The Farrellite dynasties

For the first 1500 years, Christianity was made of episcopal hierarchies, all of whom agreed that they were the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, rightwise heirs to the upper room on Pentecost. The Reformation did a bit to disrupt that, but the attitude was still there, and contributed in no small part to the Thirty Years' War. As far as I can tell, denominationalism only really arises in America, where none of the colonial state churches became hegemonic in the federal period - forcing the churches to coexist, compete as equals, and acknowledge that they don't have exclusive monopolies.

This complicates things a bit, because Andalusada's religious history is different enough (for one thing, England and Scotland are still Catholic...) that the "I'm okay, you're okay" consensus of American religious life won't evolve. And yet the world would be a somewhat less interesting place if the variety of religious experience was less varied, no?

So, in a leap of logic a month or so back, I blurted out a solution: the Farrellite dynasties.

The French Wars of Religion

Timeframe: Early 1600s [when?]
Belligerents: Three major factions: the Guisards, the "Legitimists," and the Unitas Fidelium.
Outcome: The passage of the French throne to the Guisard faction.

THE FRENCH WARS OF RELIGION

It is a dark time for the Kingdom of France. The throne in Paris sits empty, as the armies of three pretenders endlessly battle against each other for the destiny of France. The winner of this struggle will choose the fate of France. Will that fate be Catholic, Farrellite, or Iberian?

Well, I've talked about this before. I've written about it, before (and since.) It occurs to me (after this newest edit, to get rid of the Star Wars joke) that I should probably write about it. And with that said, here's the writing.

The Montagnards

One of the truly enormous things with alternate history is that if you change it far enough back, you start getting ethnicities that don't exist IRL. Have Catholicism be slightly less successful in the Balkans, and suddenly there's no Croatia, only a Greater Serbia. Change the political careers of guys you've never heard of in Central Asia, and you wind up with a lasting Moghulistan. Change colonial histories, and you get a Japonicized Taiwan*... or a Lusophone Philippines* instead of a Hispanicized one... or Yevanic surviving in Greece because there was no Sephardic expulsion. (I have all of these.)

It also means that some ethnicities wouldn't exist. Even if there's a similar blend of peoples meeting up, there's no reason to think that they'd become Melungeon. On the same note, it's reasonably certain that "hillbillies," prevailingly Scotch-Irish, don't exist. (I'm not sure the Scotch-Irish, or their parent stock the Ulster Scots, exist either; the Plantations aren't set in stone here.) Some of the territory is originally French; even if there's the same external circumstances, the change in the parent stock would lead people to, at best, convergently evolve.

Fortunately for me, somebody has. They're called the Montagnards.

What is Farrellitism?

The "definitions" tag was created in part because Andalusada is relatively high-concept. I'm reworking ideas as well as events, so the content of those ideas needs explaining; and while this whole blog is a Sternbildung, that doesn't justify leaving its readers in the dark. So I'm going to start with Farrellitism, for no reason other than that there's a tag for it already.

Much like IRL, there's two wings of the Reformation* - a northern one (Baltic, in the case of Guntheritism) and a southern one. That southern one, as I hinted when I introduced its pivotal figure, is the one called "Farrellite."

Music of the UCNA

What does music sound like within the UCNA? It depends a bit on who's there to compose it.

The Umayyad Caliphate of New Andalusia is not a nation-state. In terms of its self-identity, it falls somewhere between the USA and a very lucky Habsburg Empire. Rather than establishing a national folk music corpus to assert its nonexistent common roots, the UCNA's musical voice is going to evolve as organically as its identity.

And at heart, that identity is formed from the intersection of the following groups:

• The Biladi core: The arbiters of high culture aren't from the Moorish diaspora; they're former khassa families of Seville, the equivalent of White Russian émigrés. They're extremely conservative, and have the money and connections to establish themselves as the arbiters of haute couture; preserving the old ways just so is all-important to a lot of them. Nonetheless, that kind of traditionalism is going to be another big ingredient in what comes out.
• The Maghrebi periphery: Independent of the Andalusis, there's also a fair number of Maghrebis. At its height, imperial Seville did achieve its historic destiny, completely controlling the Strait of Gibraltar and building an empire in northwest Africa. It is NOT wealthy, and NOT the arbiter of culture, but it's still an influence. Perhaps more importantly, that influence is also going to extend to West Africa - and may include the blues scale.
• Former French America: In addition to the Louisiana Purchase, France also controlled more of what IRL was the Anglophone Deep South. I'm not sure what this is like culturally, because while some of this is Guisard* and quite conventionally French (if from different regions thereof), other parts could very well be Farrellite. And French Farrellitism brings with it many cultural details that are uniquely its own - including, quite possibly, polyphonic singing.
• The Moorish diaspora: With the 19th-century implosion of Seville's empire, the UCNA is continually reinforced by immigration from across its diaspora. Most of the Iberian New World, Portuguese or Sevillan, is unstable at best, and there's a steady flow of refugees and guest workers who are sending money home to form a melting pot.
• Aboriginal populations: The UCNA isn't founded with manifest destiny in mind; it's founded as an exercise in reactionary pique. As such, the idea of supplanting the aboriginal populations isn't really on their agenda, so much as neatly subordinating them into the tapestry of Andalusian society. (In the beginning, in particular, the UCNA is quite happy to support the aborigines, to keep the European subjects from dominating the political landscape. It's cheaper to pay off the Cherokees than the French.)
• European (and Europeanizing) neighboring states: The UCNA has a lot of borders. I have only the vaguest idea what it's been exposed to in the Caribbean. On its southern border, it has Axamalia, a Hispano-Baltic Texas (a lot of Güntherites flee there after the Baltic crises of the late 18th century; they're why the G.P. of Mexico arose at all, and a second wave after the "Burning Thirties" leads to a successful war of independence in the early 1840s.) In the northeast, there's a Dutch-Anglo-Scottish confederal republic (on the model of the United Provinces) that congealed out of earlier turbulence. Up north is the big worry in the form of Canada*, including New Ireland (the Saint Lawrence River Valley; as Gaelic here as it is Francophone IRL) - oddly enough, a likely place to produce something recognizably akin to modern country music, if considerably more Celtic. Simply by convergence, osmosis, and cross-border exchanges of ideas (and immigrant populations), this is going to be the random element in the recipe.

So what does this blend into?

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.