Yusuf II

Dates: 18??-1908.

Yusuf I leaves impossibly large shoes to fill on his death. For the next fifty years, those shoes aren't filled - at least not by anybody of the Umayyad line; the best claimant to that position would be Yusuf's former right-hand man, Don Musa Cordovero, who (along with his son, Don Ibrahim) oversees a succession of what's commonly called "the six weak caliphs" and steers the UCNA into being a more presidential monarchy.

After Don Musa's death, and the rise of Don Ibrahim, the UCNA encounters something it hasn't known since Yusuf I. For the first time in half a century, the Umayyad and the Cordovero at the top of the pecking order had a rapport - and ambition.

That Umayyad, not coincidentally, was named Yusuf II. This is his blog post.

Seadling

IRL, Japan exported many more guns than it ever sold. The IJN left Arisaka rifles scattered around the Pacific Rim; the IJA, across mainland Asia. All of them were rechambered, for every caliber and cartridge in use at the time, and shot until they were obsolete. But even though most of their military hardware was freely available for sale, it didn't have many buyers - in part because it was so kludgy.

This is not the Japan of Andalusada. My Japan has a reputation for high-quality craftsmanship that Taisho Japan never earned IRL. My Japan's guns are not monstrously kludgy. My Japan's guns are quirky and groundbreaking and there's nothing else like them on the market.

My Japan's guns have a brand name. That brand name is Seadling.

The Swiss Advisor

The world of Andalusada has many places within itself that it considers "exotic." As a rule, most of these are inhabited by colored people full of exuberant barbarism, who by all rights should have been conquered by the world's more civilized races and all that. As a rule, most of those savages have been conquered by most of those more civilized races already.

But it's not true of all of them. There are, in fact, some exotic locales that stubbornly refuse to bow their heads and accept their destiny. It's understandable for some of these defiant aborigines, because they're proud (or cruel) and honorable (or merciless) warrior races. But not all of those holdouts are warrior races - and no warrior race, however noble (or vile) it may be, is actually the equal of the good and doughty soldiery of the Empire, whichever Empire it is that the speaker belongs to. Where the plot takes the characters into the midst of such a foreign people, therefore, it is customary to have them encounter the local Swiss Advisor.

The Chergui

Timeframe: October 1895-April 1896.
Belligerents: The Crown of All Spains vs. Mahdist insurgents.
Outcome: Pyrrhic Spanish victory

In 1893, Yusuf II was faced with a small nightmare: a military standards war. It took the better part of a year to sort it out, and no small investment of money and man-hours, before the Caliphal Army was uniformly issued matching rifles and ammunition that wouldn't explode. The Port-Royal musketoon had prevailed, and the army now faced a problem: what to do with all the noncompliant hardware?

Refitting it was too much trouble; they already had their hands full retooling sights, adjusting barrel lengths, and making similar conversions on thousands of already-assembled guns. Issuing them down the totem pole would force the very logistical nightmare they'd just spent 15 months sorting out. Issuing them to the navy might work, but would still be a logistical headache. (More importantly, the Army Secretary thought the Navy's adoption of .49-94 a decade prior a smashing political victory, one he had no desire to undo.) This being the UCNA, they'd already rechambered a number of obsolete guns for the rejected H11 cartridge - proofs of concept, substitute standards, all sorts of stuff.

The fateful solution was to sell the useless crap abroad.

The H11 controversy

The UCNA always struggled to standardize. Decimalization was still underway at the time, and it was surrounded by several distinct, and mutually incompatible, customary measuring systems: Anglo-Scottish to its north, an Ibero-Baltic blend down south, and French scatterings in the Caribbean (and its own borders.)

Matters came to a head, however, in 1893, when the UCNA finally phased out its long-serving .49-94 for something altogether new. It's still causing headaches in several continents today, where it's commonly known as the H11 Controversy.

Sanjak Jerusalem

I have no idea what the Middle East looks like in Andalusada.

I know that prior to the Thousand Days the Russians threw the entire place for a hell of a loop [details?]. I know that (prior to that, courtesy of the Great Realignment) Evgeny IV's predecessor [who?] botched what should have been an easy Russo-wank by launching a winter invasion of Afghanistan, dragging down a Napoleon-tier general staff [who?] long enough for a Kurdish tribe to turn the course of the war and, eventually, seize the Persian throne. But I have no idea what happens between, say, the 1820s and the First Crusade 750 years before. That's an enormous gap in my knowledge.

I still have no idea what it looks like between the First Crusade and the Vechist Wars. But, as of last night and this post, I have a vision for what comes after. I'll detail this vision more as time progresses, but tonight I'll discuss the one part of it that I know: the Sanjak of Jerusalem.

Service-based suffrage

One of the oldest notes on steampunk social science was written on my Samsung. It was last edited some time ago, but I'm fairly certain it dates back to December last year, before the Andalusada Scrapbook came into being.

Insert quotation here.

On the blog itself, I first mentioned it when I introduced Poland-Ruthenia, or if not then when I expanded it to its current form: "Following the Baltic republican lead, Poland-Ruthenia has been experimenting with service-based suffrage." - whence the name of this concept.

Modern Pomerania

In the end, there was the Reductions, and Pomerania was erased forever. "Forever," as it turned out, was less than a century; by 1840, the Germanized Baltic littoral had won its independence in a ferocious revolt, which was recognized by Saxony in the Treaty of Meissen. Pomerania was back.

Modern Pomerania 101

Skipping the why a bit, here we go:

• Who? Modern Pomerania's still as Güntherite as its forebears, but it's much less ethnically diverse; it's overwhelmingly either German or Germanized. Modern Pomerania, colored by its own private Counter-Reformation during the Polish generations, is a much less diverse state than it was the first time around.
• What? In state dogma, modern Pomerania is a continuation of sansinger Pomerania: a revolt with a state. In practice, the two look almost nothing alike. Modern Pomerania's usually described as "Spartan," and the description works: it's a corvée democracy, organized on very military lines and built on a foundation of compulsory state service.
• Where? Modern Pomerania's rather reduced from its former territory, but it still stretches from the Oder River east a fair ways.
• When? After the UCNA (which started on April 5), modern Pomerania has the most specific date of founding I can think of: the signing of the Treaty of Meissen in 1836.

Moving on a bit...

Go-guns

With all of modern history retconned, Andalusada faces an enormous number of problems. One of the smaller but more nagging ones was first mentioned here: the verse has (almost) no gun brands, and a universe of generic products wrecks verisimilitude.

And so, in the interest of verisimilitude, I introduce to you the official infantry small arm of the Imperial Union. It comes in more varieties than Heinz ketchup, and in all of them it's called the Go-gun.

The Order of Saint Gonzalo

Right now there's nothing in Andalusada called the Order of St. Dominic, and even if there are "Dominicans" they have nothing to do with the Dominicans IRL. That's because that niche evolved differently, and the organization filling it is the Order of Saint Gonzalo, commonly the Gonzalans.

Dominican Gonzalan spirituality 101

Because of Rule of Canny, Gonzalan spirituality looks understandably like the Dominican spirituality it replaces. (At one point, I described Franciscan and Dominican spiritualities as being "Christocentric" vs. "Logocentric"; in Andalusada, the distinction is better incarnational vs. evangelical.) The first and most glaring distinction is that Gonzalo did something Domingo didn't: by adopting (and adapting) the Rule of Saint Stephen from Stephanines, he circumvented a papal ban on establishing new rules.

"The one rule of our salvation and of all others'," the Rule begins, "is the Gospel of Christ..." - and it goes from there, in a fairly stark fashion. More specifically, the Rule is followed by a distinctly Augustinian, southern, and... well, let's be honest, openly schismatic reading of it, which lead to hundreds of Stephanines defecting to Gonzalo's side when it became known to them. That southern-Augustinian-dissenting addendum moderates the Muretin starkness, but in doing so also emphasizes the features of it that are most recognizably Dominican.

(This means that, from the very start, a case could be made that Saint Gonzalo wasn't following his own Rule. It also means that, unlike the Dominicans IRL, it's both meaningful and possible for there to be Capuchin-style strict-observance orders. Some of those strict-observance sausage parties were probably key figures in the rise of the Sodality.)

The Burning Thirties

In 1825, the world enjoyed something it hadn't known in quite some time: five years of peace. Nobody knew it then (such is the way of historiography), but the Great Realignment was over. It was a changed world.

In France, the succession war was finished, with the Bourguignons victorious; the new family in Paris was making overtures to ouverture, and the Guisards reduced to honoring a pretender in Rome and eulogizing their bygone Catholic dystopia. Across the Channel, England-Scotland was binding its wounds and making itself presentable as "the Union of the English and Scottish Empires." The Low Countries were draining their shattered polders with the power of the first general-purpose steam engines. South of the Pyrenees, the Crown of All Spains was dusting itself off, living in a world where Seville - great Seville, eternal Seville, Seville the glorious, Najm al-Umma - was gone, as dead as Pomerania. It was a changed world.

In the New World, Cabralia was rebuilding and recovering, slowly but surely, from the trauma of Baltazar's mutiny, calling their elder statesman Kaspar back to its Principal Palace. Mexico was très-mignon, as they say: a mestiza was styling herself "Grand Princess" in her own right, and the Pope was telling the crowns of Europe to greet their sister in Christ as an equal, and wasn't it adorable? And she even had her pet Moor, who was doing everything he could to give her plebeian husband no reason to annex his mainland claims and spank him back to Cuba. It was a changed world.

Plebeian Cabralia

When the Grand Principality of Cabralia established itself in the 1790s, it was a very different place from what it would be fifty years later. It stretched across every climate zone between the equator and Tierra del Fuego. In every possible sense, it was the greatest of the 18th-century republics. Its future was unbounded, its possibilities endless. In its capital [where?], the government could dream with starry eyes of maximismo, when all of Cabralia might be a part of it.

It didn't work out, obviously. But this is the story of what came before - and what might have been.

Republican Cabralia 101

Why? Best practices. If Guisard France deserves to be distinct from other Frances, the early Grand Principality deserves to be distinct from its imperial form.

• Who? Everyone. It had Anglo-Dutch settlers from the north, Moros from the Andes, and everything in between. The early G.P. was more cosmopolitan than the contemporary UCNA, and had every potential to stay so if it could've held together.
• What? Very turbulent early on, but it eventually consolidated into a very aristocratic republic of sorts. The major problem was that it got more aristocratic as time went on...
• Where? In the beginning, about 70% of the entire continent - all of Brazil, Argentina, bits of Chile (with a few isolated Moorish holdouts), Paraguay, Uruguay, etc.
• When? From the 1790s to 1834. After 1834, Kaspar Sansinger's marriage is a done deal, and the slide into modern Cabralia is all but foreordained.

Guillermo I

Dates: 1091-[when?]

In 1091, the frighteningly young Urraca becomes pregnant by her husband, Raymond of Burgundy. Unlike IRL, the child survives, and her firstborn son is named Alfonso after his late grandfather. He isn't the last son she has with Raymond, though: she has at least one other. In keeping with Iberian naming conventions, that second son is named after his other grandfather, William of Burgundy. On Urraca's death, he ascends to the throne as the first Ivrean king, under the regnal name "Guillermo I."

Thus begins the reign of the first completely fictitious person in Andalusada's history.

ACP

The last weekend was spent doing two things: consolidating my non-blogged Andalusada writing (scattered across dozens of files when it's recorded at all), and overhauling my other blog's writing about Andalusada's logic. In particular, the second installment of that, about GURPS.

Both of those consolidated on a specific detail: gun porn. And then, last night, I fatefully wrote this:

Take the CRC, for instance, which uses 7.65mm Mauser because Argentina did IRL - that was also the standard caliber of Belgium, home of FN and the world's de facto armorer; in Andalusada, where Belgium doesn't exist, the Triple Alliance has been assigned to a new role as one of the arsenals of the world - which changes a lot of gun sales because they're otherwise such a noxious place.

I didn't even know that until I typed it out myself, and yet it's an obvious thing from what I know about the CRC. Making it the home of Andalusada's *Fabrique Nationale is so obvious I'm surprised I hadn't thought of it earlier. All it needed was a name - and as of this morning, it's had a name: ACP.

The Order of St. Stephen

In 1076, St. Étienne of Muret founded a own hermitage in the wasteland that was Muret, France. He gathered a following, which relocated to a new location in 1150, set up a proper priory, and became known as the Grandmontines after it. It was like nothing else at the time - and after 1185, when for the first time (but not the last) its members overthrow their prior, it more or less ran out of steam and got supplanted by the rise of 13th-century mendicancy. The Grandmontines puttered along, tiny and marginal, until the French Revolution finally put them out of their misery and ended their unique spiritual tradition forever.

IRL, anyways. In Andalusada, their name's changed - they are the Order of Saint Stephen (O.S.S., Ordo sancti Stephani), or Stephanines for short. And I have some very lofty plans for that ascetic movement from northern France - because a movement whose founding document baldly states "Our rule is the Gospel of Christ" is too good to pass up.

Grandmontine Stephanine spirituality 101

Let's start with the most basic thing: the Stephanines have their own rule. The Rule of St. Stephen, written down by the fourth head of the Order in 1124. In Andalusada the words will understandably be somewhat different, but in spirit with the original (excerpted from here):

• Prologue: "The one primary and fundamental Rule of Rules for our salvation and all others derive from [the Gospel]. We are all Christians, living the Rule of the Gospel, which is the root of all Rules."
• Ch. 39: "We forbid you absolutely to receive women into your observance."
• Ch. 54: "The better part which the Lord praised so highly in Mary, we impose upon the clercs [sic] alone.... [w]e entrust the temporal care of the monastery to the convers alone; in matters worldly and all other business, they are to command the other brethen, both clercs and convers..."

After that my sources (namely Wikipedia and Philip Sheldrake) give me very conflicting details about the Order, which is fine with me. There were arguments over whether the IRL Grandmontines were more Benedictine or Augustinian in their rule (it varied with time, apparently...), because they didn't see themselves as monks or hermits or canons regular, but as all three. (What tore them apart IRL was probably differing takes on how to actually be that.)

The other thing to note about the Stephanines is the fact that they had a mind-bogglingly democratic structure from the outset. Traditionally both the monks and the conversi (lay brothers) were counted as absolutely equal, and would share common living quarters. (Traditionally, the lay brothers were supposed to outnumber the monks by 2:1; that probably influenced the power struggles too.) It took papal intervention to organize them into a more normal monastic hierarchy.

Introducing St. Matilda

Saint Matilda exists because Saint Dominic doesn't. Per Rule of Canny, Andalusada needs someone to fill his shoes, an that someone is Saint Gonzalo of Lerida - but he's an original character, which means that I have both free room and a lot of details to fill in. And back before his page took on its current form, one of my earliest notes about Gonzalo was something I wanted in his story: "a Gonzalan St. Clare."

For the longest time, this has sat unattended, because the only reason I introduced Gonzalo was because John George wasn't an Augustinian, and I honestly hadn't had any interesting thoughts about it. Last night, though, while trying to rename Catholic orders to fit into my arbitrary naming conventions, I discovered some really cool things, which brought this back to mind - and I'm gonna make the most of it.

Esbat

Esbat, n. Moorish. A straight sword.

The iconic Arab sword is the scimitar: long, single-edged, and backswept - and not an Arab sword. IRL, it was first adopted in Khorasan, the far side of the umma from al-Andalus; it was brought west in the Turkic migrations, where the Seljuks (and the Byzantines, who'd already adopted the single-edge as a cavalry weapon) first wielded it against the Crusaders. Progressive Turkish immigration Arabized and assimilated, and the single-edged sword displaced the straight-bladed weapons that had come before.

Everywhere, that is, except in Seville. al-Andalus was in a lot of ways a living fossil of Islamic culture; if Osprey is any indicator, that extended to sword architecture too. In Andalusada, where the Moorish world is happily spared the waves of Turkish immigration, the double-edged sword is not replaced. As time goes on, and Seville's economy shifts progressively into the western Mediterranean, the non-Arabic influence on sword design in Toledo (and, thus, the Moorish world) come from the Aragonese Empire, Sicily, and the various Italies.

What this evolves into is the iconic sword of the Moorish world: the esbat.

Instead of 9mm

What we call ".38 caliber" or "9mm" IRL is anything but. .38 Special is .357", for instance, as is the (aptly-named) .357 Magnum. Only one pistol cartridge actually fired a .38" bullet, 9.65mm ACP - and you've never heard of it, because it never entered production. (And for another outlier, there's .38-40, which fired a 10mm bullet. There's some speculation that the name is dyslexic, and it should've been called the .40-38 instead.)

This discrepancy goes back to the ur-9mm handgun: Colt's Texas Paterson. It (and the Colt Navy Revolver that came a decade later) established .36" as a revolver caliber, and later in the era, some .36-style cartridges loaded with heeled bullets, which actually were .38" give or take a few thousandths of an inch. After heeled bullets fell from fashion, the standard shifted to the largest bullet that could fit inside the case mouth, whence .357.

What happens in Andalusada, where Col. Colt is never born? Ballistics favors convergence - and for the sake of laziness, I'm ruling that this converges - but for that frisson of difference, the big successful caplock caliber was about a hundredth of an inch off.

And that, as I complained in a long-ago sonnet, changes everything.

Skopetchka

Skopetchka, n. Russian. A sawed-off rifle.

The concept of the shortened rifle is basic and old. England-Scotland's menagerie of Go-guns mostly exists because the Infantry Pattern's 30" barrel is burdensome and hard to handle; France is probably no different.

The idea of shortening a rifle, though, is fairly new, and in popular consciousness is known by the Russian name for such a modification: skopetchka (cf. Russian skopets "eunuch.")

The Taiping Princess

Andalusada isn't just a story, isn't just an alt-history: it's a verse, designed for a GURPS game. And because of that, I've had a certain number of characters - some named, some simply archetypes - bouncing around in my head for a long time now. Today I'm going to start sketching a few of them up...

Inside the cities of many New World cities lies an unknown area, demarcated by paifong. On one side of the paifong is the rest of the city; on the other, a micro-nation as sovereign and distinct as the Vatican City. It is cramped, crowded, confined - but to the world outside, it is perilously, barely, contained. The city's law enforcement can enforce no laws there, because even Chinese immigrants find it foreign; their policy is to do as little as possible, and when they must to do it through the only certain authority they can recognize: that Chinatown's very own Taiping Princess.

Polish orthography

Poland adopted the Latin alphabet (so says Wikipedia) after the beginning of Andalusada. And because Polish remains... well, Polish, the orthography remains in flux for quite awhile. Click the link and you can see some of the many, many ways it could've played out.

Since it's somewhat arbitrary that Polish orthography standardized the way it did IRL (and with a world history that's divergent enough to end up with Poland-Ruthenia, there has to be some big enough changes to start impacting that stuff), Andalusada's Polish orthography has standardized with a few subtle changes:

• The letters I and Y have their phonological values reversed, with according changes to the spelling of Polish names.
• The letter H is pronounced /x/, as per IRL, but it's also the normal way to spell /x/. (IRL, the normal Polish rendition of /x/ is with Ch; in Andalusada, this is restricted to loanwords.)

It's a subtle change, but it has some nice side effects to it:

• Rendering /x/ as H brings it more into line with the IRL orthographies of various "Ruthenian" languages, while distinguishing it from Czech and Russian a bit more.
• Reversing the values of I and Y changes the feel of Polish names. Some of them (Pyotr) become more Russian, others (Zigmunt) more German, and others (Maksimylyan) just... weird.

Both of which, I feel, give Andalusada's Polish a nice frisson of difference without requiring any more linguistics than a bit of basic cyphering.

The Pomeranian Reductions

Timeframe: Early- to mid-1700s
Belligerents: Güntherite Pomerania vs. everybody.
Outcome: The dissolution of Pomerania as an independent state until the 1830s.

For most of the 17th century, the Baltic Sea was a Güntherite lake. The north was dominated by the sprawl that was Denmark-Sweden; the south, by sansinger Pomerania, the once unstoppable juggernaut that had toppled the Teutonic Knights and left the Holy Roman Empire moribund.

Then the Great Realignment came, and as the Russian Empire became a serious threat, the ever-struggling Polish-Ruthenian Commonwealth found itself facing a constant problem: Pomerania, for the longest time their vassal, was turning into a Russian cat's-paw. And while Pomerania was by no means the unstoppable military juggernaut of its youth, in alliance with Russia it would leave the commonwealth facing a two-fronted war.

At some point [when?], Pomerania did something tactically smart and strategically stupid: they did ally with Russia, very briefly, against Poland-Ruthenia. Krakow's worst fears had been verified.

Sansing

Sansing, n. A scythe blade affixed to a sword hilt.

In 1523, Terra Mariana a peasant revolt; later historians remember it as "the Livonian Revolt," and more generally as "the Güntherite Wars." But the rebellious peasantry had more pressing things to worry about than what the hell their fight was called. Specifically, their issue was how to arm themselves for a fight against a serious (if perhaps not unchallenged) enemy: the Teutonic Order.

Peasant revolts being what they are, they naturally gravitated toward peasant weaponry. Like the IRL Hussites, one of the great weapons of the Revolt was the threshing flail, reinforced with metal. The other was the scythe [Pomm. Sansa], which saw use in a number of varieties.

The least common conversion involved mounting a sword hilt. Compared to the much larger war scythes, they were given a Pommersch diminuitive, forming a distinct word of its own: Sansing.

The Church of Hungary

In the Christian taxonomy of Andalusada, there was an isolated entry called "the Church of Hungary." It's the replacement for the Church of England IRL, and it takes things a step further by claiming to be Orthodox and Catholic and Protestant at the same time.

Shugembo

Shugembo, n. Takasagonese. A Franciscan friar.

Oyashima has no "folk Catholicism," because Catholicism in Oyashima is new, and the converts tend to be scholarly, educated, and individual. There isn't much room for popular distortions of the faith when the faith isn't popular to begin with.

But one thing about Japonic Catholicism is globally distinctive, and it's pan-Japonic.

Japanese pop culture holds that nuns are mikos. This trope doesn't exist in Andalusada, for a number of reasons (most notably that Great Japan is a little more aware of Catholicism, what with it being the faith of their Takasagonese overlords) - but it's been replaced by a world-specific trope. Written out in TV Tropes format, it would be something like Friars are Yamabushi.

Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar

Moorish history, wrote Izanagi Aoi, "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."

This is the story of that wandering warlord.

Rodrigo Diaz before 1081

Alfonso VI has Rodrigo Diaz exiled in 1081, and judging by the romances about him, he takes a number of loyal retainers with him. What he isn't allowed to take with him is any of his assets.

His first stop is to spend the winter in Barcelona, where he apparently offers his services to Ramon Berenguer and Berenguer Ramon, the confusingly named children of Ramon Berenguer I, who jointly share the comital title. It doesn't go over well; they fall out hard, and after Berenguer Ramon becomes the Fratricide they wind up facing each other in battle a few times. As soon as the snow thaws in 1082, therefore, Rodrigo and friends turn south, arriving in Saraqusta. And IRL, that's the end of this story; for reasons lost to time, he's hired by al-Musta'in, securing Zaragoza for the next five years and throwing a wrench into the power dynamics of the north.

But Andalusada isn't IRL, and in Andalusada that's where things start diverging. Because Rodrigo isn't hired by al-Musta'in, and (running out of cash, and with a certain number of retainers with him) he turns south, there to find employment in Seville.

People of 11th-century Iberia

Andalusada is a long and complicated world, and it starts in 11th-century Iberia, which is particularly notable for a few reasons:

• There are so many factions, and all of them need to be accounted for from the start.
• So many of them - far more, understandably, than the rest of the TL combined - are actual historic personalities, who'll need rewriting.

This, therefore, is a one-stop list for keeping track of who's who, and from where.

Alfonso VI of Castile

Before the beginning, Rodrigo Diaz was in the employ of Alfonso VI, at that point King of Leon and Castile. In the beginning, he's predictably banished.

Once that beginning gets underway, Alfonso VI has only a few years left to live. But he doesn't know that. This is his story.

Alfonso VI up to the point of divergence

Alfonso VI was the second son of Ferdinand the Great, sandwiched between Sancho (king of Leon) and Garcia (king of Galicia.) He was also the first to seriously ignore the division of territories between the sons, extorting money from Badajoz.

And starting from about 1072 (which, admittedly, gets off to a bad start when his brother Sancho kicks his ass at Golpejera and sends him fleeing to Toledo), the ten years prior to the POD had actually been pretty good for him. Sancho gets killed later that same year, allowing Alfonso to claim the coveted title of "King of Leon"; and when García is recalled from exile, he's forced to take monastic vows and gets banished to a monastery, never to fuck or fight again. By 1077, Alfonso VI is in a position to start styling himself Imperator Totus Hispaniae: "Emperor of All the Spains."

In 1079, he marries Constance of Burgundy, who bears him a daughter, Urraca. (She's going to be important one day, as soon as I figure out how.)

Sufyan

Born: 1790s. [details?]
Died: 1850s. [details?]

Long ago, before I started this blog, I was writing Andalusada mostly on paper. At some point, I realized that I'd need to know something about the succession of the UCNA. So I drew up a very tenuous outline of the dynasty.

There are a few names that I haven't mentioned yet (Yusuf II and Yusuf III, and some others), but all the key names of the succession survive only in the four-word tag of the UCNA's brief history: "the six weak caliphs." All the names but one: Sufyan.

A few nights ago, after I got out my GURPS book again, I started writing him up, based on what I knew about backbiting and so forth.

Disadvantages: Lecherous [-15]; Sense of Duty (his father) [-2]; Sense of Duty (his children) [-5].
Quirks: Bad with names; Wears his heart on his sleeve; Prudish in public.

Quite a character, no? And this is his story.