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.

The Second Mahdist War

Timeframe: Early to mid-1820s, contemporary with the War of the French Succession
Belligerents: The Crown of All Spains vs. al-Mahdi and his supporters
Consequences: The death of al-Mahdi; collapse of Mahdism as a unified force; Legitimist withdrawal from France; rise of Saxon-aligned Malta as a Mediterranean force

In 1786, Umayyad Seville knew its last year of peace and sovereignty. Seven years later, the Civil War had run its course, and the newly-united Spanish Crown was busily annexing what was left of Moorish Spain. Hisham V [who?], the last Caliph of Seville, was dead. The caliphate was contested by three squabbling, doomed brothers, and his four-year-old son had been smuggled into safety and irrelevance across the Straits of Gibraltar.

During those dark days, his supporters gave him a regnal name of his own: al-Mahdi. And in 1821, with the House of Guise crumbling and a civil war in France, al-Mahdi made his move and crossed the Straits of Gibraltar again.

Asad from Seville

Mahdism doesn't just cause wars. As an ethos and a mythos, its (minor) influence has extended to every aspect of Iberian global culture, Christian and Muslim.

Mahdism has shaped the Ibero-Romance languages, giving them metaphors just like Jacobitism gave English sub rosa IRL. It's established an iconography and a lexicon of motifs (the keys on the necklace, hunter green shot through with silver thread) that are recognized worldwide. It's been a recurring inspiration for a pan-Iberian artistic corpus - especially a lyrical corpus: Mahdism has produced marches favored by directors as far south as the CRC, and its melodies have been set to different lyrics and become recognized as far away as Japan.

That said, though, Mahdism's mostly felt through its violence. It's caused three wars in Iberia itself; it's caused no end of troubles in Spanish North Africa, not counting the infamous Chergui; it is the impetus for considerable terrorism, especially that of the G1200.

The most legendary Mahdist terrorism, though, may have been neither Mahdist nor terrorist. We would call it the work of a serial killer, but when he struck there was no word in any language to describe the carnage he left behind.

That terrorism was the work of a single man, Asad from Seville.

Guillermo I

Dates: 1091-[when?]

In 1091, the frighteningly young Urraca becomes pregnant by her husband, Raymond of Burgundy. Unlike IRL, the child survives, and her firstborn son is named Alfonso after his late grandfather. He isn't the last son she has with Raymond, though: she has at least one other. In keeping with Iberian naming conventions, that second son is named after his other grandfather, William of Burgundy. On Urraca's death, he ascends to the throne as the first Ivrean king, under the regnal name "Guillermo I."

Thus begins the reign of the first completely fictitious person in Andalusada's history.

People of 11th-century Iberia

Andalusada is a long and complicated world, and it starts in 11th-century Iberia, which is particularly notable for a few reasons:

• There are so many factions, and all of them need to be accounted for from the start.
• So many of them - far more, understandably, than the rest of the TL combined - are actual historic personalities, who'll need rewriting.

This, therefore, is a one-stop list for keeping track of who's who, and from where.

Alfonso VI of Castile

Before the beginning, Rodrigo Diaz was in the employ of Alfonso VI, at that point King of Leon and Castile. In the beginning, he's predictably banished.

Once that beginning gets underway, Alfonso VI has only a few years left to live. But he doesn't know that. This is his story.

Alfonso VI up to the point of divergence

Alfonso VI was the second son of Ferdinand the Great, sandwiched between Sancho (king of Leon) and Garcia (king of Galicia.) He was also the first to seriously ignore the division of territories between the sons, extorting money from Badajoz.

And starting from about 1072 (which, admittedly, gets off to a bad start when his brother Sancho kicks his ass at Golpejera and sends him fleeing to Toledo), the ten years prior to the POD had actually been pretty good for him. Sancho gets killed later that same year, allowing Alfonso to claim the coveted title of "King of Leon"; and when García is recalled from exile, he's forced to take monastic vows and gets banished to a monastery, never to fuck or fight again. By 1077, Alfonso VI is in a position to start styling himself Imperator Totus Hispaniae: "Emperor of All the Spains."

In 1079, he marries Constance of Burgundy, who bears him a daughter, Urraca. (She's going to be important one day, as soon as I figure out how.)

The Moorish language

In the beginning, the Iberian languages were all pretty close together. They probably had distinct dialectal names for each other, but it wasn't that hard for any one person to write anyone else (assuming they could write in the vernacular at all, that is, although interestingly Rodrigo Diaz was literate in Latin.)

But the world doesn't stay at the beginning forever, and as time progresses and things evolve (for instance, Aragon becoming much more important much earlier), those languages start to speciate and distinguish themselves fairly quickly - especially between the dialects spoken in al-Andalus and ash-Shamal.

Now that it's been dead 700 years IRL, we call the southern dialect continuum Mozarabic. This is a nice, distinctive term to describe what wasn't a terribly distinct dialect family at the time - but it has one problem: "Mozarabic" identifies itself not as "Mozarabic" but latino/us, vernacular Latin. (For that matter, most Romance languages of the period did that as well.)

Mahdism

Talking about Andalusada can be hard. On good days, the problem is that nobody has any idea what the hell I'm going on about, because I can't just link them to the blog and say, "Read all of it." On bad days, though, it's because it involves Islam, and Islam makes people stop thinking.

Well-meaning but clueless people hear that North America is a Spanish-speaking Muslim country, and that's all they hear. Without a chance to get into how it evolves, or what politics can be like in a world with steampunk social science, they immediately conclude that the UCNA is a superpower Islamic Republic of Iran; it's only because I live in a decent part of the country that I haven't heard the word "Islamofascist" used yet.

Which is a shame, because there's a joke that I could make, and nobody who used "Islamofascist" would get it: This is Islamic Spain I'm talking about. They have Islamo-Carlism instead.

Mahdism 101 ("Onward to the twelfth century!")

Mahdism's goal can be summarized with a single four-digit number: "1200." That's 1200 AH for all you dhimmis out there - 1786, the last stable year in the history of Umayyad Seville. Logically or semi-logically, that goal entails the following things:

• Andalusi independence: Mahdism is nationalist, not regionalist. While most of them would be quite happy to give the Crown of All Spains a taste of its own medicine by taking over Castilla as well, the key goal isn't retribution; it's the restoration of Seville as a state in its own right.
• ...as a caliphate: Mahdism isn't exactly "Islamist" in our sense, but it's certainly Muslim; what was once a metropolis and cultural capital has been turned into an emigration society, and the emigrants are overwhelmingly Moors who are disadvantaged under the new state Catholicism that (incidentally) doesn't benefit the Mozarabs that much either.
• Because Seville's common law was abolished after the First Mahdist War, "restoring the caliphate" implicitly also means "restoring the prewar legal codes," which would restore a lot of the old Moorish khassa to prominence again. (It would also mean that a lot of poor Moors would suddenly own small amounts of Old World land.)
• ...ruled by the House of Umayya. Originally, this was the legitimist claim of al-Mahdi. In the wake of his death, that cult of personality has diffused into a cult of dynasty. Although any serious Mahdist pretender will have a cult of personality, Mahdism as a whole is devoted less to the individual than to the continuing succession of the first, greatest, and only true rulers of the Islamic world.
• Specifically, this means "under an Umayyad descended from al-Mahdi." There's a fair number of them at this point. Pretenders are always styled Mahdi, and their mothers "Umm Mahdi" as an honorific.

Or at least that's how it's supposed to work.

Urraca of León and Castille

Once things start getting different, I run into one of the first big divergence in history: the last Castillian monarch common to both timelines. Her name is Urraca, and she's something I've tried to ignore for awhile because so much is changed that I have no certain idea how her life plays out. This is her blog post.

Urraca's recognizable life

The only reason that I'm sure about Urraca's existence at all is because she's born in 1079. This means that she's two years old as of the POD.

The Miramoline

The has the name Wendy, which went from being an American-only outlier (on par with inflicting your child with a variant spelling of a name) to an internationally recognized one because of some Scotsman writing some book. (The Slavic world has an equivalent in the form of Svetlana.)

Andalusada almost certainly doesn't have Wendy, and it probably doesn't have Svetlana either. But it does have a female name of its own. That name, in the original French spelling, is Miramoline. Within a century the interconsonantal /a/ had been lost, giving rise to Mirmeauline, and (in English) the same thing, with various renderings of the vowels and duplicate letters: Mermelline, Myrmeline, etc. The name caught on.

This entry is about person who made it stick. The first woman to ever sign her name as la Miramoline.

The Palaces of Granada

The most important thing about Granada is that it's out of the way and very hard to access. The city is hemmed in by mountains, with a single route in that's extraordinarily secure. This is why the Nasrid Emirate, the puny final holdout of Moorish Spain, was able to resist the Reconquista for long enough to build Hispano-Arabic architecture's crown jewel: the Alhambra.

Andalusada has no final Islamic holdout in Granada. It has no Nasrids. Instead of the beauty of the Alhambra, the city of Granada becomes legendary for the palace that rises there instead.

Where it all begins

While I've discussed the origins of Andalusada in outline before, I haven't actually typed it out explicitly, and certainly not here. Now that it's hyperlinked, I have no excuse. So let's take this from the top. Andalusada starts in the year 1081.

In 1081, some politics comes up. We're not totally sure about what it was; there's some legends and such but it's not nearly as well-documented as we'd like. What matters is that Alfonso VI has been remarried to one Constance of Burgundy, who brings with her a lot of Cluniac ties, papal opposition, and personal drama. A fair number of people apparently got exiled because of them this, including one Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, who leaves with no money and a fair number of retainers to feed.

With no loyalties owed to Alfonso, Díaz has to find a new employer. The first place he turns to is Barcelona, where he winters with the Counts. They hate each other. Passionately. Still unemployed at the end of the winter, Rodrigo is forced to look elsewhere to feed his cohorts.

This is the point of divergence. This is the point of departure. This is where Andalusada stops being IRL.

The Guerillas of Toleto

The survival of Moorish Spain (in the form of Seville) effectively stalls the southern expansion of the Roman Rite. Under various iterations of Moorish rule, the Mozarabic liturgy survives long past the point where it died out IRL.

It also means that the struggle within the Spanish Church over which Rite to use is more pronounced, and much more politicized, because the major players - Aragon and Catalonia - are extremely tied to the Roman Rite. Their efforts to push south (and not purely military ones; witness the Gonzalans) are going to be resented, and perceived as imperialism, by the Christians living under Moorish rule.

This most frequently comes to a head in the Primate of Spain: Toleto, a city (like Batallos) on the edge of both the Christian and Moorish worlds, and (unlike Batallos) one that changes hands at least twice during the Middle Ages. [details?] In Milan, attempts to suppress the Ambrosian Rite led to repeated riots. Attempts to do the same in Toledo are going to lead to what are called, in hindsight, the guerillas: the little wars.