The Burning Thirties

In 1825, the world enjoyed something it hadn't known in quite some time: five years of peace. Nobody knew it then (such is the way of historiography), but the Great Realignment was over. It was a changed world.

In France, the succession war was finished, with the Bourguignons victorious; the new family in Paris was making overtures to ouverture, and the Guisards reduced to honoring a pretender in Rome and eulogizing their bygone Catholic dystopia. Across the Channel, England-Scotland was binding its wounds and making itself presentable as "the Union of the English and Scottish Empires." The Low Countries were draining their shattered polders with the power of the first general-purpose steam engines. South of the Pyrenees, the Crown of All Spains was dusting itself off, living in a world where Seville - great Seville, eternal Seville, Seville the glorious, Najm al-Umma - was gone, as dead as Pomerania. It was a changed world.

In the New World, Cabralia was rebuilding and recovering, slowly but surely, from the trauma of Baltazar's mutiny, calling their elder statesman Kaspar back to its Principal Palace. Mexico was très-mignon, as they say: a mestiza was styling herself "Grand Princess" in her own right, and the Pope was telling the crowns of Europe to greet their sister in Christ as an equal, and wasn't it adorable? And she even had her pet Moor, who was doing everything he could to give her plebeian husband no reason to annex his mainland claims and spank him back to Cuba. It was a changed world.

Plebeian Cabralia

When the Grand Principality of Cabralia established itself in the 1790s, it was a very different place from what it would be fifty years later. It stretched across every climate zone between the equator and Tierra del Fuego. In every possible sense, it was the greatest of the 18th-century republics. Its future was unbounded, its possibilities endless. In its capital [where?], the government could dream with starry eyes of maximismo, when all of Cabralia might be a part of it.

It didn't work out, obviously. But this is the story of what came before - and what might have been.

Republican Cabralia 101

Why? Best practices. If Guisard France deserves to be distinct from other Frances, the early Grand Principality deserves to be distinct from its imperial form.

• Who? Everyone. It had Anglo-Dutch settlers from the north, Moros from the Andes, and everything in between. The early G.P. was more cosmopolitan than the contemporary UCNA, and had every potential to stay so if it could've held together.
• What? Very turbulent early on, but it eventually consolidated into a very aristocratic republic of sorts. The major problem was that it got more aristocratic as time went on...
• Where? In the beginning, about 70% of the entire continent - all of Brazil, Argentina, bits of Chile (with a few isolated Moorish holdouts), Paraguay, Uruguay, etc.
• When? From the 1790s to 1834. After 1834, Kaspar Sansinger's marriage is a done deal, and the slide into modern Cabralia is all but foreordained.

The Pomeranian Reductions

Timeframe: Early- to mid-1700s
Belligerents: Güntherite Pomerania vs. everybody.
Outcome: The dissolution of Pomerania as an independent state until the 1830s.

For most of the 17th century, the Baltic Sea was a Güntherite lake. The north was dominated by the sprawl that was Denmark-Sweden; the south, by sansinger Pomerania, the once unstoppable juggernaut that had toppled the Teutonic Knights and left the Holy Roman Empire moribund.

Then the Great Realignment came, and as the Russian Empire became a serious threat, the ever-struggling Polish-Ruthenian Commonwealth found itself facing a constant problem: Pomerania, for the longest time their vassal, was turning into a Russian cat's-paw. And while Pomerania was by no means the unstoppable military juggernaut of its youth, in alliance with Russia it would leave the commonwealth facing a two-fronted war.

At some point [when?], Pomerania did something tactically smart and strategically stupid: they did ally with Russia, very briefly, against Poland-Ruthenia. Krakow's worst fears had been verified.

Umayyad Seville

When I started writing "nations," I originally focused on writing nations that are still alive as of the present day; it's only been in the last month or so that I started writing important dead states. Only tonight has it really struck me that I've been having world ADD, writing about other countries first. I said it right up front, in Andalusada's very first post:

[I]t is the story of how, by doing this, they accidentally created one of the most impressive nations the world will ever see. (Even if most of the local cretins still believe sacred monarchy is a good idea.)

This is going to be a long story. Let's take it from the top.

I'm not taking it from the top, obviously. I'm working in spirals and constellations - a bit from the beginning, a bit from the end, the dots that connected inward - because I know less about how that story goes than where it begins and where it ends. But as of when the story ends, Moorish civilization survives first and foremost in the Umayyad Caliphate in New Andalusia.

This is about what came before. This is about what the UCNA wants to claim itself as the continuation of, and what Mahdists the world around want to restore. This is about what came before there was a Moorish diaspora; the greatest moment that Moorish civilization had ever known.

Umayyad Seville 101

Every nation gets a 101 section, and traditionally that starts with the simple question: why? For most nations, this is about what made me interpret the nation this way rather than another. For dead states, though, why? asks something different: why it's important to write about this. In Umayyad Seville's case, it's because it was the pinnacle of Moorish civilization in the Old World - a civilization that's now as fallen as Constantinople, and will never be restored to quite its former glory.

• Who? The only new people in Umayyad Seville were the members of the House of Umayya (who reshuffled the pecking order of the Five Families.)
• What? The most centralized state the Moorish Empire ever managed to achieve; and it was trying to be more centralized, even up to the very end.
• Where? Most of Iberia, the northernmost fixed point being Toledo (beyond which lay ash-Shamal), extending south to the Straits of Gibraltar and crossing it southwest into the Maghrib (at the very least most of Morocco and some of Libya.) From there, stretching across the Atlantic Ocean to include varying swathes of the Caribbean, a fair chunk of the Andes, and most of what we'd call Mexico - and, from 1750 onwards, most of France-Outremer as well. All of it, of course, centered on the eternal metropolis of Seville.
• When? Umayyad Seville only lasted for about a century: 1688 (when Umayya al-Mujadid deposed the Miramoline) to, traditionally, 1786, its final year of stability under Hisham V. When exactly it ended remains hotly disputed, but it's definitely dead by the time the Yusufids secure their succession in the UCNA.

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.

Dystopian Catholic France

Andalusada's France has had a different sets of ups and downs. It missed out on the revolutions, for one thing; as of the present day, under the House of Burgundy, it's a semi-constitutional monarchy struggling to recover from the Great War. The Hundred Years' War is called something different, and I know that it played out differently because I have some ideas for how the Black Death affects the British Isles. But you wouldn't know about that, because I haven't written about that stuff at all.

I write what I know, and at the moment this is primarily the early modern era. And since I like pithy names (mind you Hispano-Baltic Texas), and try to write about Andalusada the same way I talk about it, I'm gonna introduce early modern France by its working name. In French historiography, everything related to the period is tagged with the adjective très-chrétien; in the rest of Andalusada, early modern France is "the Most Christian Kingdom." But within this blog, it's what I've called it for at least a year: Dystopian Catholic France.

Messieurs, mesdames, it's time to stare into the abyss. Don't let it stare back into you.

Dystopian Catholic France 101

Alt-history writers have a bad rap for making history more awful. At its most ambitious we have Bruce Sterling's Draka series, and Harry Turtledove's TL-191 involving a surviving CSA, and any number of Nazi-victory timelines. One of my goals with Andalusada was to, as a general rule, make the world less awful - it's why the first thing I wrote about Great Russia's economy was two words long: "Not Stalinism."

Dystopian Catholic France makes the first question of the national 101 take on a new meaning: why? Why did I give one of the world powers over to a family that rips people's tongues out of their heads?

• Who? The House of Guise.
• What? IRL French royal absolutism, coupled with a Catholic hierarchy as independent as powerful as IRL Spain's. Coupled with a devoutly Catholic royal family that fears and hates the Farrellites for the harm they caused.
• Where? Most of what we'd call "France," but with some exceptions. Dystopian Catholic France, much like its successor, controls at the very least most of what we'd consider Belgium; the French empire-building that took place during the Hanseatic Wars lasted pretty well until the succession collapsed, so at various points it's controlled smatterings of the moribund Holy Roman Empire and enough coastline to threaten Denmark-Sweden.
• When? France makes the turn toward dystopia while the Wars of Religion are underway. It mellows out a bit, but never backs away from the institutional dystopianism until after the House of Guise is well and thoroughly displaced. So maybe ~1625 to ~1825, give or take a few years either way.

I didn't answer why? at the top, because it would've taken too long. And the truth is: I still don't have a satisfying explanation. All I have is a true one.

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.

The Great Realignment

By the year 1650, Andalusada's modern European balance of power had been set more or less in stone. The Holy Roman Empire was a shattered mess, still recovering from the Hanseatic Wars; it was moribund, surviving only vicariously. Hungary, Poland-Ruthenia, and to an extent Pomerania were in better shape, but all of them were tied up with the threat from the east - either the post-Byzantine Turkic juggernaut or the irresistible rise of mighty Tver as it gobbled up Lithuania. In the west, there were only two powers that mattered - Imperial Seville (by that point late into the Five Families period) and its continental counterweight, dystopian Catholic France, itself starting to establish a serious global presence. All the other nations (England, the Portuguese Empire, the rise of little Castille, and eventually what consolidated into Denmark-Sweden) were second-tier at best.

That status quo definitely survives for another century, despite the Five Families period ending with the Miramoline and the transfer of a big chunk of continental America out of French control. It might survive for another 50 years after that, even. But by 1850, the global stage has changed wildly.

For starters, after 1100 years, Muslim control over southern Iberia is over. Once-mighty Seville is gone, spinning off the UCNA, the G.P. of Mexico, and Gran Peru (amongst many other countries.) Portugal's not doing so hot either, having lost most of its new world holdings to Cabralia and the CRC. Across the world, the once-inexorable rise of France has been halted or curtailed - not least in France itself, where a new dynasty has ended the dystopia. And now it's opposed by, of all things, a united British Isles, which hadn't existed since the 1300s.

By 1850, the world had changed enough that the power struggles were between totally different sides. The era before 1850, however long that may have taken, is known to historians as the Great Realignment.

The Military Chronicle of the Beautiful Marshal

This last week in Andalusada has been spent mostly in my most favorite of all places: Taiping China. This week in the rest of my life, however, has been spent mostly offline, with my nose increasingly in books. This post was inspired by a passage from one of those books:

Whether described by Teresa of the Castle or Teresa of the antimacassars, the slow, painful, clearly marked journey is the same.... But in this anthology none of these maps or manuals or "ways" will be found to be described. For the mystic who happesn to be a Protestant, although he is not more isolated than the Catholic... the fellow climbers are not roped. For the Catholic there are "recognitions" everywhere. But for Jakob Boehme the sixteenth-century shoemaker, or John Wesley the founder of Methodism, or George Fox the Quaker, or Emanuel Swedenborg, there was no benefit of clergy, no scaffolding to hang onto, few guidebooks, and little in history to help.

-Anne Fremantle, The Protestant Mystics, p. viii

Even though Protestantism plays out differently (Güntheritism does have some mystical background, for starters), I'm guessing that this is still true - and nowhere is it more true than in Taiping China, which develops Christianity in radically non-Western ways.

Since I've already introduced one book, and have nothing better to write about just now, I may as well introduce another. One with a name so awful that I'm only going to use it three times in this entire post.

The Great Translation

At its broadest, "the Renaissance" IRL means the economic and political upheaval caused by the Black Death and the end of the Medieval Warm Period, the changing power dynamics between Rome and the kingdoms caused by the Avignon Schism, linguistic changes caused by the rise of vernaculars and the rediscovery of classics (beginning with the Greek texts brought home from the Latin Empire, and accelerated as Byzantine civilization declined in its aftermath.)

And that's a problem for me. Because there's no guarantee that the Fourth Crusade (and there will be a Fourth Crusade) will result in the Latin Empire; there's no guarantee that church-state power dynamics will change because there may not be an Avignon Papacy; the Black Death could very well evolve in a different way. (Vernaculars and the end of the Medieval Warm Period, well, there's only so much that can be done about those.) Between that and a generally different intellectual landscape, there's no reason to think that the 13th century is going to play the same way, or indeed that it's going to be called "the Renaissance."

There is, however, going to be the Great Translation

Luciferianism and the Black Death

Moorish Spain has a rather occult modernity.

IRL, there was a Hermetic Reformation in the early 1500s: Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, Paracelsus, and a few others that come to mind. It didn't go anywhere really big in Europe, for the perfectly valid reason that Europe at the time was having a much bigger shakeup in the form of the Protestant Reformation. Seville, however, isn't going to have that kind of shakeup. I don't see any new madhhab arising from its Malikism (although maybe a few tariqas from its late Sufism?) Everything about the flow of history points to the fact that the world-shaking events of the 1500s are simply going to reinforce their attitudes of (Maliki, Moorish) Islam as universal empire.

In that context, seizing on Bruno and della Mirandola would be a way to shake things up, emphasizing that Moorish Islam is a very different beast from the Turkish juggernaut that dominates the rest of Islamic Eurasia - and letting them enter modernity as the weird uncle of Europe rather than having modernity happen to them.

The problem is historiography.

Things don't just happen. In most universes, people assume that the way things happened for them are the only way it could have. They also perceive this as part of a continuity of progression from the past, especially with something (like Hermeticism) that draws its authority from its antiquity. Andalusada is going to write its own history, and given Moorish Hermeticism, they're going to wonder "Where was the occultism that Moorish Hermeticism came from in the past?"

I have an idea. It involves the Black Death.

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.