Greetings and salutations!
As I have done a few times before, I am redoing someone else’s map that sparked my fancy: this one was by Beedok.
In this world, the Islamic invasion of Frankish territory was more successful, and much of OTL France was overrun: it took a century of warfare for the Franks to push the invaders back across the Pyrenees, and in the meantime Islamic navies based in western France invaded the British isles and conquered Ireland outright.
In the long run, this proved somewhat counterproductive, since it led to the consolidation of a more centralized – and rather more proactively anti-Muslim – Frankish empire than that of OTL, which remained (largely) united from the 9th century on. When the Islamic caliphate crumbled in civil war, an ambitious Frankish Emperor approached the Emperor in Constantinople with a proposal for an alliance…
Most of a millennium later, the Islamic world remains split between the eastern and the western Muslim realms, divided by the Christian nations of the Levant and Egypt. In compensation, however, the great Caliphate of the west has created a whole new Islamic world across the sea.
The Islamic conquest of the Americas started earlier than OTL, and with poorer ships and no gunpowder, was a more gradual and difficult process. Native Americans had more time to develop immunities to European and African diseases, and the collapse of native societies was less complete. Although the inhabitants of OTL Mexico are as Muslim as they are OTL Catholic, they also generally still speak local languages and are more Indian and Mestizo (although of course all educated men also know the good Arabic of Toledo).
Finding their way to the Americas by the St. Brendan route, the Irish Muslims intermarried, warred with and gave diseases to the local Amerindians, eventually constructing a sizeable empire, it’s population swelled by the various waves of immigration triggered by no less than three efforts by Franks and Anglo-Saxons to re-conquer Eire proper. (The last time, the Old Sod was liberated by American forces, and the locals are a bit unhappy with being ruled by “half-Indian” former colonials.)
The Europeans, following in the Islamic wake, found themselves in sharp competition with the Muslims, who were happy enough to provide arms and advice to any local tribes who would make the basic submissions to Allah and help them fight the Christians. Only in eastern south America, where the backwards local jungle and grassland dwellers had not attracted much in the way of Islamic Jihads, did the Europeans manage to carve out great domains of their own: the HRE rules a rich colony of slaves and tropical products (whiter than OTLs Brazil, the HRE having a far greater pool of potential settlers than Portugal), and the oligarchic Italian confederation headed by Venice created a settler colony which has broken away to become the first important democracy since the time of the old Greeks.
Christian western Europe, locked in a death-struggle with Islam for a century, was slowed in its expansion to the east: the Slavs north of the Balkans went Christian a couple centuries later than OTL; Saxony, after being driven east in a couple wars, eventually decided that not being massacred was worth a mass, but was not swallowed by the Empire (indeed, through dynastic marriages with the Slavs, they had a pretty big Early Modern empire in the east for a while); and the eastern Vikings never converted at all, instead syncretizing Christianity and their own faith into a more solidly rooted Paganism, and bringing their faith to the eastern Baltic and a Russia confined to the north (butterflies led to the development of a Bulgar/Magyar empire extending from the gates of Constantinople to Central Asia, cutting off the northern Slavs from Byzantium).
Europe west of Byzantium is dominated by the Holy Roman Empire, but not ruled by it: after the Investiture Wars [1] of the 14th century, in which it was demonstrated that the Empire could push around any one of the other Christian states but not all at once, the Emperor in Mainz had to be content with a loose sort of overlordship with no real dominance: the Catholic Slavs remained under the Imperial finger longer, due to the need for protection from the fierce pagans to the east, but have increasingly become an allied, independent block over the last couple centuries. Although huge, the HRE is autocratic and relatively backward compared to more “agile” and commercially adept states such as Venetia, Angeland and Denmark.
The Venetian-Italian block (which also includes some Slavs) is looked on as dubious Christians, given their essentially neutral stance on HRE-Caliphate conflicts: they may hold Gibraltar, but the Straits are a risky enough passage still that they prefer not to anger the Caliph, lest they be cut off from their profitable colonial and trade projects abroad (there still is the Red Sea passage, but the Egyptians charge tolls). Byzantium still endures, although its borders have fluctuated over the centuries. The Holy Land remains a source of dispute.
The Caliphate of Arabia tends to look upon the western Caliph in Al-Andalus as an impostor, and relations are poor. A Sultan rules in Sa’da, while a largely powerless Caliph reigns in Mecca. Blocked to the North, the Arabs of south Arabia made vigorous efforts to spread their faith by sea, and managed to gain converts all around the Indian Ocean rim, although they met only partial success in Indonesia, which remains a religious patchwork of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. They also managed to establish colonies in Australia, although their efforts to conquer the continent as a whole were forestalled by the Toledans coming around Africa. (Currently, a “buffer zone” of desert and aboriginal nomads helps prevent conflict in Australia).
Buddhism is dominated by a Bon-influenced variety exported from Tibet, which emphasizes forcible action in the real world to free people from the veils of Mara. Tibet itself is ruled by kings rather than Lamas, and remains a military power of some note: it is allied with the Mongols and the Magyarai, who received their faith after the Mongols conquered the eastern half of their empire. (Said Mongol conquests were less extensive than OTL, there being no Genghis: south Russia, central Asia and North China: oh, and they kinda smashed up the Third Persian Empire ).
The Buddhist powers are allied against the Turks, the strongest of the eastern Muslim powers. With the heretical Persians to the west, the Buddhists from NW to NE, and the Hindu to the SE, the Turks are feeling a bit encircled: there has been talk of late of an alliance with the Arabians to divide up Persia between them.
Turkish and Tibetan incursions have led to the formation of a Hindu alliance of Rajahs, but it is a somewhat shaky and internally troubled affair: Hindu India as a whole is falling behind in terms of organization and military know-how, and Christian and Muslim predators are starting to peck around the edges.
China (which has had a fairly different post-Tang dynastic history than OTL) remains impressive in bulk, but is also falling a bit behind, as the current dynasty descends into the Eunuch Fantasy stages of decay – in spite of a lot of bribes to make sure his head stays on, it has been noted at the Imperial court that the general sent to protect their Lao vassals from a bunch of hairy barbarians seems to have withdrawn in the face of far smaller (but better led and organized and armed) HRE forces. This has also been noted by the Empire of Nihon, a well-ordered, tightly organized, no-spitting-in-public-no-walking-on-the-grass kind of place with overseas colonies of their own: they have started sniffing around Korea and Taiwan.
The world is a bit more backwards than OTL at the time: although both western Europe and western Islam have started playing around with steam and coal (a steam-powered paddleboat recently traveled some 50 miles up the Mississippi before its boiler blew up) and the printing press and literacy are widely distrubuted, there has not yet been a full-blown industrial revolution in the year 1847. The gap between East and West remains relatively narrow.
Bruce
[1] No, not the Pope: by the 14th century Emperors had successfully managed to gain dominance over the Popes, although the Popes still hold Rome to this day. This was a matter of the Emperor trying to establish control over religious appointments in other Catholic Christian nations, and nearly led to an outbreak of Protestantism.
