Butterfly effect that have happened throughout history.

The decision of a Tang dynasty emperor to give a Turkic nobleman more status led to Central Asia becoming Turkic, the creation of Russia and Turkey, the Spanish colonization of America and eventually the USA.

The year is 742 and the Tang dynasty looks like this:

The Tang is arguably at its peak, the emperor would probably be known as one of the greatest Chinese emperors if not THE greatest emperor had he not made one major error.

The Tang dynasty at the time had something like 45% of the world’s economy and was socially and culturally flourishing, much of the major innovations in economic policy that powered the Song golden age found their roots in Tang dynasty economic policy. It was cosmopolitan, socially vibrant, scientifically advanced and arguably still had some room left to keep going up.

That is, until this guy right here gets promoted to regional warlord of the North:

This is An Lushan, a Turkic-Central Asian nobleman who was in the service of the Tang army in the 7th century AD. As a general he led his troops to defeat several rebellions by Khitans and other tribes on the Northern frontier and as a result gained a lot of power and prestige in the Tang court.

One of his major policies was to bring more non-Han soldiers and generals into the Tang army, so the Emperor says well he’s successful enough in defeating the Khitans and Turks, let’s go ahead and let him get his wish.

An Lushan had somehow managed to get permission to have not one region, but three out of nine military regions on the Northern border and he controlled nearly 50% of the Tang elite cavalry, many of whom were Turkic or Mongolic in origin.

So now An Lushan has a bunch of soldiers whom are more loyal to him than the emperor, and also most of his generals are Turko-Mongol and certainly do not place the emperor over their resident Khagan. He then decided “fuck it, I’m gonna try to create my own dynasty now” which leads to a rebellion named after him and a small dynasty called the Yan dynasty centered around Hebei.

The rebellion caused the Chinese population to drop from ~50 million to 20 million and the Tang dynasty never really recovers from it, had the rebellion not happened the Tang would’ve likely kept going for another century or two considering that the Tang actually managed to stay alive for another century in our timeline even with this rebellion occurring.

Now the Tang dynasty was forced to devolve much central power to regional warlords known as Jiedushi, which meant that the local warlords fragment into much smaller statelets than in previous collapses, for example the Han dynasty collapsed led to the three Kingdoms periods while the Jin dynasty collapse led to again a relatively stable 2–3 kingdom period. The Tang collapsed into 5 dynasties and 10 kingdoms, relatively ripen for something dramatic to happen.

“Even after the difficult suppression of that rebellion, some jiedushi such as the Three Fanzhen of Hebei were allowed to retain their powers due to the weakened state of the court. The jiedushi were one the primary factors which contributed to the political division of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, a period marked by continuous infighting among rival kingdoms, dynasties, and regional regimes established by jiedushi.”

Now, remember the small group that An Lushan managed to suppress as a general the Khitans? Well the Khitans used to be a small semi-nomadic tribe in the Liao river valley that had been a vassal tribe to either the Turkic people in Mongolia or the Tang dynasty, the sudden collapse of Tang hegemony meant they were finally free to expand.

The political environment of Northern China is so fractured that the Khitans whom were originally a weak semi-nomadic polity in Manchuria are able to effectively blitzkrieg themselves into Northern China.

The Khitans then expanded into Mongolia and Northern China, establishing the Liao dynasty.

See that small yellow strip? That is called the 16 prefectures, a small but extremely important territory that completes the great wall, without it the great wall is essentially useless and as a result the Chinese dynasty that reunifies most of the country suddenly has a major problem on their hands.

The Khitans could attack south and retreat north whenever they wanted but the Song couldn’t follow back, as a result of this the Song and Liao fought pretty much non-stop for the first century of their existences, and neither could really make a big dent in each others defenses. Eventually the Song and Liao decided to settle the issue by having the Song pay the Liao a fixed amount of silk and other treasure each year to keep the Khitans from invading and the Song and Liao had peace for a while.

But the Song never really forgot about how a big piece of territory that was supposed to be theirs is in the hands of some barbarians. Even then the Khitans were actually faithful to the treaty, as long as the Song paid up, nothing happened.

One thing that is a common theme throughout history is when a settled civilization is being harassed by a nomadic one, and the settled civilization decides to call up some other nomads to beat up the original ones but then it turns out that the old nomads were becoming more like the sedentary civilization while the new nomads end up beating up the settled civilization even more after they are done.

So the Song never really forgot about how the Khitans took their land and decided to call up another semi-nomadic group of barbarians called the Jurchens (ancestral to the later Manchus) to come destroy the Liao.

Now in the meantime the Liao had actually sinicized to such a degree that when the Mongols rolled around, they actually called the Khitans Chinese and put them in the racial caste system they made as Northern Chinese instead of Semu or Mongol, this is despite the Khitans being very close to Mongols ethnically (The Modern name of China in Mongolian is still derived from the term “Khitan”). The Liao had begun its own process of sedentarization, with the construction of the Liao great wall to block various Mongolic and Turkic tribes and the Khitans began to pick up agriculture.

This meant that the Liao stood no chance against the Jurchens whom were still very much horse barbarians and the Liao got rolled over, but the Liao envoy dispatched to the Song had a warning they really should’ve taken seriously:

“We might’ve been horse barbarians 200 years ago but you guys don’t know, we aren’t those horse barbarians anymore! when the Jurchens take over our lands, they will take over your lands too!”

And what did the Song do? They ignore their advice and begin attacking the Khitans themselves, obviously due to the geography they get totally destroyed and the Jurchens have to finish the Liao themselves and just as the Liao envoys said the Jurchens marched south and conquered Northern China.

Now the Song is really fucked, not only did they lose their pretty terrible defensive line in the north but now they are set all the way back to the Huai river and the Jurchens can just launch attacks on a huge front, the Jurchens and Song fight wars on and off for the next century.

Now as the Liao collapsed they lost control over Mongolia, so the Jin dynasty which sees itself as a successor of the Liao basically tries to walk into Mongolia again, a few of the Mongol tribes align themselves but one of those tribes doesn’t, the name of the tribe? Khamag Mongol.

So the Jin never really was able to control Mongolia like the Khitans were, so they decide to go the good ol’ divide and conquer route, they decide to support the Tatars against the Mongols, the Tatars capture Genghis Khan’s grandfather and the Jin have him tortured and executed which leads to huge enmity between Jurchen aligned tribes and anti-Jin tribes.

This was the first motivation for the Mongols to eventually start attacking the Jin dynasty. Now the Jin dynasty itself became like the Liao that preceded them, the Jin became sinicized and slowly lost the marital ability that had allowed them to conquer the Khitans and subdue to proto-Mongolic tribes as well as conquer Northern China, so by the time the Mongols roll around the Jin get absolutely wrecked by the Mongols.

So the Mongols are now supremely confident, they managed to defeat the Jin and now they develop tactics they used during their war with the Jin and consolidate their forces, now swelling with Khitan, Jurchen and even Han defectors from the Jin whom would later form the core of the Mongol army later on.

Remember those Khitans from earlier? A splinter group of them whom had refused to submit to the Jin actually fled west to Xinjiang and created a dynasty called the Western Liao in Xinjiang that bordered the Khwarezmian empire which controlled Iran and Central Asia.

The Western Liao had recently had a coup d’etat, a Naiman prince fled to Western Liao and was given a position, only for him to betray the emperor and take power for himself. Now the Mongols had a major reason to go into Central Asia, the prince could use the Western Liao as a stepping stone to reconquer his tribal lands from the Mongols and this was a very big threat. The Mongols then invaded the Western Liao and put to rest the last remnants of the Khitan Liao dynasty.

Now the Mongols border Russia, Central Asia, Iran and China.

Eventually the Mongols conquer China, Iran, Central Asia, Russia and the middle east:

First instance of the butterfly effect:

So the Mongols end up invading central Asia and killing 90% of Iran and Central Asia’s population, which led to the end of the historical dominance of Iranian languages in the area. The result of this conquest meant that the centuries old dominance of Iranian cultures and languages ends up being supplanted by Turkic languages in less than a decade.

Now that’s not the only instance:

The destruction in Central Asia leads to the displacement of various Turkic tribes that fled the Mongol conquest to the only place that had a similar climate and terrain to Central Asia that was not under the control of the Mongols - Anatolia.

To the north of the Ottomans on the Eastern European plain the Mongols then conquer the Kipchak-Cumans and the early Russian states, the legacy of this is the unification of the disparate Russian states into the Muscovy duchy. Which is the basis of modern day Russia.

The Mongol empire ushers in a new era of trade and commerce along the silk road, one fellow from Italy named Marco Polo decides to head east and eventually ends up in China. His writings and stories are recorded and passed around in Europe and paint the picture of Asia as a rich and prosperous continent that has a lot of treasure waiting to be taken and a lot of heathens waiting to be Christianized.

The Ottomans would then eventually cut off trade between Asia and Europe, which leads to the Spanish and Portuguese to seek alternative trading routes. One of these fellows named Cristobal Colon is inspired by Marco Polo’s original stories and decides he wants to try to get to Asia, he decides to get west instead of east which leads to him bumping into two new continents.

This eventually leads to the Spanish colonization of the America’s

Soon one of the countries that was a rival of the Spanish that wanted in on all the gold and resources the Spanish now had in abundance due to the colonization of the America’s starts to claim the Eastern coast of the United States

Which then expands to the Continental US we know today.

Synopsis: The decision of a Tang emperor to give a Turkic nobleman more status leads to the decline of the Tang dynasty which leads to the rise of the Khitans which leads to the rise of the Jurchens which leads to the rise of the Mongols, whom unify Russia under Moscow, displace Iranic languages from Central Asia and push Turkic tribes into Anatolia, which leads to the Ottoman ban on European trade heading East which leads to Spanish ships heading west which leads to European colonization of the America’s and eventually leads to the establishment of the United States.