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.

The "little wars" are essentially big riots, only called "wars" because they aren't restricted to individual cities on the Christian-Moorish frontier. Most of them are catalyzed by what, to our eyes, are amazingly petty religious details. Stuff like "What color should the stoles be on Good Friday?" or "How many pieces should the Eucharistic Host be divided into?" (The last is a particularly hot issue, because the Mozarabs themselves don't agree on the number: either seven or nine.)

What are the issues at work in the Guerillas?

Guerillas aren't purely high-church dickwaving over the colors of the stoles on Good Friday, of course. Some of the other issues are as follows:

Conflicts within Iberian Gonzalanism. I'm not sure whether St. Gonzalo himself ever crosses the Tagus after founding the Order, but the Order does, and becomes entrenched enough that the Gonzalan Rite reflects the influence of the southerners. There are Gonzalans living and serving under both Christian and Moorish masters, and don't always see eye to eye.

• IRL, Irish Franciscanism went through several increasingly strict reforms, as a way for the Gaels to be autonomous of the Anglo-Irish lords. Mozarab Gonzalans might well do the same thing to assert themselves against northern aggressors.

Conflicts within Iberian mendicancy in general. IRL, the Dominicans and Franciscans were ferocious rivals of each other, because they shared a fairly similar niche and the smaller cities of the period weren't often big enough to support both at once. The Mozarabs (living under Moorish rule that isn't innately friendly to reforming missionary movements within Christianity) have these tensions turned up to eleven. Could they spill into open bloodshed? I wouldn't rule it out.

Class-linked anti-Semitism. Jews and Mozarabs may both be second-class in Moorish Spain, but one is smaller and better off than the other, and there's not a hell of a lot of room for upward mobility. Gonzalan missionary work takes some of the population pressure off the Christians, but not enough. I don't think it's a necessary undercurrent of the guerillas, but I could see a few pogroms dressed up as guerillas, using violence to open space for Christian class mobility.

The end of the guerillas

The guerillas of Toleto are a phenomenon of the Middle Ages, and ends with the discovery of the New World, for several reasons:

• The New World opens room for expansion. Demographic pressures were a major force behind the guerillas: the underlying sense that there wasn't enough for everybody to share. The Moorish New World is a frontier for the Christians, in which they're encouraged to expand.
• The efforts of the Sodality. The Sodality's cooperative spirit is balm for the self-inflicted wounds of the Mozarabic church. Granted, it gets suppressed pretty quickly after the House of Guise institutionally hijacks it, but before that point it takes off like wildfire and does no small amount of good to end the violence. 

Practically the only part of the Guerillas that continues past 1500, in fact, is the use of liturgical niceties as a pretext for violence. This lasts at least into the 1740s, when Umayyad Seville - having never experienced anything quite like what's going on in Mexico at the time - wrongly calls the Liturgical War a guerilla. (Mexico honors it as a full-scale war, but it's interesting that they, too, continue to identify the motives for the war as theological rather than demographic.)