In the very slightly different history of Conquistador, Lady Rebecca did not contract her fatal disease; she lived until 1622, when she shared her husband’s fate at the hands of her furious countrymen. She also bore two more sons, John and Samuel—and from them derived the long line of the Rolfes of Virginia. Few made any great mark on history; they were typical of their time and class: horsemen and hunters, owners of plantations and slaves, and growers of tobacco and wheat and corn. Some served on the Governor’s Council; others led the colony’s militia in time of war. They shared the declining fortunes of the Virginian gentry as the nineteenth century wore on, and lost the last of their wealth in the convulsions of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
None shook the earth… until John Rolfe VI, fresh from the Pacific Theatre of World War Two, started fiddling with a shortwave set one April in 1946….
APPENDIX THREE
A Brief Overview and Ethnography of the Post-Alexandrian World
When Alexander did not die in 323 B.C.E., the history of the world and its peoples turned down an entirely new track.
After recovering from his illness, Alexander spent several years consolidating his vast conquests, and pressing forward with his policy of Graeco-Iranian synthesis and Greek colonization. In 320 B.C.E., the Greek cities of Sicily and southern Italy, pressed by the Carthaginians and Italics, appealed to Alexander, and a new round of conquests began….
Alexander the Great died in August of 280 B.C.E., in the summer capital of Ecbatanta, in the Zagros mountains. He was succeeded by his son Alexander II (by the Bactrian-Persian princess Roxanne), and his dynasty remained in power for a further century and a half. By that time, the empire ruled from Babylon (renamed, of course, Alexandria) stretched from Iberia to the Ganges delta. After roughly A.D. 0, it began to decline and eventually fissured into a maze of quarrelsome city-states and regional kingdoms; by about A.D. 300 the last pretence of political unity was gone. Its ghost continued to haunt men’s minds for many generations, and “Alexandros” became alternate title for Zeus, and the term for “ruler” as well.
Twenty-two hundred years after his death, the heritage of the Conqueror still marked the world. Since the Alexandrian empire had been so much larger than Rome’s, its legacy was more widespread; half the 600 million or so human beings on Earth in the early twenty-first century spoke languages derived from Greek, in much the same way as French, Spanish and so forth are derived from Latin. The post-Alexandrian linguistic/cultural zone encompassed the whole Mediterranean basin, the Balkans as far north as the Carpathians, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Near East including Anatolia and the Caucasus, parts of the southern Ukraine, most of the settled part of Central Asia (plus Iran-Afghanistan), and northern India all the way from Pakistan to Bengal.
Technologically, the post-Greek zone was the most advanced part of the world prior to the opening of the Gate in 1946; the level is roughly late-medieval, and has shown little change for many centuries. Paper and printing are known, but gunpowder is not.
Arabic is limited to the southern coast of Arabia, and to spots along the East African coast. Most of sub-Saharan Africa is much as it was in our timeline in the Renaissance period, with a huge and obvious exception: no Islam or Christianity. Tribal statelets or ancephalous societies cover most of the continent, with some substantial kingdoms in the savannah of West Africa; those have been profoundly influenced by the neo-Greek states of North Africa via the trans-Saharan trade routes. The South Arabian civilizations have been influential down the east coast.
Southern India is inhabited by Dravidian-speaking Hindus who use Sanskrit as a liturgical language, but they have been heavily influenced by Greek culture. Southeast Asia is mostly Hindu but speaks Austronesian-Malaysian languages, except for a Han kingdom in what is northern Vietnam and southeastern China in our timeline.
There are vast differences in Central and East Asia. The Alexandrian empire and its neo-Greek successor states remained strong in Bactria—the settled, agricultural part of southern Central Asia—and assimilated the sedentary Iranian peoples. The north-Iranian nomads, blocked and harassed by the Greeks in Bactria, the southern Ukraine and cis-Caucasia, turn east instead of west—in our history they eventually moved as far as central Europe, pushed and followed by the Turkic, Ugrian (Hungarian) and later Mongol-speaking tribes.
In the Alexandrian timeline the migrations went the other way. The northern Iranian nomads first moved east over the Tien Shan and pushed the Tocharian-speakers of the Tarim Basin[1] and Shansi directly east, into Manchuria, Korea and northeastern China. Then they followed and bypassed them in waves, taking over outer and inner Mongolia, then invading China proper.
Korea-Manchuria-northeast China is held by a number of Selang-Arsi kingdoms, essentially Tocharian, but with substantial influence from the Chinese substrate. The rest of China as far south as the southern fringes of the Yangtse valley is occupied by mixed peoples speaking Iranian languages. Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Sinkiang and the steppe zone as far as the Tien Shan are inhabited by North Iranian nomads, and farmers in the oasis zones. The Mongol and Turkic peoples were swallowed up by the Tocharian and Iranian migrations.
Europe was always a backwater to the Alexandrian Empire, although Greece remained culturally important. Italy, southern France (roughly Provence), and Spain are post-Greek—small kingdoms and city-states, civilized in a provincial fashion.
In northern Europe, without the Romans to intervene, the Germanics more or less completely displaced the Celts; the destructive passage of the Cimbri through Gaul around 100 B.C., and their settlement in the Garronne estuary, began the obliteration of the western Celts.
The area from Ireland to the mouth of the Danube is occupied by various Germanic kingdoms and tribes—all barbarians and preliterate save for a narrow fringe along the edge of the post-Alexandrian zone; occasional folk-migrations and conquests along the Mediterranean shore have been of little long-range consequence, since the invaders were invariably absorbed by the higher culture.
In eastern Europe, the Slavs were weakened by their clashes with the Alexandrian Empire and its successors; this largely prevented the Dark Age migrations out of the urheimat in southeastern Poland/northwestern Ukraine, which in our history carried the Slavic languages deep into the Balkans and far into Asia. Instead, the Balts supplanted the Slavs in a long series of folk-movements, occupying the zone east of the Germanics and stretching to the upper Volga; however, except for a few of their southernmost kingdoms, they remain even more backward than their western neighbors.
New Guinea and Australia-New Zealand are roughly as in our history—prediscovery—except that the New Virginians have begun making settlements there.
North America was neolithic or hunter-gatherer when the Gate opened in 1946. Some early state-level societies had emerged in the Mississipi-Ohio valley, and the Iroquoian peoples had mostly replaced the others in the northeast and middle Atlantic states. On the Pacific, the Potlatch tribes—the Haida and their relatives—had the most elaborate culture, and had spread further than in our timeline, reaching down the Oregon coast. They had some contact with the Chumash, the most sophisticated of the Californian peoples.
The Aztec and Inca hegemonies had long since fallen apart in 1946, but their areas remained civilized and had advanced into a full Bronze Age, with extensive use of bronze weapons and tools, and both had developed genuine writing systems ultimately derived from the Maya syllabic script. Politically they were chaotic, with many small kingdoms; they remained handicapped by the lack of horses and other draft animals. The Nahuatl and Quechua languages had spread to most of those areas, reducing their linguistic diversity.
1
Tocharian is the name given to a group of Indo-European languages spoken in what is now Chinese Turkestan/Sinkiang from the Bronze Age through the early medieval period. The Tocharian speakers were the easternmost of the Indo-European peoples, and their tongue (rather oddly) shows a closer kinship to the western Indo-European languages (Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Italic) than it does to the Indo-Iranian group. Recent archaeological work in the Tarim, whose climate is uniquely suited to preserving bodies, has shown that the Tocharians were European in appearance as well—tall, narrow-faced people with light complexions and often blond or red hair; in fact, they looked rather like Central or Northern Europeans. In our history they were overrun and assimilated by Turkic-speaking peoples, the ancestors of the present Uighur population of Sinkiang.