The I.C.&Cie. Modeste AR

The world's most famous tierseur is also its least respected. In the market ecology of tierseurs, the Modeste's niche is to be the pariah, the untouchable, the one that all other customers sniff their noses at. The Modeste exists as a designated inferior for all others in the industry to be better than in every way. It also exists because a valid market niche exists for such a device.

Before 1895, the tierseureries coexisted in peace. Oh, there was drama between the tierseureurs - what artistic medium isn't without its petty feuds and legendary rivalries? - but the industry, such as it was, was governed by a rigid unspoken code of honor. Each tierseurerie was distinct, and they made a point of not stepping on each other's toes.

In 1895, Innocent Cauvigne et Cie. introduced their own interpretation of the tierseur. No sooner had the first order been shipped than the Calais firm was buried under a dozen lawsuits from outraged tierseureries, each and all striving to destroy the upstart.

The Shimoga man-eaters

The events described in this post are nothing historical. No lines on maps were redrawn because of it, no wars fought, no great men created and only a few notable ones [who?] destroyed. If I had never thought of it, if it had never been written, Andalusada would look no different. In no way does this significantly change the overall flow of history.

This post is parerga. And yet it is legendary parerga. This post is a symptom of imperial France in its decline, a post of a story that's become etched in the French consciousness as surely as Jaws is in ours.

Background to the Shimoga man-eaters

Since it hasn't been mentioned in awhile, southern India is a French colony. L'affaire de Chimogue was entirely a colonial affair, taking place in French Malenadu - specifically in the vicinity of Shimoga, home to a fairly large and young coffee latifonde.

• The War of the French Succession left the Empire perilously close to fiscal collapse; the next generation had been spent trying to rebuild it. Fortunately for them, the Iberian coffee monopoly had cracked with the collapse of Umayyad Seville thirty years earlier; since the price of New World coffee stayed high (between limited Mexican production and Cabralia's war-shaken economy), the French colonies were able to make it a lucrative cash crop, leading to the Oriental Company's latifundism.
• From the 1880s, the spread of coffee rust blight from Africa started seriously impacting the global coffee market. French India, which had thus far managed to avoid the coffee blight, was thus even more profitable than it had ever been before.
• About a generation later [when?], tiger-hunting become the sport of choice for a certain type of cosmopolitan noble twit. Guns in hand (many totally inadequate for the task; many Frenchmen gave their lives before the black-powder cat-gun was sorted out), they managed to devastate the Malabar tiger population, which led to some interesting side effects, such as...
• ...the collapse of tiger-hunting, and with it preparation for dealing with tigers.
• ...the collapse of a lot of former tiger habitats, as growing populations along the Malabar Coast began expanding outward, pushing back the tree coverage that the tigers needed to move and progressively driving them north.
• ...a period of about a decade in which so few tiger hunts were successful that the tables began to turn: every year during this period [when?], Malabar tigers killed more humans than humans could find tigers to kill. (This was chalked up to the tigers being more aggressive rather than any environmental changes.)

French colonial policy had thoughtlessly prepared a perfect storm. Early in the 20th century [when?], that storm hit.

The H11 controversy

The UCNA always struggled to standardize. Decimalization was still underway at the time, and it was surrounded by several distinct, and mutually incompatible, customary measuring systems: Anglo-Scottish to its north, an Ibero-Baltic blend down south, and French scatterings in the Caribbean (and its own borders.)

Matters came to a head, however, in 1893, when the UCNA finally phased out its long-serving .49-94 for something altogether new. It's still causing headaches in several continents today, where it's commonly known as the H11 Controversy.

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.

April 5th

Everywhere that Persian language and culture have ever been hegemonic, Muslims still celebrate the distinctly Persian holiday of Nawruz (however so spelled.) About a thousand years ago, al-Andalus had a holiday of its own: al-khamsa al-Abril, "April 5th."

There was no religious significance to the day - it was simply created as an excuse for Muslims to get drunk with Christian neighbors on Easter. (Doubtless there were April 5th jokes in all the years when it came later than that.) We know it existed for the very simple reason that the ulama felt a recurring need to remind everybody that it was a reprehensible bid'a and was never observed in the time of the righteous ancestors.

al-Andalus collapsed, obviously, and that collapse is a big part of why April 5th is no longer celebrated like that today. In Andalusada, just as obviously, it didn't collapse, and that holiday continued to be celebrated, for long enough that it wound up becoming a distinctive of Moorish civ, just as much as Nawruz is for the Persianate world.

New World Carolingian literature

"There are but three matters," says a poet, "that none should be without: the matters of France, of Britain, and of great Rome." That poet may not even be born in Andalusada, and I can't assume that the three matters are going to arise the same way, coming as they do at least two generations after the point of divergence. For the sake of the discussion, I'm going to assume that the chansons de geste do in fact turn out rather similarly; if that assumption changes, expect this post to be invalidated with a later one.

Up until the 19th century (or so says Wikipedia), the Carolingian cycle was as familiar as Arthurian legend is to us now. (Part of why it's become less so is because in the Anglophone world a lot of writers have revisited the Arthurian mythos in the 150 years.) In Andalusada, where the large area we call "the United States of America" is an officially Hispanophone Gallo-Moorish state and the Anglophone world is correspondingly a fair bit smaller, that equality is still going to be real.

And in the Umayyad Caliphate in New Andalusia, a country that I'm benchmarking as 55% Muslim/35% various sorts of Christians/a generous 10% other, where that familiarity is going to cause problems and create a solution.

Crown princes and their titles

In the present day, the titles of crown princes are pretty much meaningless: Prince of Asturias. Prince of Girona. Prince of Wales. But at some point in history, those titles meant something. And at some point in history, those titles became the titles of crown princes. And because Andalusada parts ways with the world we know in 1081, I'm going to need to rethink all of those stories.

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 Black Codices

After the discovery of the New World in 1484, there's every reason to think that Seville, in the name of having money to spend after such a long and marginal existence, does what Spain did IRL: spends so much New World gold that it collapses economies worldwide, causing a global shift toward the silver standard.

At the lowest point of the gold crash, somebody in the Five Families had an inspired idea: if gold is so cheap, why not make a show of it? Thus was born the Black Codices.

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.

Moorish scientific Hermeticism

One night, in the plausibly near future of the verse, an Andalusian observatory will discover the planet that we know by the name of Pluto.

A few nights later, a bunch of astronomers will gather in their jamia, bringing with them an enormous set of odd paraphernalia. They will bring with them bottles of wine, and bottles of cider, and bottles of other liquors, and plenty of water for tea and chocolate. They will bring whatever it is that they smoke, and whatever it is that they need to smoke it with. They will bring stacks of books - maps of the night sky, and biographies, mostly.

They will sit down and plot out, over glasses of drinks, important questions, like "What was Pluto doing when all these people were born? What college was it in? What was it occluding? Where was it relatively to all else?" And they will work this out, and account for this in the horoscopes of the great men of history. (And some great women too.)

And when they have established this, they will then ask the ensuing question: "What are the differences between what the original uncorrected horoscope would suggest, and what actually happened?" And they will observe this, and record it for the record.

And over the course of many such questions, they will ask a third question: "All of these horoscopes, across centuries and continents - what trends do we observe about the ways the horoscopes failed to account for the lives that fell under them? What is constant when Pluto is on the cusp of this, or occluding that?"

Bit by bit, scouring the archives of the world, they will theorize the astrological significance of Pluto to a very high standard of rigor. And if you tell them that what they're doing isn't science at all, they'll stare blankly.

And then put their cigars out in your eye.

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.

A recurring complaint throughout history

Excerpted from Güntheritism: A Very Poor Introduction:

"The Revel Catechism was the first work widely published in the Livonian language. The Balts were among the last peoples of Europe to embrace the Christian faith, a task that the Knights of the Order had never thought to undertake themselves. This was brought to the Master's attention after he was settled in Riga; claims of the "Livonian Trinity" of Jesus, the Blessed Virgin and St. George the Dragonslayer remain hotly contentious to the present day, although it has been immortalized in Baltic profanity...

Scratch notes on Taiping hymnography

Taiping pastors are responsible for gathering up their flock for worship services. They're also responsible for escorting them to the designated places of worship (IRL, the Taipings never built dedicated churches; I'm not sure how their sacred architecture plays out in Andalusada.) In some cases, they may or may not also be responsible for escorting their flock from the churches too. (All those conditionals are necessary because the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is not noted for its organization.)

Which highlights one of the things that makes the Taiping Christian religious experience different from all others: it's actually more collective than any other Christian mode of worship. The Taiping faithful are formed into groups before they actually assemble into a single congregation, and because the pastor's responsible for handling them as such, they can also leave as groups, rather than going in peace as individuals.

It also doesn't synchronize exactly with the service.

And because of Taiping distinctivies, both IRL and in Andalusada, I have every reason to guess that Taiping piety involves a lot of very loud processional hymns (and a somewhat smaller number of recessionals.)

Attempts to establish a common cycle of processional and recessional hymns, for the sake of standardization, have all met with failure. As is ever the case with Taiping Christianity, chaos reigns.

The Nestorian Epistles

There are many things that bother me in alternate histories. Three of them come to mind right off the bat, like so:

• The humanities tend to be plot-significant-only. Presumably there's an enormous amount of art and writing and architecture that's going on in any timeline, but nobody ever takes a break to discuss what the hell it is unless it's directly related to the overarching story.
• Directly related to the above, the mental landscape of the world is assumed to never significantly deviate from the IRL norm unless it's plot-significant. (Even then, there's relatively little exploration of how it deviates, or the consequences of doing so.)
• Eurocentrism.

So, for variety, today I'm gonna blog about a fictional work of writing, loosely inspired by the Persian Letters of our world.

Music of the UCNA

What does music sound like within the UCNA? It depends a bit on who's there to compose it.

The Umayyad Caliphate of New Andalusia is not a nation-state. In terms of its self-identity, it falls somewhere between the USA and a very lucky Habsburg Empire. Rather than establishing a national folk music corpus to assert its nonexistent common roots, the UCNA's musical voice is going to evolve as organically as its identity.

And at heart, that identity is formed from the intersection of the following groups:

• The Biladi core: The arbiters of high culture aren't from the Moorish diaspora; they're former khassa families of Seville, the equivalent of White Russian émigrés. They're extremely conservative, and have the money and connections to establish themselves as the arbiters of haute couture; preserving the old ways just so is all-important to a lot of them. Nonetheless, that kind of traditionalism is going to be another big ingredient in what comes out.
• The Maghrebi periphery: Independent of the Andalusis, there's also a fair number of Maghrebis. At its height, imperial Seville did achieve its historic destiny, completely controlling the Strait of Gibraltar and building an empire in northwest Africa. It is NOT wealthy, and NOT the arbiter of culture, but it's still an influence. Perhaps more importantly, that influence is also going to extend to West Africa - and may include the blues scale.
• Former French America: In addition to the Louisiana Purchase, France also controlled more of what IRL was the Anglophone Deep South. I'm not sure what this is like culturally, because while some of this is Guisard* and quite conventionally French (if from different regions thereof), other parts could very well be Farrellite. And French Farrellitism brings with it many cultural details that are uniquely its own - including, quite possibly, polyphonic singing.
• The Moorish diaspora: With the 19th-century implosion of Seville's empire, the UCNA is continually reinforced by immigration from across its diaspora. Most of the Iberian New World, Portuguese or Sevillan, is unstable at best, and there's a steady flow of refugees and guest workers who are sending money home to form a melting pot.
• Aboriginal populations: The UCNA isn't founded with manifest destiny in mind; it's founded as an exercise in reactionary pique. As such, the idea of supplanting the aboriginal populations isn't really on their agenda, so much as neatly subordinating them into the tapestry of Andalusian society. (In the beginning, in particular, the UCNA is quite happy to support the aborigines, to keep the European subjects from dominating the political landscape. It's cheaper to pay off the Cherokees than the French.)
• European (and Europeanizing) neighboring states: The UCNA has a lot of borders. I have only the vaguest idea what it's been exposed to in the Caribbean. On its southern border, it has Axamalia, a Hispano-Baltic Texas (a lot of Güntherites flee there after the Baltic crises of the late 18th century; they're why the G.P. of Mexico arose at all, and a second wave after the "Burning Thirties" leads to a successful war of independence in the early 1840s.) In the northeast, there's a Dutch-Anglo-Scottish confederal republic (on the model of the United Provinces) that congealed out of earlier turbulence. Up north is the big worry in the form of Canada*, including New Ireland (the Saint Lawrence River Valley; as Gaelic here as it is Francophone IRL) - oddly enough, a likely place to produce something recognizably akin to modern country music, if considerably more Celtic. Simply by convergence, osmosis, and cross-border exchanges of ideas (and immigrant populations), this is going to be the random element in the recipe.

So what does this blend into?