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 Skete of Orsa

IRL, the Taizé Community of ecumenical fame is founded in and based out of Taizé, a small town in Bourgogne where, to the best of anybody's knowledge, nothing interesting ever happened until 1940. (Brother Roger went to Taizé because it was isolated enough to escape military attention, and stayed because its population was lonely enough that he felt called by God to address it.)

As of Andalusada's present, the Taizé Community would still be twenty years in the future even if it was going to happen, which it most certainly is not, because the world's going to be wildly different enough that there won't be Nazis, or a united Germany, or an occupation of France at that point. Unless something else happens there, that little commune would be forever unknown to the world.

Fortunately, however, there is something that can happen there: Taizé is an hour's march from a neighbor whose claim to fame is secured before things even start. Because (Old World) places are far more likely to exist than people, and the Wars of Religion are still only a sketch, I asked a friend last night: "How would you feel about a Battle of Taizé?"

His response took me by surprise: "What would that do to the service style?" This is my answer.

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 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 catalyst of the Hanseatic Wars

When Günther published the first modern translation of the Bible, he was translating it because that was the language of the urban Pomeranian elite he needed to appeal to. He was translating it because it was his native language. He was also translating it into Low German because it was the language of his beloved hometown, Rostock.

And Rostock, it should be noted, was a Reichsfrei city. Low German was also the language of the Hansa, a medieval attempt at a megacorporation.

Ship by ship, shipping by shipping, printing by printing, the Günther Bible spread across the Hanseatic city-states. It didn't spread too far outside of them, because it didn't cross the language barrier very well, and the Saxon High German Bible existed to stop its spread.

And while the Holy Roman Empire was still recovering from the spanking it had been dealt during the Güntherite Wars, it had more pressing things to do than press the matter.

A generation or so later, however, there would be a new Holy Roman Empire, one who had never known the humiliation of defeat at Güntherite hands. Only the humiliation of his predecessor, and a need to avenge that humiliation.

The moment he was elected, the Hanseatic Wars became inevitable.

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.

The Gonzalan Rite

One of the problems that Saint Dominic faced was the fact that there wasn't really a standardized liturgy his friars could preach. There may have been, but there were enough regional variations from convent to convent, diocese to diocese, parish to parish that they couldn't celebrate it together. So his successors set about making their own, which was enshrined as the Dominican Rite and was practiced up until the 1960s.

Saint Gonzalo, his replacement in Andalusada, has the same issue, and handles it approximately the same way. By the time it's compiled, though, the differences on the ground are enough that they're reflected in the superstructure. And because theology is one of the things I geek about, I'm going to write about it.

What is Güntheritism?

"Güntheritism is the functional analogue of Lutheranism IRL."

That's the short answer. Theologically, though, it's a case study in steampunk social science.

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.