Umayyad Seville

When I started writing "nations," I originally focused on writing nations that are still alive as of the present day; it's only been in the last month or so that I started writing important dead states. Only tonight has it really struck me that I've been having world ADD, writing about other countries first. I said it right up front, in Andalusada's very first post:

[I]t is the story of how, by doing this, they accidentally created one of the most impressive nations the world will ever see. (Even if most of the local cretins still believe sacred monarchy is a good idea.)

This is going to be a long story. Let's take it from the top.

I'm not taking it from the top, obviously. I'm working in spirals and constellations - a bit from the beginning, a bit from the end, the dots that connected inward - because I know less about how that story goes than where it begins and where it ends. But as of when the story ends, Moorish civilization survives first and foremost in the Umayyad Caliphate in New Andalusia.

This is about what came before. This is about what the UCNA wants to claim itself as the continuation of, and what Mahdists the world around want to restore. This is about what came before there was a Moorish diaspora; the greatest moment that Moorish civilization had ever known.

Umayyad Seville 101

Every nation gets a 101 section, and traditionally that starts with the simple question: why? For most nations, this is about what made me interpret the nation this way rather than another. For dead states, though, why? asks something different: why it's important to write about this. In Umayyad Seville's case, it's because it was the pinnacle of Moorish civilization in the Old World - a civilization that's now as fallen as Constantinople, and will never be restored to quite its former glory.

• Who? The only new people in Umayyad Seville were the members of the House of Umayya (who reshuffled the pecking order of the Five Families.)
• What? The most centralized state the Moorish Empire ever managed to achieve; and it was trying to be more centralized, even up to the very end.
• Where? Most of Iberia, the northernmost fixed point being Toledo (beyond which lay ash-Shamal), extending south to the Straits of Gibraltar and crossing it southwest into the Maghrib (at the very least most of Morocco and some of Libya.) From there, stretching across the Atlantic Ocean to include varying swathes of the Caribbean, a fair chunk of the Andes, and most of what we'd call Mexico - and, from 1750 onwards, most of France-Outremer as well. All of it, of course, centered on the eternal metropolis of Seville.
• When? Umayyad Seville only lasted for about a century: 1688 (when Umayya al-Mujadid deposed the Miramoline) to, traditionally, 1786, its final year of stability under Hisham V. When exactly it ended remains hotly disputed, but it's definitely dead by the time the Yusufids secure their succession in the UCNA.

A brief history of Umayyad Seville

Umayyad Seville's history was brief: at just over a century, it was the single shortest-lived dynasty since the Almohads, and they spent almost all of it at war. The gist of this was as follows:

• In the beginning, during the 1680s, there came what Umayyad historians called "the restoration" and what everybody else called "the Moorish War of Succession." It involved deposing the Miramoline, driving her into Italian exile.
• With the last ruler of Five Families Seville out of the way, al-Mujadid's first act was to do what he'd been meaning to do for awhile: anathematize his own son and send him to die in Granada. This screwed up his hope for an orderly succession, and his next act was to do what he'd been meaning to not do: marry some khassa families, which both legitimated and perpetuated the Five Families oligarchy for another generation.
• al-Mujadid hadn't even had the time to finish dying of old age before a war with Dystopian Catholic France started up again. I'm not sure what it was called, but it was a sprawling affair that was basically resolved in the early 1740s, when (amongst other things) France was forced to cede France-Outremer to Seville.
• They more than got their revenge in the Mexican Liturgical War, though. The Umayyads (in part because they were Umayyads) crushed it with a fervor that cost them a huge amount of political capital, tying them up in the New World for a generation.
• In the wake of this, the Umayyads also wound up increasingly meddling in the Caribbean. [details?]
• In 1787, the Umayyad Caliphate fell through in the Moorish Civil War. By 1793, Caliph Hisham V was dead, and the infant successor (along with his regent, al-Mahdi) was in exile across the Straits. More importantly, by Christmas in 1792 the unthinkable had happened: the Spanish had taken control of Seville.

And that's about the end of that.

The legacy of Umayyad Seville

Umayyad Seville matters because of the first word in it: Umayyad. Whether it's legitimately so none can say (libraries were ransacked to revise its historiography), but the truth matters less than the claim. The Moorish world had always fancied itself the truest and purest part of the umma; the Umayyad era made that official. The UCNA's international jockeying to secure its caliphal recognition isn't because they're the best Muslim state in the world, or even rightful successors of the first caliphate: it's because they're a continuation of that caliphate.

The other reason Umayyad Seville matters is because it otherwise a century of largely preventable disasters for Andalusia. Moorish historians focus on its highlights - and there were highlights - but Umayyad absolutism paved the way for the fall of Seville.

• Intriguing amongst the khassa had been endemic for centuries, but the Five Families evolved organically and never had their legitimacy challenged. The Umayyads abolished it hoping to end the swamp of intrigue, but made room for something Andalusia hadn't seen in 500 years: genuine, and ultimately successful, attempts to topple a dynasty.
• Umayyad Seville was a violent society; in its century of life it knew only one year of peace. [when?] A number of families emigrated (or were exiled) around the Moorish empire, and established petty principalities when the Collapse came; their disunity is why the heartland of the Moorish New World is getting less Muslim each year.

Umayyad Seville was also the last (or at least the most recent) Moorish Seville; the last time that half of Iberia was controlled by Muslims, the last time that Western Europe had to worry about the Muslim menace. The end of Umayyad Seville changed Europe's psychogeographic self-image, in ways that the entire world is still adjusting to.

• One notable consequence of Umayyad Seville is that it made southern Iberia a crazier place. The House of Umayya, congenitally prone to madness, generally let their crazier members do what they wanted to do as long as it wasn't overly evil or expensive; if the Five Families era had continued, for instance, Granada would be a less quirky, creepy, and interesting place.
• Even the collapse of Seville before the nascent Crown of All Spains didn't change how Moorish Andalusia is. A significant portion of southern Spain is still Muslim and speaks Arabic at home (although the Spanish Crown has specifically forbidden the speaking or teaching of Arabic in public schools), turning Andalusia into an emigration society à la Ireland and significantly bolstering the global Moorish diaspora.