Tierseur

Tierseur, n. French. A third-bore rifle, esp. used for the hunting of dangerous game.

In the French Empire, no hunt is more revered or mythologized than the tiger hunt. And just as no iconic Great White Hunter IRL is complete without a big-bore double rifle, no great French hunter is great without his weapon of choice: a tierseur.

Esbat

Esbat, n. Moorish. A straight sword.

The iconic Arab sword is the scimitar: long, single-edged, and backswept - and not an Arab sword. IRL, it was first adopted in Khorasan, the far side of the umma from al-Andalus; it was brought west in the Turkic migrations, where the Seljuks (and the Byzantines, who'd already adopted the single-edge as a cavalry weapon) first wielded it against the Crusaders. Progressive Turkish immigration Arabized and assimilated, and the single-edged sword displaced the straight-bladed weapons that had come before.

Everywhere, that is, except in Seville. al-Andalus was in a lot of ways a living fossil of Islamic culture; if Osprey is any indicator, that extended to sword architecture too. In Andalusada, where the Moorish world is happily spared the waves of Turkish immigration, the double-edged sword is not replaced. As time goes on, and Seville's economy shifts progressively into the western Mediterranean, the non-Arabic influence on sword design in Toledo (and, thus, the Moorish world) come from the Aragonese Empire, Sicily, and the various Italies.

What this evolves into is the iconic sword of the Moorish world: the esbat.

Skopetchka

Skopetchka, n. Russian. A sawed-off rifle.

The concept of the shortened rifle is basic and old. England-Scotland's menagerie of Go-guns mostly exists because the Infantry Pattern's 30" barrel is burdensome and hard to handle; France is probably no different.

The idea of shortening a rifle, though, is fairly new, and in popular consciousness is known by the Russian name for such a modification: skopetchka (cf. Russian skopets "eunuch.")

Sansing

Sansing, n. A scythe blade affixed to a sword hilt.

In 1523, Terra Mariana a peasant revolt; later historians remember it as "the Livonian Revolt," and more generally as "the Güntherite Wars." But the rebellious peasantry had more pressing things to worry about than what the hell their fight was called. Specifically, their issue was how to arm themselves for a fight against a serious (if perhaps not unchallenged) enemy: the Teutonic Order.

Peasant revolts being what they are, they naturally gravitated toward peasant weaponry. Like the IRL Hussites, one of the great weapons of the Revolt was the threshing flail, reinforced with metal. The other was the scythe [Pomm. Sansa], which saw use in a number of varieties.

The least common conversion involved mounting a sword hilt. Compared to the much larger war scythes, they were given a Pommersch diminuitive, forming a distinct word of its own: Sansing.

Shugembo

Shugembo, n. Takasagonese. A Franciscan friar.

Oyashima has no "folk Catholicism," because Catholicism in Oyashima is new, and the converts tend to be scholarly, educated, and individual. There isn't much room for popular distortions of the faith when the faith isn't popular to begin with.

But one thing about Japonic Catholicism is globally distinctive, and it's pan-Japonic.

Japanese pop culture holds that nuns are mikos. This trope doesn't exist in Andalusada, for a number of reasons (most notably that Great Japan is a little more aware of Catholicism, what with it being the faith of their Takasagonese overlords) - but it's been replaced by a world-specific trope. Written out in TV Tropes format, it would be something like Friars are Yamabushi.

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.

Backbiters

Backbiters, n. Muckraking journalists.

Journalism is tangentially relevant to my interests. IRL's Progressive Era saw the golden age of the muckraker - and of pulp fiction, in which journalism was significant as one of the only acceptable heroic roles for a female character. (Lois Lane, reporter for the Daily Planet, is the exemplar of type, dating back to the Golden Age herself - which was at the tail end of the pulp era.)

In Andalusada, of course, it'd be too convergent to call them muckrakers. They're called "backbiters" instead, and the role is recognizable but recognizably different.

Reclamation

The Moorish New World was, first and foremost, Christian. During the Age of Exploration, the Five Families actively encouraged Isidoran missionary efforts, for entirely cynical reasons: it gave the Christians something to do besides revolt, and New World dhimmitude made it much easier to systematically exploit its staggering wealth. Islamization only came during the colonial era, when it was profitable to be above Christians.

Relations didn't significantly sour until the Liturgical War, which Umayyad Seville handled with an infamously heavy hand, but once they were soured they stayed soured. Come the Mexican Revolt, there was (of necessity) a staggering amount of anti-Muslim violence - and when the dust settled, the Moorish Empire was gone. And in its place, in the New World, was the G.P. of Mexico: a Christian government with a significant, and very diverse, Muslim minority.

Reclamation in theory and ideology

By the time Teresa Maria ascended to the throne, Mexico was suffering serious battle fatigue. Its economy was a mess, and an entire generation had never known peace. And (given that the First Mahdist War had only just died down in the Old World, and Cuba was still strong in the Caribbean), "peace" would be nothing but a chance to reload unless something serious was done to either placate the Muslims or permanently dispose of them.

That "something serious" turned out to be the policy now known as "Reclamation."

Christianities of Andalusada

"Christianity" is a pretty broad-stroke thing. In America, because we're used to thinking of it in this way, we define it in terms of Catholics and various denominations of Protestants. In Europe, it's defined in terms of national churches and such.

But broken down into its most basic taxonomy, the overwhelming majority of Christianity can be partitioned into some point of this taxonomy, arranged in roughly chronological order. Branches (or sub-branches) written in boldface represent churches that have historically claimed some degree of exclusivity in the past:

• Assyrian Church of the East
• Oriental Orthodox communion
• Coptic canonical tradition
• Ethiopian canonical tradition
• Eastern Orthodox communion
• Greek canonical tradition
• Slavonic canonical tradition
• (cf. Russian Orthodox) Old Believers
• Roman Catholic communion
• Roman Catholic Church
• Uniate churches
• Protestantism
• Lutheranism 
• Calvinism
• Presbyterian tradition
• Congregational tradition
• Baptist tradition
• Anabaptist tradition (arguably separate from Protestantism)
• Anglican Communion (arguably a Protestant tradition)
• Methodist tradition
• Holiness tradition
• Pentecostal tradition

This is, obviously, a very reduced taxonomy. It isn't counting in the tangle of loyalties caused by the Eastern Catholic tradition, for instance, or the hairsplitting that's come out of Protestantism. It also isn't counting in the extinct branches, or the subtle liturgical differences between canons.

Commissars

Commissars. Huh. What are they good for?

It's pretty much inevitable that any alternate-history Russia will have commissars; as inevitable as it being called vodka instead of spirt. Why do they exist? Because Russia, that's why. And because Andalusada does use its share of clichés, Great Russia has its commissars too. The only problem is justifying them - and this is my basic idea.

Vodka and tea

Reading lots of history has taught me something important: it's basically a fluke of luck that America's political parties are called what they are.

"Whig" and "Tory" are both corruptions of Gaelic insults. Sweden during the Age of Liberty had Hats and Caps. And in 1848, the Germans assembled at the Frankfurt Parliament broke down into Fraktionen named after the places they went to drink. The revolutionists who topple Evgeny the Old fell somewhere in between.

A Scottish New World glossary

Andalusada loves dynastic unions, so you heard it here first: before there was England-Scotland, there was... well... medieval England-Scotland. (I'm not sure how it starts or ends - although I'm thinking that Scottish Semi-Salic inheritance leads to a split in the dynasty - just that it's there.)

But after it ends, at around the dawn of the age of exploration, there's another dynastic union: Scotland-Norway. By the time it breaks up (after yet another instance of Scotland's Semi-Salic inheritance passing the throne to somebody the Norwegians wouldn't get), both of them have some holdings in the New World, with Scotland having more and better of them.

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.

Republican political titles

In republican politics, "President" is a very important term IRL, so much so that it's a normative one: the opposite of a parliamentary system is, for instance, a presidential system. And yet it's enormously contingent on the rise of the United States, and even more specifically on the Constitutional Convention of 1787 - which, just over 700 years after Andalusada's history is cut adrift from the anchor of IRL, is guaranteed not to happen. (And even that, according to Wikipedia, derives from the Commonwealth of England - which is pretty much guaranteed not to play out the same way either.)

This wouldn't be so much of an issue, except that a learnéd friend of mine, after reading about Cabralia's Three Wise Men last night, asked me a question about how republican governments work in Andalusada - and I didn't have a ready answer. After much derping, he pronounced my thoughts "a bit much to keep track of," which was my cue to blog about it today.

Introducing the Three Wise Men

The Latin American Wars of Independence tend to get ignored in English-language alternate history, for the simple reason that most of the best literature about them is probably written in Spanish. Which is a shame, because they have an enormous number of Great Men in their ranks. Bolivar. San Martin. And my favorite, Bernardo O'Higgins, founding father of Chile - not so much for anything he did, but because he has such a wonderfully implausible name.

Wars of Independence happen in Andalusada too, during the breakdown of Umayyad Seville - but obviously not the same ones, because by the time the wars Spanish history is 700 years gone. There are still going to be lots of Great Men in the histories of those wars; Yusuf I is one of them.

In Cabralia, by sheer coincidence (and authorial fiat), the greatest of those Great Men shared an unlikely set of names that leads to them being internationally known, in all languages, as "the Three Wise Men." This is their introduction.

Chinese six-guns

One small but important problem with alt-history gun porn is that no recognizable brand exists in Andalusada. There are no Colts. There are no Brownings. There are no Mausers. There are no Maxims. This is at once liberating and imposing; freedom to explore ballistic history's roads less traveled, but with no name recognition I have to explore those roads, or I'm wasting my keystrokes and your time with wordy spellings-out of the word *1911. A world this far gone needs some recognizable new guns with recognizable new mystiques.

Taiping China was the first state in modern history to field significant forces of (flat-chested) soldiering women under their own command. As such, Taiping China was also the first place that had to consider a woman's physique when it outfitted soldiers. In the later 19th century, once Fraternal Studies had started to pick up steam and Taiping China was starting to become an international buyer, representatives of the Phoenix Hosts gave rise to one of Andalusada's iconic weapons: the Chinese six-gun.

Stockholm Syndrome

During the Thousand Days, the single most devastated theater on the Scandinavian mainland was the city of Stockholm. (Visby was probably hit even worse, but it was much smaller by comparison, and the Visby Campaign didn't last nearly as long as the Battle of Stockholm did.) It was the world's first experience with industrialized urban warfare; it epitomizes the horror of violence in the era in almost exactly the same way that Verdun epitomized the Great War.

Götaland was probably the first time that any developed nation outside of Russia saw machine guns used in urban warfare. (The Russians beat the rest of the world to it by about ten years.) It was definitely the first place on Earth to see rocket warfare on that large a scale. And for more than two years, it never ended.

The Great Powers, ca. 1930

Andalusada's arbitrarily defined present day, as set down by GURPS canon, is 1930. This is what the world looks like then.

France 

For most of the early modern era, France was a Catholic dystopia, using the power of the Sodality and the weakness of its neighbors to horrifying effect. In the aftermath of the War of the French Succession, it's become significantly less dystopian (and slightly less Catholic), but as of the present day it's a large, powerful unitary state in a world that's convinced they aren't going to last.

• Has a slightly different core territory (missing some of the east and southeast, but including more in the north, including Alsace, Lorraine, and a fair chunk of the Low Countries.)
• Imperial holdings: India. All of Dravidian India is basically under French control; so is most of its coastline, stalled firmly by little Bengal (and its international allies.)

 England-Scotland

 England and Scotland are sort of two separate countries. During the

• Imperial holdings: Almost all of North America between them (most notably New Ireland), "Guinea" (a lot of sub-Saharan West Africa), and some chunks of southeast Asia.
• Alliances: A close alliance with Bengal, to act as a check on French expansion out of India. Historically, Japan's been a close ally of England-Scotland, but since the breakdown of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance a decade ago it's nothing quite as secure.

"Great Russia"

A *Narodnik republic with a needlessly wordy name (the Autocephalous Revolutionary National Sobor of All the Russias, or something like that. It changes every few years.)

• Capital: Tver, because it's never Tver.
• Core territories: Russia and Siberia.
• Imperial holdings: A loudly complaining *Alaska, most notably.
• Alliances: Propping up proxy states in Karelia, Anatolia, and some parts of Central Asia. Great Russia has a nonaggression pact with Japan that's older than Great Russia itself; it used to have close ties to Korea, but those have waned since what happened to Evgeny the Old.

Saxony

• Along with the Kingdom of Bavaria, one of the two vicars of the Holy Roman Empire (which is defunct but hasn't been abolished.)
• The smallest of the Great Powers; not so much a power on its own, but the keystone of the alliance that tips the balance in almost every European land war.
• Core territories: Electoral Saxony, along with most of what we'd call the Duchy of Saxony, the better part of Thuringia, and some scattered others.
• Imperial holdings: The Suez* Canal. After some rearrangements, Saxony wound up with almost controlling ownership of it, and has made itself a bit of a broker. Quixotically, they've also colonized Port Sudan, which they're trying to build into a respectable international harbor.
• Alliances: At the moment, Poland-Ruthenia and the Baltic states in the east, which it's trying to cement into a central European military bloc against Russian expansionism. Egypt and Abyssinia have some relatively equal treaties too, as a check against Anglo-French adventurism.

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.

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."