The sixth and seventh centuries, a far stronger reaction to the Avars, Persia, and the Arabs?
The Northern frontier, less of a tribal threat to the Balkans?
The survival of the Western Empire would also have had major effects on the East, which would have had an ally able to send troops in major crises but also a strategic bonus in the upper and middle Danube area. It is possible that the survival of a militarily powerful West through the third and fourth centuries, and perhaps its preservation in the fifth, would have involved a scenario where the Empire held onto or regained Dacia. Apparently evacuated at a time of military crisis in the mid-third century, probably by Gallienus or Aurelian, it might have been preserved as a province had the Empire’s rulers had the will to follow through Marcus Aurelius’ occupation of the Czech lands to the Carpathians in the 180s. Due to lack of firm evidence we cannot say for definite that Marcus had a grand plan of strategy in mind to advance the frontier permanently to the Carpathians, but the discovery of Roman military structures in Bohemia would indicate that a long-term occupation was planned. Lacking a determined resistance from the occupied tribes with outside assistance, the factor which led to the similar advances in Scotland in the 80s and 140s and in Iraq in 114–17 being aborted, there would have been no logical reason for a later Emperor to withdraw in the later second or third centuries.
Thus Rome would have been been defending the Carpathians not the Danube as the frontier against the German tribes through the third century; a limited number of mountain passes and gaps in the Carpathian ridges were easier to defend than a river which was crossable for all its length and needed more troops. This more viable frontier would then have been defendable through the third century, barring major defeats like that of Decius by Kniva’s Goths in 251, even with the Empire’s troop numbers reduced due to the serious outbreak of plague in the early 250s.
Alternatively, Dacia might have been abandoned due to reduced troop levels and the number of attacks from neighbouring tribes, if not in the third century, then under pressure from the Goths as they retreated from the expanding Hunnic empire on the steppes around 376. Roman-held Dacia would then have been an obvious destination for their refugees rather than the south bank of the Danube as in real life. Dacia might have been lost to the Huns themselves in the 430s, or fallen under the weight of attacks by tribal refugees from Attila at a time when the Western Empire could not manage a military response, maybe after the death of Constantius III in 421, in the succession crisis before Galla Placidia secured the throne for her son Valentinian III in 425. In this scenario of a surviving Western Empire, the Rhine would not have been crossed by a permanent Germanic presence in 406, and thus armed bands of warriors from 406 and refugees from the 430s–440s would not have been settling in Gaul, Spain, and Africa. The pressure of westward tribal movements on Dacia and any Roman territories in Bohemia would have been acute, leading to the same sort of demands for admission that the refugee Goths made on the lower Danube in 376. Refusing them admission to the Empire would have run the risk of defiance, armed confrontation, and a Roman defeat such as the Goths carried out in 376–8. Constantius III, who handled the Gothic problem in Spain and Gaul successfully in 411–18 and allowed them a vassal kingdom, and Aetius had the military and diplomatic skill to handle such a Romano-German crisis successfully. Valentinian III, Aetius’ jealous sovereign who assassinated him in 454 and precipitated the West’s fatal collapse, did not.
Even if Dacia and/or the Czech lands had been lost to the German tribes in the early fifth century, this might not have been permanent. Had the West retained a str
Excerpt from : If Rome Hadn't Fallen: What Might Have Happened If the Western Empire Had Survived
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