Ixbiliada: an Andalusi TL

Ixbiliada
the history of Seville, 1070-1290

FOREWORD
excerpted from Izanagi Aoi, Moorish History: A Very Poor Introduction. Honolulu: Daiwakoku Press, 1988.

Far out in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy lies an utterly representative G-series star.

Orbiting this, at a distance of 149 000 000 kilometers is a dense-cored world whose inhabitants are so mind-shatteringly uncouth that many of the local cretins still believe that sacred monarchy is a good idea.

This planet has (and always had) a problem: most of its multitudes were immiserated most of the time. Many solutions were proposed for this problem, most of which involved redrawing lines on maps and killing people, which was great fun but still left the multitudes immiserated, even the ones with sacred monarchs.

And then, one fine night (I believe it was a Thursday), the archangel Gabriel was compelled to descend from heaven, approach a trader out in the desertified armpit of the world, and share the very definitely final revelation of God Himself, setting forth a record clear and without error, because God Himself wanted to make sure the local cretins got it right this time.

So of course they promptly set about redrawing lines on maps and killing people, which was great fun and still left the multitudes immiserated, and soon the empire had stretched to a peninsula on the edge of the known world. When they had finished redrawing the lines on its maps and killing people, they introduced dhimmitude and toothpaste and the very definitely final revelation of God Himself to the region, making sure the local cretins got it right this time, and created a kingdom that was one of the more impressive things the world had ever seen.

This is not the story of that kingdom.

But it is the story of a small city's depraved dictator, and a wandering warlord, and their rocky relationship in the ashes of that kingdom.

It is also the story of how the one paid the other to redraw lines on maps and kill people, having great fun and immiserating the multitudes.

And it is the story of how, by doing this, they accidentally created one of the most impressive nations the world will ever see. (Even if most of the local cretins still believe sacred monarchy is a good idea.)

This is going to be a long story. Let's take it from the top.

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With this done, I commit myself to keeping al-Andalus alive and Moorish from winter 1080 (when El Cid finds an employer) through the Berber Fitna [1], the Almohads, the collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate, at least one crusade, and the lives of the last recognizable people in the ATL's Iberian history.

And now, for the obligatory stuff:
  • This began as a writeup for a GURPS worldline; you can probably find the original post buried somewhere in the SJG forum archives. (If you do, the POD and the writeup of the world ca. 1930 are pretty much unchanged; everything else has been demoted to "extremely rough draft," which is partly why I started writing.)
  • Where it's possible, this TL is written as in-ATL texts. (I'm trying to make them less dry and academic than my source material; I apologize in advance if any of that bleeds through.) "Year: Event" formatting will be avoided unless a particular period of time gets really dense.
  • The present day of the ATL is 1348/1930; at the moment I'm limiting my scope (and my workload) to 1070-1270ish.
  • At some point in the world-building (probably when I realized none of my prospective players were history buffs) things took a turn for the poppy and pulpy; for one thing, there'll be many more recognizable names than there really should be. (Most of this won't be an issue for quite awhile, but it's something that should be said now.)
This is going to be a long story. Let's take it from the top.

[1] Medieval Sevillan historiography universally agreed that the collapse of Umayyad Cordoba was entirely the fault of unassimilated Berber immigrants. Historiography is fun like that.
 
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Try to keep the Christians around!

Nah- the Christians didn't keep the Muslims around! Inshallah- al-Andalus must be converted (by taxes! While at the same time staying tolerant!)

Will this al-Andalus be Sunni, Shia, or one of the other splinter sects. al-Haruriyya Islam is pretty interesting (perhaps co-opting ideas into a more contemporary, mainstream Islam?)

Great idea and wonderful opening. Has certainly caught my interest.
 
Nah- the Christians didn't keep the Muslims around! Inshallah- al-Andalus must be converted (by taxes! While at the same time staying tolerant!)

Will this al-Andalus be Sunni, Shia, or one of the other splinter sects. al-Haruriyya Islam is pretty interesting (perhaps co-opting ideas into a more contemporary, mainstream Islam?)

Great idea and wonderful opening. Has certainly caught my interest.

By this late, it was already decidedly Sunni of Maliki madzhab.

And indeed, it has a cool prologue. Looking forward to it :cool:
 
This is kind of interesting. I love a further Islamicized Spain (and of course, its reverse in such great works as the RoS)
 
By this late, it was already decidedly Sunni of Maliki madzhab.
Right you are.

(If Andalusis wanted heterodoxy, they'd have adopted their own domestic Zahiriyya. You'd sense a great disturbance in the TL, as if millions of ordinary language philosophers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.)

Try to keep the Christians around!
Oh, don't worry; they're going to stick around, and have a long day in the sun when I get to the early modern era. Because the Isidoran Rite is cool. (And because I would be a sad panda if there were no cavernous Moorish Gothic cathedrals to stage gunfights in.)

Actually, the Christians are going to wind up making a debut before I get to the POD. Ordinarily it's bad form to let this sort of thing get in the way of a Charlton Heston role, but this particular bout of OMG CHURCH DRAMA is going to spawn lots of angry butterflies down the line.

My internet connection's unreliable and tomorrow's a long work day, but I'm shooting for a proper update within 36 hours.
 
Right you are.

(If Andalusis wanted heterodoxy, they'd have adopted their own domestic Zahiriyya. You'd sense a great disturbance in the TL, as if millions of ordinary language philosophers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.)

Having the knowledge of their influence on the Salafis, they hardly look heterodox to me.
 
Background: Spain just before the POD

BACKGROUND: Spain just before the POD
Translated from G. Icarie, Falcons sans nids. Les Omeyyades au 11e siècle en Espagne. Paris: Malligard, 1952.

"The Cordoba Caliphate did not end with its ruling family. Hisham III's exile into Andalusi folklore left a considerable number of men from the Umayyad house, any of whom could by Sunni standards legitimately claim the caliphate for themselves; indeed, as we shall see, at least one of them actually attempted to do so. Such genealogies as survived the purging of the libraries in the 17th century indicate that various persons (albeit none of any political position) claimed descent from the Banu Omayya at least as late as the Second Crusade, placing them in the same period as Ibn Arban. Even if one sensibly dismisses the claims of the later Hishamites as spurious, the possibility of crypto-Omayyad families cannot be dismissed out of hand.

"When the populace of Cordoba appointed as caliph one Abd el-Rahman to contest the legitimacy of the Hammudids, the young and gifted caliph was unable to afford either a court or an army, and lost the support of the Cordovan gentry in attempts to remedy this. A similar narrative runs through all other Omayyad contenders in the same period, suggesting a more fundamental problem: the family, for all its size and legacy, simply lacked the resources to afford its caliphate..."

Excerpted from Fr. Pero Asclavas, The Gregorian Reconquest: Rome and Toledo 1073-1130. New Orleans: San Leandro Universidat, 1954.

"Exactly one week passed between Pope Gregory VII's investiture and the beginning of his Spanish policy: on 30 April 1073, he called for Spain to be reclaimed for Christendom in the name of Saint Peter, putative founder of the church in Spain. The letter written on this date made the unprecedented claim that the lands of Spain were the property as well as the jurisdiction of the Holy See, held against the law of God and man by the infidels, and that whatsoever was conquered in the name of the Church could be held by its conquerors or granted by the Holy See to his vassals.

"Part and parcel of Gregory VII's political realignment of Europe was an inextricably related theological one: the abandonment of the regional liturgies in favor of the Roman one. In Iberia this had informally begun as early as 1071; during Gregory's reign this became official policy. By 1076 the kingdoms of Aragon, Navarre, Castile and León had all adopted the Roman rite; in a papal bull dated 10 October 1076, the "superstitio toletana" was forever repudiated in the Spanish north. A subsequent bull in 1077 proclaimed all of Spain as belonging to the Holy See; the same bull also proclaimed Alfonso VI king of Castile, establishing a working relationship that would continue for the rest of Pope Gregory VII's life.

"The major stumbling block in this effort was the churches of Toledo, at that time the responsibility of one Archbishop Pasqual, which objected to this effort. The liturgy established by St. Isidore of Seville was, then as now, an important aspect of identity for the southern Christians; the Gregorian efforts to suppress it were viewed as heavy-handed, and accusations of Arianism and Adoptionist elements did nothing to improve matters. (The political consequences of such a realignment would have been obvious and unpleasant for those Christians living under Muslim rule, which doubtless influenced their stance, but no surviving sources discuss the matter in these terms.) More seriously, the Archdiocese of Toledo had been established and recognized as the metropolitan seat of Spain during the Visigothic period. The see of Toledo was the pinnacle of the church hierarchy in Spain, making it effectively immune to more direct expressions of papal authority.

"All parties at the time must have realized that the question of Toledo would have to be resolved sooner rather than later. For the Christian north, however, there was every reason to think that it would be resolved in their favor, and very soon..."

Excerpted from M. Katsuragi, Anti-Caliphate and Legitimacy in the Berber Fitna. San Leandro: University of San Leandro Press, 1968.

"The first anticaliph actually predated the fall of the Cordoba Caliphate. At the end of the civil war between Sulayman and Hisham II, if not earlier, Mujahid al-Siqlabi of Denya declined to recognize either contestant, instead paying homage to one Abu Abdallah b. al-Walid. The so-called "al-Muntasir," uniquely among the anticaliphs, actually was an Umayyad, albeit from a line that had never claimed the throne, and as an established military leader Mujahid could at the very least have made him a credible contender in the death throes of the Cordoba Caliphate. If any other peninsular leaders recognized al-Muntasir, however, they left no records of doing so, and for various reasons (discussed in greater detail in Ch. 3) Mujahid's political career led him to abandon Umayyad restoration in exchange for Mediterranean raiding.

"The most famous of the anticaliphs, however, was Hisham II, discovered in 414/1023 after twenty years in absentia and a decade of presumed death. Despite being universally acknowledged as an impostor, Hisham II was nonetheless recognized by a coterie of taifa leaders, including the aforementioned Mujahid. Chapters 4 and 5 focus respectively on the ideological roles served by this imposture, and the intersectionality of those roles with race and ethnic identity, during his "rein" from 1023 to his announced death in 1069, and the reasons for its abandonment when the rise of al-Mu'tamid brought the Berber Fitna into its third and final phase..."

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Thus ends a Very Poor Introduction to the taifa period.
I think I've covered the bases that need covering here (especially the church politics, which doesn't get written about much.)

Next update is soon, because now that the stage is set it's time to Meet The Cast.
 
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Meet the Cast

MEET THE EMPEROR: Alfonso VI

excerpted from Zygmunt Bauer, Diplomacy on the Frontiers of Christendom. Dresden: Universität Dresden, 1956.

"Under the terms of the Pact of Cuenca, al-Qadir was obligated to quarter and sponsor two Leónese garrisons in Toledan territory. One of these, located in Canturias roughly 70 kilometers west of Toledo's walls, was the first line of defense against the Taifa of Badajoz. The garrison of Zorita, located more than 100 kilometers northeast of the taifa capital, was likewise positioned to strike at Valencia and Zaragoza.

"The weakest link of this was al-Qadir himself. Even discounting later Arab historiography's uniformly dismal view of the man, few can dispute his role in Toledo's lost competition with Seville. It was under his reign that Toledo's decade-long dominance of Valencia had ended, when Abu Bakr restored the eastern city to Amirid rule. More seriously, al-Qadir was facing troubles at home; the 1075 rebellion against him had left Toledo occupied by Badajoz, and only with Castillian soldiers had al-Qadir been reinstalled in power.

"1080 saw Alfonso VI, now styling himself imperator totius Hispaniae, emerge as regional hegemon in Iberia, able to project Leónese force across almost the entire peninsula. It also saw him tasked with the critical burden of maintaining the status quo, propping up a critically weak Toledo plagued with internal turmoil and openly coveted by Umar al-Mutawakkil; a serious challenge to his functional borders, especially one on multiple fronts, would have left the military power of Castile-León helplessly overstretched. It is in this context, not that imposed by historians of the era, that we are best reading the embassy to Seville during the campaign season of 1080..."

MEET THE DESPOT: Muhammad al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad
excerpted from Saliha Bubaqueriz, "The Tragedy of Ibn 'Ammar," Popular History, December 1988.

"In about 1055, Abbad al-Mu'tadid assigned his teenaged son to supervise the town of Silves. The assignment was taken seriously enough that he assigned Abu Bakr ibn 'Ammar, his vizier and right-hand man, to supervise the education of his son. Given the narrow window of time between the start of the assignment and his exile in 1058, the legendary relationship between the two must have started almost as soon as they were out from under the father's nose.

"Whatever else he did, ibn 'Ammar did an excellent job as teacher. Under his wing the heir of Seville learned the art of statecraft that would serve him so well later in life, and perhaps developed his own gift for poetry. Most importantly, during a particularly infamous romantic excursion together, he saw Muhammad meet his wife I'timad, buy her from her owner, marry her and change his name to the one history remembers: al-Mu'tamid. (His father only found out about this later, shortly before he exiled ibn 'Ammar on pain of death.)

"None of this mattered by the end of 1078. After ibn 'Ammar had spent years petitioning for an invasion of Murcia, al-Mu'tamid (now lord of Seville) had sent his companion across the Muslim south at the head of an army. By the time the invasion was over, ibn 'Ammar had borrowed 10,000 dinars from the Christians in Aragon, and offered as collateral al-Mu'tamid's firstborn son Rashid. According to his biographer and powerful enemy Abdallah of Granada,
he rode roughshod over the people, violated the laws of Allah, and became an inveterate drunkard so that in the end he brought down on himself the odium of its inhabitants. He managed a show of obedience to al-Mu'tamid, but in fact was in revolt. It was no secret that he ran al-Mu'tamid down and lampooned him for things of which he was innocent, in the manner of villains and scoundrels.
"With his son held hostage and his closest companion gone renegade, al-Mu'tamid wrote a long poem insulting ibn 'Ammar's family. ibn 'Ammar retaliated in kind, and when a copy in his handwriting reached al-Mu'tamid any love left between them was extinguished forever.

"When the inevitable backlash came, ibn 'Ammar was deposed and forced to flee Murcia for his life. He had almost nowhere to go; the Berber taifas led by Abdallah of Granada were poisoned against him almost as deeply as Seville. His only hope was to flee north to the taifa of Toledo, seeking shelter from Alfonso VI.

"1080 saw al-Mu'tamid, one of the three most powerful Muslims in al-Andalus, in dire straits indeed. On top of the yearly 10,000 gold dinars he paid to Alfonso VI, he had been forced to ransom his own son from Barcelona. With his vizier gone renegade, it was time to start looking for new friends..."

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Sorry about the long delays in posting, but it's updated at last.
 
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For shame no one is reading this! It was a very unique and interesting idea for an timeline. Surely I have to bump this!
 
Just resting for the moment.

My computer was stolen recently, so I'm reduced to writing on what's available during public library hours (or, God forbid, my phone.) But there's an update or two that are in the works.
 
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