Knowing how greeks were the Pechengs and how they got much of Anatolia without the turk settlement, it was more of Christians vs Muslims, both considered themselves Romaioi as Hellene still means pagan
Moonlight in a Jar: An Al-Andalus Timeline
- Thread starter Planet of Hats
- Start date
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- Tags
- al-andalus cordoba timeline
yes, remember the fall of the Christian Roman Empire was a far different affair from OTL, the Pechegs changed a lot what a Romaioi means, and the Bataids changed it further too
Most likely the former than the latter. Note that the inhabitants of Rhomania are all Greek-speaking peoples and culturally Roman, despite their different ethnicities. It makes no sense for them to take up a pagan term against the Muslim Romans since there's very few differences between them aside from religion (as opposed to the Orthodox vs the Latins). It also invalidates them from their Romanity by the other Roman claimants (such as the Romanians or the Germans) or their rivals (the Andalusi) that would absolutely use this opportunity to state that they are not true Romans at all as opposed to the peoples in Western Europe.
If anything both Muslim/Christian Romans would assert their Romanity more ITTL since that is the uniting cultural factor and a source of prestige for the Roman Empire.
ACT IX Part XVII: The Red Comet
Planet of Hats
Donor
Excerpt: The People's Faith: A History of Modern Islam - Abu Najib ibn Abd al-Aziz al-Mufaji, AD 2007
Even as the Asmarids dealt with the stubborn and hard-to-pin-down Mahdi Army, colonial endeavours proceeded apace not only for their realm, but for new powers in the Eastern World seeking toeholds in areas where Andalusis once held formidable monopolies on overseas trade. For all that Andalus had a century of lead time on exploration, their empire was largely one of trading posts and local partners, with a core of settlement mainly centred on the Sea of Pearls, Tirunah and Quwaniyyah. Much of their overseas holdings were sparsely populated at best, particularly in northern Berengaria.
The weakness of these Asmarid claims is reflected in how little Isbili seems to have concerned itself with the Romanian presence in Muqmara and Vaçeu. These colonies had received comparatively little focus from the Asmarid leadership, with Muqmara itself simply failing to launch in the face of hostilities from indigenous groups. Barshil, too, was never followed up on and allowed to remain in Christian hands.
The inability or disinterest of the Asmarids to claim everything upon which their explorers' eyes fell opened the way for other powers to step in and lay down claims, and while the Romanian claims in Berengaria were the most immediate, the entry of France into overseas exploration would prove crucial. With control of powerful harbour cities in the Low Countries, particularly Antwerp - at that point one of the largest and most prosperous ports in Europe - the French gained both enormous economic prosperity and access to some of the best sailors on the continent.
It is no surprise that most French exploration in the Western World was spearheaded by Brabantine sailors out of Antwerp. The 1544 adventure of Jean de Leonhocque - Johann van Leeuwenhoek, more properly - followed that model, with four ships venturing west on a royal charter and sweeping down the Berengarian coast south of Vaçeu proper. Van Leeuwenhoek, an experienced sailor and cartographer, took extensive notes on the areas he mapped, producing the first reasonably complete chart of the environs of St. Denis Bay.[1] The area had been known and noted on Andalusi and other charts, but poorly explored until Van Leeuwenhoek's first and second expeditions. The second arrived in 1546 with a hundred colonists, mainly churchmen and military men and families from Normandy and the southern reaches of the Low Countries, to establish Fort Mont-Réal at the foot of the eponymous peak.[2]
The establishment of a French anchorage in the New World amounted to another cut into already-frought relations between France and Romania. Fort Mont-Réal had the advantages of an incredibly defensible position, sheltered by an enclosed harbour and backed by the mountain itself. A fleet of 17 Romanian ships arrived in 1549 to try and expel the French, but the newly-established fort, supported by a small fleet in turn, held off the assault. A second Romanian effort to remove the fort would follow in 1552, this time with nearly 30 ships, but by this time France had expanded Fort Mont-Réal's defenses and constructed an additional redoubt for field dragons, allowing the Romanian fleet to come under heavy attack from shore. These failed attempts to remove France wedged Romania's rival squarely between its two nascent Berengarian communities of Vaçeu in the north and Sant-Pol in the south.
French entry into the game of intercontinental trade would put them in competition with the largest Christian power on the seas: The Anglish.
While not active in Berengaria, Anglish possessions in the New World included their immense Granham claims to King Robart's Land and the sugar-producing island of St. Albans, and they'd poured considerable efforts into building up a trade network to China. With their trading posts in India and the Sudan as a jumping-off point, Anglish traders increasingly made inroads into Chinese, Japanese and Nusantaran markets. Piracy in the Indian Ocean became an increasing issue as Anglish and Danish freebooters took the opportunity to prey on wealthy Andalusian merchant ships, though these attacks grew more difficult as more modern Moorish escort ships became prevalent.
The French would prove more vulnerable in the early going. The emergence of Paris into the Asian maritime trade saw Anglish merchants and pirates increasingly competing to keep the French out of what they viewed as their markets. European history typically contrives to pit Angland and France against one another, and the same would prove true in the age of sail and blackpowder.
For all that the Asmarid overseas empire was rooted in a trading-post economy, and for all that the Mahdist War created pressure to field a strong army, this is not to say that settlement overseas was neglected. Indeed, the populations of key settler colonies swelled in the early to mid-1500s, a trend attributable to some extent to natural disasters.
Andalusia is no stranger to earthquakes, and two major ones had struck the peninsula in the early to mid-15th century. In 1522, an earthquake struck the port of Al-Mariyya, leveling much of the city and damaging structures as far away as Gharnatah. A smaller one leveled towns in the Maghurin Islands. A more serious quake struck in 1531, leveling much of Beja and collapsing homes and buildings as far away as Lishbuna. The Beja-Lishbuna quake is estimated to have killed more than 20,000 people and left countless more homeless.
While the cities would be steadily rebuilt on the back of the Asmarid Empire's significant wealth, many left homeless by the quakes - particularly those living in the countryside - would flee the disaster zones overseas. From the mid-1520s, Tirunah, Quwaniyyah and Al-Gattas experienced a major wave of migration from southern and coastal Andalusia, bringing entire families to the Asmarids' flagship settler societies. Much of this was soaked up by the mainland, with Tirunah drawing in the largest share by virtue of new discoveries of gold. The legends of the Emerald City and the Golden King remained strong in popular culture despite the routine failure of kishafa to find anything more in the dense jungles than small villages.
Perhaps driven by the quakes, the mid-1530s saw Tirunah experience a significant gold rush. The population of Abourah swelled with new migrants out to seek their fortune inland. By 1542, a new town had been established at Wadabidah, in the gold-rich highlands east of the Wadi al-Tirunah.[3] While many of these new arrivals failed to find fortune in the Tirunah highlands, most stayed in the region, either drifting back to trading cities on the coast or heading further east to settlements in Ar-Rakayiz.[4] The region had been somewhat neglected since its discovery, but the search for the Golden King had led kishafa through on countless expeditions, leading to at least one breakthrough: The discovery of gold east of Rayakiz Bay, in the lands drained by the Wadi al-Yaraqi.[5]
Gold discoveries in the region led to the founding of several new settlements: Qubaybah[6] in 1542, Madinat al-Amal (later just Alamal)[7] in the same year, and the port of Al-Mawlid[8] in 1544. Alamal in particular would experience the largest early boom as a main centre of gold exploration in Rakayiz and Yaraqi, with smaller settlements eventually springing up inland. Again, as with Tirunah, few prospectors actually struck it rich, but most remained in the Gharb al-Aqsa to set up shop as plantation workers, livestock farmers and general traders and providers of services. While gold was the main lure, the backbone of Tirunah and Rakayiz - the latter treated as an eastern appendage of the former - became agriculture, focusing both on cash crops and the raising of sheep, chickens, goats and cows to service the growing local economy.
The gold boom out of the west proved a boon to the new government in Isbili. With Mahdists haunting the Maghrebi hinterlands and forcing the constant movement of troops, Hajib Uthman put Tiruni gold to good use financing upgrades to both the Asmarid army and navy. On land, the gold would fund an expansion of modern blackpowder arms and good horses, enabling crack Asmarid troops to more rapidly respond to the blandishments of Fakhreddin's Mahdi Army. At sea, the gold would pay for new ships capable of patrolling vital trade routes east and west, critical now more than ever in the face of rising Christian pressure.
Excerpt: The Red Comet: The Rise of European Vulgarity - Heinrich Holst, Falconbird Press AD 2018
Even as the world expanded for the kingdoms of Christendom, new technologies ushered in an age of tumult for broader Europe. Nowhere was this more keenly felt than in the German-speaking world of the Holy Roman Empire, where the struggle for the Imperial crown became rapidly tied up in the rising tide of Vulgarity.
Printing presses had steadily crept north from the Islamic world, mainly into the hands of well-connected merchants. In the German sphere, presses soon found themselves churning out two broad groups of political literature: Bibles and Vulgar commentaries on Bibles. One of the most influential of these texts of the Late Interregnum, driving Vulgarity into greater prominence, was the Commentary on God and Man.
The Commentary, penned by Vulgar theologian Amadeus Fleischer of Dortmund, began circulating from 1543, amidst the dragging succession struggle that followed the end of the Geroldseck line. At the time, Pope Celestine VII had grudgingly passed the crown of Italy on to Alarich, Duke of Bavaria, who commanded the loyalty of some of the German nobility closer to Rome but was heavily contested by Friedrich von Saldern, the Vulgarity-influenced Duke of Lower Saxony. If not for the power struggle in Germany, Fleischer's work might have passed in the night - but the arguments he presented were entirely too convenient for Friedrich to pass up on. In 1545, he invited Fleischer to his seat of power in Hildesheim and met with him for several days to hear out his thoughts.
Fleischer's Commentary took a highly Vulgar approach to Christian law, marrying older theologies to newer ideas emerging from thought strains influenced by the Anicetians. To Fleischer, the idea of a single and all-powerful Papacy flew in the face of the idea that each man could have a relationship with God. He advocated for council ecumenism to take the form of a Common Church, one that could meet the spiritual needs of a specific realm in a way that a single generalized church could not. His vision of faith saw the source of Christianity's power as coming from the bottom up, not from the top down.
In practice, the Commentary was a justifying mechanism for Duke Friedrich, who patronized Fleischer and his followers and endeavoured to spread their works far and wide. This was not without controversy, alienating some Vulgarians who saw Friedrich's efforts as subverting the faith for political gain. The Lower Saxon effort to overcome Alarich was plodding and inconclusive for several years, hobbled by periodic defections and failed insurgencies both by Papal and Radical Vulgarian breakaway factions, matters offset only by the grudging refusal of some smaller-scale pro-Vulgarian lords in Alarich's corners of Europe to commit men and gold to his cause. By 1546, however, Friedrich suffered a serious defeat at the Battle of Darmundstadt, rolling back gains he'd made to his south and costing him a number of his allies.
The defeat of Friedrich marked a turning point in the conflict: With allies deserting him, Friedrich was unable to hold off Papist forces, and Alarich swept into Hildesheim by mid-1547. Friedrich was promptly thrown into prison and his lands parceled out to less radical cousins, and Fleischer and his followers were ordered tried for heresy. This would prove to be the worst decision Alarich could make.
The Hanging of Amadeus on August 7, 1547, served only to make a martyr of Amadeus Fleischer in the eyes of Vulgarians. His Commentaries long outlived him, circulating from growing numbers of renegade presses throughout Europe and making it into translation in other parts of the continent. To many common Germans, Fleischer was a heroic figure, speaking to them in their own language against the excesses and indifference of churchmen who cared more about the approval of Rome than the wellbeing of the peasantry. While the overthrow of Friedrich and the execution of Fleischer would buy Alarich a few years' uncontested rule, barring efforts to tamp down rebellion in Lombardy and attempt to reclaim the Low Countries, his efforts would carry the growing millstone of popular and noble unrest.
An increasing portion of Alarich's army consisted of soldiers sympathetic to Vulgarity, and resentment between men from various regions of the realm made unit cohesion impossible. This was never more apparent than in the Lowland War of 1549-51, which saw the Empire surprisingly rebuffed in their effort to reassert control of areas of the Lowlands claimed by France. The decisive Battle of Attert seemed primed to deliver a win to Alarich over the French, but the Holy Roman army's cohesion was disrupted by disastrously bad coordination and tension between troops from the south and those from north and central Germania. Alarich's numeric superiority evaporated when the French threw a body of Hispano-Norman mercenaries against the northerners, who promptly deserted and quit the field to leave the Alarich loyalists to be surrounded. Thousands of pro-Vulgarity soldiers fled home overland or vanished into the countryside, while thousands more of the best soldiers on the Papist side were either killed or captured, leaving Alarich badly weakened and unable to make up territory.
The defeat at Attert - together with the northern German trade cities going into a tax revolt - forced Alarich to regroup, weakening him just as Vulgar riots and rebellions began to pick up steam. At the same time, it emboldened nobles who viewed him as an illegitimate pawn of the Papacy. The refusal of pro-Vulgar nobles to remit taxes made it more difficult for Alarich to rebuild the army or buy off barons and counts sitting on the fence.
Worse for Alarich was the re-emergence of succession as an issue. Going into his coronation, Alarich fully expected to be able to pass his titles on to his son, Alarich the Younger. His death in the winter of 1553, brought on by what modern analysts agree to be liver failure, left succession a question: Alarich had no other male issue. He and his empress, Magdalene of Silesia, had followed up Alarich with two daughters, and by the time of Alarich's death she was far from her childbearing years.
Alarich's advisors urged him to seek a new marriage for the good of the realm, a decision he waffled on out of sheer love for Magdalene. Ultimately, he caved to the pressure and lobbied for a divorce, which Pope Pius III granted in 1554 on grounds of consanguinity - a decision seen as cynical and un-Christian by many. Alarich turned around within months and arranged a wedding to Princess Iseu, daughter and eldest child of King Berenguier the Pious of Romania. Iseu, nineteen at the time, is described by virtually all sources as uniquely beautiful, yet uniquely stubborn and independent-minded. Her marriage to Alarich was one of political convenience, forging an alliance between the Papist factions in Germany and the steadfastly Papist Romanian realm, yet personally unfulfilling for her: It became obvious that she detested the 74-year-old Alarich. With political pressure on her to deliver a male heir as fast as possible, she chafed at the constant attention and demands on her person.
The remainder of 1554 came and went, followed by the first half of 1555, and Iseu and Alarich seemed no closer to consummating their marriage. All the more alarming to the Holy Roman court was the obvious decline in the Emperor's health, rendering him increasingly limited to the palace. Pope Pius III himself intervened, penning an infamous letter to Iseu reminding her of her "Christian duty" to sleep with her husband and assuring her it was not, in fact, a sin. An increasingly frustrated Iseu spent much of the spring getting under the skin of German courtiers and secluding herself in her tower, but by autumn, the word that the court awaited finally came down: Iseu was with child.
The sequence of events that followed would strike down any hopes of good fortune. Within weeks of the dawn of 1556, Alarich died old and infirm, leaving an interregnum to wait with bated breath for the birth of his successor. The anticipated child would be crowned the instant he left the womb. Already Iseu's handlers had kept her on a steady regimen of old pre-naturalistic rituals and edibles thought to make it more likely she'd give birth to a boy.
The court in Nuremberg all but ground to a halt through the winter of 1556 as virtually all of Christendom held its breath in anticipation. The days ticked by until the expected time of Iseu's giving birth.
It was in that moment of Christian paralysis that a comet flew. Beginning in February and March of 1556, observers across Europe observed the passage of an immense comet. The account of Bishop Conrad III of Osnabruck describes it as "a torch among the stars," fully half as wide around as the Moon. Another account describes it as being as red as Mars.[9]
The day after the comet was seen in Nuremberg, Empress Iseu gave birth to her only child by Alarich: A girl named Cecilia.
[1] Guanabara Bay.
[2] Yes, Montréal is in OTL Brazil here. The future Montréal is actually OTL Rio, and Mount Royal itself is Corcovado Peak, site of the Cristo Redentor.
[3] Guatavita, Colombia, northeastish of Bogota.
[4] Venezuela around Lake Maracaibo. The lake is known to the Andalusis as the Lake of Stilts.
[5] The departments of Yaracuy and southern Falcón, Venezuela.
[6] Cabimas, on Lake Maracaibo.
[7] San Felipe, Yaracuy.
[8] Tucacas.
[9] The Comet of 1556.
Even as the Asmarids dealt with the stubborn and hard-to-pin-down Mahdi Army, colonial endeavours proceeded apace not only for their realm, but for new powers in the Eastern World seeking toeholds in areas where Andalusis once held formidable monopolies on overseas trade. For all that Andalus had a century of lead time on exploration, their empire was largely one of trading posts and local partners, with a core of settlement mainly centred on the Sea of Pearls, Tirunah and Quwaniyyah. Much of their overseas holdings were sparsely populated at best, particularly in northern Berengaria.
The weakness of these Asmarid claims is reflected in how little Isbili seems to have concerned itself with the Romanian presence in Muqmara and Vaçeu. These colonies had received comparatively little focus from the Asmarid leadership, with Muqmara itself simply failing to launch in the face of hostilities from indigenous groups. Barshil, too, was never followed up on and allowed to remain in Christian hands.
The inability or disinterest of the Asmarids to claim everything upon which their explorers' eyes fell opened the way for other powers to step in and lay down claims, and while the Romanian claims in Berengaria were the most immediate, the entry of France into overseas exploration would prove crucial. With control of powerful harbour cities in the Low Countries, particularly Antwerp - at that point one of the largest and most prosperous ports in Europe - the French gained both enormous economic prosperity and access to some of the best sailors on the continent.
It is no surprise that most French exploration in the Western World was spearheaded by Brabantine sailors out of Antwerp. The 1544 adventure of Jean de Leonhocque - Johann van Leeuwenhoek, more properly - followed that model, with four ships venturing west on a royal charter and sweeping down the Berengarian coast south of Vaçeu proper. Van Leeuwenhoek, an experienced sailor and cartographer, took extensive notes on the areas he mapped, producing the first reasonably complete chart of the environs of St. Denis Bay.[1] The area had been known and noted on Andalusi and other charts, but poorly explored until Van Leeuwenhoek's first and second expeditions. The second arrived in 1546 with a hundred colonists, mainly churchmen and military men and families from Normandy and the southern reaches of the Low Countries, to establish Fort Mont-Réal at the foot of the eponymous peak.[2]
The establishment of a French anchorage in the New World amounted to another cut into already-frought relations between France and Romania. Fort Mont-Réal had the advantages of an incredibly defensible position, sheltered by an enclosed harbour and backed by the mountain itself. A fleet of 17 Romanian ships arrived in 1549 to try and expel the French, but the newly-established fort, supported by a small fleet in turn, held off the assault. A second Romanian effort to remove the fort would follow in 1552, this time with nearly 30 ships, but by this time France had expanded Fort Mont-Réal's defenses and constructed an additional redoubt for field dragons, allowing the Romanian fleet to come under heavy attack from shore. These failed attempts to remove France wedged Romania's rival squarely between its two nascent Berengarian communities of Vaçeu in the north and Sant-Pol in the south.
French entry into the game of intercontinental trade would put them in competition with the largest Christian power on the seas: The Anglish.
While not active in Berengaria, Anglish possessions in the New World included their immense Granham claims to King Robart's Land and the sugar-producing island of St. Albans, and they'd poured considerable efforts into building up a trade network to China. With their trading posts in India and the Sudan as a jumping-off point, Anglish traders increasingly made inroads into Chinese, Japanese and Nusantaran markets. Piracy in the Indian Ocean became an increasing issue as Anglish and Danish freebooters took the opportunity to prey on wealthy Andalusian merchant ships, though these attacks grew more difficult as more modern Moorish escort ships became prevalent.
The French would prove more vulnerable in the early going. The emergence of Paris into the Asian maritime trade saw Anglish merchants and pirates increasingly competing to keep the French out of what they viewed as their markets. European history typically contrives to pit Angland and France against one another, and the same would prove true in the age of sail and blackpowder.
*
For all that the Asmarid overseas empire was rooted in a trading-post economy, and for all that the Mahdist War created pressure to field a strong army, this is not to say that settlement overseas was neglected. Indeed, the populations of key settler colonies swelled in the early to mid-1500s, a trend attributable to some extent to natural disasters.
Andalusia is no stranger to earthquakes, and two major ones had struck the peninsula in the early to mid-15th century. In 1522, an earthquake struck the port of Al-Mariyya, leveling much of the city and damaging structures as far away as Gharnatah. A smaller one leveled towns in the Maghurin Islands. A more serious quake struck in 1531, leveling much of Beja and collapsing homes and buildings as far away as Lishbuna. The Beja-Lishbuna quake is estimated to have killed more than 20,000 people and left countless more homeless.
While the cities would be steadily rebuilt on the back of the Asmarid Empire's significant wealth, many left homeless by the quakes - particularly those living in the countryside - would flee the disaster zones overseas. From the mid-1520s, Tirunah, Quwaniyyah and Al-Gattas experienced a major wave of migration from southern and coastal Andalusia, bringing entire families to the Asmarids' flagship settler societies. Much of this was soaked up by the mainland, with Tirunah drawing in the largest share by virtue of new discoveries of gold. The legends of the Emerald City and the Golden King remained strong in popular culture despite the routine failure of kishafa to find anything more in the dense jungles than small villages.
Perhaps driven by the quakes, the mid-1530s saw Tirunah experience a significant gold rush. The population of Abourah swelled with new migrants out to seek their fortune inland. By 1542, a new town had been established at Wadabidah, in the gold-rich highlands east of the Wadi al-Tirunah.[3] While many of these new arrivals failed to find fortune in the Tirunah highlands, most stayed in the region, either drifting back to trading cities on the coast or heading further east to settlements in Ar-Rakayiz.[4] The region had been somewhat neglected since its discovery, but the search for the Golden King had led kishafa through on countless expeditions, leading to at least one breakthrough: The discovery of gold east of Rayakiz Bay, in the lands drained by the Wadi al-Yaraqi.[5]
Gold discoveries in the region led to the founding of several new settlements: Qubaybah[6] in 1542, Madinat al-Amal (later just Alamal)[7] in the same year, and the port of Al-Mawlid[8] in 1544. Alamal in particular would experience the largest early boom as a main centre of gold exploration in Rakayiz and Yaraqi, with smaller settlements eventually springing up inland. Again, as with Tirunah, few prospectors actually struck it rich, but most remained in the Gharb al-Aqsa to set up shop as plantation workers, livestock farmers and general traders and providers of services. While gold was the main lure, the backbone of Tirunah and Rakayiz - the latter treated as an eastern appendage of the former - became agriculture, focusing both on cash crops and the raising of sheep, chickens, goats and cows to service the growing local economy.
The gold boom out of the west proved a boon to the new government in Isbili. With Mahdists haunting the Maghrebi hinterlands and forcing the constant movement of troops, Hajib Uthman put Tiruni gold to good use financing upgrades to both the Asmarid army and navy. On land, the gold would fund an expansion of modern blackpowder arms and good horses, enabling crack Asmarid troops to more rapidly respond to the blandishments of Fakhreddin's Mahdi Army. At sea, the gold would pay for new ships capable of patrolling vital trade routes east and west, critical now more than ever in the face of rising Christian pressure.
~
Excerpt: The Red Comet: The Rise of European Vulgarity - Heinrich Holst, Falconbird Press AD 2018
Even as the world expanded for the kingdoms of Christendom, new technologies ushered in an age of tumult for broader Europe. Nowhere was this more keenly felt than in the German-speaking world of the Holy Roman Empire, where the struggle for the Imperial crown became rapidly tied up in the rising tide of Vulgarity.
Printing presses had steadily crept north from the Islamic world, mainly into the hands of well-connected merchants. In the German sphere, presses soon found themselves churning out two broad groups of political literature: Bibles and Vulgar commentaries on Bibles. One of the most influential of these texts of the Late Interregnum, driving Vulgarity into greater prominence, was the Commentary on God and Man.
The Commentary, penned by Vulgar theologian Amadeus Fleischer of Dortmund, began circulating from 1543, amidst the dragging succession struggle that followed the end of the Geroldseck line. At the time, Pope Celestine VII had grudgingly passed the crown of Italy on to Alarich, Duke of Bavaria, who commanded the loyalty of some of the German nobility closer to Rome but was heavily contested by Friedrich von Saldern, the Vulgarity-influenced Duke of Lower Saxony. If not for the power struggle in Germany, Fleischer's work might have passed in the night - but the arguments he presented were entirely too convenient for Friedrich to pass up on. In 1545, he invited Fleischer to his seat of power in Hildesheim and met with him for several days to hear out his thoughts.
Fleischer's Commentary took a highly Vulgar approach to Christian law, marrying older theologies to newer ideas emerging from thought strains influenced by the Anicetians. To Fleischer, the idea of a single and all-powerful Papacy flew in the face of the idea that each man could have a relationship with God. He advocated for council ecumenism to take the form of a Common Church, one that could meet the spiritual needs of a specific realm in a way that a single generalized church could not. His vision of faith saw the source of Christianity's power as coming from the bottom up, not from the top down.
In practice, the Commentary was a justifying mechanism for Duke Friedrich, who patronized Fleischer and his followers and endeavoured to spread their works far and wide. This was not without controversy, alienating some Vulgarians who saw Friedrich's efforts as subverting the faith for political gain. The Lower Saxon effort to overcome Alarich was plodding and inconclusive for several years, hobbled by periodic defections and failed insurgencies both by Papal and Radical Vulgarian breakaway factions, matters offset only by the grudging refusal of some smaller-scale pro-Vulgarian lords in Alarich's corners of Europe to commit men and gold to his cause. By 1546, however, Friedrich suffered a serious defeat at the Battle of Darmundstadt, rolling back gains he'd made to his south and costing him a number of his allies.
The defeat of Friedrich marked a turning point in the conflict: With allies deserting him, Friedrich was unable to hold off Papist forces, and Alarich swept into Hildesheim by mid-1547. Friedrich was promptly thrown into prison and his lands parceled out to less radical cousins, and Fleischer and his followers were ordered tried for heresy. This would prove to be the worst decision Alarich could make.
The Hanging of Amadeus on August 7, 1547, served only to make a martyr of Amadeus Fleischer in the eyes of Vulgarians. His Commentaries long outlived him, circulating from growing numbers of renegade presses throughout Europe and making it into translation in other parts of the continent. To many common Germans, Fleischer was a heroic figure, speaking to them in their own language against the excesses and indifference of churchmen who cared more about the approval of Rome than the wellbeing of the peasantry. While the overthrow of Friedrich and the execution of Fleischer would buy Alarich a few years' uncontested rule, barring efforts to tamp down rebellion in Lombardy and attempt to reclaim the Low Countries, his efforts would carry the growing millstone of popular and noble unrest.
An increasing portion of Alarich's army consisted of soldiers sympathetic to Vulgarity, and resentment between men from various regions of the realm made unit cohesion impossible. This was never more apparent than in the Lowland War of 1549-51, which saw the Empire surprisingly rebuffed in their effort to reassert control of areas of the Lowlands claimed by France. The decisive Battle of Attert seemed primed to deliver a win to Alarich over the French, but the Holy Roman army's cohesion was disrupted by disastrously bad coordination and tension between troops from the south and those from north and central Germania. Alarich's numeric superiority evaporated when the French threw a body of Hispano-Norman mercenaries against the northerners, who promptly deserted and quit the field to leave the Alarich loyalists to be surrounded. Thousands of pro-Vulgarity soldiers fled home overland or vanished into the countryside, while thousands more of the best soldiers on the Papist side were either killed or captured, leaving Alarich badly weakened and unable to make up territory.
The defeat at Attert - together with the northern German trade cities going into a tax revolt - forced Alarich to regroup, weakening him just as Vulgar riots and rebellions began to pick up steam. At the same time, it emboldened nobles who viewed him as an illegitimate pawn of the Papacy. The refusal of pro-Vulgar nobles to remit taxes made it more difficult for Alarich to rebuild the army or buy off barons and counts sitting on the fence.
Worse for Alarich was the re-emergence of succession as an issue. Going into his coronation, Alarich fully expected to be able to pass his titles on to his son, Alarich the Younger. His death in the winter of 1553, brought on by what modern analysts agree to be liver failure, left succession a question: Alarich had no other male issue. He and his empress, Magdalene of Silesia, had followed up Alarich with two daughters, and by the time of Alarich's death she was far from her childbearing years.
Alarich's advisors urged him to seek a new marriage for the good of the realm, a decision he waffled on out of sheer love for Magdalene. Ultimately, he caved to the pressure and lobbied for a divorce, which Pope Pius III granted in 1554 on grounds of consanguinity - a decision seen as cynical and un-Christian by many. Alarich turned around within months and arranged a wedding to Princess Iseu, daughter and eldest child of King Berenguier the Pious of Romania. Iseu, nineteen at the time, is described by virtually all sources as uniquely beautiful, yet uniquely stubborn and independent-minded. Her marriage to Alarich was one of political convenience, forging an alliance between the Papist factions in Germany and the steadfastly Papist Romanian realm, yet personally unfulfilling for her: It became obvious that she detested the 74-year-old Alarich. With political pressure on her to deliver a male heir as fast as possible, she chafed at the constant attention and demands on her person.
The remainder of 1554 came and went, followed by the first half of 1555, and Iseu and Alarich seemed no closer to consummating their marriage. All the more alarming to the Holy Roman court was the obvious decline in the Emperor's health, rendering him increasingly limited to the palace. Pope Pius III himself intervened, penning an infamous letter to Iseu reminding her of her "Christian duty" to sleep with her husband and assuring her it was not, in fact, a sin. An increasingly frustrated Iseu spent much of the spring getting under the skin of German courtiers and secluding herself in her tower, but by autumn, the word that the court awaited finally came down: Iseu was with child.
The sequence of events that followed would strike down any hopes of good fortune. Within weeks of the dawn of 1556, Alarich died old and infirm, leaving an interregnum to wait with bated breath for the birth of his successor. The anticipated child would be crowned the instant he left the womb. Already Iseu's handlers had kept her on a steady regimen of old pre-naturalistic rituals and edibles thought to make it more likely she'd give birth to a boy.
The court in Nuremberg all but ground to a halt through the winter of 1556 as virtually all of Christendom held its breath in anticipation. The days ticked by until the expected time of Iseu's giving birth.
It was in that moment of Christian paralysis that a comet flew. Beginning in February and March of 1556, observers across Europe observed the passage of an immense comet. The account of Bishop Conrad III of Osnabruck describes it as "a torch among the stars," fully half as wide around as the Moon. Another account describes it as being as red as Mars.[9]
The day after the comet was seen in Nuremberg, Empress Iseu gave birth to her only child by Alarich: A girl named Cecilia.
[1] Guanabara Bay.
[2] Yes, Montréal is in OTL Brazil here. The future Montréal is actually OTL Rio, and Mount Royal itself is Corcovado Peak, site of the Cristo Redentor.
[3] Guatavita, Colombia, northeastish of Bogota.
[4] Venezuela around Lake Maracaibo. The lake is known to the Andalusis as the Lake of Stilts.
[5] The departments of Yaracuy and southern Falcón, Venezuela.
[6] Cabimas, on Lake Maracaibo.
[7] San Felipe, Yaracuy.
[8] Tucacas.
[9] The Comet of 1556.
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As the Asmarids recede from the world stage due to the war with the Mahdi, other powers view this as an opportunity. I thought the HRE would've been the one that started its own colonies and not France due to its own internal issues, but it's funny how the roles are reversed thanks to the Lowland Wars and Vulgarity.
France founding Montreal at OTL Rio is very interesting, but they're easily going to incur the wrath of the Romanians who have claimed Berengaria as their own. I sense a war coming between the two powers pretty soon as colonial claims start to overlap and competition in the Algarves becomes much fiercer.
Coming back to the Asmarids, it will be interesting to see how this new Gold Rush will mean for Tirunah in the long term as it gains even more settlers from Andalusia and the Maghreb (especially the former). Agriculture will surely remain the backbone of Tirunah though thanks to the rise of the plantation industry providing valuable cash crops for trade across the globe, but it's a good thing that the influx of gold is contributing to the end of Fakhreddin's rampage in the Maghreb.
The death of Amadeus is eerily similar to Jan Hus who was also martyred, sparking outrage across Central Europe as Vulgarity starts to spread like wildfire. Things are only going to get worse with Alarich's oppressive control over the Vulgar population and his defeat at Attert. I can't help but think that Vulgarity will be much more influential in Germanic regions north of the Alps compared to OTL.
Also, I can imagine a Polandball scene where France is smirking at the HRE for still following Salic Law and getting caught up with a succession crisis as a result (which is ironic given the War of the Five Flowers but whatever).
France founding Montreal at OTL Rio is very interesting, but they're easily going to incur the wrath of the Romanians who have claimed Berengaria as their own. I sense a war coming between the two powers pretty soon as colonial claims start to overlap and competition in the Algarves becomes much fiercer.
Coming back to the Asmarids, it will be interesting to see how this new Gold Rush will mean for Tirunah in the long term as it gains even more settlers from Andalusia and the Maghreb (especially the former). Agriculture will surely remain the backbone of Tirunah though thanks to the rise of the plantation industry providing valuable cash crops for trade across the globe, but it's a good thing that the influx of gold is contributing to the end of Fakhreddin's rampage in the Maghreb.
The death of Amadeus is eerily similar to Jan Hus who was also martyred, sparking outrage across Central Europe as Vulgarity starts to spread like wildfire. Things are only going to get worse with Alarich's oppressive control over the Vulgar population and his defeat at Attert. I can't help but think that Vulgarity will be much more influential in Germanic regions north of the Alps compared to OTL.
Really? Angland and France didn't even fight each other for the past few centuries until now. It's nothing like OTL where they fought several destructive wars (such as the Hundred Years War) from just the Middle Ages alone. I'd imagine Scotland as a more iconic rival for the dragon.
Oh no....a daughter when there's no Pragmatic Sanction? Now a war between rival German states is inevitable as the Emperorship is up for grabs, and that will inevitably draw the other Europeans in. Scratch the war between Romania and France, it could involve practically every major power in Western Europe, perhaps even the Asmarids once they get rid of Fakhreddin.
Also, I can imagine a Polandball scene where France is smirking at the HRE for still following Salic Law and getting caught up with a succession crisis as a result (which is ironic given the War of the Five Flowers but whatever).
Great chapter, I think the HRE got -3 stab event.
I believe the instability of the HRE will be helpful to the ottoman's ITTL ( I forgot ther name)
I believe the instability of the HRE will be helpful to the ottoman's ITTL ( I forgot ther name)
The Bataids. I don't think this succession crisis will be helpful because they're basically on their way out, assuming Aidamir successfully usurps the Bata dynasty.
No, the real winners are clearly France, Romania, and possibly even Poland-Ruthenia, as all three are poised to contribute heavily to the war.
Perhaps, but I doubt it will happen because Romania is both a great power militarily and has allies in Al-Andalus and possibly Angland. A French victory would be pretty humiliating for the Romanians, though.
I'm not so sure- the principles of consensus and negotiation still pervade the empires political culture, and there are still strong institutions through which this can be carried out. Especially given how important printing is and the relatively unified public sphere within the empire, this will mostly be decided by consensus.
I think we're at a point similar to Francis I's candidacy, where Charles V was chosen largely because he was seen as the more German candidate. There is no chance of people fighting for the right of an infant girl to become empress regnant. The question I have is what happened to Alarichs daughters from his first marriage- the empire is not a hereditary monarchy but dynasty is respected, so their husbands would have decent shots in a Reichstag at bidding for the vacant throne. It's difficult to say because we know so little about the hres internal map atm, there's no large powers left that we know of and there aren't any formal electors that we know of, so presumably all princes of the empire consider themselves equal. In that respect the most obvious parallel is the great interregnum of otl in the mid 13th century- a succession of emperor's from different dynasties unable to solidify their claim or succession due to a lack of personal funds separate from the imperial office. With vulgarity already in full swing, and the empires institutions looking for ways to ensure that everyone pays taxes, I see this empire becoming a princely Republic within a few decades unless and until the daughters of alarich are married to people with enough *indivisible* personal land to fund their candidacies and solidify imperial power.
If any of Alarichs daughters are married to kings from denmark-norway or France, that's where issues of outside influence could arise. Foreign kings could just campaign on the basis of their wealth, but without a dynastic claim i doubt it would stick.
I'm trying to figure out how iseu and Cecilia could come into this- Cecilia obviously also has the same power as older daughters to give legitimacy to someone's claim, but her half sisters have husband's who can make their claims now while she herself is an infant. If her half brothers in law are all more minor nobles who don't have the money to ensure the crown stays in their line long enough for her to get married, as well as the removal of male heirs to Romania- perhaps we get a situation similar to Maria Theresa where Cecilia rules in her own right in Romania and funds her husbands candidacy, and then the wealth of Romania ensures the imperial crown remains in their family. No need for any pragmatic sanction either as women aren't barred to rule in Romania. If Cecilia isn't also herself queen though, even if her husband can leverage her status into a successful bid for the crown, they wouldn't have the money to secure the crown for future generations.
I quite like the idea of the empire becoming a princely Republic though, with a figurehead emperor while all real decisions of empirewide importance are taken by the Reichstag.
Now's as good a time as any to ask about the linguistic situation in the empire- is middle low German maintaining its prestige or is high German taking over as in otl?
Did the bits of the kingdom of burgundy that are in the empire Germanise? Did they develop their own standard form of Franco Provencal, or do they just see arpitan as a dialect of Romanian? Oh also, does the King of Romania claim a place as a prince of the empire because of Provence in the same way the spanish kings did otl because of burgundy? Is Bohemia germanising quicker without the Hussites? Also did a prestige dialect ever emerge in Italy? Or does the language hierarchy in Italy go Latin->Standard Romanian-> gallo-italic/italo-dalmatian local language
These language questions have political consequences because it would affect the degree to which the empire is envisioned as a distinctly German business as opposed to a congress of different kingdoms and nations, united under the theoretically universal power of the emperor.
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Planet of Hats
Donor
Romania is absolutely certain to get caught up in the post-Omen of 1565 conflict. Iseu is, after all, the daughter of Berenguier the Pious, who is himself the recognized champion of the Papacy, in control of the strongest kingdom opposed to Vulgarity if you exclude a unified Holy Roman Empire.
Standardization is far from complete, in large part because a lot of that depends on a common written language handed down somewhat centrally, which usually means a printing press. The north of Burgundy is semi-Germanized but has large populations of Arpitan-speakers, and Berenguier fancies himself king of that region by right of Romania's descent from the Arelat and Provence. This is entirely a de jure claim because Romania, while rich, does not have the schmotz to take on the Holy Roman Empire alone in an offensive war. It's won unlikely victories and seen defensive successes, but going on the offensive in the Alps against the Empire is a massive undertaking.
German is not presently unified - there are a lot of dialects, broadly similar to how they fall OTL. In general, Low German predominates in the north and into what used to be Prussia and Livonia. High German has spread northish a little more because the Geroldsecks came from Swabia and spread a Swabian dialect north, pushing it even into the Rhineland marginally, but it's far from total. As for Bohemia, it's a little more Germanized than in life, but that's starting to wane.
Bohemia actually does not have entirely clean splits. It's on the edge of being pro-Rome - the German population there tilts it slightly that way, while if you're a speaker of Czech first, you're more likely to be a Vulgarian. But it's not a clean binary - there are Papal loyalist Czechs and Vulgar Germans.
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I don't know that they have to take on the holy Roman empire? They could very well press their legal claim such that in some treaty or other people in the empire are willing to just hand it over if the smaller nobles in the area are given recompense and the territory remains part of the empires taxation/political structures. Romania would get the money from the territory which is due to the prince, and the empire gets what's due to it too.
And as for the literary standard? Is that based on low German, or a koine style mix? Are there multiple literary standards for the different German nations- in the middle ages, not that nationalism existed, but people probably thought of there being multiple German nations.
Planet of Hats
Donor
It's a regional mix right now. Swabian's the most common High German dialect and has some prestige because the Geroldsecks ran a good ship for some time and Swabia in general is considered an important region, and it has a bit more of a distinct identity, but there is no single German literary standard. They don't think of themselves as a fully unified whole yet, either. They're different people with much in common, but much not.
Were the Bretons' famed sailing skills butterflied away? They've ranged as far around as the Basques did on the ocean.
Corcovado Peak is a bit far from the sea. Would this mean Montreal is at Botafogo, the nearest shoreline to it? The lake Lagoa is closer to it, but at this time, it's more like a shallow and swampy lagoon. Interestingly, the Pao de Acucar/Sugarloaf Mountain was an island at the time (the land connection was a fill-in made by the city in the 17th century - the strait was narrow and shallow anyway). You can see it in the map of France Antarctique:
Translation of the caption below the map:
French map of Guanabara Bay, c. 1555. Rich in details, it shows the original topographic conformation of the Sugarloaf Mountain (here called Pot de Beurre ), away from the beach. With the hills of Urca and Cara de Cão, it formed the "Island of Trindade", which today is integrated to the mainland as a result of silting and a landfill at the end of the 17th century. Another curiosity is the indication of points of interest, sometimes in French, sometimes in Tupi.
A martial version of Frederick III, Prince-Elector of Saxony? I dig it.
It is. Martin Luther was initially horrified to find that he has arrived at similar conclusions as the heretic Jan Hus before studying him further to develop his belief system.
What actually pushed the election in Charles V's favor is his borrowing immense sums of money from the wealthy Jakob Fugger, and using it to
Planet of Hats
Donor
I'd say Botafogo might be the peak in question, yeah. Sometimes my sense of perspective is a little off. I always appreciate a fresh set of eyes.
Ah, Isseu. To sleep away her youth with a prune and not still not delivering the cherished result of her no love-no lust union. I feel sorry for her. And German states are in deep shit. I agree with some readers that Amadeus is like Jan Hus but his legacy is more widespread, think if church executed Martin Luther and imagine what would have happened. I hope Romans can now snag Croatia thus bringing the entire region south of Danube under their thumb( be it Bataid or Aidamurids) while Hungary busy in North.
And despite a head start, Asmarids are not half good colonisers as OTL spain. I wonder if it is an AH cliche that Muslim colonization is slower and less bloodier. Again makes me wonder if colonization would have sped up if the Asmarids were replaced by Almoravids/ Almohad equivalent of ITTL. Despite recently gobbling up the last christian kingdoms of Iberia, there isn’t an iota of holy war zeal in their spirit. Perhaps absence of christian equivalent of Ottoman threat is also a factor here and the continued trade from Jabel Tariq to Nusantara nullifies the economic incentive for going conquistador mode. But with gold discovered, I wonder if we will see that change?
And despite a head start, Asmarids are not half good colonisers as OTL spain. I wonder if it is an AH cliche that Muslim colonization is slower and less bloodier. Again makes me wonder if colonization would have sped up if the Asmarids were replaced by Almoravids/ Almohad equivalent of ITTL. Despite recently gobbling up the last christian kingdoms of Iberia, there isn’t an iota of holy war zeal in their spirit. Perhaps absence of christian equivalent of Ottoman threat is also a factor here and the continued trade from Jabel Tariq to Nusantara nullifies the economic incentive for going conquistador mode. But with gold discovered, I wonder if we will see that change?
Come on france time for the big blue blog to expand. Take back back Romania and kick the HRE down.
Planet of Hats
Donor
I actually think my next project might be a close-in map of Europe highlighting not just the top-level kingdoms and empires, but individual constituent fiefdoms. We are approaching the era of greater centralism, where control over land matters more, particularly in the HRE following the Omen of 1556. Getting a sense of what's to come practically demands a more in-depth look at who controls what and how hideously fractured the inner lands of the various kingdoms can be.
The Wittelsbach realm, for ex, is not contiguous, and there are cadet Geroldsecks ruling various fiefs around the German realm, particularly in Swabia but also in Bohemia.
The Wittelsbach realm, for ex, is not contiguous, and there are cadet Geroldsecks ruling various fiefs around the German realm, particularly in Swabia but also in Bohemia.
Because the nature of the regime,. Muslim prefers local vassals states and very specific colonies, but did have some blood and tirunah if well develop can be a gold mine with gold, emeralds, sugar and coffee