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.

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.

The Sodality

IRL, the Reformation gave rise to a new force within Catholicism: the Society of Jesus. A Spanish thing originally, and it really couldn't have formed the way it did by anybody but a Spanish guy (well, Basque, but I'm gonna split the difference and assume no nationalists are gonna hit this blog any time soon.) Or, at least, a guy growing up in that particular Spain. Which, after what happened to Spain way back there at the start, doesn't exist.
It also doesn't help that all two responses to medieval Catholicism are, to say the least, more than a little different from the ones we're used to thinking of. That's what happens when you steampunk social science. Even if the Jesuits existed, the context in which they existed would be quite different; in particular, it's one where the Gonzalans (and thus potentially the Inquisition itself) has already been seriously compromised by the Reformation.*

No, Andalusada needs something different. Something that isn't relying on people well past their allotted century of grace. And that something is *whispers* The Sodality.

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.

Calibers of the UCNA

The Muslim world gave rise to lots of guns (they introduced gunpowder weaponry to Europe), but not to many cartridges. The united case-charge-ball assembly that we call the cartridge was a product of the Industrial Revolution even if the idea was much earlier, and by that time the Muslim world was lagging far enough behind that it was importing, rather than introducing, military technology. (There are some cartridges that were big - Egyptian Remington, for instance - but even then, there's no evidence that the Egyptian Remington was designed by Egyptians rather than Remington ballisticians on contract.)

This is a problem for me, because in the end this story is about Islam. And for the part of its history that I know the most about, there is a major Muslim state that's got enough resources and vision to seriously develop their own guns during the cartridge era. This post exists because it's where GURPS intersects with sloth - and because I sweat gun porn in general, I'm going to sort out some issues here.

20th-century ships of war

Let me begin by saying that I'm an amateur at this. I may know the first thing about it, but that's entirely due to Grey Wolf's blogging on the subject himself. Today I'm going to talk about naval power.

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.

(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.

Where it all begins

While I've discussed the origins of Andalusada in outline before, I haven't actually typed it out explicitly, and certainly not here. Now that it's hyperlinked, I have no excuse. So let's take this from the top. Andalusada starts in the year 1081.

In 1081, some politics comes up. We're not totally sure about what it was; there's some legends and such but it's not nearly as well-documented as we'd like. What matters is that Alfonso VI has been remarried to one Constance of Burgundy, who brings with her a lot of Cluniac ties, papal opposition, and personal drama. A fair number of people apparently got exiled because of them this, including one Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, who leaves with no money and a fair number of retainers to feed.

With no loyalties owed to Alfonso, Díaz has to find a new employer. The first place he turns to is Barcelona, where he winters with the Counts. They hate each other. Passionately. Still unemployed at the end of the winter, Rodrigo is forced to look elsewhere to feed his cohorts.

This is the point of divergence. This is the point of departure. This is where Andalusada stops being IRL.

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...

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.

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 UCNA as wrap culture

Not all of my work is actual outlining and planning historical events. I take a lot of breaks working on Andalusada, and focus my attention on the parerga: stuff that doesn't advance the world and its timeline so much as detailing it. In particular, my authorial gaze falls on a few specific kinds of parerga: humanities, foodways, and militaria.

So on the subject of foodways, let's start by saying that the UCNA is a wrap culture.

The Montagnards

One of the truly enormous things with alternate history is that if you change it far enough back, you start getting ethnicities that don't exist IRL. Have Catholicism be slightly less successful in the Balkans, and suddenly there's no Croatia, only a Greater Serbia. Change the political careers of guys you've never heard of in Central Asia, and you wind up with a lasting Moghulistan. Change colonial histories, and you get a Japonicized Taiwan*... or a Lusophone Philippines* instead of a Hispanicized one... or Yevanic surviving in Greece because there was no Sephardic expulsion. (I have all of these.)

It also means that some ethnicities wouldn't exist. Even if there's a similar blend of peoples meeting up, there's no reason to think that they'd become Melungeon. On the same note, it's reasonably certain that "hillbillies," prevailingly Scotch-Irish, don't exist. (I'm not sure the Scotch-Irish, or their parent stock the Ulster Scots, exist either; the Plantations aren't set in stone here.) Some of the territory is originally French; even if there's the same external circumstances, the change in the parent stock would lead people to, at best, convergently evolve.

Fortunately for me, somebody has. They're called the Montagnards.

The Sufyanid families

Sufyan b. Yusuf was never going to be the heir of his father. He had some kind of mental illness, and while it was only very mild the medical science of the day left no good way to treat it except alcohol. He was a drunk, and often a brooding one. His politics perpetually clashed with his father's, by turns liberal and Mahdist, and he had neither his father's sharp mind nor his golden tongue. For a nascent state that wanted stability afterwards, Sufyan simply wasn't a good role model.

But the biggest reason Sufyan was never going to be Sufyan I was the succession crisis that would follow him, because Sufyan was a real sex machine. Over the course of his life, Sufyan had eight (or possibly nine) wives, four or five mistresses, a few assorted bastard children, and one pair of identical twins that he adopted simply because he wouldn't be surprised if he did father them before they were abandoned at his doorstep.

There is one thing that could be said in his defense, though: Sufyan ibn Yusuf took his duties seriously. Almost none of his children had much quality time with him, but he did make a point of arranging a proper education for them, and through some string-pulling saw most of them into service posts within midcentury New Andalusia. From this came the several families that bear his name.

Caliph Yusuf I

Born: August 22, 1772.
Died: 1839.
Position: Caliph of the UCNA.
Preceded by: None (position created.)
Succeeded by: Ilyas [who?]

The fall of Umayyad Seville was a big moment in Andalusada, because it collapsed the Moorish world. The great Mohammedan threat to the West shattered into pieces, never to recover. Out of it rose a number of nations. Above them all, ultimately, rose the Umayyad Caliphate in New Andalusia.

The fact that the UCNA is recognized as the legitimate heir of Seville is due primarily to one man, Yusuf I. This is his story.

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.

International perceptions of India

IRL, our perception of "India" is actually of north India. India is Aryan; "Indian" restaurants (at least in America; not sure how it works in the UK) are much closer to Punjabi than, say, Gujarati cuisine. This isn't "natural"; it evolved this way for historical reasons.

After a thousand years of divergence, Andalusada's Indian subcontinent has diverged in two ways, hinted at before but spelled out explicitly here:

• The colonial hegemon is French. England, Scotland, Portugal and a few other players all have their own presence on the subcontinent, but most of that looks disproportionately large on maps because otherwise it wouldn't be visible at all.
• Colonialism has been much less successful. Because of various trends that are still too far in the future for me to explain yet, the French Empire has not been able to build a united French Raj. While Paris controls much more of India than you might expect (especially given that unlike the United Kingdom IRL they have not had a solid century of domestic tranquility), Gujarat and points north have repeatedly fought the Firangis to a standstill, and Bengal has successfully played its French and Scottish (later Anglo-Scottish) neighbors off each other so long and so well that it's become an established buffer state.

So what are the consequences of this?

Prestige languages of the world, ca. 1930

I am a linguistics nerd, and I totally sweat the details on this stuff.

The languages of the empires

There are a few languages that are obvious to want to learn: the languages of the great empires.

Evgeny the Old

Dates: 1820s-1905. 
Succeeded by: Position abolished; see elsewhere [where?] for the pretenders.

I'm not sure how many kings Russia has. Truth be told, I'm not sure about a lot of Russian history. But I do know a bit about Russia's last tsar. His name is Evgeny IV, and at the beginning of his reign he was styled "the New" after the legendary Evgeny I.

By the end of it, having outlived the empire itself, he was Evgeny "the Old."

Russian Old Calendarism

One thing I hate, with a burning passion, is peripheral convergence: the idea that uninteresting parts of the world evolve the same way because you're too lazy to do the research, and think that nobody will notice. For whatever reason, this is particularly inescapable with Russia, which always evolves the same way.

It's also pretty much foreordained with Eastern Christianity too. I've seen a fair number of "How can we cause an Eastern Christian Reformation?" threads on AH.com, and I get the reason behind that: it's trying to break that convergence. Almost all of the attempts I've seen have entailed a different playout of the Raskol.

In Andalusada, alas, the Raskol is nearly 600 years after the POD. There's every reason to think that none of the players exist. There's also every reason to want something equally cool to happen, what with Rule of Cool being one of the design parameters after all.

And I have an idea.

The Russo-Japanese War

Timeframe: 1904-1905.
Theater: Both sides of the Strait of Tartary.
Belligerents: The Russian Empire (under Evgeny the Old) vs. the Greater Japanese Empire.
Outcome: No official resolution; de facto Japanese victory due to the collapse of the Russian government.

In 1904, Russia and Japan get into a war with each other, and historians declare it "the Russo-Japanese War." After that point, the details start getting very different fast.

Introducing Constantine II of Hungary

"King Constantine." You don't need to name him any more than that; everybody will know who he is, just as well as they'd recognize "Count Dracula." And for the same reasons.

The guy is hated across cultures.

Let's introduce him...

The Great Powers, ca. 1930

Andalusada's arbitrarily defined present day, as set down by GURPS canon, is 1930. This is what the world looks like then.

France 

For most of the early modern era, France was a Catholic dystopia, using the power of the Sodality and the weakness of its neighbors to horrifying effect. In the aftermath of the War of the French Succession, it's become significantly less dystopian (and slightly less Catholic), but as of the present day it's a large, powerful unitary state in a world that's convinced they aren't going to last.

• Has a slightly different core territory (missing some of the east and southeast, but including more in the north, including Alsace, Lorraine, and a fair chunk of the Low Countries.)
• Imperial holdings: India. All of Dravidian India is basically under French control; so is most of its coastline, stalled firmly by little Bengal (and its international allies.)

 England-Scotland

 England and Scotland are sort of two separate countries. During the

• Imperial holdings: Almost all of North America between them (most notably New Ireland), "Guinea" (a lot of sub-Saharan West Africa), and some chunks of southeast Asia.
• Alliances: A close alliance with Bengal, to act as a check on French expansion out of India. Historically, Japan's been a close ally of England-Scotland, but since the breakdown of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance a decade ago it's nothing quite as secure.

"Great Russia"

A *Narodnik republic with a needlessly wordy name (the Autocephalous Revolutionary National Sobor of All the Russias, or something like that. It changes every few years.)

• Capital: Tver, because it's never Tver.
• Core territories: Russia and Siberia.
• Imperial holdings: A loudly complaining *Alaska, most notably.
• Alliances: Propping up proxy states in Karelia, Anatolia, and some parts of Central Asia. Great Russia has a nonaggression pact with Japan that's older than Great Russia itself; it used to have close ties to Korea, but those have waned since what happened to Evgeny the Old.

Saxony

• Along with the Kingdom of Bavaria, one of the two vicars of the Holy Roman Empire (which is defunct but hasn't been abolished.)
• The smallest of the Great Powers; not so much a power on its own, but the keystone of the alliance that tips the balance in almost every European land war.
• Core territories: Electoral Saxony, along with most of what we'd call the Duchy of Saxony, the better part of Thuringia, and some scattered others.
• Imperial holdings: The Suez* Canal. After some rearrangements, Saxony wound up with almost controlling ownership of it, and has made itself a bit of a broker. Quixotically, they've also colonized Port Sudan, which they're trying to build into a respectable international harbor.
• Alliances: At the moment, Poland-Ruthenia and the Baltic states in the east, which it's trying to cement into a central European military bloc against Russian expansionism. Egypt and Abyssinia have some relatively equal treaties too, as a check against Anglo-French adventurism.

Taiping pastors

Pastoral responsibilities are a bit different in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

For one thing, China has no tradition of collective worship, so the work of a pastor is literally to be a shepherd: they're tasked with making sure that people show up for worship, and accounting for their flock. (As per IRL, burning the attendance records is part of the liturgy.)

For another, interrupting the fixed parts of the Taiping liturgy is punishable by summary execution, and the movement of the Holy Spirit does not count as a valid excuse. So pastors are also responsible for pulling their flock out of the service before they get themselves killed.

The UCNA, ash-Shamal and aboriginal politics

The UCNA has neither a manifest destiny nor a Wild West. It has ash-Shamal: "The North."

ash-Shamal is a concept that's as old as Moorish civilization itself. Spain stabilizes on the Tagus, with Christians to the north of it and Moors to the south. (And Toledo, which changes hands several times.) In  between is ash-Shamal,"the North" - the edge of the Moorish world, where the borders are permeable, fluctuate, and are defined by a certain amount of lawlessness. (Think of the Anglo-Scottish Border Marches and you'll have a pretty good idea of what it can be like.)

700 years later, that spatialization of the world is entrenched enough to transition to the New World. The heart of the Moorish New World, during the golden age of the empire, was in Mexico, defined by its northern border with France-Outremer and various aboriginal nations; after the fall of the empire, the UCNA (rising in what was formerly France-Outremer) has a clearly defined southern border (claimed by Mexico) and a very nebulous northern border.

The UCNA is extremely expansionist, but it claims no God-given mandate to do so. Also unlike America, its identity doesn't have a hugely ethnic national component; Moorish racial taxonomy is rather different from the historic Spanish casta, and even if it wasn't the experience of Maghrebi diversity left the Moors used to being a plurinational state. As long as they learn to speak Moorish and behave themselves in public, tribes are actually rather cute.

The one sticking point is the tribes in The North.

ash-Shamal in New Andalusia diverges from ash-Shamal in one critical respect: it's a lot less static. As far as the Moors are concerned, a certain amount of low-intensity warfare is typical and acceptable in The North; the only problem is that the location of The North is going to change over time, and the Shamali tribes aren't necessarily going to agree with changes in psychogeography.

There probably won't be a Trail of Tears in the UCNA. But a conscious collapsing of the southern bison herds? I wouldn't rule it out.

What is Güntheritism?

"Güntheritism is the functional analogue of Lutheranism IRL."

That's the short answer. Theologically, though, it's a case study in steampunk social science.

What is Farrellitism?

The "definitions" tag was created in part because Andalusada is relatively high-concept. I'm reworking ideas as well as events, so the content of those ideas needs explaining; and while this whole blog is a Sternbildung, that doesn't justify leaving its readers in the dark. So I'm going to start with Farrellitism, for no reason other than that there's a tag for it already.

Much like IRL, there's two wings of the Reformation* - a northern one (Baltic, in the case of Guntheritism) and a southern one. That southern one, as I hinted when I introduced its pivotal figure, is the one called "Farrellite."

Andalusada Principles and Practices

IRL, Islamic Spain ended around 1250, with the collapse of the Almohads. Andalusada is the story of how that civilization never died; how its death was, in fact, derailed before it could begin. Even more importantly than that, however, Andalusada is the story of how that derailing (and the survival) changed the world beyond recognizability into uncanniness.

I'm not purely making things up as I go, though. There are some rules of thumb. Here they are.

#1: Rule of Cool.

This is a story. This is an epic story. This is the story of a world being rewritten until it evolves into a new language. (Several, in fact.) This will see a civilization rise, and at least one other civilization fall, and the rise and clash and fall of at least a dozen major powers in Europe alone, discounting the rest of the world. I will not compromise plausibility, but I will not compromise the scope and power of the story either.

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?