Is history a random sequence of unrelated events?

[bigdaddy1204]

"History is not a random sequence of unrelated events. Everything affects, and is affected by, everything else." - William Manchester, A World Lit Only By Fire.

The collapse of the Byzantine Empire in the period 1025 to 1204 seems to parallel the collapse of the Caliphate of Cordoba and Muslim Andalusia.

Were these two events related? If you changed one, would it affect the other? And what other examples can you find of historical events that seem unrelated, but might actually be connected?

Another example: it has been claimed Germany lost WW2 in May 1940, when many Luftwaffe transport planes were shot down over the Netherlands. Two years later, it was the Luftwaffe's lack of transport aircraft that made it impossible to supply the Stalingrad pocket in the winter of 1942/3.

What historical events that don't seem obviously linked, might also have played a bigger role than we thought?

[Ἀπολλόδοτος Α΄ ὁ Σωτήρ]

For every action, there's a reaction...

[Cyclops]

[MARXISM INTENSIFIES]

Look that's a bizarre clickbait thread title. If historical events are unrelated then there's no history, you could file an account of the battle of Thermopylae in with your Gordon Ramsay memes.

History, from the first word of the first history book, is an enquiry into the relationships between events. Typically they are causal, linear and hierarchic, but we've seen some nice stabs at complex relationships in this forum, eg the "Did Philip IV of Spain cause the fall of the Ming Dynasty in China" thread.

I'm interested in the Crisis of the Third Century in Roman history, which seems to be a period where the Western Mediterranean suffered traumatic economic collapse, leading to political collapse two centuries later (it limped on that long sustained by the wealth of the eastern Med I think) and ultimately a dramatic shift in Western and Northern Europe from a Mediterranean to an Atlantic economy. Relating the rise of Portugal (and the establishment of a globe spanning empire) to social and economic decay in city state administration in adjacent and further provinces over a thousand years before is mind boggling but I think demonstrable.