The Crown of All Spains (and France)

Writing about Mahdism this last week or so leaves me kinda bothered that I haven't written about Spain yet. I have my reasons; given that it's ground zero for the point of divergence, all I can honestly say is that I know the Crown of All Spains exists (for plot reasons), and that it's ruled by the pre-Wars of Religion French ruling house (whence the inevitable "and France" in the name.)

But I've posted articles about things I knew less than that about, so here goes nothing.

The Crown of All Spains 101

Why? Because it's been here from the beginning. Admittedly in the beginning it was Napoleon driving the Moors out of Spain, but a united Spain is still there.

• Who? Not the Galicians (Galicia having been part of Galicia or Portugal or Portugal-Galicia for most of its history since 1090, when Garcia II sets up shop in A Corunha), but other than that you'd recognize most of the territories. There's Asturias and Cantabria, and the Catalans and the Aragonese, the Léonese and the Castillans, the Toletans... and, south of the Tagus, the Andalusis, many of whom still speak Arabic at home.
• What? The Crown of All Spains is one of the complex dynastic unions that Andalusada seems to love - a confederal monarchy that on its good days is exactly the sum of its parts, and on its bad days much less as those parts cancel each other out.
• Where? Most of Iberia, predictably. The Crown of All Spains also controls a number of North African city-states, which it occupied during the destruction of Barbary Coast piracy, and a fair bit of Morocco through very unreliable Andalusi landlords.
• When? The Crown of All Spains dates from the late 1780s, although I'm not sure exactly what year it was.

And now for the expanded answer to "why?" The answer: drama and melodrama.

The Second Mahdist War

Timeframe: Early to mid-1820s, contemporary with the War of the French Succession
Belligerents: The Crown of All Spains vs. al-Mahdi and his supporters
Consequences: The death of al-Mahdi; collapse of Mahdism as a unified force; Legitimist withdrawal from France; rise of Saxon-aligned Malta as a Mediterranean force

In 1786, Umayyad Seville knew its last year of peace and sovereignty. Seven years later, the Civil War had run its course, and the newly-united Spanish Crown was busily annexing what was left of Moorish Spain. Hisham V [who?], the last Caliph of Seville, was dead. The caliphate was contested by three squabbling, doomed brothers, and his four-year-old son had been smuggled into safety and irrelevance across the Straits of Gibraltar.

During those dark days, his supporters gave him a regnal name of his own: al-Mahdi. And in 1821, with the House of Guise crumbling and a civil war in France, al-Mahdi made his move and crossed the Straits of Gibraltar again.

The Chergui

Timeframe: October 1895-April 1896.
Belligerents: The Crown of All Spains vs. Mahdist insurgents.
Outcome: Pyrrhic Spanish victory

In 1893, Yusuf II was faced with a small nightmare: a military standards war. It took the better part of a year to sort it out, and no small investment of money and man-hours, before the Caliphal Army was uniformly issued matching rifles and ammunition that wouldn't explode. The Port-Royal musketoon had prevailed, and the army now faced a problem: what to do with all the noncompliant hardware?

Refitting it was too much trouble; they already had their hands full retooling sights, adjusting barrel lengths, and making similar conversions on thousands of already-assembled guns. Issuing them down the totem pole would force the very logistical nightmare they'd just spent 15 months sorting out. Issuing them to the navy might work, but would still be a logistical headache. (More importantly, the Army Secretary thought the Navy's adoption of .49-94 a decade prior a smashing political victory, one he had no desire to undo.) This being the UCNA, they'd already rechambered a number of obsolete guns for the rejected H11 cartridge - proofs of concept, substitute standards, all sorts of stuff.

The fateful solution was to sell the useless crap abroad.