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.

Güntherite Pomeranian history in a nutshell

This is sorta how it goes:

• The Güntherite Wars: In the beginning, there was the revolt. And the revolt came with Günther, and the revolt became Günther.
• The Fourth Güntherite War: And when the Kingdom of Poland tried to raise a stink about it, the Güntherites kicked his ass seven ways to Sunday, and then - graciously - buried his dead for free.
• The Hanseatic Wars: As outsiders to the Holy Roman Empire (and mostly not nobles in any case), the Pomeranians weren't able to stand for the office of Emperor. They could, however, throw in behind the (Güntherite) Margrave of Brandenburg.
• The Franco-Swedish Wars: The big major-power struggle of the late 17th century is fought between dystopian Catholic France and Denmark-Sweden, mostly over control of the Low Countries. (I think. This is really conjectural.) I'm not sure what sides people are on, but it strikes me that this would be a perfect time for Güntherite Pomerania to do something that nobody had ever seen it do before: lose a war.
• The Pomeranian Reductions: Poland-Ruthenia was a personal union with an electoral monarchy. Its neighbors, meanwhile, were significantly more stable than it was, and aggressively expansionist - and every time Poland-Ruthenia wound up at war with Denmark-Sweden, say, or the encroaching juggernaut that the Tsardom of Russia, it found itself fighting a war on two fronts. They were winnable wars - after the last big one, Pomerania's military juggernaut had finally run out of steam - but it was a problem. And so, with the tacit approval of Saxony and Sweden, the Reductions began. Between 1716 and 1768, Pomerania was systematically wiped from the map.

Thus ends the history of Güntherite Pomerania.

The legacy of Güntherite Pomerania

In the end, of course, Pomerania wouldn't stay dead forever. It rose again - twice, actually - and finally managed to resuscitate itself during the Burning Thirties; but land and historic claims notwithstanding, republican Pomerania is no more a successor state to Güntherite Pomerania than IRL Poland is to the Commonwealth of Both Nations.

• Güntheritism united Pomerania, more than any race or nation. (This has been more than a bit lost; modern Pomerania is explicitly "Pomeranian," and distinguishes, say, Poles in a way that would've been unknown during the days of yore.)
• The Pomeranian partitions gave rise to a significant Pomeranian diaspora, large chunks of which went to support various radical causes - and foreign militaries. (They were disproportionately prominent in the Grand Principalities, for instance, and there's a reason that the New World's only homegrown political dynasty is called the House of Sansinger.)