The Hanseatic Wars

Belligerents:
Outcome: The crowning of a French king as Holy Roman Empire; disintegration of any significant imperial authority.

One of the shortcuts that alternate-history writers take is using their plots to kill things that they're too lazy to research. While I'm endeavoring to not do this to ethnicities overly much, I'm not going to lie: I do it too. (And it's problematic for me because I have enough gaps in my knowledge of how things work that when I try to do this I still need to do all the research anyways.)

This is a related thing: using the plot to cleanly end a few crises ahead of schedule.

The wars commonly called "Hanseatic" (what they're called depends on which language and locale you're speaking in, because the politics of the matter are rather obscure) are the substitute for the Thirty Years' War: a crisis that plunges Germania into chaos. Unlike the Thirty Years' War, there are different demographic issues at work here.

And by the end of it, both the Hanse and the Reich have been crippled thoroughly enough to render them moribund.

The catalyst of the Hanseatic Wars

When Günther published the first modern translation of the Bible, he was translating it because that was the language of the urban Pomeranian elite he needed to appeal to. He was translating it because it was his native language. He was also translating it into Low German because it was the language of his beloved hometown, Rostock.

And Rostock, it should be noted, was a Reichsfrei city. Low German was also the language of the Hansa, a medieval attempt at a megacorporation.

Ship by ship, shipping by shipping, printing by printing, the Günther Bible spread across the Hanseatic city-states. It didn't spread too far outside of them, because it didn't cross the language barrier very well, and the Saxon High German Bible existed to stop its spread.

And while the Holy Roman Empire was still recovering from the spanking it had been dealt during the Güntherite Wars, it had more pressing things to do than press the matter.

A generation or so later, however, there would be a new Holy Roman Empire, one who had never known the humiliation of defeat at Güntherite hands. Only the humiliation of his predecessor, and a need to avenge that humiliation.

The moment he was elected, the Hanseatic Wars became inevitable.

The Miramoline

The has the name Wendy, which went from being an American-only outlier (on par with inflicting your child with a variant spelling of a name) to an internationally recognized one because of some Scotsman writing some book. (The Slavic world has an equivalent in the form of Svetlana.)

Andalusada almost certainly doesn't have Wendy, and it probably doesn't have Svetlana either. But it does have a female name of its own. That name, in the original French spelling, is Miramoline. Within a century the interconsonantal /a/ had been lost, giving rise to Mirmeauline, and (in English) the same thing, with various renderings of the vowels and duplicate letters: Mermelline, Myrmeline, etc. The name caught on.

This entry is about person who made it stick. The first woman to ever sign her name as la Miramoline.

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 Gonzalan Rite

One of the problems that Saint Dominic faced was the fact that there wasn't really a standardized liturgy his friars could preach. There may have been, but there were enough regional variations from convent to convent, diocese to diocese, parish to parish that they couldn't celebrate it together. So his successors set about making their own, which was enshrined as the Dominican Rite and was practiced up until the 1960s.

Saint Gonzalo, his replacement in Andalusada, has the same issue, and handles it approximately the same way. By the time it's compiled, though, the differences on the ground are enough that they're reflected in the superstructure. And because theology is one of the things I geek about, I'm going to write about it.

(Re)introducing Karl Marx

Myth: Karl Marx was Prussian.
Fact: Karl Marx is most famous for being Prussian, and established his name in public consciousness during the rebellions that rocked the Baltic to its core during the 1830s. The first person to write under the name "Karl Marx," however, was demonstrably Genevan, and may have been writing in other parts of Switzerland anonymously from as early as 1824. By 1841 two other authors had adopted the pseudonym, one Bavarian and one writing in Provence (infamous for his shaky grasp of the German language); these four authors are universally agreed to have formed the core of first-generation Marxian economic writing.

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.