What if the Byzantine empire never fell?

>tfw People Republic of Rome exist in your lifetime

the only way byzantine could stay standing is if the muslim conquests were a complete failure. as long as there was a caliphate somewhere, they would eventually wage war on byzantine. for byzantine to stand they would have to win every war against muslims, which sooner or later it would come down to "there can be only one." muslim culture would take the place of byzantine in history, that is to say, eradicated

>never rose
>gif literally show actual eastward expansion as well as the taking of western and Bosporus territory the eats never held before
Are you retarded?

If it never fell it would de-legitimize the claim of all empires fall one day. But why would it be called Romania? It would technically still be an empire so why not Roman Empire. It was what contemporaries called it. And if the HRE survived would it be treated like a singular state or like the EU. When the time for an election comes who becomes emperor, a king or the actual head of state of the country?

Theoretically, the conquests could succeed, but the Caliphate would break apart (as it did IRL) before reaching Anatolia.

At that point, whatever entity was in charge of Persia would likely attack the states in Syria/Iraq from the east for perceived ez conquest.

What happens next is anyone's guess. Likely some sort of Great Game for the Levant/Mesopotamia between ERE and alt-Persia.

Without the Arab invasions, Byzantium would be more prosperous and larger than OTL, but this brings up so many butterflies it's hard to tell (who would have predicated the Crusades, called upon to help ERE against Muslims, would end up nearly destroying it).

Depending on the competency of the Emperors, some form of Western conquest is possible. If the Empire grows too vast (which is not that big, honestly), I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up evolving into something similar to the HRE, with a holy Emperor on top but one with few actual powers in a decentralized realm.

Eventually someone would try to centralize a la Louis XIV, and other states would attack ERE to prevent it from growing too strong.

As Byzantium never had any of the democratic/representative trappings of, say, England or Poland, disgruntled nobles and a burgeoning bourgeoisie would likely team up after some major crisis to replace/remove the Emperor.

Civil war ensues, other countries probably use this time to grab territory where they can, and the ERE is likely a shell of its former self by the end, if it even exists as a singular unit.

A number of warlords would have likely carved out their own states, local nobles insufficiently Romanized (read: Greek-ified) would try to establish their own states as well, and I wouldn't be surprised if whoever's Emperor ends up only holding (some of) the natively Greek lands (by that point, Greece and Anatolia definitely, maybe some smaller areas of the Balkans and northern Syria/Iraq as well, depending on cultural diffusion/settlement patterns).

There's also the very simple outcome of the empire better resisting the initial Arab attacks, outliving the caliphate, and presenting a strong enough front that the arabs piss off.

Despite common myth, they did NOT attack when they perceived themselves as being weaker. On top of that, the empire didn't really do extermination. Hard to do right, and it just left a power vacuum that some other bastards would fill. Who would then fall on your weakend borders and armies.

Mudshits would still be around, just with less territory.

What I don't understand, what did Ottomans do right and Byzzies did wrong, for Ottomans to expand so much while starting with the same territories that Byzzies had for most of their existence?

Because they called it Romania, a name that existed since before the Fall of the West. It literally means Domain of the Romans, how Dacians got to name their country that I have no idea. But I say that it would be called so because people referred to the Ottoman Empire as Turkey since before it fell so I supposed that "The Roman Empire" would be the state's official name, but it wouldn't be popularly called that, like how we call The Republic of China as Taiwan.

I'm so much more okay with this, over what we have now.

The Byzantines were fighting off the West and the East at the same time for pretty much all their existence. The Ottomans faced fewer threats from the East and during the Age of Discovery the West was much more focused on exploring other bountiful continents than taking over Ottoman desert land.

It honestly depends on several things. There are like 3 ways a Byzantine Empire can survive. One is a POD that happens early on, one extremely overused one is if they won Manzikert. This basically means that Byzantines will probably live into the modern area with deep parts of a Hellenized Anatolia. A second one is where Theodore II Laskaris stops the Palaiologoi from going into power, as the Palaiologoi were the ones to lose Anatolia cause they really didn't give a shit. This version is modern Greece, southern Albania, FYROM, and south Bulgaria, plus the west coast of Anatolia, and Thrace, of course. Third is one where Greece wins the Greco Turkish war after WWI by winning a decisive victory, and not pushing into Ankara and instead defend their position. Eventually the Turks give up and Britain gives Constantinople to the Greeks, and as every Greek man woman and child are collectively orgasming, they proclaim the state Basilea Rhomaion. We're really however just looking at Greece with Thrace and just the Greek majority and large minority parts of Anatolia, and that's pretty much just the coastline and nothing else. That's just my two cents, anyways

The thing that posters who keep saying "Oh it would be just Greece + Constantinople" forget, is that Constantinople has as many citizens as all of Greece and Turkey's most important city. Without it, Turkey is an endless series of backwater cities, farmland and industrial towns.

Hey, I'm not saying Constantinople is insignificant, if that's what you're saying

No, no I just happened to quote you because you were the last person to mention that scenario. What I always wondered about though, can a city like Constantinople retain it's greatness despite not having the lands and the empire that were there when it became great? It doesn't make sense, but then you have places like Hong Kong and Singapore and they are just that.

What I mean by "just that" is huge, important cities without any significant land holdings.

It made the empire, not the other way around.