: An Alternate History 2.0

After quite some thought regarding a previous idea of mine which some of you may well know, I have had an epiphany! As it turns out, there are a number of parallels between the Crusades and the Push for Space. Whatever economic opportunities there are/were at either, the cost of Modern Civilization/Medieval Europe to expand it's presence to such a place is/was so prohibitively expensive that ultimately any motive for doing so would have to be political... as it was for the Crusades, though religious idealism certainly played a role in driving the people who took part. The main problem is and was that whatever the initial motive, if the endeavour isn't profitable then whatever the political motive was dries up like a prune in Atlanta. All the resources and manpower spent crusading were resources and manpower not being spent on building infrastructure, consolidating monarchical power, or fighting war against EUROPEANS. All of this eroded the essential ethos that drove the initial Crusades.

My premise? A united, militant Christendom setting out to take over the world for Christ, with a POD somewhere over the course of one of the first three Crusades. What I realized in pondering this was that unlike space the Holy Land had pre-existing trade going on: The Silk Road, along which the spice trade had been proceeding long before the Crusaders came. If a political body involved in the Crusades such as the Knights Templar had opted to capitalize on this trade they could have more than paid for the Crusades, prolonging the endeavour longer than in OTL.

After those Mideastern lands have been secured more firmly by Christendom, medical knowledge picked up over there proves very useful in lightening the blow suffered by Western Europe thanks to the Black Death. Thus the socio-political order of the time - which includes the Catholic Church - suffers a less severe blow. Protestant Movements may or may not emerge, but it won't catch quite as well as it did in the history you or I might be familiar with regardless. What follows, in time, is a confident expansion into places like Africa and Asia. The message the Church sends is clear: if the native peoples convert, they will be welcomed as fellow brothers in Christ. If they refuse. choose to keep their sinful ways, then they shall face an army with no fear of death and and ultimately a most painful subjugation. Then the Mongols come, and for the first time in a while the European are humbled most verily.

In this timeline as in ours, the Mongols' military capabilities are far beyond those of the Europeans, and although it goes marginally better than our history records due to the less severe blow given by the Black Death and Europe with more capacity for cooperating, it is still a rather hopeless war. Here as in OTL, a lucky archer's arrow manages to kill Genghis Khan. By their own laws the Mongols are obligated to return home to select a new Khan.

In the time which follows,Christendom -whose spiritual center lies in Rome, from whence the Pope grants his blessing to whichever monarch is currently the Defender of Christendom. He (invariably so) will proceed to rally the rest of Christendom to both it's defense and expansion. Trade with heathen peoples is still done - in the Orient, Africa, and in time the Americas but always carefully monitored and only legal if it is in Christendom's interests to do so.The ultimate goal of all this is that all the world will one day lie under Christ's domain.

Three questions:

1. What will the various Oriental and African peoples think of the civilization I have described, and how to best describe their interactions?

2. Given the history I have described, what happens to the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment, or the Industrial Revolution?

3. How to best work this within the confines off the Swashbuckler genre?

To do this you essentially have to eliminate the partisan nature of European nationalism, which isn't going to be easy.

The Enlightenment/development of the scientific method might take a hit, or at least take longer- the Enlightenment at least sprung in part from the weakening of the Catholic Church as a part of people's lives. If the success in the Crusades strengthens their influence, a few prominent scientist in OTL will probably get smothered. (Or at least, smothered earlier than they were, as in the case of Galileo.) As this is a space-centered story, you'd have to butterfly the effect away somehow.

Also, is this story going to deliver An Aesop either for or against Christianity? Either one would be considerably different, at least in tone/themes, than a straight-up alternate history.