Zahra

Life: 1887-present.
Position: Calipha of the Umayyad Caliphate in New Andalusia
Preceded by: [who?]

The electoral side of the UCNA's history is justifiably a sausage party: as of 1930, women's suffrage is still something that needs campaigning for. The monarchic side of the UCNA's political history is, at this point, a sausage party too, and it shouldn't be. Presumably the caliphs have no shortage of wives and daughters, but who are they? What are they doing?

As of tonight, I'm only really familiar with the current calipha of New Andalusia; I'm not even sure about her family name yet. What I know is that, in several spellings, her name is Zahra, devoted wife of Caliph Yusuf III. This is her story.

Yusuf III

Dates: January 20, 1891-present.

The Caliphate in New Andalusia is no stranger to unexpected successors; they're pretty much inevitable when congenital madness runs in the family, the (Jewish) maître d' has rights over each step of the acclamation process, and there are half a dozen collateral lines waiting in the wings. In the 19th century, those unexpected successors went down in history as "the six weak caliphs." In the 20th century, one of them turned out famously well. Only one of them, however, has been judged a bad caliph. His name is Yusuf III, and this is his story.

The Crown of All Spains (and France)

Writing about Mahdism this last week or so leaves me kinda bothered that I haven't written about Spain yet. I have my reasons; given that it's ground zero for the point of divergence, all I can honestly say is that I know the Crown of All Spains exists (for plot reasons), and that it's ruled by the pre-Wars of Religion French ruling house (whence the inevitable "and France" in the name.)

But I've posted articles about things I knew less than that about, so here goes nothing.

The Crown of All Spains 101

Why? Because it's been here from the beginning. Admittedly in the beginning it was Napoleon driving the Moors out of Spain, but a united Spain is still there.

• Who? Not the Galicians (Galicia having been part of Galicia or Portugal or Portugal-Galicia for most of its history since 1090, when Garcia II sets up shop in A Corunha), but other than that you'd recognize most of the territories. There's Asturias and Cantabria, and the Catalans and the Aragonese, the Léonese and the Castillans, the Toletans... and, south of the Tagus, the Andalusis, many of whom still speak Arabic at home.
• What? The Crown of All Spains is one of the complex dynastic unions that Andalusada seems to love - a confederal monarchy that on its good days is exactly the sum of its parts, and on its bad days much less as those parts cancel each other out.
• Where? Most of Iberia, predictably. The Crown of All Spains also controls a number of North African city-states, which it occupied during the destruction of Barbary Coast piracy, and a fair bit of Morocco through very unreliable Andalusi landlords.
• When? The Crown of All Spains dates from the late 1780s, although I'm not sure exactly what year it was.

And now for the expanded answer to "why?" The answer: drama and melodrama.

Don Ibrahim

Dates: 1860-1980. (Yes, he dies fifty years after the canonical present day. This is important.)
Position: Secretary of the Caliphal Household.
Preceded by: His father, Don Musa Cordovero

The least democratic institution in the UCNA is the Caliphal Household. Founded under Yusuf I, it has survived chart reforms, two regencies, three succession crises and Populism almost unscathed. Holding an ambiguous position, both private employees of the caliph and public servants of the caliphate, the Caliphal Household is barely accountable to either.

Between the death of Yusuf I and the rise of Yusuf II, the most powerful man in the UCNA was a Sephardi Jew whose friends and enemies alike styled him simply "Don Musa." The son is more formidable than the father; as of 1930 he is the longest-serving man in the government of New Andalusia at around 45 years. His name is Don Ibrahim - and if Cardinal Richelieu was hale as an ox, and could kill you with the power of his Kabbalah, he would start coming close to the fearful awe commanded by the UCNA's bespectacled court Jew.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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."

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 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.

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.

Great Russia

Seeing that the last two posts have been about details of modern Russian culture, it bears mentioning that Russia's finally gone revolutionist. And because of steampunk social science, it's not the USSR that you know and have feelings about.

Great Russia in a nutshell

Why? Because it's right there in 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, Saxony, and Russia.

 The timeline calls for a Russia that's on par with the Moors (albeit in a new interpretation), Japan, and Saxony, and so a great Russia it shall receive. (Honestly, the hard part is establishing a great Saxony.)

• Who? A whole hell of a lot of people. I'm not sure which peoples, but a lot of them anyways.
• What? A cabal of variously romantic, technocratic *Narodnik oligarchs, forcibly dieselpunking the entire world for arcane reasons. Under and around them is a coalition government that's unlikely to ever dissolve, because an entire branch of the military obeys its orders first and Supreme Command's only later.
• Where? Most of what we'd call the USSR, but not all of it.
• When? Celebrating its 25th birthday on the day after Pascha this year, when (with Japanese support) the riots in Tver first got going.

The bigger question, then, is why this Russia?

The Grand Principality of Cabralia

On Saturday, I'm going to finally post something that's been haunting me for a few weeks, about Iberian-American beer styles. But before I do that, I'm going to have to introduce a country: the Grand Principality of Cabralia.

The G.P. of Cabralia 101

Why? Butterflies were vague concepts when I started writing Andalusada. Once I became aware of them (and washed my hands of the idea of a Bonapartist Brazil descended from Lucien), the notion of a *Bonapartist *Brazil tied to Mexico lingered on; once I read "The Great Powers" and made the fateful decision to wank Bolivar-Peru, the course was set for Brazil to get demoted a bit.

• Who? Overwhelmingly Lusophone and Catholic, but that's as much as you can say about the population; it's really racially mixed.
• What? A war-scarred, militaristic Lusophone regime, locked in an endless on-and-off war with the CRC and a lot of dick-waving and posturing with the Lusophone states up north.
• Where? When it began, the G.P. stretched from French Guyana to Argentina. At this point, though, it probably comprises less than Brazil proper - definitely the eastern half, but Gran Peru claims bits of Acre, the CRC's revanchist claims stretch as far as Santa Catarina, and north of the Amazon the jungle lines are almost meaningless.
• When? Officially, the Grand Principality dates its history from the 1790s. In its modern form, though, the GP dates back to the mid-1830s, when Kaspar Sansinger remarried, setting in motion the Second Baltazarist War.

So why this way? Because, very simply, Mexico's filling the bad cop role.

The UCNA

A lot of my posts have horrible, wordy introductions. A lot of it's because I'm a horrible, wordy writer. A lot more is because most of my posts are spontaneous, arbitrary, and completely unforeshadowed, so I have to assume that nobody else knows what I'm talking about. We'll have none of that today. This is the Umayyad Caliphate in New Andalusia. It shouldn't need any more introduction than that.

But for you, dear readers, who haven't been with me from the beginning, I'm going to spell this out anyways.

The UCNA 101

Why? Because this is the point. GURPS Infinite Worlds specified that in the Andalus timeline, Moorish Spain threw off the Reconquista and discovered the New World in 1484, building an empire that today (ca. 1930) competes against Saxony, Russia, and Japan. The timeline needed a Moorish great power; ladies and gentlemen, this is that great power.

• Who? EVERYONE. A scattering of aborigines in ash-Shamal. Moorish-speaking Muslims from everywhere that Moorish is spoken. A lot of French Farrellites living on its old frontiers, and a lot of French Catholics living all over the place. Lots of West Africans bought as slaves for the frontier plantations. Andalusi Arabs, Maghribi Arabs, Aqsi Arabs. A dynasty of Sephardi Jews who run half the show behind the scenes. This is a mosaic society the likes of which we haven't seen since the Ottoman Empire. Güntherites from down south, and Gaels from up north. And, above it all, a caliph from the House of Umayya - the first, last, and best leaders the House of Islam will ever know.
• And two Jews.
• What? An Islamic Empire of Brazil (my first and biggest inspiration for it.)
• Where? The continental French New World, and most of the Moorish New World as well (although ironically almost none of the Sevillan New World.) Cuba, through some tangled marital politics, and a scattering of islands in the Caribbean (though not the bigger ones.) What was once France-Outremer, north to the Great Lakes and beyond (not too much north, though, and the northern border with England-Scotland is actually a bit lower than the USA's because it's more prone to following the curves of rivers.) The UCNA also owns some land in Cabralia too, specifically enough to prop up the Transcabralia Canal.
• When? The actual groundwork is at least 15 years older - but it all starts on April 5.

The Grand Principality of Mexico

If I wanted a true and serious wank, I would've had the UCNA keep the Moorish empire. Even losing the Old World, they'd be one of the largest countries on the planet, controlling both the Mexican and Transcabralian Canals and the combined resources of everything from the Great Lakes south to around Chile. I did not want a wank, however. I wanted something plausible. And mostly, when I started writing this world as a GURPS Infinite Worlds setting, I was clueless about world history.

So of course there was a Mexico. Of course it was pretty similar to Mexico IRL. And because of sheer inertia, Mexico has existed as an independent nation ever since. But it hasn't stayed the same; the world has moved on, and the butterflies have turned it into the Grand Principality of Mexico.

The G.P. of Mexico 101

Why? Originally, this was the space-filling Empire of Mexico. After awhile, it evolved into a Bonapartist space-filling empire (on the lines of the Second Empire, which was run by a Habsburg); after that, into an ideologically Bonapartist empire; and after that, once reactionary Prussia had evolved into revolutionary Pomerania, into the G.P. of Mexico that you see here today.

• Who? Almost all the possible permutations of the Moorish ethnoreligious colonial hierarchy, with the Muslim varieties greatly reduced, under the charismatic rule of the House of Sansinger and its forest of bayonets.
• What? At one point, the UCNA's nemesis; at this point, its quirky miniboss antagonist.
• Where? Mexico and more. The G.P. of Mexico controls enough land to its south to have built the Mexican Canal, for instance.
• When? Like almost everything in the New World, the G.P. of Mexico is a child of the Great Realignment - specifically that part in the 1790s, when the Moorish colonial empire imploded. From that point, despite more and more serious turmoil than IRL Mexico was ever diverse enough to experience, it's managed to survive to the present day.

 So moving on a bit...

Hispano-Baltic Texas

At the start, the USA still existed; greatly reduced, but far more of it, and more recognizable, than it had any right to be. (It was my first alt history. Sue me.) As I wrote the world, it gave way to many countries in the continent called, very simply, "America." The UCNA, obviously, is the dominant one.

Due south of the UCNA lies the G.P. of Mexico, which is now a quirky miniboss antagonist - but used to be an existential threat. In between Mexico and the UCNA lies a swathe of land with at least one recognizable border, painted (on the B_Munro map) in what the Expanded Universal Colour Scheme would call the Lone Star Republic. I'm going to call it by its working name: Hispano-Baltic Texas.

Hispano-Baltic Texas 101

Why? Rule of Cool, of course; but more to it than that. Andalusada is a world that has not been good to the cause of republicanism; by establishing HBT as a republic, it offset the fact that a lot of (often dysfunctional) monarchies prevail in the timeline. (And it's still "Texan"; it has a very different attitude and style from the Atlantic confederacy that broke away from England-Scotland.)

• Who? Originally it was mostly Moorish mestizos; after about 1750, it was run by Prussians and Pomeranians. Since then it's attracted a few waves of refugees from these two old-stock ethnicities (originally Balts, more recently a lot of Mexicans), as well as a fair number of republican Moors from the UCNA.
• What? A quirky, plucky republic synthesizing Moorish dissent with Baltic republicanism, supported by the UCNA as a buffer state against Sansinger Mexico.
• Where? Corresponding with IRL Texas, with some parts of Oklahoma and Arizona included and the eastern borders a little pushed back. (The northwestern borders I'm not clear about, but the Rio Grande provides an obvious geographic boundary anyways.)
• When? It started becoming Baltic in the 1750s; it became formally independent in I think the late 1830s. From that point, it's continued to the present day.

The question, of course, is "how."

The Warsaw School of ballistic thought

In the beginning, there was the Russo-Japanese War, in which Japan... didn't exactly win, but managed to make the Russian Empire lose. After that came the Russian Civil War, in which the Vechists decisively did win; and once the Vechist government had shored itself up enough at home, it addressed the fact that it was also at war with almost all of its neighbors.

There was, first off, a war in the Caucasus, which dealt a humiliating defeat to the by now space-filling (probably Turkic) empire that picked up where Constantinople left off. And after that there was the war in Armenia, and the war in Georgia, and possibly some struggles with the Sorani dynasty that took over most of Persia the last time the Russians had fought around there. There was, of course, that issue in Karelia that ended about a thousand days later.

And then there was the European theater. And the first opponent, as usual, was the Polish-Ruthenian Commonwealth. Here ends the backstory; let's move on to the gun porn.

The Thousand Days

Timeframe: 1916-1919.
Belligerents: Great Russia vs. Sweden, Saxony, Pomerania, etc.
Outcome: Swedish strategic defeat; nominal Vechist victory

At some point, after the Russian Civil War was over but before 1920, the Vechist government in Tver had a problem. Specifically, it was a problem with Sweden, or maybe Finland, or maybe Karelia. (I will be the first to confess that I'm not sure exactly how Scandinavian politics plays out in Andalusada, even after the Great Realignment.)

The Vechist government has enough of a problem, in fact, that it authorizes one of its generals to teach the King of Sweden a lesson. That lesson (as I said once) is remembered in Sweden as "the Three Years' War." Everywhere else in the world, it's remembered for the authoritative history written about it: The Thousand Days.

The Technical Censors

Russia's modernization got off to a rocky start.

To his credit, Evgeny the Old did establish the polytechnic schools, and provided a fair number of subsidies to make them accessible. The first generation of Russian technicians, however, were mostly hired by the first generation of Russian industrialists who would happily cut off their nose to spite their competitor's face; a fair number of those engineers were paid well to make things not interoperable, in fact, and that set a precedent for things to come.

By the turn of the century, Russia had two dominant gauges, neither of which could run on the other; there were two others that didn't cover nearly enough area to compete with the first two, but enough to be nontrivial. (Significantly, the area around Lake Baikal involved a track change. From the very beginning it was a logistical loggerhead; when the Russo-Japanese War began and armies had to be mobilized to Meammosirsk, the delays were serious enough that it may have cost Russia the war.) Tsarist power grids were even worse; east of Moscow, some cities had dangerously different voltage standards, and even today older electricians still have complete sets of adapters.

What were they to do?