The Gate of Worlds

by Robert Silverberg

The Black Death killed three fourths of the European population, delaying progress and, ultimately, the Industrial Revolution. Most of Central Europe was conquered by the Ottoman Empire, which occupied it until the twentieth century, leaving it in no shape for colonization of much of the non-European world as in our timeline. Constantinople was conquered in 1420, the Ottomans moved into Vienna in 1440, and took over Paris in 1460, before invading the British Isles in 1490.

The greater virulence of the Black Death in Europe allowed non-European powers to emerge. These included the Aztecs and Incas in Central America and South America, given that Europeans only 'discovered' the Americas in 1585 through an inadvertent Portuguese expedition. In Eastern Asia, Russia and Japan are now the main powers. By contrast, Turkey has undergone a period of instability that cost it control over England, from which it was expelled in the early twentieth century due to the leadership of a new royal dynasty inaugurated by "James the Valiant." Evidently, William Shakespeare's ancestors survived the epidemic, although Shakespeare wrote his histories, tragedies and comedies in the Turkish language, set in the Ottoman Empire milieu of England's new Muslim masters. The narrator and protagonist is eighteen-year-old Dan Beauchamp, who travels from impoverished England in 1967 to seek his fortune in the Aztec Empire. Along his way, he is accompanied by Aztec philosopher Quequex.