As much as I like the contact between the Old and New worlds, I wish the records are clearer on pronunciation. It's
Xochitl! And
Quetzalcoatl!! Not Qishalguat!
So far, trade seems to be the order of the day in the Azcopotzalco valley. I see the Andalusis are using a woman guide, so that's going to be another figure for future revisionists to argue on. And it's so nice to see them being in wonderment of the lakeside cities, so here's hoping the local architecture and beauty gets preserved in this 'verse instead of being replaced. It's a bit odd to see the pyramids being called
ziqqura, and I can see French and English people getting confused later on, but oh well.
The attempts at communication are... intriguing. Obviously both sides can't explain themselves well enough, and there's a lot that goes over their heads as to explanations and such, but there doesn't seem to be the urge to conquer and take like Cortes did, so the miscommunications can be excused. But at the same time, I can't see this going well if there are bad actors hoping to exploit the situation; the Andalusis and locals need to understand each other ASAP for peace to continue.
And the part of the locals going sick, that's an ominous ending.
There's just no getting around the fact that disease isn't going to have mercy on the New World. Millions and millions of people are going to die even if the people who cross the Atlantic are utter saints who just so happen to make landfall with ships loaded with doctors and healers. The spread of virgin-field epidemics is simply impossible to constrain with technology in the year 1350. While Andalusians are better healers than most Europeans, they also don't know what variolation is and still have a primitive understanding of how epidemics spread.
That said, the Andalusians coming over are not warriors or men interested in the
jihad, save some of the
kishafa. For the most part, those who make the dangerous journey to the Farthest West do so because they want rare trade goods. Amazonian ceramics and Caribbean gold make for intriguing curiosities in domestic markets back in Iberia, and around the Makzan al-Husayn they've got another industry they love: Pernambuco wood, or brazilwood. The Amazonian Makzan is a hub of timbering activity, and pernambuco wood and dye is incredibly valuable. More than that, each and every Makzan has sprung up Andalusian-style farming around it, and there's increasing awareness that some of these places are great for sugar - and that some of the foods the natives grow are actually pretty good.
Of course, that kind of exploitation puts the Tupi, Caribs and Amazonians in greater danger than the Nahua and Maya are. The Andalusians don't
need to mow down forests in Quwunah or Anawak. They can trade for manufactured goods and make more money without ever having to knock over an
altepetl, barring something like a conflict, and if there is fighting, the Mesoamerican high cultures are better able to oppose the Muslims; as such, traders in Mesoamerica tend to be less aggressive. By contrast, in Ard al-Baraa and the Pearl Islands, high-value manufactured goods are much more rare, but the natural resources are abundant, and extracting them will inevitably cause grief with the natives.
Bad-faith actors in the New World, in other words, are less likely to take the form of the Caliph going "Let's have a
jihad against the Tepanecs" and more likely to take the form of unscrupulous
kishafa and shady resource barons in the Caribbean or South America butchering native Tupi or Arawaks because they want gold, brazilwood and workers to grow their sugar, or outright because some of the
kishafa hold extreme religious views that put them at odds with the natives' pagan practices. This is hard for Isbili to stop because Andalusia does not have a ton of
direct control over the Makzans, and because they have enemies back home they need to fight, which limits their ability to launch an overseas invasion even against pagans who practice religion in the style of the Mesoamericans. The Church Knights and Genoese raiders ain't goin' anywhere. And the tech gap between the Andalusians and the Mesoamerican high cultures is not insurmountable for the Nahua and the Maya: The
kishafa coming over may have horses and steel equipment, but they have the javelin and the crossbow, not the cannon and the handgun (while Andalusia does have the firelance in small quantities and has begun to play with gunpowder, it's in its very early stages), and they're fighting on terrain they don't know well.
Contact won't look like Cortes walking in and kicking down an empire that becomes an overseas territory. Andalusians will end up entangled in local politics in the Mesoamerican high cultures, though.
I can image Texcoco being a center of Islamic faith in the region, especially when the traders convince the leader that his 'Lord of Everywhere' being Allah and given the temple as their mosque. Imagine, Aztec pyramids with minarets, then the architecture blends the two in the coming centuries. I imagine the future nations in the area being more native influenced than OTL.
The Muslims are beginning to gain a scratchy understanding of the religion of some of the peoples they're meeting. To those at Makzan al-Thariya, they tend to view Quetzalcoatl as "the good god" in the Nahua pantheon. They keep wondering why the people in the Farthest West give human sacrifices; after all, didn't God tell Ibrahim not to do that anymore?
In general, the Acolhua are pretty friendly, and the Tepanecs are significantly less brutal than the OTL folks Cortes encountered. It's worth noting that the Aztecs were anomalous for Mesoamerica in that their network of tributaries was uniquely huge, uniquely brutal, and held together largely by fear. The amount of sacrificing the Aztecs did dwarfed previous empires, and they'd extended their dominion well outside the Valley of Mexico largely through a model of empire which led their subjects to resent them. Compared to the Aztecs, the ITTL Tepanecs are a smaller empire mostly focused on the Valley of Mexico, but they sacrifice less often - there is still human sacrifice, but there's been no figure like Tlacaelel to come along and crank up the scale and frequency of sacrifices. Also worth noting is that Huitzilopochtli is not really an important part of the pantheon here; OTL he increased in prominence with the Aztecs because he was their patron deity.
That said, human sacrifice still happens. I mean, Tlaloc still exists. And hell, the Aztecs still exist. The current Valley of Mexico group looks at them as "the really scary nomads who live kind of northy from here." Instead of the Mexica coming down, a group called the Caxcan migrated in, though they've largely assimilated and become vassals of the Tepanecs.
