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.

The rise and fall of the Ryal Kirk

IRL, the medieval Church in Scotland was corrupt. And by corrupt I mean "corrupt by the standards of medieval Catholicism." Come the 16th century Scotland swept away almost every trace of it converting to Presbyterianism, and there were compelling reasons why.

This poses a problem for me, because in Andalusada England doesn't break with Rome. And before the Great Realignment gets underway, before the Imperial Union of England-Scotland, there is Scotland-Norway - and Norway, in Andalusada as per IRL, does break with Rome and become Güntherite.

I know enough about Stuart England to know that the marriage of Reformed Scotland and Anglican England was volatile already, and they were both Protestant. A marriage of Catholic Scotland and Güntherite Norway during the *Reformation period itself is unimaginable - but the Imperial Union is foreordained. And given how recent and contingent ecumenism has been IRL, would the union of *Protestant Scotland and Catholic England really be any more plausible, or functional, than that of Catholic Scotland and Güntherite Norway? I don't think so.

Last night, I found a solution, which I'm going to derp out here. You heard it first, Engel.

The Günther Bible

Historically, the Ordensstaat actually used a dialect of Middle German in their chanceries. Why I'm not sure, because the lands of the Teutonic Order apparently didn't use it as a vernacular; IRL, after the secularization of the State into Ducal and Royal Prussia, the Teutonic Kanzelrei was completely abandoned in favor of the Low German spoken in daily life.

In Andalusada, of course, the Monastic State isn't secularized; it's overthrown. Monastic Middle German wasn't abandoned ITTL so much as consciously supplanted by the language of the rising urban population, and the Günther Bible (by establishing their Low German as a written language) was instrumental in doing this.

The Manazil and Moorish popular Islam

Historically, the Arabic-language printing is complicated by the fact that it's a cursive-only script, which requires a larger range of letters because there needs to be initial, medial, final, and isolated versions of almost all. IRL, this was only made harder by the fact that in the Ottoman Empire the printing presses were run by Christians (and often Catholic foreigners rather than the domestic Greeks), who adopted as their standard typeface a script of Arabic that Muslims generally didn't use.

(This Catholic influence, incidentally, was also part of the crisis that gave rise to the Uniate church; the early Ottoman printing industry was Jesuit, and for a solid century after the fall of Constantinople the autonomous churches under it had basically no printed literature at a time when their Catholic neighbors had tons of it. The Russians responded, at least in part, by transferring the seat of the church from Kiev to Muscovy, and eventually pressuring the Ecumenical Patriarch to grant them autocephaly; the same events gave rise, in lands under the Polish-Lithuanian orbit, to the church transferring its loyalties from the Patriarch to the Pope in the interest of securing equal status with their Roman hegemons.)

The biggest issue was that the publication of the Qur'an was frowned on very, very hard. In Western Europe, the publication of the Bible (even outside the vernacular) was enormously financially successful in early modernity, which basically doomed the age of manuscript and the assumptions of manuscript culture.
But what's true of the Ottoman Empire (or whatever the Turks are in Andalusada, because the Ottomans are not foreordained) isn't necessarily true of the Moors, who after all develop their own civilization by the time they start establishing trans-Atlantic colonies.

So how does the printed Qur'an work? I have some tentative thoughts.

The Black Codices

After the discovery of the New World in 1484, there's every reason to think that Seville, in the name of having money to spend after such a long and marginal existence, does what Spain did IRL: spends so much New World gold that it collapses economies worldwide, causing a global shift toward the silver standard.

At the lowest point of the gold crash, somebody in the Five Families had an inspired idea: if gold is so cheap, why not make a show of it? Thus was born the Black Codices.

The Hanseatic Wars

Belligerents:
Outcome: The crowning of a French king as Holy Roman Empire; disintegration of any significant imperial authority.

One of the shortcuts that alternate-history writers take is using their plots to kill things that they're too lazy to research. While I'm endeavoring to not do this to ethnicities overly much, I'm not going to lie: I do it too. (And it's problematic for me because I have enough gaps in my knowledge of how things work that when I try to do this I still need to do all the research anyways.)

This is a related thing: using the plot to cleanly end a few crises ahead of schedule.

The wars commonly called "Hanseatic" (what they're called depends on which language and locale you're speaking in, because the politics of the matter are rather obscure) are the substitute for the Thirty Years' War: a crisis that plunges Germania into chaos. Unlike the Thirty Years' War, there are different demographic issues at work here.

And by the end of it, both the Hanse and the Reich have been crippled thoroughly enough to render them moribund.

The Güntherite Wars

Around 1519, the Monastic Knights of the Teutonic Order started to lose their grip on their sprawling Baltic empire. In the early 1520s, that grip was lost for good; by the late 1520s, it was lost forever, in the first revolution of modern European history. This is the blog entry for that revolution.

Before the Revolt

If this sounds vague, it's because the exact details of what went on are really contingent on how the Knights fared in the 1400s - about which I know relatively little.

A recurring complaint throughout history

Excerpted from Güntheritism: A Very Poor Introduction:

"The Revel Catechism was the first work widely published in the Livonian language. The Balts were among the last peoples of Europe to embrace the Christian faith, a task that the Knights of the Order had never thought to undertake themselves. This was brought to the Master's attention after he was settled in Riga; claims of the "Livonian Trinity" of Jesus, the Blessed Virgin and St. George the Dragonslayer remain hotly contentious to the present day, although it has been immortalized in Baltic profanity...

Introducing Constantine II of Hungary

"King Constantine." You don't need to name him any more than that; everybody will know who he is, just as well as they'd recognize "Count Dracula." And for the same reasons.

The guy is hated across cultures.

Let's introduce him...

Oliver Farrell

Andalusada has its *Luther, in the form of Johan Georg Günther. If only life was that simple. IRL, though, didn't have just one Protestantism: it had at least two.

*Protestantism does best in the liminal spaces of the Holy Roman Empire. The biggest of them is the Monastic State of the Teutonic Order, which Günther turns into Prussia in a way that winds up aborting the unification of Germany. But it's not the only liminal space of the HRE; another is the intersection of the Alps where Germany, Italy, and France run into each other. At the time, it was variously Lyons, Provence, Savoy, and the Eidgenossenschaft. We call it "Switzerland."

IRL, the other (and much more dominant) Protestantism was started there by Huldrych Zwingli. (Two of them, actually, because Zwingli also personally spun off the Anabaptists.) Herein, it begins in what I suspect is now part of France. And the guy who begins it is at once legendary, historic, and mythical.

His name is Oliver Farrell.

Introducing Johan Georg Günther

By the time the Protestant Reformation should be rolling around, I've got my hands full and my ass handed to me.

Because by that point, the cumulative issues that have been set in motion by things have basically ensured that nobody recognizable's gonna be born. Even more seriously, even if the same analogues rise at about the same time, the ideas are gonna be different too, setting off which-came-first-the-base-or-the-superstructure arguments that ripple across the continuity.

For clarity's sake, I'm going to introduce one of those analogous figures now. His name is Johan Georg Günther, and he's the Antiluther.

Introducing Saint Sakura

A classic trope of yuri manga is that (Japan being blissfully ignorant of the ways of Christendom) our lesbian couple usually meets at a Catholic girls' school. This school is traditionally named after Saint Engrish, something feminine-sounding that's not actually from any Indo-European language.

Never is it a Japanese name.

I'm going to stand that on its head. Meet Saint Sakura.