Low German

I still don't know the full extent to which Andalusada's butterflies change the evolution (and survival) of languages. I do know that Mozarabic survives, or at least evolves into a spoken language the world recognizes as "Moorish."

At least one other language survives to Andalusada's present day: Low German, in various iterations.

Kaspar Sansinger

Born: April 24, 1773

The history of 19th-century Cabralia was shaped by many great names, but rising above them all are a triumvirate that have gone down in history as the Three Wise Men. First among them, in both chronological and conventional order, is Kaspar Sansinger - military leader in the Cabralian War of Independency, statesman, and ultimately architect of the Grand Principality's descent into monarchism. This is his story.

Caliphal succession

al-Mujadid meant the Caliphate of Seville to be a hereditary monarchy, like contemporary France or England at the time. Because his designated son Ahmad went blasphemously insane, that didn't work out, and Umayyad Seville never did manage to sort out a succession system before al-Mahdi was forced into exile in 1792.

Caliph Yusuf I, significantly, didn't leave directions for the process himself, beyond specifying in no uncertain terms that there would never be a Caliph Sufyan. The original idea was probably that the Caliph of New Andalusia would appoint his successor (possibly naming him the Abdallah), who on his death or resignation would be acclaimed by the Maxaha and ascend to the throne accordingly. Once again, that didn't work out. Unlike Seville before it, though, the UCNA has evolved a formal (if mostly unwritten) policy for handling caliphal successions. This is how it works.

The Sodalite Revolt of 1830

France managed to ride out the Burning Thirties more or less unscathed. They had better things to do, like catching their breath. The House of Burgundy just finished toppling the House of Guise, driven Spain out of the Côte d'Or (with a bit of help), and hounded the Most Christian King [who?] into Roman exile. There was work to do: standardizing measures, rebuilding polders, renegotiating treaties, restoring normalcy in France.

In 1830, it had a chance to come undone - and didn't.

The Occidental French

It's been awhile since my most recent ethnicity, and [as of 11/29] I've been struck with a few days of something that's never happened before: writer's block. I honestly have no ideas to run with, at least for anything particularly new or interesting...

...but I do see some big, glaring things that need filling in. Like the UCNA's population, for instance. Where the hell do they all come from? Some are Arabs, many other are Moors, some are Mozarabs... but they have to come from somewhere. Who are they? How do they interact with each other?

Of all the ethnic groups of the UCNA, though, none has vexed me quite so much as the elephant in the room: the Catholic French Andalusians. Until tonight, I haven't written anything significant about them. Until tonight, anyways, when I named them the Occidentales. This is their story.

The Black Friars

For the first few centuries of the modern era, everybody expected the French Inquisition. Dystopian Catholic France would have it no other way. They scoured Farrellitism into paranoid French undergrounds or Occidental exile; to this day, children are terrorized into good behavior by the simple threat "Gardes ta langue": watch your tongue. When the Nestorian Epistles led to the construction of Saint-Thomas d'Indé in Paris, the Inquisitors fought it tooth and nail, driving several Syro-Indian metrans back to the Malabar Coast before the rest were built and burning one or two Heretical Heroes [who?]. During the Guise Golden Age, any thinker or writer of note expected a visit from inquisitors at some point during their career; the first visit by the Inquisition was a commemorated coming of age, like losing your virginity.

After the War of the French Succession, the Burgundian disengagement from the Catholic Church led to the decline of the Inquisition as an arm of the French state. But given how powerful it had been for those first 200 years, is it any surprise that the fear of the Inquistion has lasted to the present day?

In Andalusada, that fear has a name, a face and a mythos: the Black Friars.

The I.C.&Cie. Modeste AR

The world's most famous tierseur is also its least respected. In the market ecology of tierseurs, the Modeste's niche is to be the pariah, the untouchable, the one that all other customers sniff their noses at. The Modeste exists as a designated inferior for all others in the industry to be better than in every way. It also exists because a valid market niche exists for such a device.

Before 1895, the tierseureries coexisted in peace. Oh, there was drama between the tierseureurs - what artistic medium isn't without its petty feuds and legendary rivalries? - but the industry, such as it was, was governed by a rigid unspoken code of honor. Each tierseurerie was distinct, and they made a point of not stepping on each other's toes.

In 1895, Innocent Cauvigne et Cie. introduced their own interpretation of the tierseur. No sooner had the first order been shipped than the Calais firm was buried under a dozen lawsuits from outraged tierseureries, each and all striving to destroy the upstart.

The Shimoga man-eaters

The events described in this post are nothing historical. No lines on maps were redrawn because of it, no wars fought, no great men created and only a few notable ones [who?] destroyed. If I had never thought of it, if it had never been written, Andalusada would look no different. In no way does this significantly change the overall flow of history.

This post is parerga. And yet it is legendary parerga. This post is a symptom of imperial France in its decline, a post of a story that's become etched in the French consciousness as surely as Jaws is in ours.

Background to the Shimoga man-eaters

Since it hasn't been mentioned in awhile, southern India is a French colony. L'affaire de Chimogue was entirely a colonial affair, taking place in French Malenadu - specifically in the vicinity of Shimoga, home to a fairly large and young coffee latifonde.

• The War of the French Succession left the Empire perilously close to fiscal collapse; the next generation had been spent trying to rebuild it. Fortunately for them, the Iberian coffee monopoly had cracked with the collapse of Umayyad Seville thirty years earlier; since the price of New World coffee stayed high (between limited Mexican production and Cabralia's war-shaken economy), the French colonies were able to make it a lucrative cash crop, leading to the Oriental Company's latifundism.
• From the 1880s, the spread of coffee rust blight from Africa started seriously impacting the global coffee market. French India, which had thus far managed to avoid the coffee blight, was thus even more profitable than it had ever been before.
• About a generation later [when?], tiger-hunting become the sport of choice for a certain type of cosmopolitan noble twit. Guns in hand (many totally inadequate for the task; many Frenchmen gave their lives before the black-powder cat-gun was sorted out), they managed to devastate the Malabar tiger population, which led to some interesting side effects, such as...
• ...the collapse of tiger-hunting, and with it preparation for dealing with tigers.
• ...the collapse of a lot of former tiger habitats, as growing populations along the Malabar Coast began expanding outward, pushing back the tree coverage that the tigers needed to move and progressively driving them north.
• ...a period of about a decade in which so few tiger hunts were successful that the tables began to turn: every year during this period [when?], Malabar tigers killed more humans than humans could find tigers to kill. (This was chalked up to the tigers being more aggressive rather than any environmental changes.)

French colonial policy had thoughtlessly prepared a perfect storm. Early in the 20th century [when?], that storm hit.

Tierseur

Tierseur, n. French. A third-bore rifle, esp. used for the hunting of dangerous game.

In the French Empire, no hunt is more revered or mythologized than the tiger hunt. And just as no iconic Great White Hunter IRL is complete without a big-bore double rifle, no great French hunter is great without his weapon of choice: a tierseur.

The Remarkable Mahr

No Muslim marriage is complete without a mahr: a mandatory expenditure (4:4 aside, it's not a "gift") that the husband owes to his wife, without which the entire nikah is void. I'm saying it here because you, dear reader, might not know it already: Andalusada (where the survival of Moorish Spain has left most of Europe much more exposed to Moorish interpretations of Islamic cultural norms) already does.

In fiction, of course, simply paying in cash isn't gonna cut it. A mahr is an opportunity for the author to say something important about the bride-to-be, and just like the chance for anyone opposed to speak now or forever hold their peace, it's too good to pass up. Any creative works that involve a mahr will, almost of necessity, involve a Remarkable Mahr.

Moorish phratries

When Abu Talha Rais first sighted the northern coast of Cabralia in 1484, he had no illusions that he'd reached India. (He did, however, name Hispaniola al-Waqwaq, whence its current name "Guaquaquite.") Instead, he categorically named everything on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean the Bilad al-Aqsa: "the Farthest Land." Later maps would declare the continents to be "America" and "Cabralia," and the water between them and Florida Algeciras to be "Caribby," but in Arabic none of that mattered. For the Moorish world, the New World was always al-Aqsa.

For most of the Five Families era, the Arabs weren't terribly interested in colonizing it. It was simpler to let the Isidorans ease their demographic pressures by moving abroad, converting the New World to (Isidoran) Catholicism and making them administrators of the dhimma. Come 1700, though, Umayyad Seville changed that forever. And when in 1792 al-Mahdi was driven into Maghrebi exile, things changed forever again.

Zahra

Life: 1887-present.
Position: Calipha of the Umayyad Caliphate in New Andalusia
Preceded by: [who?]

The electoral side of the UCNA's history is justifiably a sausage party: as of 1930, women's suffrage is still something that needs campaigning for. The monarchic side of the UCNA's political history is, at this point, a sausage party too, and it shouldn't be. Presumably the caliphs have no shortage of wives and daughters, but who are they? What are they doing?

As of tonight, I'm only really familiar with the current calipha of New Andalusia; I'm not even sure about her family name yet. What I know is that, in several spellings, her name is Zahra, devoted wife of Caliph Yusuf III. This is her story.

The Backbiting Journalists

This is the golden age of newspapers. They're everywhere, and so are their employees; any newspaper reporter could be a stock character - in fact, most of them are, because Andalusada recognizes the same News Tropes and uses them in the same basic ways.

When you have two of them, however, they transform into a world-specific trope worth talking about on its own: the Backbiting Journalists. Very much like Buddy Cops, Backbiting Journalists come in pairs; what makes them so tropey is the huge variety of ways their relationship (between each other and the rest of the cast) can be explored by any halfway-decent author. Where any other character archetype can show up, the Backbiting Journalists can too, and probably have at some point.

This trope is big, moreso than anything yet discussed.

Yusuf III

Dates: January 20, 1891-present.

The Caliphate in New Andalusia is no stranger to unexpected successors; they're pretty much inevitable when congenital madness runs in the family, the (Jewish) maître d' has rights over each step of the acclamation process, and there are half a dozen collateral lines waiting in the wings. In the 19th century, those unexpected successors went down in history as "the six weak caliphs." In the 20th century, one of them turned out famously well. Only one of them, however, has been judged a bad caliph. His name is Yusuf III, and this is his story.

Andalus

The very first draft of what is becoming Andalusada was written as a GURPS Infinite Worlds setting on the SJG forums. (You can read it here, if you're so inclined.) Even by my current standards, it's embarrassingly bad, but I do believe it's worth reposting, just so I can link to it within this blog more easily.

Exiled and penniless, Rodrigo Diaz spent the winter of 1080 in Barcelona, falling out with its lords and weighing his options. In 1081, he caused this worldline's history to diverge when he turned south for Seville, whose armies awaited his order to march west. The taifas fell like dominos; Badajoz in 1082, Cordoba in 1083, and Toledo in 1085. When the Berbers invaded (in a desperate Granadan bid for power), he led the coalition that drove them back from Gibraltar and laid the siege that would capture Granada nine months later. A terrified Alfonso VII recalled his general from exile in 1087 (aborting a planned campaign on Barcelona), but the damage was already done; by the time Valencia fell in 1110, all land south of the Duero and Ebro belonged to the Abbadids, and the cause of Christendom in Spain had been set back 300 years.

Current Events

1930: With war on the horizon and a perilous world economy, the last Muslim superpower is looking for allies and preparing for its first move.

Divergence Point

1080: El Cid is hired as a mercenary general by the taifa of Seville, derailing the Reconquista and setting the stage for Islamic Spain as a European power.

Major Civilizations

Western-Islamic (empire), Western (empire with rivals), Orthodox (empire with rivals), Japanese (empire with satellites.)

Great Powers

Umayyad Caliphate of New Andalusia (feudal representative democracy, CR3 for Muslims, CR4 for everyone else); Greater German Empire (dictatorship, CR4); Great Britain (anarchic representative democracy, CR4 and rising); French Fourth Republic (representative democracy, CR3 and falling); Empire of Japan (clan-based oligarchy with democratic traits, CR4-6); Russian SFSR (socialist oligarchy, CR4-5); Turanian SFSR (socialist oligarchy, CR5) Alaskan RFSR (socialist republic, CR3-4); Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (feudal theocracy, CR2-4)

Worldline Data:

TL: 6 Mana Level: Low
Quantum: 4 Infinity Class: P9
Centrum Zone: Inaccessible

The Lisbon Meridian

The equator's position is fixed and determined by geography and mathematics. The prime meridian's position is not only not fixed, it's utterly arbitrary. It took until 1851 for most of the world to establish the Greenwich meridian as their standard, and several nations (France most notably, but also the Empire of Brazil) didn't accept it for decades.

Andalusada, ever the disorganized one, has reduced its own mess of meridians to three. And unlike IRL, the dominant one is based not in England-Scotland but in Lisbon.

The Maud Missionary

The Missionary Sisters of the Office have such a widespread colonial presence that they've become a stock character of their own, as recognized as the Great White Hunter. Or, at least, the fully-ordained Sister has become a stock character, the Maud Missionary - inevitably a white-hat character.

Unlike other female stock characters, the Maud Missionary is universally acceptable. Her vow of celibacy desexualizes her even as it locks her into the traditional femininity of a woman religious, and her vow of obedience puts no stress on Andalusada's glass ceiling. Those same vows that establish her femininity, however, also make her a Missionary, a daughter of Holy Mother Church whose job is to go to exotic, dangerous non-Western places and prevent folk Catholicism from forming. Even in environments where proper women have no business appearing, the Maud Missionary not only has an excuse to show up - she isn't necessarily a burden on the men. This ability to go anywhere, and thus fill "feminine" roles anywhere, is a big part of what's established the Maud Missionaries in popular fiction.

Eugen Karl Orff

By the end of the Great Realignment, the Electorate and Archduchy of Saxony had become a notable player in the Mediterranean, mostly through their control of Malta [details?] and, more lastingly, through majority ownership of the half-completed, half-assed Egyptian Canal. Saxon money and Saxon engineers saw that crumbling vanity project to its conclusion, cementing Saxon importance not only in the Mediterranean but the Levant as well.

Nearly a century after its completion, however, most of the names of that great work have passed into history. Only historians know the original builders of the Canal before it was abandoned. Only economists know the names of the diplomats who acquired the rights to the site, or the engineers who redesigned it. Even the Egyptians have forgotten the names of their own who toiled and died bringing that national folly to fruition.

One name, remains common knowledge, and is given far more credit for the completion of the Canal than even he was willing to accept. Even if they know nothing about what he did to earn that name, everybody knows "Eugen of Egypt": gunfighter, financial wizard, the man involved (somehow) with the Canal, and infamous apostate.

Eugen of Egypt was baptized Eugen Karl Orff. This is his story.

The Ryalkirk rifle

Late in the second round of the Northern Wars [when?], the armed forces of New Britain - which had heretofore struggled against those of the Anglo-Scottish north, New Andalusia, and assorted aboriginal nations [details?] - fielded something fairly commonplace by our standards, but unheard of at the time: a repeating bolt-action rifle. It was named Ryalkirk, after the armory it was first built in [where?], and it changed military history forever.

The Missionary Sisters of the Office

While I was writing out my thoughts on Andalusada's differences from IRL two nights ago, I came up with the Heretical Hero as an archetype. And then, between that, Taiping China, and my drabblings of writing about the Maroons (out when they're done), I came up with another tropey character, the Maud Missionary.

I really should have written up her first, because while I know that the Maud Missionary is the perfect and rightful heir of St. Matilda, I don't know anything about the movement she's a part of. So little, in fact, that I've been hammering myself for hours about what they're named.

To that end, a conversation with Ebola gave me the working name, and the one I'll be using for the URL: "the Missionaries of Hegemony."

The Heretical Hero

In the works he appears, the Swiss Advisor wears a white hat. He is invariably a Good Guy, and the proof of it is that he walks with crowds and keeps his virtue - although immersed amidst the most raw and primitive of the aboriginal world, he pours out his civilizing whiteness upon them like the oil of anointment, and their aboriginality cannot grasp or overcome him.

His shadow, his dark parallel, is a separate but related trope: the Heretical Hero. Where the Swiss Advisor blurs the line between civilized and savage respectably - by bestowing honorary whiteness upon those around them - the Heretical Hero blurs that line the wrong way: making their darkness his own, even into the depths of his soul.

Line-based calibers

As an American, calibers come in two varieties: Imperial, and metric. While there are some irregularities with the Imperial system (some .44s are actually .43 because they originally used heeled bullets, and anything may or may not have an extra .008" to allow for rifling), the Imperial system is blessedly devoid of any such. (Except, of course, for 8mm Mauser, which is 8mmJ or 8mmS.) Those two systems of measure - one of which I grew up with, one of which is intuitive - are the only ones that matter. Not so in Andalusada.

Sans decimalizing revolutionaries, France doesn't adopt the metric system. Sans France, nobody else necessarily does either. Up until the French Revolution, the world had worked just fine without universal metrication; there's no reason to think it couldn't continue to do so. (Except for France, and even that Augean stable doesn't need metrication.) And that means two, three, many systems of measurement - making my beloved gun porn a nightmare to write about.

But today, poring over two, three, many obsolete customary measurements, something clicked - and after doing some math, I found a beautiful heuristic in which to express calibers: for most of the world, smokeless cartridges are measured not by any international norm, but in lines.

Andalusian gun culture

This is a work in progress. It will be expanded upon.

The Crown of All Spains (and France)

Writing about Mahdism this last week or so leaves me kinda bothered that I haven't written about Spain yet. I have my reasons; given that it's ground zero for the point of divergence, all I can honestly say is that I know the Crown of All Spains exists (for plot reasons), and that it's ruled by the pre-Wars of Religion French ruling house (whence the inevitable "and France" in the name.)

But I've posted articles about things I knew less than that about, so here goes nothing.

The Crown of All Spains 101

Why? Because it's been here from the beginning. Admittedly in the beginning it was Napoleon driving the Moors out of Spain, but a united Spain is still there.

• Who? Not the Galicians (Galicia having been part of Galicia or Portugal or Portugal-Galicia for most of its history since 1090, when Garcia II sets up shop in A Corunha), but other than that you'd recognize most of the territories. There's Asturias and Cantabria, and the Catalans and the Aragonese, the Léonese and the Castillans, the Toletans... and, south of the Tagus, the Andalusis, many of whom still speak Arabic at home.
• What? The Crown of All Spains is one of the complex dynastic unions that Andalusada seems to love - a confederal monarchy that on its good days is exactly the sum of its parts, and on its bad days much less as those parts cancel each other out.
• Where? Most of Iberia, predictably. The Crown of All Spains also controls a number of North African city-states, which it occupied during the destruction of Barbary Coast piracy, and a fair bit of Morocco through very unreliable Andalusi landlords.
• When? The Crown of All Spains dates from the late 1780s, although I'm not sure exactly what year it was.

And now for the expanded answer to "why?" The answer: drama and melodrama.

The Second Mahdist War

Timeframe: Early to mid-1820s, contemporary with the War of the French Succession
Belligerents: The Crown of All Spains vs. al-Mahdi and his supporters
Consequences: The death of al-Mahdi; collapse of Mahdism as a unified force; Legitimist withdrawal from France; rise of Saxon-aligned Malta as a Mediterranean force

In 1786, Umayyad Seville knew its last year of peace and sovereignty. Seven years later, the Civil War had run its course, and the newly-united Spanish Crown was busily annexing what was left of Moorish Spain. Hisham V [who?], the last Caliph of Seville, was dead. The caliphate was contested by three squabbling, doomed brothers, and his four-year-old son had been smuggled into safety and irrelevance across the Straits of Gibraltar.

During those dark days, his supporters gave him a regnal name of his own: al-Mahdi. And in 1821, with the House of Guise crumbling and a civil war in France, al-Mahdi made his move and crossed the Straits of Gibraltar again.

New Toleto

This page has a writeup in GURPS format. You can view it here.

Significance: Capital city of the UCNA
Location: On the western shore of the Mississippi River, near its confluence with the Ohio

On April 5th, Yusuf was caliph over a very disjointed territory. One of his seats of power was in Cuba [details?], and the main city on the mainland was Port-Royal, which became the UCNA's de facto capital for most of his career. At best it was a stopgap solution.

As a permanent capital city, Port-Royal had serious disadvantages. It was built in the swamps, and epidemics of malaria and cholera were so regular that diplomats demanded hazard pay. It was vulnerable to naval warfare, making the (Cuban-dominated) navy too powerful [details?] - and Cuban aggression couldn't be ruled out. (And although it was a nonissue at the time, Port-Royal anchored the UCNA to Caribby at a time when the north was extremely open territory.) From fairly early, both Yusuf and Don Musa had plans to relocate the capital. All they needed was a suitable location.

Asad from Seville

Mahdism doesn't just cause wars. As an ethos and a mythos, its (minor) influence has extended to every aspect of Iberian global culture, Christian and Muslim.

Mahdism has shaped the Ibero-Romance languages, giving them metaphors just like Jacobitism gave English sub rosa IRL. It's established an iconography and a lexicon of motifs (the keys on the necklace, hunter green shot through with silver thread) that are recognized worldwide. It's been a recurring inspiration for a pan-Iberian artistic corpus - especially a lyrical corpus: Mahdism has produced marches favored by directors as far south as the CRC, and its melodies have been set to different lyrics and become recognized as far away as Japan.

That said, though, Mahdism's mostly felt through its violence. It's caused three wars in Iberia itself; it's caused no end of troubles in Spanish North Africa, not counting the infamous Chergui; it is the impetus for considerable terrorism, especially that of the G1200.

The most legendary Mahdist terrorism, though, may have been neither Mahdist nor terrorist. We would call it the work of a serial killer, but when he struck there was no word in any language to describe the carnage he left behind.

That terrorism was the work of a single man, Asad from Seville.

The Caliphal Household

New Andalusia was meant to be demotic, not democratic. Yusuf I was familiar enough with the arguments of Moorish Dissent to appreciate the distinction, but he feared and hated majority rule, and by the end of his life was vindicated by watching plebeian Cabralia plummet into monarchism. It's why the UCNA (several Charters later) still, uniquely, uses Borda count voting.

For all his efforts, though, the UCNA did slide towards democracy as time progressed. Most of this was the work of his right-hand man, who in his defense strengthened the Maxaha because he had a lot of weak caliphs to deal with, and the government needed to function somehow. But a side effect of Don Musa's efforts was the creation of a new and totally undemocratic force in Andalusian politics: the Caliphal Household.

Don Ibrahim

Dates: 1860-1980. (Yes, he dies fifty years after the canonical present day. This is important.)
Position: Secretary of the Caliphal Household.
Preceded by: His father, Don Musa Cordovero

The least democratic institution in the UCNA is the Caliphal Household. Founded under Yusuf I, it has survived chart reforms, two regencies, three succession crises and Populism almost unscathed. Holding an ambiguous position, both private employees of the caliph and public servants of the caliphate, the Caliphal Household is barely accountable to either.

Between the death of Yusuf I and the rise of Yusuf II, the most powerful man in the UCNA was a Sephardi Jew whose friends and enemies alike styled him simply "Don Musa." The son is more formidable than the father; as of 1930 he is the longest-serving man in the government of New Andalusia at around 45 years. His name is Don Ibrahim - and if Cardinal Richelieu was hale as an ox, and could kill you with the power of his Kabbalah, he would start coming close to the fearful awe commanded by the UCNA's bespectacled court Jew.

Yusuf II

Dates: 18??-1908.

Yusuf I leaves impossibly large shoes to fill on his death. For the next fifty years, those shoes aren't filled - at least not by anybody of the Umayyad line; the best claimant to that position would be Yusuf's former right-hand man, Don Musa Cordovero, who (along with his son, Don Ibrahim) oversees a succession of what's commonly called "the six weak caliphs" and steers the UCNA into being a more presidential monarchy.

After Don Musa's death, and the rise of Don Ibrahim, the UCNA encounters something it hasn't known since Yusuf I. For the first time in half a century, the Umayyad and the Cordovero at the top of the pecking order had a rapport - and ambition.

That Umayyad, not coincidentally, was named Yusuf II. This is his blog post.

Seadling

IRL, Japan exported many more guns than it ever sold. The IJN left Arisaka rifles scattered around the Pacific Rim; the IJA, across mainland Asia. All of them were rechambered, for every caliber and cartridge in use at the time, and shot until they were obsolete. But even though most of their military hardware was freely available for sale, it didn't have many buyers - in part because it was so kludgy.

This is not the Japan of Andalusada. My Japan has a reputation for high-quality craftsmanship that Taisho Japan never earned IRL. My Japan's guns are not monstrously kludgy. My Japan's guns are quirky and groundbreaking and there's nothing else like them on the market.

My Japan's guns have a brand name. That brand name is Seadling.

The Swiss Advisor

The world of Andalusada has many places within itself that it considers "exotic." As a rule, most of these are inhabited by colored people full of exuberant barbarism, who by all rights should have been conquered by the world's more civilized races and all that. As a rule, most of those savages have been conquered by most of those more civilized races already.

But it's not true of all of them. There are, in fact, some exotic locales that stubbornly refuse to bow their heads and accept their destiny. It's understandable for some of these defiant aborigines, because they're proud (or cruel) and honorable (or merciless) warrior races. But not all of those holdouts are warrior races - and no warrior race, however noble (or vile) it may be, is actually the equal of the good and doughty soldiery of the Empire, whichever Empire it is that the speaker belongs to. Where the plot takes the characters into the midst of such a foreign people, therefore, it is customary to have them encounter the local Swiss Advisor.

The Chergui

Timeframe: October 1895-April 1896.
Belligerents: The Crown of All Spains vs. Mahdist insurgents.
Outcome: Pyrrhic Spanish victory

In 1893, Yusuf II was faced with a small nightmare: a military standards war. It took the better part of a year to sort it out, and no small investment of money and man-hours, before the Caliphal Army was uniformly issued matching rifles and ammunition that wouldn't explode. The Port-Royal musketoon had prevailed, and the army now faced a problem: what to do with all the noncompliant hardware?

Refitting it was too much trouble; they already had their hands full retooling sights, adjusting barrel lengths, and making similar conversions on thousands of already-assembled guns. Issuing them down the totem pole would force the very logistical nightmare they'd just spent 15 months sorting out. Issuing them to the navy might work, but would still be a logistical headache. (More importantly, the Army Secretary thought the Navy's adoption of .49-94 a decade prior a smashing political victory, one he had no desire to undo.) This being the UCNA, they'd already rechambered a number of obsolete guns for the rejected H11 cartridge - proofs of concept, substitute standards, all sorts of stuff.

The fateful solution was to sell the useless crap abroad.

The H11 controversy

The UCNA always struggled to standardize. Decimalization was still underway at the time, and it was surrounded by several distinct, and mutually incompatible, customary measuring systems: Anglo-Scottish to its north, an Ibero-Baltic blend down south, and French scatterings in the Caribbean (and its own borders.)

Matters came to a head, however, in 1893, when the UCNA finally phased out its long-serving .49-94 for something altogether new. It's still causing headaches in several continents today, where it's commonly known as the H11 Controversy.

Sanjak Jerusalem

I have no idea what the Middle East looks like in Andalusada.

I know that prior to the Thousand Days the Russians threw the entire place for a hell of a loop [details?]. I know that (prior to that, courtesy of the Great Realignment) Evgeny IV's predecessor [who?] botched what should have been an easy Russo-wank by launching a winter invasion of Afghanistan, dragging down a Napoleon-tier general staff [who?] long enough for a Kurdish tribe to turn the course of the war and, eventually, seize the Persian throne. But I have no idea what happens between, say, the 1820s and the First Crusade 750 years before. That's an enormous gap in my knowledge.

I still have no idea what it looks like between the First Crusade and the Vechist Wars. But, as of last night and this post, I have a vision for what comes after. I'll detail this vision more as time progresses, but tonight I'll discuss the one part of it that I know: the Sanjak of Jerusalem.

Service-based suffrage

One of the oldest notes on steampunk social science was written on my Samsung. It was last edited some time ago, but I'm fairly certain it dates back to December last year, before the Andalusada Scrapbook came into being.

Insert quotation here.

On the blog itself, I first mentioned it when I introduced Poland-Ruthenia, or if not then when I expanded it to its current form: "Following the Baltic republican lead, Poland-Ruthenia has been experimenting with service-based suffrage." - whence the name of this concept.

Modern Pomerania

In the end, there was the Reductions, and Pomerania was erased forever. "Forever," as it turned out, was less than a century; by 1840, the Germanized Baltic littoral had won its independence in a ferocious revolt, which was recognized by Saxony in the Treaty of Meissen. Pomerania was back.

Modern Pomerania 101

Skipping the why a bit, here we go:

• Who? Modern Pomerania's still as Güntherite as its forebears, but it's much less ethnically diverse; it's overwhelmingly either German or Germanized. Modern Pomerania, colored by its own private Counter-Reformation during the Polish generations, is a much less diverse state than it was the first time around.
• What? In state dogma, modern Pomerania is a continuation of sansinger Pomerania: a revolt with a state. In practice, the two look almost nothing alike. Modern Pomerania's usually described as "Spartan," and the description works: it's a corvée democracy, organized on very military lines and built on a foundation of compulsory state service.
• Where? Modern Pomerania's rather reduced from its former territory, but it still stretches from the Oder River east a fair ways.
• When? After the UCNA (which started on April 5), modern Pomerania has the most specific date of founding I can think of: the signing of the Treaty of Meissen in 1836.

Moving on a bit...

Go-guns

With all of modern history retconned, Andalusada faces an enormous number of problems. One of the smaller but more nagging ones was first mentioned here: the verse has (almost) no gun brands, and a universe of generic products wrecks verisimilitude.

And so, in the interest of verisimilitude, I introduce to you the official infantry small arm of the Imperial Union. It comes in more varieties than Heinz ketchup, and in all of them it's called the Go-gun.

The Order of Saint Gonzalo

Right now there's nothing in Andalusada called the Order of St. Dominic, and even if there are "Dominicans" they have nothing to do with the Dominicans IRL. That's because that niche evolved differently, and the organization filling it is the Order of Saint Gonzalo, commonly the Gonzalans.

Dominican Gonzalan spirituality 101

Because of Rule of Canny, Gonzalan spirituality looks understandably like the Dominican spirituality it replaces. (At one point, I described Franciscan and Dominican spiritualities as being "Christocentric" vs. "Logocentric"; in Andalusada, the distinction is better incarnational vs. evangelical.) The first and most glaring distinction is that Gonzalo did something Domingo didn't: by adopting (and adapting) the Rule of Saint Stephen from Stephanines, he circumvented a papal ban on establishing new rules.

"The one rule of our salvation and of all others'," the Rule begins, "is the Gospel of Christ..." - and it goes from there, in a fairly stark fashion. More specifically, the Rule is followed by a distinctly Augustinian, southern, and... well, let's be honest, openly schismatic reading of it, which lead to hundreds of Stephanines defecting to Gonzalo's side when it became known to them. That southern-Augustinian-dissenting addendum moderates the Muretin starkness, but in doing so also emphasizes the features of it that are most recognizably Dominican.

(This means that, from the very start, a case could be made that Saint Gonzalo wasn't following his own Rule. It also means that, unlike the Dominicans IRL, it's both meaningful and possible for there to be Capuchin-style strict-observance orders. Some of those strict-observance sausage parties were probably key figures in the rise of the Sodality.)

The Burning Thirties

In 1825, the world enjoyed something it hadn't known in quite some time: five years of peace. Nobody knew it then (such is the way of historiography), but the Great Realignment was over. It was a changed world.

In France, the succession war was finished, with the Bourguignons victorious; the new family in Paris was making overtures to ouverture, and the Guisards reduced to honoring a pretender in Rome and eulogizing their bygone Catholic dystopia. Across the Channel, England-Scotland was binding its wounds and making itself presentable as "the Union of the English and Scottish Empires." The Low Countries were draining their shattered polders with the power of the first general-purpose steam engines. South of the Pyrenees, the Crown of All Spains was dusting itself off, living in a world where Seville - great Seville, eternal Seville, Seville the glorious, Najm al-Umma - was gone, as dead as Pomerania. It was a changed world.

In the New World, Cabralia was rebuilding and recovering, slowly but surely, from the trauma of Baltazar's mutiny, calling their elder statesman Kaspar back to its Principal Palace. Mexico was très-mignon, as they say: a mestiza was styling herself "Grand Princess" in her own right, and the Pope was telling the crowns of Europe to greet their sister in Christ as an equal, and wasn't it adorable? And she even had her pet Moor, who was doing everything he could to give her plebeian husband no reason to annex his mainland claims and spank him back to Cuba. It was a changed world.

Plebeian Cabralia

When the Grand Principality of Cabralia established itself in the 1790s, it was a very different place from what it would be fifty years later. It stretched across every climate zone between the equator and Tierra del Fuego. In every possible sense, it was the greatest of the 18th-century republics. Its future was unbounded, its possibilities endless. In its capital [where?], the government could dream with starry eyes of maximismo, when all of Cabralia might be a part of it.

It didn't work out, obviously. But this is the story of what came before - and what might have been.

Republican Cabralia 101

Why? Best practices. If Guisard France deserves to be distinct from other Frances, the early Grand Principality deserves to be distinct from its imperial form.

• Who? Everyone. It had Anglo-Dutch settlers from the north, Moros from the Andes, and everything in between. The early G.P. was more cosmopolitan than the contemporary UCNA, and had every potential to stay so if it could've held together.
• What? Very turbulent early on, but it eventually consolidated into a very aristocratic republic of sorts. The major problem was that it got more aristocratic as time went on...
• Where? In the beginning, about 70% of the entire continent - all of Brazil, Argentina, bits of Chile (with a few isolated Moorish holdouts), Paraguay, Uruguay, etc.
• When? From the 1790s to 1834. After 1834, Kaspar Sansinger's marriage is a done deal, and the slide into modern Cabralia is all but foreordained.

Guillermo I

Dates: 1091-[when?]

In 1091, the frighteningly young Urraca becomes pregnant by her husband, Raymond of Burgundy. Unlike IRL, the child survives, and her firstborn son is named Alfonso after his late grandfather. He isn't the last son she has with Raymond, though: she has at least one other. In keeping with Iberian naming conventions, that second son is named after his other grandfather, William of Burgundy. On Urraca's death, he ascends to the throne as the first Ivrean king, under the regnal name "Guillermo I."

Thus begins the reign of the first completely fictitious person in Andalusada's history.

ACP

The last weekend was spent doing two things: consolidating my non-blogged Andalusada writing (scattered across dozens of files when it's recorded at all), and overhauling my other blog's writing about Andalusada's logic. In particular, the second installment of that, about GURPS.

Both of those consolidated on a specific detail: gun porn. And then, last night, I fatefully wrote this:

Take the CRC, for instance, which uses 7.65mm Mauser because Argentina did IRL - that was also the standard caliber of Belgium, home of FN and the world's de facto armorer; in Andalusada, where Belgium doesn't exist, the Triple Alliance has been assigned to a new role as one of the arsenals of the world - which changes a lot of gun sales because they're otherwise such a noxious place.

I didn't even know that until I typed it out myself, and yet it's an obvious thing from what I know about the CRC. Making it the home of Andalusada's *Fabrique Nationale is so obvious I'm surprised I hadn't thought of it earlier. All it needed was a name - and as of this morning, it's had a name: ACP.

The Order of St. Stephen

In 1076, St. Étienne of Muret founded a own hermitage in the wasteland that was Muret, France. He gathered a following, which relocated to a new location in 1150, set up a proper priory, and became known as the Grandmontines after it. It was like nothing else at the time - and after 1185, when for the first time (but not the last) its members overthrow their prior, it more or less ran out of steam and got supplanted by the rise of 13th-century mendicancy. The Grandmontines puttered along, tiny and marginal, until the French Revolution finally put them out of their misery and ended their unique spiritual tradition forever.

IRL, anyways. In Andalusada, their name's changed - they are the Order of Saint Stephen (O.S.S., Ordo sancti Stephani), or Stephanines for short. And I have some very lofty plans for that ascetic movement from northern France - because a movement whose founding document baldly states "Our rule is the Gospel of Christ" is too good to pass up.

Grandmontine Stephanine spirituality 101

Let's start with the most basic thing: the Stephanines have their own rule. The Rule of St. Stephen, written down by the fourth head of the Order in 1124. In Andalusada the words will understandably be somewhat different, but in spirit with the original (excerpted from here):

• Prologue: "The one primary and fundamental Rule of Rules for our salvation and all others derive from [the Gospel]. We are all Christians, living the Rule of the Gospel, which is the root of all Rules."
• Ch. 39: "We forbid you absolutely to receive women into your observance."
• Ch. 54: "The better part which the Lord praised so highly in Mary, we impose upon the clercs [sic] alone.... [w]e entrust the temporal care of the monastery to the convers alone; in matters worldly and all other business, they are to command the other brethen, both clercs and convers..."

After that my sources (namely Wikipedia and Philip Sheldrake) give me very conflicting details about the Order, which is fine with me. There were arguments over whether the IRL Grandmontines were more Benedictine or Augustinian in their rule (it varied with time, apparently...), because they didn't see themselves as monks or hermits or canons regular, but as all three. (What tore them apart IRL was probably differing takes on how to actually be that.)

The other thing to note about the Stephanines is the fact that they had a mind-bogglingly democratic structure from the outset. Traditionally both the monks and the conversi (lay brothers) were counted as absolutely equal, and would share common living quarters. (Traditionally, the lay brothers were supposed to outnumber the monks by 2:1; that probably influenced the power struggles too.) It took papal intervention to organize them into a more normal monastic hierarchy.

Introducing St. Matilda

Saint Matilda exists because Saint Dominic doesn't. Per Rule of Canny, Andalusada needs someone to fill his shoes, an that someone is Saint Gonzalo of Lerida - but he's an original character, which means that I have both free room and a lot of details to fill in. And back before his page took on its current form, one of my earliest notes about Gonzalo was something I wanted in his story: "a Gonzalan St. Clare."

For the longest time, this has sat unattended, because the only reason I introduced Gonzalo was because John George wasn't an Augustinian, and I honestly hadn't had any interesting thoughts about it. Last night, though, while trying to rename Catholic orders to fit into my arbitrary naming conventions, I discovered some really cool things, which brought this back to mind - and I'm gonna make the most of it.

Esbat

Esbat, n. Moorish. A straight sword.

The iconic Arab sword is the scimitar: long, single-edged, and backswept - and not an Arab sword. IRL, it was first adopted in Khorasan, the far side of the umma from al-Andalus; it was brought west in the Turkic migrations, where the Seljuks (and the Byzantines, who'd already adopted the single-edge as a cavalry weapon) first wielded it against the Crusaders. Progressive Turkish immigration Arabized and assimilated, and the single-edged sword displaced the straight-bladed weapons that had come before.

Everywhere, that is, except in Seville. al-Andalus was in a lot of ways a living fossil of Islamic culture; if Osprey is any indicator, that extended to sword architecture too. In Andalusada, where the Moorish world is happily spared the waves of Turkish immigration, the double-edged sword is not replaced. As time goes on, and Seville's economy shifts progressively into the western Mediterranean, the non-Arabic influence on sword design in Toledo (and, thus, the Moorish world) come from the Aragonese Empire, Sicily, and the various Italies.

What this evolves into is the iconic sword of the Moorish world: the esbat.

Instead of 9mm

What we call ".38 caliber" or "9mm" IRL is anything but. .38 Special is .357", for instance, as is the (aptly-named) .357 Magnum. Only one pistol cartridge actually fired a .38" bullet, 9.65mm ACP - and you've never heard of it, because it never entered production. (And for another outlier, there's .38-40, which fired a 10mm bullet. There's some speculation that the name is dyslexic, and it should've been called the .40-38 instead.)

This discrepancy goes back to the ur-9mm handgun: Colt's Texas Paterson. It (and the Colt Navy Revolver that came a decade later) established .36" as a revolver caliber, and later in the era, some .36-style cartridges loaded with heeled bullets, which actually were .38" give or take a few thousandths of an inch. After heeled bullets fell from fashion, the standard shifted to the largest bullet that could fit inside the case mouth, whence .357.

What happens in Andalusada, where Col. Colt is never born? Ballistics favors convergence - and for the sake of laziness, I'm ruling that this converges - but for that frisson of difference, the big successful caplock caliber was about a hundredth of an inch off.

And that, as I complained in a long-ago sonnet, changes everything.

Skopetchka

Skopetchka, n. Russian. A sawed-off rifle.

The concept of the shortened rifle is basic and old. England-Scotland's menagerie of Go-guns mostly exists because the Infantry Pattern's 30" barrel is burdensome and hard to handle; France is probably no different.

The idea of shortening a rifle, though, is fairly new, and in popular consciousness is known by the Russian name for such a modification: skopetchka (cf. Russian skopets "eunuch.")

The Taiping Princess

Andalusada isn't just a story, isn't just an alt-history: it's a verse, designed for a GURPS game. And because of that, I've had a certain number of characters - some named, some simply archetypes - bouncing around in my head for a long time now. Today I'm going to start sketching a few of them up...

Inside the cities of many New World cities lies an unknown area, demarcated by paifong. On one side of the paifong is the rest of the city; on the other, a micro-nation as sovereign and distinct as the Vatican City. It is cramped, crowded, confined - but to the world outside, it is perilously, barely, contained. The city's law enforcement can enforce no laws there, because even Chinese immigrants find it foreign; their policy is to do as little as possible, and when they must to do it through the only certain authority they can recognize: that Chinatown's very own Taiping Princess.

Polish orthography

Poland adopted the Latin alphabet (so says Wikipedia) after the beginning of Andalusada. And because Polish remains... well, Polish, the orthography remains in flux for quite awhile. Click the link and you can see some of the many, many ways it could've played out.

Since it's somewhat arbitrary that Polish orthography standardized the way it did IRL (and with a world history that's divergent enough to end up with Poland-Ruthenia, there has to be some big enough changes to start impacting that stuff), Andalusada's Polish orthography has standardized with a few subtle changes:

• The letters I and Y have their phonological values reversed, with according changes to the spelling of Polish names.
• The letter H is pronounced /x/, as per IRL, but it's also the normal way to spell /x/. (IRL, the normal Polish rendition of /x/ is with Ch; in Andalusada, this is restricted to loanwords.)

It's a subtle change, but it has some nice side effects to it:

• Rendering /x/ as H brings it more into line with the IRL orthographies of various "Ruthenian" languages, while distinguishing it from Czech and Russian a bit more.
• Reversing the values of I and Y changes the feel of Polish names. Some of them (Pyotr) become more Russian, others (Zigmunt) more German, and others (Maksimylyan) just... weird.

Both of which, I feel, give Andalusada's Polish a nice frisson of difference without requiring any more linguistics than a bit of basic cyphering.

The Pomeranian Reductions

Timeframe: Early- to mid-1700s
Belligerents: Güntherite Pomerania vs. everybody.
Outcome: The dissolution of Pomerania as an independent state until the 1830s.

For most of the 17th century, the Baltic Sea was a Güntherite lake. The north was dominated by the sprawl that was Denmark-Sweden; the south, by sansinger Pomerania, the once unstoppable juggernaut that had toppled the Teutonic Knights and left the Holy Roman Empire moribund.

Then the Great Realignment came, and as the Russian Empire became a serious threat, the ever-struggling Polish-Ruthenian Commonwealth found itself facing a constant problem: Pomerania, for the longest time their vassal, was turning into a Russian cat's-paw. And while Pomerania was by no means the unstoppable military juggernaut of its youth, in alliance with Russia it would leave the commonwealth facing a two-fronted war.

At some point [when?], Pomerania did something tactically smart and strategically stupid: they did ally with Russia, very briefly, against Poland-Ruthenia. Krakow's worst fears had been verified.

Sansing

Sansing, n. A scythe blade affixed to a sword hilt.

In 1523, Terra Mariana a peasant revolt; later historians remember it as "the Livonian Revolt," and more generally as "the Güntherite Wars." But the rebellious peasantry had more pressing things to worry about than what the hell their fight was called. Specifically, their issue was how to arm themselves for a fight against a serious (if perhaps not unchallenged) enemy: the Teutonic Order.

Peasant revolts being what they are, they naturally gravitated toward peasant weaponry. Like the IRL Hussites, one of the great weapons of the Revolt was the threshing flail, reinforced with metal. The other was the scythe [Pomm. Sansa], which saw use in a number of varieties.

The least common conversion involved mounting a sword hilt. Compared to the much larger war scythes, they were given a Pommersch diminuitive, forming a distinct word of its own: Sansing.

The Church of Hungary

In the Christian taxonomy of Andalusada, there was an isolated entry called "the Church of Hungary." It's the replacement for the Church of England IRL, and it takes things a step further by claiming to be Orthodox and Catholic and Protestant at the same time.

Shugembo

Shugembo, n. Takasagonese. A Franciscan friar.

Oyashima has no "folk Catholicism," because Catholicism in Oyashima is new, and the converts tend to be scholarly, educated, and individual. There isn't much room for popular distortions of the faith when the faith isn't popular to begin with.

But one thing about Japonic Catholicism is globally distinctive, and it's pan-Japonic.

Japanese pop culture holds that nuns are mikos. This trope doesn't exist in Andalusada, for a number of reasons (most notably that Great Japan is a little more aware of Catholicism, what with it being the faith of their Takasagonese overlords) - but it's been replaced by a world-specific trope. Written out in TV Tropes format, it would be something like Friars are Yamabushi.

Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar

Moorish history, wrote Izanagi Aoi, "is the story of a small city's depraved dictator, and a wandering warlord, and their rocky relationship in the ashes of that kingdom. It is also the story of how the one paid the other to redraw lines on maps and kill people."

This is the story of that wandering warlord.

Rodrigo Diaz before 1081

Alfonso VI has Rodrigo Diaz exiled in 1081, and judging by the romances about him, he takes a number of loyal retainers with him. What he isn't allowed to take with him is any of his assets.

His first stop is to spend the winter in Barcelona, where he apparently offers his services to Ramon Berenguer and Berenguer Ramon, the confusingly named children of Ramon Berenguer I, who jointly share the comital title. It doesn't go over well; they fall out hard, and after Berenguer Ramon becomes the Fratricide they wind up facing each other in battle a few times. As soon as the snow thaws in 1082, therefore, Rodrigo and friends turn south, arriving in Saraqusta. And IRL, that's the end of this story; for reasons lost to time, he's hired by al-Musta'in, securing Zaragoza for the next five years and throwing a wrench into the power dynamics of the north.

But Andalusada isn't IRL, and in Andalusada that's where things start diverging. Because Rodrigo isn't hired by al-Musta'in, and (running out of cash, and with a certain number of retainers with him) he turns south, there to find employment in Seville.

People of 11th-century Iberia

Andalusada is a long and complicated world, and it starts in 11th-century Iberia, which is particularly notable for a few reasons:

• There are so many factions, and all of them need to be accounted for from the start.
• So many of them - far more, understandably, than the rest of the TL combined - are actual historic personalities, who'll need rewriting.

This, therefore, is a one-stop list for keeping track of who's who, and from where.

Alfonso VI of Castile

Before the beginning, Rodrigo Diaz was in the employ of Alfonso VI, at that point King of Leon and Castile. In the beginning, he's predictably banished.

Once that beginning gets underway, Alfonso VI has only a few years left to live. But he doesn't know that. This is his story.

Alfonso VI up to the point of divergence

Alfonso VI was the second son of Ferdinand the Great, sandwiched between Sancho (king of Leon) and Garcia (king of Galicia.) He was also the first to seriously ignore the division of territories between the sons, extorting money from Badajoz.

And starting from about 1072 (which, admittedly, gets off to a bad start when his brother Sancho kicks his ass at Golpejera and sends him fleeing to Toledo), the ten years prior to the POD had actually been pretty good for him. Sancho gets killed later that same year, allowing Alfonso to claim the coveted title of "King of Leon"; and when García is recalled from exile, he's forced to take monastic vows and gets banished to a monastery, never to fuck or fight again. By 1077, Alfonso VI is in a position to start styling himself Imperator Totus Hispaniae: "Emperor of All the Spains."

In 1079, he marries Constance of Burgundy, who bears him a daughter, Urraca. (She's going to be important one day, as soon as I figure out how.)

Sufyan

Born: 1790s. [details?]
Died: 1850s. [details?]

Long ago, before I started this blog, I was writing Andalusada mostly on paper. At some point, I realized that I'd need to know something about the succession of the UCNA. So I drew up a very tenuous outline of the dynasty.

There are a few names that I haven't mentioned yet (Yusuf II and Yusuf III, and some others), but all the key names of the succession survive only in the four-word tag of the UCNA's brief history: "the six weak caliphs." All the names but one: Sufyan.

A few nights ago, after I got out my GURPS book again, I started writing him up, based on what I knew about backbiting and so forth.

Disadvantages: Lecherous [-15]; Sense of Duty (his father) [-2]; Sense of Duty (his children) [-5].
Quirks: Bad with names; Wears his heart on his sleeve; Prudish in public.

Quite a character, no? And this is his story.

露茶女

Rojanyeo, n. "Russian tea girl."

I confess that this entry was entirely inspired by "Gangnam Style."

There is a certain class of teahouse, in present-day Korea, that can be counted among the most exclusive, inaccessible places on the planet. The Chapel of the Tablet, the inside of the Ka'aba, and some parts of Mt. Athos are joined by cafes in P'yongyang, Wonsan and Chemulpo. Some of them are by invitation only, and the only unexpected guests allowed are of royal descent. Those are the less exclusive ones.

None of them are Korean teahouses. To be that kind of exclusive is, by definition, to be a Russian (or at least Russian-style) teahouse, the ones that epitomize P'yongyang modernity. You rent samovars? The samovars are lacquered and gilded, each one a masterpiece of Russo-Korean fusion artwork. Some of the teahouses let you rent specific ones; the most popular can be booked months in advance.

In the eyes of this tiny peninsular nation-state, nobody will ever step through those doors except for the only people in the world who will ever matter. Those teahouses are where you go to see the petty people being seen.

Backbiters

Backbiters, n. Muckraking journalists.

Journalism is tangentially relevant to my interests. IRL's Progressive Era saw the golden age of the muckraker - and of pulp fiction, in which journalism was significant as one of the only acceptable heroic roles for a female character. (Lois Lane, reporter for the Daily Planet, is the exemplar of type, dating back to the Golden Age herself - which was at the tail end of the pulp era.)

In Andalusada, of course, it'd be too convergent to call them muckrakers. They're called "backbiters" instead, and the role is recognizable but recognizably different.

The Greater Japanese Empire

At the start of Andalusada was GURPS Infinite Worlds, p. 118:

Other Muslim timelines include:

Andalus (Q4, current year 1930), in which the Muslims of Spain threw back the Reconquista and went on to discover America in 1484, achieving TL6 in rivalry with Japan...

Well, there you have it.

The Greater Japanese Empire 101

Why? should be obvious with an opening quote like that: because it's canon. Japan needs to be something that's genuinely

• Who? "The Japanese," for an eclectic definition of "Japanese" based on spurious ethnography to include as many peoples as is feasible. This includes, but is not limited to, Ryukyuans, the Okinawans, Takasagonese, Takasagonese aborigines, "Japonic diaspora isolates" scattered around the Pacific Rim, the Ezochi, the "Ezoic diaspora ethnicities" around the northern Pacific Rim as far as the Aleuts, and possibly (though with no guarantees) the Aleuts themselves. And the Cossacks.
• What? The world's first notable experiment with pan-nationalism, set up as a constitutional federal monarchy, and having a bit more trouble with the whole thing than is strictly necessary.
• Where? Oyashima, of necessity. But it also includes the Ryukyus, Okinawa, Takasago, Ezo, Karafuto, the Kuriles, a few claims on Yakutsk, and so forth. And the territory formerly claimed by Meammosirsk.
• When? The Greater Japanese Empire dates itself back to the day after Tanabata, 1870, and is still going as of the present day.

Why? is a chance for me to go on a tangent about my design philosophy, and in this case I had my concise answer written four months ago: "I want a distinctive Japan. A Japan that isn't obviously the only one it could only ever possibly evolve into being. And one that has cet certain je ne sais quoi that we associate with all things Japanese."

Reclamation

The Moorish New World was, first and foremost, Christian. During the Age of Exploration, the Five Families actively encouraged Isidoran missionary efforts, for entirely cynical reasons: it gave the Christians something to do besides revolt, and New World dhimmitude made it much easier to systematically exploit its staggering wealth. Islamization only came during the colonial era, when it was profitable to be above Christians.

Relations didn't significantly sour until the Liturgical War, which Umayyad Seville handled with an infamously heavy hand, but once they were soured they stayed soured. Come the Mexican Revolt, there was (of necessity) a staggering amount of anti-Muslim violence - and when the dust settled, the Moorish Empire was gone. And in its place, in the New World, was the G.P. of Mexico: a Christian government with a significant, and very diverse, Muslim minority.

Reclamation in theory and ideology

By the time Teresa Maria ascended to the throne, Mexico was suffering serious battle fatigue. Its economy was a mess, and an entire generation had never known peace. And (given that the First Mahdist War had only just died down in the Old World, and Cuba was still strong in the Caribbean), "peace" would be nothing but a chance to reload unless something serious was done to either placate the Muslims or permanently dispose of them.

That "something serious" turned out to be the policy now known as "Reclamation."

Don Musa

Dates: 1796-1883.
Position: Secretary of the Caliphal Household.
Preceded by: None (office created by Yusuf I)
Succeeded by: His son, Don Ibrahim

Hegel had his roommates at the Tübinger Stift. Martin Luther had Melanchthon, Calvin had Farel and Bullinger (and they both had Bucer), the prophet Muhammad had the Sahaba... behind every Great Man of History there's a bunch of lesser names who are nonetheless key players in the story.

But who are those companions in Andalusada? Most of them, to be honest, I either don't know or haven't blogged about. Günther has his generals [who?], Oliver Farrell has his fellows from a dozen walks of life and eras [again, who?], the first Guise King of France [who?] has Simon the Apostate, who I know about but have only hinted about once (introducing the Montagnards.) Only in one case have I actually answered that question of [who?], and that was last night, when I gave Oskar Sansinger's wife a name: Teresa Maria, the Grand Princess. (Oskar Sansinger is himself one of the names to the first Grand Prince, also known as [who?] as of 9/26.)

Caliph Yusuf I is another one of the Great Men of History, and I already know that he's got a number of great names (and some lesser ones, like his son Sufyan.) One of them the UCNA's first great court Jew, an Andalusi expat and patriarch of the Cordovero dynasty: Don Musa. This is his story.

The Grand Princess

Dates: late 1700s [when?]-1834.

Mexico's constitution specifically allows for semi-Salic inheritance, because when the first Grand Prince [who?] died, all of his daughters were married morganatically - at least in principle, none of their husbands were eligible to rule in their own right. The daughter who succeeded him was his second, Teresa Maria. In Mexico, and in most of the New World as well, she is simply o Gran Princesa: "the Grand Princess."

This is her story.

The Axamallan Revolt

Timeframe: 1837-1838.
Belligerents: The G.P. of Mexico vs. the Pomeranos, supported by the UCNA.
Outcome: The independency of Axamalla.

In the 19th century,  was the dominant power of the New World; its only rival was  staggering from the loss of, well, Mexico - the historic heart of the Moorish New World. In no small part, this dominance was because of its Baltic diaspora; Mexico had an impressive amount of military talent at its disposal, most of which spoke Pommersch at home.

Then, in the 1830s, it all started going terribly wrong.

Best practices: tagging and titling

There's an enormous number of labels for this blog, which is pretty straightforward to deal with - just add or delete them as I go. More problematically, I have no idea how to title things, which is already becoming obnoxious because I'm busily retitling blog posts (and breaking links) as I go. It stands to reason that I should set some official blog policy down on this stuff, if only to save myself some work.

Oskar Sansinger

The UCNA's rise to power was ordained by me as the author, but it wasn't inevitable. If the wars had played out differently, the Grand Principality of Mexico could possibly have become the greatest state in the New World; if several wars had played out differently, Mexico might have been a global power, and the Yusufid dynasty reduced to a Caribbean empire centered on *Cuba. (It's extremely unlikely, because it ignores the butterflies that such a runaway Mexico-wank would've set in motion - but it's not impossible.)

History is the story not just of Great Times, though, but of Great Men. The UCNA's story was also the story of its first and greatest ruler, Yusuf I, and his friends [who?]. And once the UCNA had been established, the history of the G.P. of Mexico is likewise also the story of its great man - Yusuf I's nemesis and contemporary, one Oskar Sansinger.

The House of Sansinger

A fair number of alt-histories try to establish an American royal family. I've seen people save the Iturbides, the Habsburgs, the Braganzas... and I've seen a fair number of attempts at dynasties too. (Even though it's much more likely that Washington would've set himself up as President-for-life, the House of Washington seems to be a relatively popular one.)

The hard part is establishing a New World royal dynasty - in the first concept sketch, I was actually playing with a New World House of Bonaparte, which got butterflied away once I realized just how errant a Moorish survival TL would be after that many centuries. The House of Bonaparte (tracing from both Napoleon and Lucien) gave rise to "Bonapartist" (which remains a fair enough description)... until, eventually, my writing on Güntheritism and *Prussia (and the vast Hohenzollern-shaped hole that I still feel in Andalusada's political landscape) congealed, and everything clicked into four words: "The House of Sansinger."

The Moorish language

In the beginning, the Iberian languages were all pretty close together. They probably had distinct dialectal names for each other, but it wasn't that hard for any one person to write anyone else (assuming they could write in the vernacular at all, that is, although interestingly Rodrigo Diaz was literate in Latin.)

But the world doesn't stay at the beginning forever, and as time progresses and things evolve (for instance, Aragon becoming much more important much earlier), those languages start to speciate and distinguish themselves fairly quickly - especially between the dialects spoken in al-Andalus and ash-Shamal.

Now that it's been dead 700 years IRL, we call the southern dialect continuum Mozarabic. This is a nice, distinctive term to describe what wasn't a terribly distinct dialect family at the time - but it has one problem: "Mozarabic" identifies itself not as "Mozarabic" but latino/us, vernacular Latin. (For that matter, most Romance languages of the period did that as well.)

The House of Umayya

Let's start with the short version of the story:

The Banu Umayya is very, very old. Their family goes back to Umayya ibn Abd-Shams, great-grandfather of Mu'awiya I, the fifth true Caliph of Islam. Under the rule of the Banu Umayya, Islam went from being the dominant religion of Arabia to being the dominant religion of the entire Western world. Constantinople, which had reconquered the entirety of the former Roman Empire, lost all but Anatolia, and their end in 1476 began eight centuries earlier under Yazid I. The march of Islam was only halted by treachery most foul - and before the dust had settled, the last survivors of the Banu Umayya fled to the western most reaches of their former empire, and built it again, better than the first time. Under their rule, al-Andalus displaced even great Damascus as the jewel of civilization: in 1000, Qurtuba was the largest city in the Western Hemisphere, bar none.

It didn't last forever, of course; treachery most foul, once again, and when the Berber fitna was finally over and al-Andalus was reconsolidated, it was under the Abbadids in Seville. The Abbadids gave way to a short period of Berber interlopers, who gave way to the Abbadids, who eventually gave way to the Five Families. But it's a testimony to the Banu Umayya that the civilization they began in that backwater peninsula was never overshadowed by the rest of the Umma.

And when the Five Families had been broken, and the bitch had been beaten, the Umayyads rose from the ashes and restored themselves. And when (not for the first time) they were laid low by treachery most foul, the survivors (again, not for the first time) fled to the westernmost reaches of their former empire, and built it again, better than before.

That's the short version of the story. It's not entirely true, but it's true enough. And even if some of it is lies, and some of it can't be called either way, that doesn't make it any less impressive. Going into that part, though, does make it a bit more complex.

Umayyad Seville

When I started writing "nations," I originally focused on writing nations that are still alive as of the present day; it's only been in the last month or so that I started writing important dead states. Only tonight has it really struck me that I've been having world ADD, writing about other countries first. I said it right up front, in Andalusada's very first post:

[I]t is the story of how, by doing this, they accidentally created one of the most impressive nations the world will ever see. (Even if most of the local cretins still believe sacred monarchy is a good idea.)

This is going to be a long story. Let's take it from the top.

I'm not taking it from the top, obviously. I'm working in spirals and constellations - a bit from the beginning, a bit from the end, the dots that connected inward - because I know less about how that story goes than where it begins and where it ends. But as of when the story ends, Moorish civilization survives first and foremost in the Umayyad Caliphate in New Andalusia.

This is about what came before. This is about what the UCNA wants to claim itself as the continuation of, and what Mahdists the world around want to restore. This is about what came before there was a Moorish diaspora; the greatest moment that Moorish civilization had ever known.

Umayyad Seville 101

Every nation gets a 101 section, and traditionally that starts with the simple question: why? For most nations, this is about what made me interpret the nation this way rather than another. For dead states, though, why? asks something different: why it's important to write about this. In Umayyad Seville's case, it's because it was the pinnacle of Moorish civilization in the Old World - a civilization that's now as fallen as Constantinople, and will never be restored to quite its former glory.

• Who? The only new people in Umayyad Seville were the members of the House of Umayya (who reshuffled the pecking order of the Five Families.)
• What? The most centralized state the Moorish Empire ever managed to achieve; and it was trying to be more centralized, even up to the very end.
• Where? Most of Iberia, the northernmost fixed point being Toledo (beyond which lay ash-Shamal), extending south to the Straits of Gibraltar and crossing it southwest into the Maghrib (at the very least most of Morocco and some of Libya.) From there, stretching across the Atlantic Ocean to include varying swathes of the Caribbean, a fair chunk of the Andes, and most of what we'd call Mexico - and, from 1750 onwards, most of France-Outremer as well. All of it, of course, centered on the eternal metropolis of Seville.
• When? Umayyad Seville only lasted for about a century: 1688 (when Umayya al-Mujadid deposed the Miramoline) to, traditionally, 1786, its final year of stability under Hisham V. When exactly it ended remains hotly disputed, but it's definitely dead by the time the Yusufids secure their succession in the UCNA.

Authors of Andalusada

From the very beginning, Andalusada has been a documentary work. Ideally, most of my infodumping is going to be in the form of citing passages from works published within its verse - and this means that there's going to be a lot of authors involved.

This is the master page, simply to keep track of all the authors across the centuries.

Very Poor Introductions

FOREWORD

excerpted from Izanagi Aoi, Moorish History: A Very Poor Introduction. Honolulu: Daiwakoku Press, 1988.

Far out in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy lies an utterly representative G-series star.

Orbiting this, at a distance of 1 4900 0000 kilometers is a dense-cored world whose inhabitants are so mind-shatteringly uncouth that many of the local cretins still believe that sacred monarchy is a good idea.

This planet has (and always had) a problem: most of its multitudes were immiserated most of the time. Many solutions were proposed for this problem, most of which involved redrawing lines on maps and killing people, which was great fun but still left the multitudes immiserated, even the ones with sacred monarchs.

And then, one fine night (I believe it was a Thursday), the archangel Gabriel was compelled to descend from heaven, approach a trader out in the desertified armpit of the world, and share the very definitely final revelation of God Himself, setting forth a record clear and without error, because God Himself wanted to make sure the local cretins got it right this time.

So of course they promptly set about redrawing lines on maps and killing people, which was great fun and still left the multitudes immiserated, and soon the empire had stretched to a peninsula on the edge of the known world. When they had finished redrawing the lines on its maps and killing people, they introduced dhimmitude and toothpaste and the very definitely final revelation of God Himself to the region, making sure the local cretins got it right this time, and created a kingdom that was one of the more impressive things the world had ever seen.

This is not the story of that kingdom.

But it is the story of a small city's depraved dictator, and a wandering warlord, and their rocky relationship in the ashes of that kingdom.

It is also the story of how the one paid the other to redraw lines on maps and kill people, having great fun and immiserating the multitudes.

And it is the story of how, by doing this, they accidentally created one of the most impressive nations the world will ever see. (Even if most of the local cretins still believe sacred monarchy is a good idea.)

This is going to be a long story. Let's take it from the top.

Here ends the reading.