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.

Güntherite Pomerania

Truth be told, I'm not sure what it was actually called. It was never a kingdom, I think, although maybe a swathe of it was a Grand Duchy? I dunno. What I do know, very clearly, is that it was a religious region. Just as much as there was Moorish Spain, there was Güntherite Pomerania, and this was where it started.

Güntherite Pomerania 101

Why Güntherite Pomerania? Because it's so very different from IRL. [More to come.]

• Who? Germans, Pruthenians, Poles, Sorbs, Livonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians - basically it was one big Baltic littoral melting pot, although the first three ethnicities of that list were definitely the most pronounced ones.
• What? An unstoppable military juggernaut.
• Where? For the most part, Güntherite Pomerania encompassed the Teutonic Ordensstaat. (Some of the easternmost parts were actually vassals of the Kingdom of Poland, at that point not yet part of the Polish-Ruthenian Commonwealth.)
• When? 1520s-1760s. Depending on how you're counting, Güntherite Pomerania was established either shortly after or shortly before the end of the Güntherite Wars. (The region wasn't recognized as a state in its own until shortly after, but it was thoroughly converted to the Holy Church before the wars were over.) Once it was established, it lasted two centuries, before it was finally partitioned and wiped off the map during the Pomeranian Reductions.

So let's move on a bit.

Russian Orthodoxy after Tsarism

IRL, the Russian Orthodox Church was granted its autocephaly in the year 1589, and has retained it ever after. IRL, the Russian Revolution also caused the Russian Orthodox Church an enormous amount of drama, especially because (with some notable exceptions) it came out strongly and vocally in support of tsarism and the Whites, which caused three notable spinoffs (and a bunch of minor ones, most notably various individual Russian Uniatists.)

Andalusada has a Russian Orthodox Church, of course, and it also has a revolution (at the ass-end of the Russo-Japanese War, financed in no small part by Japanese agents); and given that the Russian Orthodox Church of Andalusada is just as much an organ of state as it was IRL, it stands to reason that there's going to be an enormous amount of drama too. But the similarities pretty much end there, because history started going haywire in the early- to mid-1650s [when?], after Evgeny the Great promulgated his calendar and took the Russian Orthodox Church out of communion with the rest of what was now "Greek" or "Levantine" Orthodoxy.

That rift means that when the Russian Orthodox Church collapses - as indeed it does - it's going to fragment in more, and more interesting, ways than the Russian Orthodox Church could dream of doing IRL. This post is meant to introduce and outline those ways.

Introducing Evgeny I of Russia

The first tsar of Russia I named definitely was also the last: Evgeny IV, popularly called "the Old." All I knew about him was what I'd retained after filing off the serial numbers of the last several Romanovs - and that he was, obviously, the fourth Evgeny of Russia.

It therefore follows that there had to be an Evgeny I as well. And, since I'd already established "the Two Evgenies" as a period in Russian historiography way back in May, it stood to reason that Evgeny I should be a notable tsar as well.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the (very WIP) introduction of the first Evgeny.

The Eugenian calendar

The problem with the Julian calendar was recognized from the very beginning, well before Andalusada's POD:

While Hipparchus and presumably Sosigenes were aware of the discrepancy, although not of its correct value, it was evidently felt to be of little importance at the time of the Julian reform. However, it accumulated significantly over time: the Julian calendar gained a day about every 134 years.

Why is this remotely relevant? Because calendrical reform affects everything. The decisive rupture between Russia and the rest of the Orthodox world starts with a calendrical reform, and the Vechist Wars were directly tied into the politics of the liturgical year. (It's still being fought over as of the present day.)

Christianities of Andalusada

"Christianity" is a pretty broad-stroke thing. In America, because we're used to thinking of it in this way, we define it in terms of Catholics and various denominations of Protestants. In Europe, it's defined in terms of national churches and such.

But broken down into its most basic taxonomy, the overwhelming majority of Christianity can be partitioned into some point of this taxonomy, arranged in roughly chronological order. Branches (or sub-branches) written in boldface represent churches that have historically claimed some degree of exclusivity in the past:

• Assyrian Church of the East
• Oriental Orthodox communion
• Coptic canonical tradition
• Ethiopian canonical tradition
• Eastern Orthodox communion
• Greek canonical tradition
• Slavonic canonical tradition
• (cf. Russian Orthodox) Old Believers
• Roman Catholic communion
• Roman Catholic Church
• Uniate churches
• Protestantism
• Lutheranism 
• Calvinism
• Presbyterian tradition
• Congregational tradition
• Baptist tradition
• Anabaptist tradition (arguably separate from Protestantism)
• Anglican Communion (arguably a Protestant tradition)
• Methodist tradition
• Holiness tradition
• Pentecostal tradition

This is, obviously, a very reduced taxonomy. It isn't counting in the tangle of loyalties caused by the Eastern Catholic tradition, for instance, or the hairsplitting that's come out of Protestantism. It also isn't counting in the extinct branches, or the subtle liturgical differences between canons.