land and were much larger than Hannibal Hamlin's original plan. As a result, the Republican coalition of the northern businessmen and the workers began to split apart. Sherman ended his Presidency in 1876 after narrowly avoiding a scandal over treatment of the defeated South and the white citizens there. The Democrats, having a bit of a revival in the North, managed to defeat James G. Blaine and take the White House with their own war hero, George Armstrong Custer, and his Vice President, Samuel Tilden. Under Custer, the Southern states were gradually readmitted to the Union and the Democratic power bloc was strengthened. The Republicans, the party now of the newly-freed blacks and of the white working class, was forced to relinquish control of many seats.
That's it. What do you think?
