Introducing Saint Gonzalo of Lerida

After any big divergence, a region has a 100-year grace period to produce the same notable people, with the creative license increasing the further I get from that divergence.

Iberia's grace period runs out in 1181, which is problematic because that's before a bumper crop of its most significant figures are even born. Some can be handwaved a bit (the ibn Rushd family was well-entrenched and had produced brilliant minds for generations by that point, so Averroes might be salvageable), but some of them can't be - like Saint Dominic, for instance, without whom Western history to come gets very alien fast.

Fortunately for me, though, if you can't use the original, you can always use an Expy. All you need to do is adjust the superstructure to account for the changed base (yes, I know, but it works), and you can work around it interestingly. And if you choose the point you start at, you can even use the Expy to highlight the little changes in the world.

So now I'm going to introduce his replacement: St. Gonzalo of Lerida.

St. Gonzalo in a nutshell

Gonzalo is growing up in a very different Spain. Early 13th-century Aragon is quite a colorful place; Aragon and Barcelona were in a very complex relationship [details?], there was a small Mozarab population from further south that was chafing under the Roman Rite, and there was plenty of heresy afoot. (Durand of Huesca was from Aragon IRL, which suggests that the Waldensians may well have been familiar to Gonzalo from a very young age, even before Occitanian Gnosticism was.)

• Saint Matilde: St. Gonzalo is going to cross the Pyrenees at some point in his life, and when he does he's going to come into contact with the southernmost edges of the Grandmontine soap opera. This is where he meets a certain Matilde, who (establishing herself as the Correctrix of her abbey) forms a lifelong alliance with him. This is also where Gonzalo first gets exposed to the Stephanines, with their legendary motto of "There is no rule save the Gospel of Christ." It resonates with him, and the attitude sticks with him for the rest of his life.

This gets problematic, because I'm honestly not familiar enough with the life of St. Dominic to say how exactly it diverges. And I'm dead sure that it does diverge, because of ripples in history, not least of them being the different flow of the Crusades.

• The founding of the Order: In the 1210s [when?], Gonzalo goes to Rome, where he's given the go-ahead to organize an Order - but (as per IRL) barred from establishing a Rule of his own. Gonzalo's response? He adopts the Rule of St. Stephen, with certain accomodations to both the Augustinian Rule and the practice of Matilda's (schismatic) southern cells.
• Once this is made known, it triggers a massive schism within the Stephanine ranks. More than half of its members (mostly the conversi) break ranks to become friars, a blow that the Stephanines take more than a century to recover from.
• At some point in the 1220s, there is a chance for Gonzalo to run into a certain Francesco. As per IRL, there's no sure guarantee that it actually happens.

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

St. Gonzalo's legacy

St. Gonzalo (like St. Dominic IRL) is a bit of a plaster saint. In Dominic's case, it's because we honestly don't know a lot about his personality.

St. Gonzalo is a plaster saint too, because nobody wants to acknowledge how whitewashed he's been. (Nobody, that is, except the deeply-Franciscan Takasagonese, who happily scour that whitewash away for polemical reasons.) Gonzalo is the antihero, the Bad Boy, the renegade cop of medieval Christendom; underneath that whitewash is somebody who would never be sainted today - not only an Inquisitor, but a man who aggravated dissension in another order to his own benefit and promulgated a Rule he didn't closely follow himself.

And yet Gonzalo, the maverick saint, is a critical player in things. He's the one who manages to turn the tide of Gnosticism in southern France; he's the one, also, who makes the Stephanine Rule known worldwide, and on his coattails the Order of St. Stephen that he damaged so much in his life has spread accordingly.