Introducing St. Matilda

Saint Matilda exists because Saint Dominic doesn't. Per Rule of Canny, Andalusada needs someone to fill his shoes, an that someone is Saint Gonzalo of Lerida - but he's an original character, which means that I have both free room and a lot of details to fill in. And back before his page took on its current form, one of my earliest notes about Gonzalo was something I wanted in his story: "a Gonzalan St. Clare."

For the longest time, this has sat unattended, because the only reason I introduced Gonzalo was because John George wasn't an Augustinian, and I honestly hadn't had any interesting thoughts about it. Last night, though, while trying to rename Catholic orders to fit into my arbitrary naming conventions, I discovered some really cool things, which brought this back to mind - and I'm gonna make the most of it.

(Re)Introducing St. Francis of Assisi

To save myself work, and keep Andalusada canny, I'm allowing myself a rolling century of grace. There can be some small changes to what's going on anywhere beforehand, but that doesn't count for a hell of a lot - but after the ripples of that one stone in the stream of history impact into the history of a given area, there's a one-century countdown before anybody recognizable stops being born. And even within that timeframe, their lives and careers will be increasingly impacted by the drift of the world.

I realize that this is kinda vague, so I'm going to demonstrate what I mean by this with a rather important example. But before I do that, I'd to take a moment and ask the forgiveness of God.

Because I'm going to grimdark Saint Francis of fucking Assisi.

Introducing Saint Gonzalo of Lerida

After any big divergence, a region has a 100-year grace period to produce the same notable people, with the creative license increasing the further I get from that divergence.

Iberia's grace period runs out in 1181, which is problematic because that's before a bumper crop of its most significant figures are even born. Some can be handwaved a bit (the ibn Rushd family was well-entrenched and had produced brilliant minds for generations by that point, so Averroes might be salvageable), but some of them can't be - like Saint Dominic, for instance, without whom Western history to come gets very alien fast.

Fortunately for me, though, if you can't use the original, you can always use an Expy. All you need to do is adjust the superstructure to account for the changed base (yes, I know, but it works), and you can work around it interestingly. And if you choose the point you start at, you can even use the Expy to highlight the little changes in the world.

So now I'm going to introduce his replacement: St. Gonzalo of Lerida.

Oliver Farrell

Andalusada has its *Luther, in the form of Johan Georg Günther. If only life was that simple. IRL, though, didn't have just one Protestantism: it had at least two.

*Protestantism does best in the liminal spaces of the Holy Roman Empire. The biggest of them is the Monastic State of the Teutonic Order, which Günther turns into Prussia in a way that winds up aborting the unification of Germany. But it's not the only liminal space of the HRE; another is the intersection of the Alps where Germany, Italy, and France run into each other. At the time, it was variously Lyons, Provence, Savoy, and the Eidgenossenschaft. We call it "Switzerland."

IRL, the other (and much more dominant) Protestantism was started there by Huldrych Zwingli. (Two of them, actually, because Zwingli also personally spun off the Anabaptists.) Herein, it begins in what I suspect is now part of France. And the guy who begins it is at once legendary, historic, and mythical.

His name is Oliver Farrell.

Introducing Saint Sakura

A classic trope of yuri manga is that (Japan being blissfully ignorant of the ways of Christendom) our lesbian couple usually meets at a Catholic girls' school. This school is traditionally named after Saint Engrish, something feminine-sounding that's not actually from any Indo-European language.

Never is it a Japanese name.

I'm going to stand that on its head. Meet Saint Sakura.