1444: Rebuilding Rome After Leaving the Ming Dynasty

Earn battle merits, rise to the rank of marquis and grand chancellor, and marry the woman you love? Sorry, during the Zhengtong era of the Ming dynasty, a man that incredible simply wasn't allowed to exist.

If you wanted to distinguish yourself, you had to curry favor with your superiors at the garrison, wait on them hand and foot, and beg for a chance to earn merits on the battlefield. If you were lucky enough to earn merit and make it off the battlefield alive, the credit would be split thirty-seventy. Even getting your thirty percent meant selling your dignity and kneeling to beg for scraps. And plenty of people couldn't even get that far. Refuse to kneel, and they'd send you to the Western Regions to eat sand.

But he said, “A hero may compromise and yield, but he must never sell his soul. I’ll fight for what I want myself. If there’s no opportunity under the Ming, then I’ll go to the ends of the earth.”

He said it, and he did it. He led a host of disillusioned Ming men across Eurasia to the land of opportunity that awaited them: Constantinople.

“From now on, we are the Western Roman Empire.”

“Wasn’t the Western Roman Empire destroyed? We’re the Eastern Romans!”

“That was then. The Eastern Roman Empire is in Beijing now.”