The Grand Principality of Mexico

If I wanted a true and serious wank, I would've had the UCNA keep the Moorish empire. Even losing the Old World, they'd be one of the largest countries on the planet, controlling both the Mexican and Transcabralian Canals and the combined resources of everything from the Great Lakes south to around Chile. I did not want a wank, however. I wanted something plausible. And mostly, when I started writing this world as a GURPS Infinite Worlds setting, I was clueless about world history.

So of course there was a Mexico. Of course it was pretty similar to Mexico IRL. And because of sheer inertia, Mexico has existed as an independent nation ever since. But it hasn't stayed the same; the world has moved on, and the butterflies have turned it into the Grand Principality of Mexico.

The G.P. of Mexico 101

Why? Originally, this was the space-filling Empire of Mexico. After awhile, it evolved into a Bonapartist space-filling empire (on the lines of the Second Empire, which was run by a Habsburg); after that, into an ideologically Bonapartist empire; and after that, once reactionary Prussia had evolved into revolutionary Pomerania, into the G.P. of Mexico that you see here today.

• Who? Almost all the possible permutations of the Moorish ethnoreligious colonial hierarchy, with the Muslim varieties greatly reduced, under the charismatic rule of the House of Sansinger and its forest of bayonets.
• What? At one point, the UCNA's nemesis; at this point, its quirky miniboss antagonist.
• Where? Mexico and more. The G.P. of Mexico controls enough land to its south to have built the Mexican Canal, for instance.
• When? Like almost everything in the New World, the G.P. of Mexico is a child of the Great Realignment - specifically that part in the 1790s, when the Moorish colonial empire imploded. From that point, despite more and more serious turmoil than IRL Mexico was ever diverse enough to experience, it's managed to survive to the present day.

 So moving on a bit...

Hispano-Baltic Texas

At the start, the USA still existed; greatly reduced, but far more of it, and more recognizable, than it had any right to be. (It was my first alt history. Sue me.) As I wrote the world, it gave way to many countries in the continent called, very simply, "America." The UCNA, obviously, is the dominant one.

Due south of the UCNA lies the G.P. of Mexico, which is now a quirky miniboss antagonist - but used to be an existential threat. In between Mexico and the UCNA lies a swathe of land with at least one recognizable border, painted (on the B_Munro map) in what the Expanded Universal Colour Scheme would call the Lone Star Republic. I'm going to call it by its working name: Hispano-Baltic Texas.

Hispano-Baltic Texas 101

Why? Rule of Cool, of course; but more to it than that. Andalusada is a world that has not been good to the cause of republicanism; by establishing HBT as a republic, it offset the fact that a lot of (often dysfunctional) monarchies prevail in the timeline. (And it's still "Texan"; it has a very different attitude and style from the Atlantic confederacy that broke away from England-Scotland.)

• Who? Originally it was mostly Moorish mestizos; after about 1750, it was run by Prussians and Pomeranians. Since then it's attracted a few waves of refugees from these two old-stock ethnicities (originally Balts, more recently a lot of Mexicans), as well as a fair number of republican Moors from the UCNA.
• What? A quirky, plucky republic synthesizing Moorish dissent with Baltic republicanism, supported by the UCNA as a buffer state against Sansinger Mexico.
• Where? Corresponding with IRL Texas, with some parts of Oklahoma and Arizona included and the eastern borders a little pushed back. (The northwestern borders I'm not clear about, but the Rio Grande provides an obvious geographic boundary anyways.)
• When? It started becoming Baltic in the 1750s; it became formally independent in I think the late 1830s. From that point, it's continued to the present day.

The question, of course, is "how."

Mahdism

Talking about Andalusada can be hard. On good days, the problem is that nobody has any idea what the hell I'm going on about, because I can't just link them to the blog and say, "Read all of it." On bad days, though, it's because it involves Islam, and Islam makes people stop thinking.

Well-meaning but clueless people hear that North America is a Spanish-speaking Muslim country, and that's all they hear. Without a chance to get into how it evolves, or what politics can be like in a world with steampunk social science, they immediately conclude that the UCNA is a superpower Islamic Republic of Iran; it's only because I live in a decent part of the country that I haven't heard the word "Islamofascist" used yet.

Which is a shame, because there's a joke that I could make, and nobody who used "Islamofascist" would get it: This is Islamic Spain I'm talking about. They have Islamo-Carlism instead.

Mahdism 101 ("Onward to the twelfth century!")

Mahdism's goal can be summarized with a single four-digit number: "1200." That's 1200 AH for all you dhimmis out there - 1786, the last stable year in the history of Umayyad Seville. Logically or semi-logically, that goal entails the following things:

• Andalusi independence: Mahdism is nationalist, not regionalist. While most of them would be quite happy to give the Crown of All Spains a taste of its own medicine by taking over Castilla as well, the key goal isn't retribution; it's the restoration of Seville as a state in its own right.
• ...as a caliphate: Mahdism isn't exactly "Islamist" in our sense, but it's certainly Muslim; what was once a metropolis and cultural capital has been turned into an emigration society, and the emigrants are overwhelmingly Moors who are disadvantaged under the new state Catholicism that (incidentally) doesn't benefit the Mozarabs that much either.
• Because Seville's common law was abolished after the First Mahdist War, "restoring the caliphate" implicitly also means "restoring the prewar legal codes," which would restore a lot of the old Moorish khassa to prominence again. (It would also mean that a lot of poor Moors would suddenly own small amounts of Old World land.)
• ...ruled by the House of Umayya. Originally, this was the legitimist claim of al-Mahdi. In the wake of his death, that cult of personality has diffused into a cult of dynasty. Although any serious Mahdist pretender will have a cult of personality, Mahdism as a whole is devoted less to the individual than to the continuing succession of the first, greatest, and only true rulers of the Islamic world.
• Specifically, this means "under an Umayyad descended from al-Mahdi." There's a fair number of them at this point. Pretenders are always styled Mahdi, and their mothers "Umm Mahdi" as an honorific.

Or at least that's how it's supposed to work.

The Warsaw School of ballistic thought

In the beginning, there was the Russo-Japanese War, in which Japan... didn't exactly win, but managed to make the Russian Empire lose. After that came the Russian Civil War, in which the Vechists decisively did win; and once the Vechist government had shored itself up enough at home, it addressed the fact that it was also at war with almost all of its neighbors.

There was, first off, a war in the Caucasus, which dealt a humiliating defeat to the by now space-filling (probably Turkic) empire that picked up where Constantinople left off. And after that there was the war in Armenia, and the war in Georgia, and possibly some struggles with the Sorani dynasty that took over most of Persia the last time the Russians had fought around there. There was, of course, that issue in Karelia that ended about a thousand days later.

And then there was the European theater. And the first opponent, as usual, was the Polish-Ruthenian Commonwealth. Here ends the backstory; let's move on to the gun porn.

The Thousand Days

Timeframe: 1916-1919.
Belligerents: Great Russia vs. Sweden, Saxony, Pomerania, etc.
Outcome: Swedish strategic defeat; nominal Vechist victory

At some point, after the Russian Civil War was over but before 1920, the Vechist government in Tver had a problem. Specifically, it was a problem with Sweden, or maybe Finland, or maybe Karelia. (I will be the first to confess that I'm not sure exactly how Scandinavian politics plays out in Andalusada, even after the Great Realignment.)

The Vechist government has enough of a problem, in fact, that it authorizes one of its generals to teach the King of Sweden a lesson. That lesson (as I said once) is remembered in Sweden as "the Three Years' War." Everywhere else in the world, it's remembered for the authoritative history written about it: The Thousand Days.

The Technical Censors

Russia's modernization got off to a rocky start.

To his credit, Evgeny the Old did establish the polytechnic schools, and provided a fair number of subsidies to make them accessible. The first generation of Russian technicians, however, were mostly hired by the first generation of Russian industrialists who would happily cut off their nose to spite their competitor's face; a fair number of those engineers were paid well to make things not interoperable, in fact, and that set a precedent for things to come.

By the turn of the century, Russia had two dominant gauges, neither of which could run on the other; there were two others that didn't cover nearly enough area to compete with the first two, but enough to be nontrivial. (Significantly, the area around Lake Baikal involved a track change. From the very beginning it was a logistical loggerhead; when the Russo-Japanese War began and armies had to be mobilized to Meammosirsk, the delays were serious enough that it may have cost Russia the war.) Tsarist power grids were even worse; east of Moscow, some cities had dangerously different voltage standards, and even today older electricians still have complete sets of adapters.

What were they to do?

The Polish-Ruthenian Commonwealth

I've mentioned it casually in the past. I've derped about it before. But since I've never actually said it yet, I may as well say it now: Poland exists.

It's a simple thing to say, because we're used to Poland existing - but for a long time IRL it didn't. Andalusada changes that; Poland survived the early-modern era, and has continued its existence uninterrupted to the present day. And even more importantly than that, it survived without significantly changing from the awesomeness of its IRL early-modern form.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Polish-Ruthenian Commonwealth. Social science doesn't get much more steampunk than this, people.

Poland-Ruthenia 101

The big question for Poland-Ruthenia is "Why?" The answer to that is simple: Rule of Cool. Every allohistorian has their own pet nations, the lost causes and might-have-beens - and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is one of mine.

So with that rationale out of the way, let me summarize Poland-Ruthenia in a nutshell:

• Who: Poles and "Ruthenians," however so defined. (The definitions are pretty vague.)
• What: The most steampunk monarchy
• When: Not exactly sure when it starts off, or even if it has claims to Lithuania; but in the form of Poland-Ruthenia it definitely lasts to the present day.
• Where: Most of IRL Poland (possibly incorporating IRL's Ducal Prussia, possibly not), less a swathe of the Pomerelian region which has been Germanic since the Teutonic Ordensstaat and broke away during the Burning Thirties. "Ruthenia" is a bit harder to define, but it includes at least the Eastern Borderlands and Galicia, and probably some other assorted bits and pieces of what we'd call Belarus, Lithuania, and the northwest Ukraine.

On machine gun taxonomies

By 1930, the real world had pretty much sorted out what a machine gun was and what they could be, establishing the light/medium/heavy trichotomy that survives more or less to the present day (with adjustments for the GPMG.) Andalusada, however, is nowhere near as straightforward, despite having invented and adopted them pretty much on schedule, and having started a major war cycle (the Great War, most recently the Russian Wars) that really should have sorted this stuff out.

And because I've derped about this at length offline, I may as well take the opportunity to say why. And that answer is: It's France's fault.

Republican political titles

In republican politics, "President" is a very important term IRL, so much so that it's a normative one: the opposite of a parliamentary system is, for instance, a presidential system. And yet it's enormously contingent on the rise of the United States, and even more specifically on the Constitutional Convention of 1787 - which, just over 700 years after Andalusada's history is cut adrift from the anchor of IRL, is guaranteed not to happen. (And even that, according to Wikipedia, derives from the Commonwealth of England - which is pretty much guaranteed not to play out the same way either.)

This wouldn't be so much of an issue, except that a learnéd friend of mine, after reading about Cabralia's Three Wise Men last night, asked me a question about how republican governments work in Andalusada - and I didn't have a ready answer. After much derping, he pronounced my thoughts "a bit much to keep track of," which was my cue to blog about it today.

Introducing the Three Wise Men

The Latin American Wars of Independence tend to get ignored in English-language alternate history, for the simple reason that most of the best literature about them is probably written in Spanish. Which is a shame, because they have an enormous number of Great Men in their ranks. Bolivar. San Martin. And my favorite, Bernardo O'Higgins, founding father of Chile - not so much for anything he did, but because he has such a wonderfully implausible name.

Wars of Independence happen in Andalusada too, during the breakdown of Umayyad Seville - but obviously not the same ones, because by the time the wars Spanish history is 700 years gone. There are still going to be lots of Great Men in the histories of those wars; Yusuf I is one of them.

In Cabralia, by sheer coincidence (and authorial fiat), the greatest of those Great Men shared an unlikely set of names that leads to them being internationally known, in all languages, as "the Three Wise Men." This is their introduction.

The Great Realignment

By the year 1650, Andalusada's modern European balance of power had been set more or less in stone. The Holy Roman Empire was a shattered mess, still recovering from the Hanseatic Wars; it was moribund, surviving only vicariously. Hungary, Poland-Ruthenia, and to an extent Pomerania were in better shape, but all of them were tied up with the threat from the east - either the post-Byzantine Turkic juggernaut or the irresistible rise of mighty Tver as it gobbled up Lithuania. In the west, there were only two powers that mattered - Imperial Seville (by that point late into the Five Families period) and its continental counterweight, dystopian Catholic France, itself starting to establish a serious global presence. All the other nations (England, the Portuguese Empire, the rise of little Castille, and eventually what consolidated into Denmark-Sweden) were second-tier at best.

That status quo definitely survives for another century, despite the Five Families period ending with the Miramoline and the transfer of a big chunk of continental America out of French control. It might survive for another 50 years after that, even. But by 1850, the global stage has changed wildly.

For starters, after 1100 years, Muslim control over southern Iberia is over. Once-mighty Seville is gone, spinning off the UCNA, the G.P. of Mexico, and Gran Peru (amongst many other countries.) Portugal's not doing so hot either, having lost most of its new world holdings to Cabralia and the CRC. Across the world, the once-inexorable rise of France has been halted or curtailed - not least in France itself, where a new dynasty has ended the dystopia. And now it's opposed by, of all things, a united British Isles, which hadn't existed since the 1300s.

By 1850, the world had changed enough that the power struggles were between totally different sides. The era before 1850, however long that may have taken, is known to historians as the Great Realignment.

The Takasagonese

"If you change it far enough back," I wrote two months ago, "you start getting ethnicities that don't exist IRL." Changing colonial histories, and you get things like most of the American South being French Farrellites... or a Lusophone *Philippines instead of a Hispanophone one, because Cabral didn't sail for Spain... or Yevanic surviving to the present day because there's a totally different Sephardi diaspora. Or, as I started the list with, a Japonicized *Taiwan.

Today, boys and girls, the post is about that Japonicized *Taiwan. Meet the Takasagonese.

April 5th

Everywhere that Persian language and culture have ever been hegemonic, Muslims still celebrate the distinctly Persian holiday of Nawruz (however so spelled.) About a thousand years ago, al-Andalus had a holiday of its own: al-khamsa al-Abril, "April 5th."

There was no religious significance to the day - it was simply created as an excuse for Muslims to get drunk with Christian neighbors on Easter. (Doubtless there were April 5th jokes in all the years when it came later than that.) We know it existed for the very simple reason that the ulama felt a recurring need to remind everybody that it was a reprehensible bid'a and was never observed in the time of the righteous ancestors.

al-Andalus collapsed, obviously, and that collapse is a big part of why April 5th is no longer celebrated like that today. In Andalusada, just as obviously, it didn't collapse, and that holiday continued to be celebrated, for long enough that it wound up becoming a distinctive of Moorish civ, just as much as Nawruz is for the Persianate world.

The Blackfriars Bible

"One small but important problem," I derped last month, "is that no recognizable brand exists in Andalusada." I retract that statement; this is a big problem. And it's not just guns that are affected: it's everything that I love - food, liquor, philosophy. Even Bibles.

Obviously there's going to be the Günther Bible, and both Oliver Farrell's Vulgate and his translation from the Opus Transtulit. But those aren't the only ones, and the simple fact is that even if Catholicism keeps Latin as its liturgical language and does its utmost to dissuade the vernacular, the vernacular is established by the time they face competition. It's not going to go away; the most that Rome can do is have a say in its relationship to the vernacular Word.

This is particularly problematic to me because, as far as I can tell, Anglicanism doesn't exist: there's no reason to imagine that the British Isles don't stay devoutly Catholic (albeit undergoing some reforms to purge what its elites consider the worst excesses of Mariolatry and the like.) I'm not sure what the successions of kings, English or Scottish, look like - all I know is that even if there is a King James of England and Scotland (and there will be an England-Scotland, mark my words), he is NOT the same King James that gave us the 1611 Authorized Version.

So today I'm going to introduce the KJV's equivalent: the Blackfriars Bible.

Gran Peru

I've seriously thought about regulating the writing of my other blog. This one? Not so much.

This blog is a place for me to do all my spontaneous writing and get it into a format that other people can read. If it's disorganized, it's because I'm disorganized; 850 years of universe to completely rewrite is a long, long time. I write the stuff that's interesting to me (which is why there's a lot of theology and food), I ignore the stuff I don't know anything about, and nobody complains because nobody even comments here. This is a vanity project; I have all the time in the world to get this stuff hammered out.

But it does mean that I can go months at a time without acknowledging really big things. It's why Taiping China gets a lot of love, but the 3-4 dynasties that precede it (all the way back to the Song, actually) are completely unaccounted for. Or why I just now started writing about stuff that I knew from the very beginning of the blogging, like the CRC's existence.

Or, for that matter, the existence of Cabralia's big regional power: Gran Peru. In a continent dominated by the G.P. of Cabralia and the endless cascade of juntas and caudillos just to their south, Gran Peru is an anomaly: a stable, safe island of accountable government and honest elections. This is where it's introduced.

Gran Peru 101

Why Gran Peru? At its heart, Gran Peru is a space-filling empire.

...so that's the why and wherefore. Now for the rest of it:

• Who? A bunch of mestizos, even more pure Andean aborigines (Quechua and Aymara are both recognized Peruvian languages), and some Swiss in there for good measure.
• What? "The little republic that could," say my oldest notes; "more cocaine and less banking, but 'Andean Switzerland' is still frighteningly accurate." The only part about it that doesn't fit the bill is "little," because going by Wikipedia Gran Peru is definitely one of the ten largest countries on the planet, jealously either rivaled or rivaling Argentina Patagonia.
• Where? Obviously, the Peru-Bolivian Commonwealth. It also pushes north a fair bit, encompassing most of Ecuador and stray bits of Colombia and Brazil. (The exact extent of it is a bit unclear; the southernmost parts of Gran Peru are contested with the CRC, and there are a few lowland jungles in the easternmost extent that are claimed by both Cabralia and the CRC.)
• When? Not sure about the beginnings; different parts conglomerate at different times. But it does survive to the present day.

The CRC

Early on, I realized that on the map, ca. 1930, there was an enormous empty space with the words "South America" scratched out and replaced with "Cabralia." Given that nature, and alternate history, abhors a vacuum, I set out to fill it in with... what, exactly?

Cabralia is obviously going to be in there somewhere (a *Bonapartist empire, because the Empire of Brazil already exists, and it's called the UCNA.) But since Brazil is always the dominant power of alt-South America (because it's the biggest, see, and that means it's the most important), and I wanted something different, there's also going to be Gran Peru, the awesome republic that could. But that still leaves the entire Southern Cone unaccounted for.

So, from early on, I created the CRC, which I've been remiss in ignoring up to this point.