The Sodalite Revolt of 1830

France managed to ride out the Burning Thirties more or less unscathed. They had better things to do, like catching their breath. The House of Burgundy just finished toppling the House of Guise, driven Spain out of the Côte d'Or (with a bit of help), and hounded the Most Christian King [who?] into Roman exile. There was work to do: standardizing measures, rebuilding polders, renegotiating treaties, restoring normalcy in France.

In 1830, it had a chance to come undone - and didn't.

Zahra

Life: 1887-present.
Position: Calipha of the Umayyad Caliphate in New Andalusia
Preceded by: [who?]

The electoral side of the UCNA's history is justifiably a sausage party: as of 1930, women's suffrage is still something that needs campaigning for. The monarchic side of the UCNA's political history is, at this point, a sausage party too, and it shouldn't be. Presumably the caliphs have no shortage of wives and daughters, but who are they? What are they doing?

As of tonight, I'm only really familiar with the current calipha of New Andalusia; I'm not even sure about her family name yet. What I know is that, in several spellings, her name is Zahra, devoted wife of Caliph Yusuf III. This is her story.

Yusuf III

Dates: January 20, 1891-present.

The Caliphate in New Andalusia is no stranger to unexpected successors; they're pretty much inevitable when congenital madness runs in the family, the (Jewish) maître d' has rights over each step of the acclamation process, and there are half a dozen collateral lines waiting in the wings. In the 19th century, those unexpected successors went down in history as "the six weak caliphs." In the 20th century, one of them turned out famously well. Only one of them, however, has been judged a bad caliph. His name is Yusuf III, and this is his story.

Andalusian gun culture

This is a work in progress. It will be expanded upon.

The Caliphal Household

New Andalusia was meant to be demotic, not democratic. Yusuf I was familiar enough with the arguments of Moorish Dissent to appreciate the distinction, but he feared and hated majority rule, and by the end of his life was vindicated by watching plebeian Cabralia plummet into monarchism. It's why the UCNA (several Charters later) still, uniquely, uses Borda count voting.

For all his efforts, though, the UCNA did slide towards democracy as time progressed. Most of this was the work of his right-hand man, who in his defense strengthened the Maxaha because he had a lot of weak caliphs to deal with, and the government needed to function somehow. But a side effect of Don Musa's efforts was the creation of a new and totally undemocratic force in Andalusian politics: the Caliphal Household.

Don Ibrahim

Dates: 1860-1980. (Yes, he dies fifty years after the canonical present day. This is important.)
Position: Secretary of the Caliphal Household.
Preceded by: His father, Don Musa Cordovero

The least democratic institution in the UCNA is the Caliphal Household. Founded under Yusuf I, it has survived chart reforms, two regencies, three succession crises and Populism almost unscathed. Holding an ambiguous position, both private employees of the caliph and public servants of the caliphate, the Caliphal Household is barely accountable to either.

Between the death of Yusuf I and the rise of Yusuf II, the most powerful man in the UCNA was a Sephardi Jew whose friends and enemies alike styled him simply "Don Musa." The son is more formidable than the father; as of 1930 he is the longest-serving man in the government of New Andalusia at around 45 years. His name is Don Ibrahim - and if Cardinal Richelieu was hale as an ox, and could kill you with the power of his Kabbalah, he would start coming close to the fearful awe commanded by the UCNA's bespectacled court Jew.

Yusuf II

Dates: 18??-1908.

Yusuf I leaves impossibly large shoes to fill on his death. For the next fifty years, those shoes aren't filled - at least not by anybody of the Umayyad line; the best claimant to that position would be Yusuf's former right-hand man, Don Musa Cordovero, who (along with his son, Don Ibrahim) oversees a succession of what's commonly called "the six weak caliphs" and steers the UCNA into being a more presidential monarchy.

After Don Musa's death, and the rise of Don Ibrahim, the UCNA encounters something it hasn't known since Yusuf I. For the first time in half a century, the Umayyad and the Cordovero at the top of the pecking order had a rapport - and ambition.

That Umayyad, not coincidentally, was named Yusuf II. This is his blog post.

Don Musa

Dates: 1796-1883.
Position: Secretary of the Caliphal Household.
Preceded by: None (office created by Yusuf I)
Succeeded by: His son, Don Ibrahim

Hegel had his roommates at the Tübinger Stift. Martin Luther had Melanchthon, Calvin had Farel and Bullinger (and they both had Bucer), the prophet Muhammad had the Sahaba... behind every Great Man of History there's a bunch of lesser names who are nonetheless key players in the story.

But who are those companions in Andalusada? Most of them, to be honest, I either don't know or haven't blogged about. Günther has his generals [who?], Oliver Farrell has his fellows from a dozen walks of life and eras [again, who?], the first Guise King of France [who?] has Simon the Apostate, who I know about but have only hinted about once (introducing the Montagnards.) Only in one case have I actually answered that question of [who?], and that was last night, when I gave Oskar Sansinger's wife a name: Teresa Maria, the Grand Princess. (Oskar Sansinger is himself one of the names to the first Grand Prince, also known as [who?] as of 9/26.)

Caliph Yusuf I is another one of the Great Men of History, and I already know that he's got a number of great names (and some lesser ones, like his son Sufyan.) One of them the UCNA's first great court Jew, an Andalusi expat and patriarch of the Cordovero dynasty: Don Musa. This is his story.

The Grand Princess

Dates: late 1700s [when?]-1834.

Mexico's constitution specifically allows for semi-Salic inheritance, because when the first Grand Prince [who?] died, all of his daughters were married morganatically - at least in principle, none of their husbands were eligible to rule in their own right. The daughter who succeeded him was his second, Teresa Maria. In Mexico, and in most of the New World as well, she is simply o Gran Princesa: "the Grand Princess."

This is her story.

Oskar Sansinger

The UCNA's rise to power was ordained by me as the author, but it wasn't inevitable. If the wars had played out differently, the Grand Principality of Mexico could possibly have become the greatest state in the New World; if several wars had played out differently, Mexico might have been a global power, and the Yusufid dynasty reduced to a Caribbean empire centered on *Cuba. (It's extremely unlikely, because it ignores the butterflies that such a runaway Mexico-wank would've set in motion - but it's not impossible.)

History is the story not just of Great Times, though, but of Great Men. The UCNA's story was also the story of its first and greatest ruler, Yusuf I, and his friends [who?]. And once the UCNA had been established, the history of the G.P. of Mexico is likewise also the story of its great man - Yusuf I's nemesis and contemporary, one Oskar Sansinger.

The House of Sansinger

A fair number of alt-histories try to establish an American royal family. I've seen people save the Iturbides, the Habsburgs, the Braganzas... and I've seen a fair number of attempts at dynasties too. (Even though it's much more likely that Washington would've set himself up as President-for-life, the House of Washington seems to be a relatively popular one.)

The hard part is establishing a New World royal dynasty - in the first concept sketch, I was actually playing with a New World House of Bonaparte, which got butterflied away once I realized just how errant a Moorish survival TL would be after that many centuries. The House of Bonaparte (tracing from both Napoleon and Lucien) gave rise to "Bonapartist" (which remains a fair enough description)... until, eventually, my writing on Güntheritism and *Prussia (and the vast Hohenzollern-shaped hole that I still feel in Andalusada's political landscape) congealed, and everything clicked into four words: "The House of Sansinger."

Great Russia

Seeing that the last two posts have been about details of modern Russian culture, it bears mentioning that Russia's finally gone revolutionist. And because of steampunk social science, it's not the USSR that you know and have feelings about.

Great Russia in a nutshell

Why? Because it's right there in GURPS Infinite Worlds, p. 118:

Other Muslim timelines include:

Andalus (Q4, current year 1930), in which the Muslims of Spain threw back the Reconquista and went on to discover America in 1484, achieving TL6 in rivalry with Japan, Saxony, and Russia.

 The timeline calls for a Russia that's on par with the Moors (albeit in a new interpretation), Japan, and Saxony, and so a great Russia it shall receive. (Honestly, the hard part is establishing a great Saxony.)

• Who? A whole hell of a lot of people. I'm not sure which peoples, but a lot of them anyways.
• What? A cabal of variously romantic, technocratic *Narodnik oligarchs, forcibly dieselpunking the entire world for arcane reasons. Under and around them is a coalition government that's unlikely to ever dissolve, because an entire branch of the military obeys its orders first and Supreme Command's only later.
• Where? Most of what we'd call the USSR, but not all of it.
• When? Celebrating its 25th birthday on the day after Pascha this year, when (with Japanese support) the riots in Tver first got going.

The bigger question, then, is why this Russia?

The Grand Principality of Mexico

If I wanted a true and serious wank, I would've had the UCNA keep the Moorish empire. Even losing the Old World, they'd be one of the largest countries on the planet, controlling both the Mexican and Transcabralian Canals and the combined resources of everything from the Great Lakes south to around Chile. I did not want a wank, however. I wanted something plausible. And mostly, when I started writing this world as a GURPS Infinite Worlds setting, I was clueless about world history.

So of course there was a Mexico. Of course it was pretty similar to Mexico IRL. And because of sheer inertia, Mexico has existed as an independent nation ever since. But it hasn't stayed the same; the world has moved on, and the butterflies have turned it into the Grand Principality of Mexico.

The G.P. of Mexico 101

Why? Originally, this was the space-filling Empire of Mexico. After awhile, it evolved into a Bonapartist space-filling empire (on the lines of the Second Empire, which was run by a Habsburg); after that, into an ideologically Bonapartist empire; and after that, once reactionary Prussia had evolved into revolutionary Pomerania, into the G.P. of Mexico that you see here today.

• Who? Almost all the possible permutations of the Moorish ethnoreligious colonial hierarchy, with the Muslim varieties greatly reduced, under the charismatic rule of the House of Sansinger and its forest of bayonets.
• What? At one point, the UCNA's nemesis; at this point, its quirky miniboss antagonist.
• Where? Mexico and more. The G.P. of Mexico controls enough land to its south to have built the Mexican Canal, for instance.
• When? Like almost everything in the New World, the G.P. of Mexico is a child of the Great Realignment - specifically that part in the 1790s, when the Moorish colonial empire imploded. From that point, despite more and more serious turmoil than IRL Mexico was ever diverse enough to experience, it's managed to survive to the present day.

 So moving on a bit...

New Ireland

As a general rule, you can get away with a lot in alternate history by mentioning any given place once. Most places are still there, and it isn't foreordained that the same stuff should happen at the same places; that's what gave rise to the Skete of Orsa, for example - the random derpy idea that there may be a Battle of Taizé, and there is a Battle of Stockholm, and where in Sweden could I plausibly put a Taizé-like community? That minimal amount of work saves you a lot of the shame of Hollywood geography by making a lot of ill-documented places important.

Then there are the hard ones: the places (usually countries) that have long, well-documented histories, which potentially are going to be significantly altered by the changes you make. Places that give rise to lots of people who understandably have the right to wonder what the hell happens there.

Places like Ireland, for instance.

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 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 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.

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.

Scots influence on Japanese military uniforms

The Imperial Japanese Army of IRL was not sexy. Not even "not sexy" as in "inevitably they're measured against the Wehrmacht, who had their uniforms decided by Coco Chanel." They just don't look cool. Nobody feels guilty about thinking that their uniforms are kinda hawt. Nobody tries to cosplay them.

This seems relatively true across most alternate histories. (The same people invent the same things. Germany, even irrelevant Germany, will always invent all the nicest hardware; by comparison, Japan will almost always have the kludge and Zeros, even if Germany's completely irrelevant and Japan has, say, conquered China and built an empire that beggars the Co-Prosperity Sphere. For the same reasons, Japan always has fugly uniforms.)

And this irritates me, because I wanted a distinctive Japan. A Japan that isn't obviously the only one it could only ever possibly evolve into being. And one that has cet certain je ne sais quoi that we associate with all things Japanese. (It also irritates me because a great deal of the visual thinking I've done about Andalusada has been animesque. Which is why I observed that nobody cosplays the IJA.)

So I have a solution of sorts.

Khalwa in Umayyad Seville

In the Moorish world, "caliph" is essentially meaningless. It mattered under Abd al-Rahman III, sure, but the Qurtuba's caliphate didn't even last a century before it was abolished by its own khassa. The Almohads brought it back for a bit, sure, but they were messianic loonies anyways. And after they'd been crushed back across the Strait of Gibraltar, the only claimants to the title of caliph were barbaric national enemies who could be safely ignored. The absolute power of the caliphate didn't devolve to the ulama and Sufis as it did in the eastern Islamic world; it simply went dormant.

But all things must eventually return. After the Almohads, after the Abbadids, after the Five Families, after the Miramoline, caliphate came back in a big way: the Emirate of Seville was now the Caliphate of Seville, under a bunch of jumped-up pretenders calling themselves the House of Umayya and claiming absolute power for themselves.

Autocracy was historically accurate for a caliph, especially an Umayyad one, but it didn't butterfly away those meddling ulama and turuq either. The ulama were dealt with in all kinds of ways (not least simply making concessions to them), but the Sufis proved more troublesome.

One of the ways Umayyad Seville found to deal with them was khalwa.