A Colonist Caliphate: Muslims in America

Winnabago

Banned
To understand this next entry, I’ll need to provide a bit of exposition on Tule culture.

When the Awkarites first arrived under Awkar the Magnificent, it was, you might remember, seen as a victory of the Tule gods (read: diseases) over the invading gods, giving the Tule a bit of godliness themselves.

Because of this, it was considered duty to use this power and make Tule and Tule gods great. But the Tule did not honor the gods by building henges or mounds, like other civilizations were intent to do: no, under Nusagandi they built ships. Priests became powerful merchants with cults of workers to cut down the jungles for boats.

When Awkarite sailors, having abandoned their religion, wandered into the Tule villages, it was seen as highly strategic to have one in your employ. We’ll call them “strategos”. This relationship took three forms (yay, history lessons!):
-A business partnership: as one writer put it, “I pay the gods, and my strategos pays me back”.
-A master-slave relationship
-A patron-client relationship
-A few rare situations in which one sailor played both roles.

This relationship also offered considerable power to women, many of whom could rally a labor force for building ships, as many women were heads of cults (like Nasagundi quickly became).

These highly paid jobs required much education and skill, which meant more demand for strategos as teachers, which meant the strategos were more highly paid, which meant more demand, etc. until the strategos were very wealthy indeed, and knowledge passed through the whole of Nasagundi’s empire well. The weakening of the strategos as more and more people became educated in the art of trade is thought to have contributed to Kuna’s end.

When the empire was reborn as the Tule empire, the strategos again rose to political power, but under a slightly different job: they were proto-accountants, managing the affairs of wealthy traders, and almost none of them were black or Muslim, though everyone knew the best ones were.

So the Crusaders arrived to a prosperous system with a powerful class structure, divided between cultists and what was becoming a thinking upper class. Trade with Hakame brought kola nuts and coca leaves to Tule priests, merchants, strategos, and philosophers, most of whom were allowed to continue to trade under Hakamite rule.

In Columbia, and the other jungle coasts of South America, a new confederation declares war on the Crusaders. Led by the deft Arawak strategos Hairoun, the Western Confederacy launched the first known attempt of guerilla warfare at sea.

Founding the movement known as the Nuchus of Amazonia, his gangs of zealots would board ships and fight to the death. Famously psychopathic and tough, these berserkers utilized every weapon possible at their disposal, and often bit and clawed enemies when they boarded their ships. The Nuchus rendered most of the jungle impossible to conquer, but they were not what defeated the Crusaders: rather, it was the strategos.

The strategos, in fits of patriotism after the capture of Tule, immediately began using their sparse resources deftly and well. Nuchus and other zealots were sent on suicide missions to drill holes in enemy ships. Whenever sailors came to port, the strategos made sure to have at least one sailor be knifed. In popular ports, sharpened tree trunks would be placed underwater to puncture enemy ships. In a word, they fought dirty.

The Hakamites soon began to realize that they were fighting the Vietnam War, and quickly gave up. The fighters marched into Tule to crowds cheering at the liberation of Native America, until they found out exactly what had liberated them: a bunch of fucking scary people.

Tule grumbled, but settled back down into the routine of cultists and scholar-merchants, but the culture’s original fullness was over.
 

Winnabago

Banned
Hi, it’s been two days, and you know what that means!

Epic update, during the 1200s!

The Crusader nobles have tried and tried to find a good, profitable crop to grow in their Caribbean island states. They find an answer in the Awkarites, who have brought an excellent crop for the islands in from India: sugar.

Sugar plantations arise, fueled by slaves imported from Akimbe and, when raids are successful, by captured Native Americans. These slave plantations are different from the ones OTL: the workers are not quite slaves, and are closer to serfs with a degree of autonomy. As well, almost any poor who show up end up serfs, not only blacks and Amerindians, though constant serf importation is needed to compensate for very high death rates.

The strategos set up a martial government in Tule, with the wealthy merchants still wealthy merchants, but robbed of political power. Thus, merchants began to go on imperial campaigns to raise their political stature.

These merchants took down several of the Lesser Antilles Crusader fiefdoms, and financed slave revolts on the island of Jamaica, where there was a high Tule population.

Meanwhile, the Maya states continued to be a thorn in the side of the Crusader governor of the Yucatan, and Cuban Crusader raids into Mexico were intermittently successful due to Mexica raiders who continuously sabotage Crusader attempts at settlement.

So, because of this, the Crusaders tend to leave the southern mainland alone, in favor of Florida and Africa. In the process, they settle the Bahamas.

And because of this, the Mexican city-states become bent on driving back the whites from their homelands, even though most of the coast was actually conquered unfairly from the Crusaders.

Now, while all this has been going on, we’ve missed the rest of the world of the 1100s: let’s go back.

The Byzantines are flattened by the Turks, as the east-west trade, much of Byzantium’s profit base, is destroyed by Awkarite merchants and new sources of supply to the far west. The Seljulks quickly conquer all of Anatolia, and Constantinople lies undefended other than its walls. Norman invasions under Bohemond capture much of Byzantine Greece, while Venice moves into the Aegean islands.

Saladin has significant difficulty with the wealthy Crusader nobles, who have some of the local Muslims on their side. Saladin wins, but his empire is filled with unrest.

The Middle East is now in a state of instability and collapse, which is stimulating new, bypassing trade routes, which further harms the Middle East.

Ghana, besieged by Awkarites and Crusaders and already having a punch in the gut by its lack of trade, collapses into a bunch of tribal Awkarite kingdoms, which it will remain for a long time.

The East Awkarite city-states, who have holdings in East Africa, the Red Sea, Yemen, the Persian Gulf, India, Southeast Asia, and Java, establish a trading post in China. The Black Death quickly spreads from there, devastating both Awkarite trade networks, causing the final collapses of the Ayyubid Sultanate, the Ghana Empire, the Republic of Hakame, and other states, over 100 years early.

General dislike of the Pope is rampant after the plague and unsuccessful Crusades, and Italy tends to be against the Pope, who is now much poorer.
 
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Winnabago

Banned
The thing about the Crusader states is that they are feudal: they tend to be self-sufficient.

With help from states like Tariq, and with a stopping point at the excellent port of Akimbe where sailors are often experienced at crossing the Atlantic, the invading fleets generally turn out okay.

But overall, it wasn’t a profitable endeavor, and one pro-king writers claimed “it was a papist spat with boat-worshipping Amazons that went to far”, which is more aggressive than it sounds because “papist” was used with bad connotation.
 

Winnabago

Banned
Wow, that is a horrible historical fail on my part. I could have sworn the Triple Alliance formed in the 1200s. Because of this, I’ll have to scrap my plans for a decent Mexican state.

As for the League of Mayapan, they never formed in the first place, due to divisions between backers of the Tule and traditionalists that occurred in most cities.
 

Winnabago

Banned
I am a horrible person for letting this go unupdated for so long.

There is crisis in Amazonia. The tribes of the great river think of abandoning the collapsing Republic of Hakame, as Hakame has, by joining the Crusade, oriented itself with the western Awkarite-Judeo-Christian lands rather than the Muslim lands. With blessings from Haroun, king of Tule, the tribes of Amazonia invade and plunder Hakame, burning its ships in the harbor, crying, “The sea has brought us nothing but hardship!”

The tribes immediately went back to fighting among themselves afterwards, and Hakame lay a ruined shell. It is to this world that Tupiniquim comes to conquer.

Amazonia, as you can see, has always been oriented towards Hakame, whether going for trade or conquer, simply because all the boats are pulled there by the current, and all the money is there. Despite being a ruined shell, it is Brazil’s Mecca: the center of religion, trade, and culture, and what you could almost call a capital.

So when the devestating armies of Tupin capture the city, the tribes are terrified, but incapable of fighting well. A new dynasty is built, guarded by the soldiers who participated in the invasion. Xeta, the general, sets up the Zo’e dynast, which rules from the old Hakamite lands. He holds some land in Brazil, but it’s difficult to access without a fleet.

The states of Italy think for the first time of deposing the Pope on a regular basis. Desperately, the Pope officially tolerates Awkarites, and gets for himself a group of Awkarite guards from Tunis. The Italians quiet down.

The French have Hispaniola and a bit of Florida. The English, using Castilian and Portuguese rest stops, land in Virginia in 1309, and the settlement starves to death. The French lol.

As all this progress and outside culture seeps into western Europe, eastern Europe is left behind, especially after the cultural center of Orthodoxy, Constantinople, starves and burns through political intrigue.
 
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