New World Carolingian literature

"There are but three matters," says a poet, "that none should be without: the matters of France, of Britain, and of great Rome." That poet may not even be born in Andalusada, and I can't assume that the three matters are going to arise the same way, coming as they do at least two generations after the point of divergence. For the sake of the discussion, I'm going to assume that the chansons de geste do in fact turn out rather similarly; if that assumption changes, expect this post to be invalidated with a later one.

Up until the 19th century (or so says Wikipedia), the Carolingian cycle was as familiar as Arthurian legend is to us now. (Part of why it's become less so is because in the Anglophone world a lot of writers have revisited the Arthurian mythos in the 150 years.) In Andalusada, where the large area we call "the United States of America" is an officially Hispanophone Gallo-Moorish state and the Anglophone world is correspondingly a fair bit smaller, that equality is still going to be real.

And in the Umayyad Caliphate in New Andalusia, a country that I'm benchmarking as 55% Muslim/35% various sorts of Christians/a generous 10% other, where that familiarity is going to cause problems and create a solution.

New Ireland

As a general rule, you can get away with a lot in alternate history by mentioning any given place once. Most places are still there, and it isn't foreordained that the same stuff should happen at the same places; that's what gave rise to the Skete of Orsa, for example - the random derpy idea that there may be a Battle of Taizé, and there is a Battle of Stockholm, and where in Sweden could I plausibly put a Taizé-like community? That minimal amount of work saves you a lot of the shame of Hollywood geography by making a lot of ill-documented places important.

Then there are the hard ones: the places (usually countries) that have long, well-documented histories, which potentially are going to be significantly altered by the changes you make. Places that give rise to lots of people who understandably have the right to wonder what the hell happens there.

Places like Ireland, for instance.

Korea and Cyrillization woes

I've mentioned, at various points, that Korea (whatever it's called) manages to pull a Meiji, modernizing in just under 40 years. I've also mentioned that Korea doesn't Westernize so much as it Russifies, consciously patterning itself off the Russian state under Evgeny IV.

Most of the early detailed maps of Korea are printed in Russia, with all the names written in Cyrillic. This is somewhat problematic because, early on, there are a few conflicting standards about how to Cyrillicize the Korean language, which includes a lot of sounds that Cyrillic represents poorly. Such as /w/, which in the end is rendered by the Cyrillic letter В в /v/.

Most of these maps are Latinized when they're passed off to neighboring states: Poland, Prussia, and Sweden mostly. Sweden continues to render в as "v"; Prussian and Polish both instead transliterate it with "w" /v/. And because it doesn't much matter to them (the Baltic states don't have a big stake in Korea), that mispronunciation continues to get passed along. As a result of this unfortunate transliteration, most of the world pronounces Wonju as "Von-ju."

Pretty quickly, this becomes part of Korean caricatures of foreigners: hypercorrecting all /w/ as /v/, sounding like a Nazi in a pulp action movie...

Cider and liquor in the continental UCNA

"In Brittany," says Wikipedia, "crêpes are traditionally served with cider." Which brings us to the other important thing about foodways: alcohol.

 Iberia is part of the wine belt of Europe, and always has been. That survived the Moorish conquest (Andalusis quickly developed a pan-Islamic reputation for being lush); it survives to the present day IRL. Presumably, given that Moorish civilization survives that long too, Moorish drinking tastes are going to favor wine; there are distinct beer regions in the New World, but the UCNA's not one of them because beer is more associated with its immigrant population. And since most of the New World is not historic wine country, and wasn't until very recently, that shortage of wine (along with the shortage of fresh olives) is going to be a big feature of the New World Moorish diet. Presumably Khalwati Sufis are going to rejoice in this, which will establish the archetype of "dry wineless al-Aqsain" even more firmly.

Breastbinding and gender in Taiping China

IRL, 太平公主 "Taiping princess" is apparently Mandarin for "a flat-chested woman" (Taiping apparently doubles as "very flat.") In Andalusada today, I'm going to take a pun and use it to do horrible things to the universe. Here's how.

The Military Chronicle of the Beautiful Marshal

This last week in Andalusada has been spent mostly in my most favorite of all places: Taiping China. This week in the rest of my life, however, has been spent mostly offline, with my nose increasingly in books. This post was inspired by a passage from one of those books:

Whether described by Teresa of the Castle or Teresa of the antimacassars, the slow, painful, clearly marked journey is the same.... But in this anthology none of these maps or manuals or "ways" will be found to be described. For the mystic who happesn to be a Protestant, although he is not more isolated than the Catholic... the fellow climbers are not roped. For the Catholic there are "recognitions" everywhere. But for Jakob Boehme the sixteenth-century shoemaker, or John Wesley the founder of Methodism, or George Fox the Quaker, or Emanuel Swedenborg, there was no benefit of clergy, no scaffolding to hang onto, few guidebooks, and little in history to help.

-Anne Fremantle, The Protestant Mystics, p. viii

Even though Protestantism plays out differently (Güntheritism does have some mystical background, for starters), I'm guessing that this is still true - and nowhere is it more true than in Taiping China, which develops Christianity in radically non-Western ways.

Since I've already introduced one book, and have nothing better to write about just now, I may as well introduce another. One with a name so awful that I'm only going to use it three times in this entire post.

Chinese six-guns

One small but important problem with alt-history gun porn is that no recognizable brand exists in Andalusada. There are no Colts. There are no Brownings. There are no Mausers. There are no Maxims. This is at once liberating and imposing; freedom to explore ballistic history's roads less traveled, but with no name recognition I have to explore those roads, or I'm wasting my keystrokes and your time with wordy spellings-out of the word *1911. A world this far gone needs some recognizable new guns with recognizable new mystiques.

Taiping China was the first state in modern history to field significant forces of (flat-chested) soldiering women under their own command. As such, Taiping China was also the first place that had to consider a woman's physique when it outfitted soldiers. In the later 19th century, once Fraternal Studies had started to pick up steam and Taiping China was starting to become an international buyer, representatives of the Phoenix Hosts gave rise to one of Andalusada's iconic weapons: the Chinese six-gun.

Taiping lightning worship

Every alt-history writer has their favorite lost nations; one of mine is the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, because it was so quirky.

They loved stamps and seals, for reasons unknown, and passed out hundreds of thousands before the Rebellion was over. They loved flags; their military rules devote tons of space assigning specific colors, sizes and numbers of flags to specific ranks. None of this flows from Taiping theology; it just flows from how quirky their leadership was. And that means that I'll need to reinvent a lot of it, because what doesn't flow from their theology is entirely up for grabs.

The Great Translation

At its broadest, "the Renaissance" IRL means the economic and political upheaval caused by the Black Death and the end of the Medieval Warm Period, the changing power dynamics between Rome and the kingdoms caused by the Avignon Schism, linguistic changes caused by the rise of vernaculars and the rediscovery of classics (beginning with the Greek texts brought home from the Latin Empire, and accelerated as Byzantine civilization declined in its aftermath.)

And that's a problem for me. Because there's no guarantee that the Fourth Crusade (and there will be a Fourth Crusade) will result in the Latin Empire; there's no guarantee that church-state power dynamics will change because there may not be an Avignon Papacy; the Black Death could very well evolve in a different way. (Vernaculars and the end of the Medieval Warm Period, well, there's only so much that can be done about those.) Between that and a generally different intellectual landscape, there's no reason to think that the 13th century is going to play the same way, or indeed that it's going to be called "the Renaissance."

There is, however, going to be the Great Translation

Crown princes and their titles

In the present day, the titles of crown princes are pretty much meaningless: Prince of Asturias. Prince of Girona. Prince of Wales. But at some point in history, those titles meant something. And at some point in history, those titles became the titles of crown princes. And because Andalusada parts ways with the world we know in 1081, I'm going to need to rethink all of those stories.

Stockholm Syndrome

During the Thousand Days, the single most devastated theater on the Scandinavian mainland was the city of Stockholm. (Visby was probably hit even worse, but it was much smaller by comparison, and the Visby Campaign didn't last nearly as long as the Battle of Stockholm did.) It was the world's first experience with industrialized urban warfare; it epitomizes the horror of violence in the era in almost exactly the same way that Verdun epitomized the Great War.

Götaland was probably the first time that any developed nation outside of Russia saw machine guns used in urban warfare. (The Russians beat the rest of the world to it by about ten years.) It was definitely the first place on Earth to see rocket warfare on that large a scale. And for more than two years, it never ended.

The Skete of Orsa

IRL, the Taizé Community of ecumenical fame is founded in and based out of Taizé, a small town in Bourgogne where, to the best of anybody's knowledge, nothing interesting ever happened until 1940. (Brother Roger went to Taizé because it was isolated enough to escape military attention, and stayed because its population was lonely enough that he felt called by God to address it.)

As of Andalusada's present, the Taizé Community would still be twenty years in the future even if it was going to happen, which it most certainly is not, because the world's going to be wildly different enough that there won't be Nazis, or a united Germany, or an occupation of France at that point. Unless something else happens there, that little commune would be forever unknown to the world.

Fortunately, however, there is something that can happen there: Taizé is an hour's march from a neighbor whose claim to fame is secured before things even start. Because (Old World) places are far more likely to exist than people, and the Wars of Religion are still only a sketch, I asked a friend last night: "How would you feel about a Battle of Taizé?"

His response took me by surprise: "What would that do to the service style?" This is my answer.

The Günther Bible

Historically, the Ordensstaat actually used a dialect of Middle German in their chanceries. Why I'm not sure, because the lands of the Teutonic Order apparently didn't use it as a vernacular; IRL, after the secularization of the State into Ducal and Royal Prussia, the Teutonic Kanzelrei was completely abandoned in favor of the Low German spoken in daily life.

In Andalusada, of course, the Monastic State isn't secularized; it's overthrown. Monastic Middle German wasn't abandoned ITTL so much as consciously supplanted by the language of the rising urban population, and the Günther Bible (by establishing their Low German as a written language) was instrumental in doing this.

Urraca of León and Castille

Once things start getting different, I run into one of the first big divergence in history: the last Castillian monarch common to both timelines. Her name is Urraca, and she's something I've tried to ignore for awhile because so much is changed that I have no certain idea how her life plays out. This is her blog post.

Urraca's recognizable life

The only reason that I'm sure about Urraca's existence at all is because she's born in 1079. This means that she's two years old as of the POD.

The Manazil and Moorish popular Islam

Historically, the Arabic-language printing is complicated by the fact that it's a cursive-only script, which requires a larger range of letters because there needs to be initial, medial, final, and isolated versions of almost all. IRL, this was only made harder by the fact that in the Ottoman Empire the printing presses were run by Christians (and often Catholic foreigners rather than the domestic Greeks), who adopted as their standard typeface a script of Arabic that Muslims generally didn't use.

(This Catholic influence, incidentally, was also part of the crisis that gave rise to the Uniate church; the early Ottoman printing industry was Jesuit, and for a solid century after the fall of Constantinople the autonomous churches under it had basically no printed literature at a time when their Catholic neighbors had tons of it. The Russians responded, at least in part, by transferring the seat of the church from Kiev to Muscovy, and eventually pressuring the Ecumenical Patriarch to grant them autocephaly; the same events gave rise, in lands under the Polish-Lithuanian orbit, to the church transferring its loyalties from the Patriarch to the Pope in the interest of securing equal status with their Roman hegemons.)

The biggest issue was that the publication of the Qur'an was frowned on very, very hard. In Western Europe, the publication of the Bible (even outside the vernacular) was enormously financially successful in early modernity, which basically doomed the age of manuscript and the assumptions of manuscript culture.
But what's true of the Ottoman Empire (or whatever the Turks are in Andalusada, because the Ottomans are not foreordained) isn't necessarily true of the Moors, who after all develop their own civilization by the time they start establishing trans-Atlantic colonies.

So how does the printed Qur'an work? I have some tentative thoughts.

The Black Codices

After the discovery of the New World in 1484, there's every reason to think that Seville, in the name of having money to spend after such a long and marginal existence, does what Spain did IRL: spends so much New World gold that it collapses economies worldwide, causing a global shift toward the silver standard.

At the lowest point of the gold crash, somebody in the Five Families had an inspired idea: if gold is so cheap, why not make a show of it? Thus was born the Black Codices.

The Farrellite dynasties

For the first 1500 years, Christianity was made of episcopal hierarchies, all of whom agreed that they were the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, rightwise heirs to the upper room on Pentecost. The Reformation did a bit to disrupt that, but the attitude was still there, and contributed in no small part to the Thirty Years' War. As far as I can tell, denominationalism only really arises in America, where none of the colonial state churches became hegemonic in the federal period - forcing the churches to coexist, compete as equals, and acknowledge that they don't have exclusive monopolies.

This complicates things a bit, because Andalusada's religious history is different enough (for one thing, England and Scotland are still Catholic...) that the "I'm okay, you're okay" consensus of American religious life won't evolve. And yet the world would be a somewhat less interesting place if the variety of religious experience was less varied, no?

So, in a leap of logic a month or so back, I blurted out a solution: the Farrellite dynasties.