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.

How long the Great Realignment lasts is up for some discussion. The seeds of it were sown at least in the 1720s, according to some historians (in the buildup for the first Mexican crisis, which bleeds Umayyad Seville white at a most inopportune time). What matters, for the sake of this blog, is to say that the Great Realignment exists, and comprises a number of other events - mostly wars.

The big events of the Great Realignment

The Great Realignment isn't a single event so much as a series of them - and even though I've hinted at some of them quite a bit (the French cession of continental North America, for instance) I've never actually spelled it out, not least because I have only the vaguest ideas about how this stuff plays. So here goes:

• The major-powers war of the 1720s-1740s. I'm not even sure what it's called yet, except that it ends with the transfer of a fair bit of France-Outremer to the Moors, who rename it "New Andalusia" and forget about it for awhile.
• The Pomeranian Reductions: For most of the early modern era, Güntherite Pomerania was an unstoppable military juggernaut. At the turn of the century, though, it runs out of steam, and its troubled relationship with its Polish liege deteriorates until, eventually, the decision is made to expunge them from the map.
• The Mexican Liturgical War. At the time, this is classed as a guerilla, no different from the riots in the Middle Ages; the surface issue is an urban Christian revolt against Moorish heavy-handedness, using Isidoran heavy-handedness as a pretext. What makes this distinct is that it's bigger, and the heavy-handed response draws a lot of criticism at the time.
• The Imperial Union of England-Scotland. For quite some time, Scotland and France were very close, held together by something very like (if not explicitly called) the Auld Alliance. At some point in the Great Realignment, however, that breaks down, and marital politics works its magic - bringing the two squabbling, space-filling halves of Great Britain under a single monarch.
  
  This isn't the first personal union, or even necessarily the first dynastic union of the two kingdoms; but what makes the Imperial Union so important is that it also marks a turn towards absolutism under the new dynasty. It isn't a turn to absolutism, simply because it's too much of a mess, but England-Scotland becomes something that had never been seen before: a modern dual monarchy.
• In 1787, a riot starts in Seville, which eventually spirals into the Moorish Civil War. By 1790, that riot ends with the last legitimate caliph of Seville, al-Mahdi, in Maghrebi exile and Castille ruling, for the first time since the Visigothic Kingdom, over al-Andalus.
• The War of the French Succession, when the dystopian House of Guise manages to die without a clear successor, leading to a civil war that ends with the Duke of Burgundy on top.
• The Second Mahdist War. Just past the halfway point of the War of the French Succession, food riots and the reaction to the new Crown of All Spains throw Iberia into chaos. Into this chaos comes al-Mahdi, the once and future Caliph of Seville - who comes terrifyingly close to Seville itself, before his army is defeated and he dies on the field. The Spanish Kingdom remains the Crown of All Spains - but his timing forces Spain to withdraw its legitimist claim, leaving the Burgundians victorious.
• The Tonic Wars: At about the same time that the Second Mahdist War is underway in Spain, or shortly thereafter, the upstart nation of Gran Peru manages to cut a truly impressive trade deal with England-Scotland, allowing a much higher survival rate in the malarial tropics of the world. Thus begins what are popularly remembered as "the Tonic Wars": an Anglo-Scottish offensive around the Indian Ocean, in which their medicinal edge tips the balance of power in their favor.

The aftermath of the Great Realignment

The big changes are as follows:

• The transatlantic Moorish Empire is gone. With the rightful heir of Seville dead, Mahdism as a coherent political force dissolves into ressentiment and cults of personality; with the dissolution of Moorish common law in the south, the Andalusi economic order is shattered, never to be restored. (The disruption of that economic order prompts a wave of emigrations, which Yusuf I is quick to exploit to his advantage.)
• England-Scotland is a new (if still rising) world power. Having annexed France's Australian* holdings, they've permanently checked French expansion into the Pacific Ocean, leaving them free to swallow up French Southeast Asian holdings with impunity.
• Saxony has replaced Pomerania as the dominant Germany. For most of the Great Realignment, Pomerania doesn't exist, and when it rises again three generations of nonexistence have taken its toll. During that time, Saxony has become the major German player in central Europe - and more than that, it's started to transform itself into an international player as well.
• French India is permanently stalled by the combined forces of England-Scotland, mighty Bengal, and some alliances with the Empire of Multan. This (combined with a certain amount of arms trading) leads to the Indians catching up with the Europeans in terms of militaria, guaranteeing that nobody will ever establish a British Raj.
• Although it's not particularly obvious, Russian expansionism into South Asia has been halted, after a Bonaparte-tier general is provoked to launch a late-August punitive expedition into Afghanistan. It botches what would otherwise have been a truly epic win for Tver, but not before damaging the Persian state enough that a new Sorani Kurdish dynasty can take over.

The most important consequence of the Great Realignment is simply this: the Europeans have been bled white. Russia, which was ever so close to a runaway victory that would've ended with ports on the Indian Ocean, blew out its brains and went to its Bog like a soldier. France is licking its wounds from its civil war. The newly-formed England-Scotland is still tottering and overstretched.

So when several missionaries in China cause a revival that gets a bit out of hand, or when the Takasagonese invent pan-nationalism just in time to throw in and take over Japan, or the UCNA claims one stretch of the land Russia ceded to England-Scotland on the Pacific Coast, far the hell away from anywhere? Europe has to let it happen. They simply have no more soldiers left to fight stuff like that.

By 1950, chauvinist historians of Empire will look back upon a hundred years ago, when the white man lost his monopoly on the world.