AHC: Balkanized Iberia

Literally balkanized. A multiethnic nation with major tensions between ethinic groups. Both a muslim and catholic prescence, maybe the protestants thrown in. Maybe they're thrown into an arbitrary union that then colapses a la Yugoslavia for good measure, then the major ethnic groups have a Bosnia-typw power struggle that leads to US-analogue intervention. Just make it as messy and balkan-like as possible.
 

archaeogeek

Banned
Literally balkanized. A multiethnic nation with major tensions between ethinic groups. Both a muslim and catholic prescence, maybe the protestants thrown in. Maybe they're thrown into an arbitrary union that then colapses a la Yugoslavia for good measure, then the major ethnic groups have a Bosnia-typw power struggle that leads to US-analogue intervention. Just make it as messy and balkan-like as possible.

I could see up to 7-8 countries out of such a mess besides Portugal.
 
This would work if the Roman Catholic Church published Dignitatis Humanae about 500 years earlier. DH, published in 1965, was the Vatican II document that espoused civil freedom of religion for majority Catholic states. In other words, DH ensured that a "confessional Catholic" state such as found in Castile and Aragon in the late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and even (conceptually) into the Hapsburg period would never happen again. The horrors of forced conversion, murder, and banishment in the name of so-called "religion" are, theoretically at least, no longer allowed to be preached by mainstream Roman Catholics. I say "mainstream" since there are schismatic groups that would defend the Inquisition as a necessary means to protect a "confessional" "Catholic" state. I don't how the Castilian and Aragonese regimes could be characterized as moral or religious regimes, but some fringe Roman Catholics consider the Inquisition to be a just moral cause.

In the peri-modern period, the m.o. certainly was the conflation of religious ideology with warfare and civilian atrocity. If the Christian states of Iberia view their reconquista as a partial religious crusade, then all non-Christians, their worship places, and religious artefacts must be destroyed. This is not to say that there were periods of relative inter-religious tolerance in Al-Analdus and Granada, but these brief peaces were marked by the subesequent desecration of worship spaces, and the displacement and murder of people of other religious and ethnic background.

The religio-social ideological "total war" of the Christian states of Iberia likely means that the reconquista would not end until the capture of Granada and persecutions of Jews and Muslims both. It is doubtful that the Christian Iberians would call a truce and permit the Granadans to preserve their emirate. If so, then I would expect a very bloody and antimoral, even amoral, bloodshed that could last for centuries.

The challenge of this AHC then, is to create a situation where some of the Berber emirates remain in a stalemate with the Christian Iberians for more than 500 years. This is a very tall, and I think impossible, task.
 
Why can't it be one where the Reconquestia has failed miserably, so instead of Granada enduring we see a Christian state existence on sufferance in the north?
 
Why can't it be one where the Reconquestia has failed miserably, so instead of Granada enduring we see a Christian state existence on sufferance in the north?

Maybe, but that's not going to stop the crusading-fanatical Christianization tendencies of the Christian Iberians. I don't think they're going to roll over for the emirates so long as they have even the slimmest chance of fighting.
 
Maybe, but that's not going to stop the crusading-fanatical Christianization tendencies of the Christian Iberians. I don't think they're going to roll over for the emirates so long as they have even the slimmest chance of fighting.

I know sufficient faith is proof against all forms of reason (responding to you, not directing this at you), but at some point those who would rather die fighting will have died fighting.
 
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