alternatehistory.com

On July 19th, 1870, Emperor Žygimantas III and his wife were assassinated with a car bomb while travelling through the streets of Moscow, a minor town to the south of Tver'. The monarch died almost immediately, as the bomb detonated right under his feet, while his wife Johanna was taken to a hospital, where she died from the injuries sustained in the attack. There were no guards around the chariot, but local police units were quickly mobilized and caught two of the members of the plot - Anastasy Volkhov and Maria Tereshkova, members of the terrorist organization "The Reaper's Hand".

According to interrogations, neither of them actually assassinated the Emperor, but they were involved in the plot and the planning of the attack, and their role was to scout the location and search for any guardsmen or policemen who could potentially thwart the plan. The organization followed the ideology of Anarcho-Nationalism - a fringe, recent and extreme ideology, declaring that the greatest threat to national identity and culture is the concept of a state, whose supranational wishes always will result in imperialistic conquests and oppression of minorities, thus the destruction of the state is necessary to preserve cultures, traditions and regional differences - and their plan was to use the death of Žygimantas III to incite a revolution across all of Lithuania and potentially seize power in the chaos to execute their plans.

That revolution never came, however, and the two conspirators were hanged, but the assassination nevertheless shook the Lithuanian government - especially since Žygimantas III was childless. Following the rules of succession, the crown went to the dead Emperor's uncle, now coronated as Emperor Mykolas I. Already over 50 years old at the time of his ascension, Mykolas was a noted Protectionist and a reactionary, vehemently opposed to the "radical" and "republican" ideas that his nephew espoused. He was a major obstacle to the noble assembly which prepared the Constitution, too. Now in power, the new Emperor swiftly (and metaphorically) pointed to Žygimantas III's bloody shirt as proof that Lithuania is not yet ready for such a big step into democracy, it needed to be stabilized first and order brought back, declined to sign the prepared Constitution and ordered to shelve it for the time being, while the Assembly was dismissed and the old council of advisors returned. In 1874, he himself lived through an assassination attempt - but not in Russia. A Revolutionary Unitarian lone wolf, armed with a pistol, attacked his chariot in Riga, firing three shots towards the Emperor, two of whom missed completely and the third hit one of the Karaite Guards in the shoulder. While the threat itself was almost immediately neutralized by the Karaites, the second attempt to kill a monarch in four years gave Mykolas enough political capital for his plans.

Under the reactionary Emperor, the administrative apparatus was dramatically increased, especially in the field of law enforcement, whose constant presence started to turn Lithuania even more autocratic than it originally was. In 1875, Mykolas I signed a decree declaring the foundation of Saugumas ("Security"), Lithuania's first secret police, whose job was to infiltrate any dangerous organizations, prevent terrorism and assassinations and intimidate the rest into following the government. The Imperial Saugumas destroyed a number of anarchist, Unitarian, Republican and nationalist circles and stamped the arrest of hundreds, if not thousands of individuals. Lithuania's Northern Territories suddenly became a lot more lively, thanks to many of those arrested being deported there as a punishment...

Mykolas I's reign marked a change in Lithuania's foreign policy, too. One more thing that his predecessor Žygimantas III hoped to bring was a reconciliation with Visegrad, he put a lot of effort in repairing the relations between the two nations, which had been strained in the first half of the 19th century. He hosted a number of diplomatic summits with Visegrad's Franciszek II, even managing to reach an agreement in a few places, despite the short time he reigned as Emperor. Mykolas I, meanwhile, was opposed to this "snuggling with the rival", and Lithuanian-Visegradian relations rapidly soured, even going as far as to cause a diplomatic crisis when Lithuania expelled Visegrad's embassy in 1878. French mediation prevented this crisis from turning into an outright war, as it always does, but the enmity remained and continued to grow.


That is not what was on the mind of the rest of Europe, however. Africa was.

Europe's idea of conquering all of Africa and populating it with white settlers was turning more and more into what it actually was - pipe dreams. Perhaps there was a reason why it was still pretty much untouched by European colonization - and boy, there surely was, and plenty of them. Africa was a continent of extremes - it had both extremely dry and extremely wet terrain, the weather was usually unpredictable and could spell doom, and the size of the landmass put Europe and even North Vespucia to shame. Unlike Native Vespucians, Africans were just as resistant to Old World diseases as the Europeans were - and not only that, but they had many plagues of their own to share with any unsuspecting colonists, most notably malaria, one of the greatest killers in human history. The indigenous peoples of Africa were not as uncivilized as the Europeans imagined them to be - West Africa had gunpowder empires and centralized societies, Ethiopia and the Great Lakes Region shouldn't be written off as primitives, either. Not even talking about North Africa.

But by now, nothing could have stopped the hype for colonizing Africa, and in 1871, France, Spain and Portugal, wishing to prevent any wars breaking out because of colonial competition, invited most of Europe into neutral Italy to join the Conference of Rome and determine Africa's future. Outside of the three organizers, Visegrad, Britannia, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark participated, while Lithuania and the VFS, despite both being uninterested in Africa, arrived as observers. Both North and South Germania were surprisingly absent - by France's decision. Here, the powers of Europe began six-month long negotiations over the division of Africa into spheres of influence. As expected, Portugal, Spain and France, being the initiators of the conference, got the biggest slices, but other countries got their share as well - the Netherlands were given Madagascar and a big portion of eastern Africa, centered around their base of operations next to Zimbabwe, Britannia, which was also looking into African colonization despite it's isolation, acquired a cut of western Africa, while Visegrad was promised Ottoman Tripolitania. A big portion of the continent was left unclaimed to serve as a "buffer" between competing spheres of influence.

It was also in Rome where European strategy was laid down - because of the climate and the hostile Africans, the powers would only colonize the coasts, which were the most "inhabitable", while the heart of the continent would be divided between European-dominated native states, which would receive their domineering power's partial protection and support in exchange for resource exploitation. With the continent divided and the strategy laid down, it was off to the Dark Continent! But, everyone was quick to realize that the documents of the Conference of Rome were just that - documents, papers, which do not have to be followed in reality...

The period since 1871 is known in the history of the continent as the Concert of Africa. Each colonizing power was not only asserting control over it's sphere of influence, through trade, alliances and usually good old fashion gunpowder diplomacy, but also trying it's best to indirectly gnaw pieces from the other's sphere, too. A classic example of this was the Cat War between Benin and Oyo in 1877, where French-dominated Benin was pressured to attack British-dominated Oyo with a made up excuse that one of the Beninese ruler's favorite cats was poisoned and killed by Oyo spies. Both sides used European weaponry, their troops were trained by European officers, and in the end, Oyo was annexed and it's territory entered the French sphere, giving it complete control of the Niger delta, a strategic, resource rich and populous region. While this was one of the most notable examples, there were many other such "brush wars" across the entire continent.

However, the most well-known example of this period's politics was the so-called Cairo Affair, happening in 1875. In the Conference of Rome, Egypt was a very highly regarded prize. Control over it meant control over a very important strategic location, as well as a region with a high population and a lot of cultural value. Not to mention that as technology progressed, more and more people saw the idea of a canal connecting the Mediterranean and the Red Sea as not just fantasy, but a potential reality. France wanted it, Visegrad wanted it, Spain wanted it, and none could agree on it's fate - thus, the countries in the Conference decided to leave it neutral, let the Ottomans keep it. While officially agreeing with the resolution, France was having none of it, and they were lucky - at the time, Egypt was ruled by a somewhat rebellious Pasha, one of the Sultan's brothers who was removed from the line of succession, so when a French delegation led by the diplomat Hugo Jaures arrived to promise him military help, funding and diplomatic support if he only were to rebel, he quickly threw himself into the French sphere, leading to a two year long war between Egypt and the rest of the Ottoman Empire, and despite the numerical disadvantage, the Egyptians, supported by French "volunteers", managed to secure a peace treaty.

Both Visegrad and Spain were livid, but there wasn't much they could do against French wishes outside of protests. The Director of France, Jean-Isidore Harispe, commented on the situation with this simple justification:

"Africa is the world's largest cake, and all we want is our own slice."

Not long after the Cairo Affair, France purchased a strip of land at the Sinai and began the construction of one of the great achievements of the Modern Era - a canal on the Isthmus of Suez.