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.

The postwar Sanjak

After the siege of Konstantiniyye, the former Turkish Empire (whatever it is) turns into something like the Beiyang Government: a nominally dominant power that's recognized as the legitimate government of China, "ruling" over several time zones of chaos that are functionally governed by its warlords, most of which have significant ties to foreign powers. Locally the warring statelets are usually the tevaif, the tawa'if, or the beyliks; it's too early for historians to settle on a term for the state of the Middle East beyond "chaos."

One of those territories is the prewar Sanjak of Jerusalem (IRL it was a mutasarrifate; I'm gonna have to figure out the distinctions, the terminology, and how the rest of this plays out at some point in the future.) The backstory doesn't matter, however, quite as much as the role it fills now. Working on the Chinese metaphor I brought up last paragraph, if the *Ottoman Empire is warlord-era China, the Sanjak of Jerusalem is Shanghai - and that's a metaphor that needs unpacking in its own right.

The Sanjak's international importance

Saxony (a fairly major player in the eastern Mediterranean since their involvement with the Knights of Malta [details?] gave them a staging point in the Mediterranean itself), while making no formal military commitments to Palestine, has a lot of regional investments that merit protection. The Hejaz railroad, for instance, was built very much by Saxon engineers overseeing an army of laborers, and the only reason the Saxons built a plurality of the trains and rolling stock on that railroad is because, like more than a few Middle Eastern states today, the decisionmakers were rich and eclectic. And one end of that railroad (for the same considerations as IRL) is either in, or very close to, Jerusalem.

• The Holy City itself. It should go without saying that the Holy City's important.
• The Hejaz Railroad. In Andalusada, as in IRL, the Hejaz Railroad was largely built by *Osmanian labor guided by German (or, in this case, Saxon) engineers.

Most importantly, though, the Sanjak of Jerusalem contains a city that isn't Jerusalem: Haifa. (Another port in the vicinity is still called Jaffa, and will never be known to the world as Tel Aviv.) Konstantiniyye may be more important, but it's controlled by only one agha - but a lot of deals between the other factions and the outside world are brokered through Haifa.

And trades there are, because the Middle East is a turbulent place. Even before the war, the Turks bought a lot of their guns from ACP; now that the war's over, the CRC is selling stuff over there by the truckload, and world munitions manufacturers are struggling to supply those purchases. And it's not just the CRC either - Russia's importing stuff. England-Scotland and France are supplying the factions they support (and the ones they don't, too, just in case.) More than a few taifas have hired their own Swiss advisors, and with them comes the inevitable Swiss-Peruvian-Italian arms sales. Everybody buys a few random things from Seadling (and complaining that it has so many parts doesn't stop them from buying more.) Business is booming - and Saxony, self-appointed arbiter of trade with the eastern Muslim world, is not willing to let Middle Eastern chaos disrupt their work.

This is a stub. It will be expanded.