Moonlight in a Jar: An Al-Andalus Timeline
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Planet of Hats
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The Azores - and by that, I mean the Maghurin Islands - are solidly Andalusian real estate at this point. However, there's a majority Mozarabic Christian community on the island of Iman (Santa Maria). Imani Christians tend to be fairly friendly to fellow Christian visitors.
The Asmarids control a lot of the Atlantic islands useful for crossing: The Canaries (Kaledats), the Cape Verde archipelago (Mufajias), the Maghurins and presumably St. Helena, which I will eventually find a name for. They've missed or ignored smaller islands like Ascension, Gough and Tristan da Cunha, as well as ones they perceive as useless, like St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks.
An important one the Andalusians have not bothered with so far: Bermuda. They usually just go around it because of reefs and bad weather.
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How will Andalusian colonisation in America go: settler colonies like England, or more trade post-based like France?
I thought azores was Andalus..that was madeira? i always confuse those.
Planet of Hats
Donor
It's been fairly trade post-based so far, with obvious warlordism-based exceptions like Mawana and the conquest of the Yucatan. The trade posts tend to spawn plantations once epidemic diseases take their toll. Along the Amazonian coastal area, for ex, there are brazilwood, sugar and indigo harvesting operations.
And the Conquest of Taino/OTL Dominica...that did was a little over zealous and brutal, even by Muslim standards
Ah thanks for reminding that buddy.
The thing Mawana was eeire familar, was excatly what spain and portugal do OTL...and kinda make sense as Andalus represent both states ITTL.
one thing looking over the point author brought up of 'moorish people' i will find interesting how will the social construct of race and ethnicity work? As andalusians are seen as the same yet have a diverse background.
I’m finally caught up again, and can I just say once again that this tl is mindblowing in both scope and depth, and the detail is simply exemplary. If I may, I have a few questions-
Concerning the religion in northern South Asia- what is the religion of the Khanate of the Panjab? Are they Muslim? If so does the steppe tradition mean there is less of an emphasis on Islamic orthodoxy as giving the right to rule, or is the lack of a Mongol empire enough to weaken that tradition? Has islamisation of the peasant population made any real headway? Is the state relatively bureaucratic or is it essentially a tribal confederation?
Have the Andalusis introduced the Algarvi crops to India yet?
With both the Tarazids and their successors, how is the interaction between the Persianate and the Sanskritic cultural complexes going on? With the survival of Hindu Buddhist cultures in Nusantara, (and continental Southeast Asia?) is the Sanskrit cosmopolis showing signs of retreat to India as otl or is it more sustainably trans regional? Obviously they remain primarily Persianate but are the Muslim conquerors identifying themselves more with it than otl, as I think they must have to have primarily Hindu successor states in the core of their realm.
Though the Tarazids have collapsed, I am incredibly impressed by the centralisation they managed to achieve in a single dynasty, as evidenced by its longevity (for a Delhi Sultanate) and the collapse upon dynastic change, and I think north India’s fragmentation into Hindu statelets is a legacy of this- the Tarazids must have kept a much tighter grip on their armed forces, preventing the rise of a Muslim warlord class able to create their own power base. I think the system created could well have been different from otls iqtadari system, but is it an earlier proto jagirdari system or something else entirely?
Otherwise I think it would have been more similar to otl in that dynasty after dynasty would be replaced by ambitious vassals, and the country would consist of a patchwork of fiefs governed by a semi independent Muslim military elite. Ittl, was it something more like the Bijapur sultanates use of Brahmins as revenue collectors and governors? I can’t imagine an early Muslim sultan of India patronising a class of Hindu military elite over a Perso Islamic one, so an overmighty bureaucracy makes sense.
Also there’s no chance the period where Persianate rulers adopted sanskritised perso Arabic terms such as Hindurayasuratana (Sultan among Indian rajas), Hammir (Amir) and personal names such as Ibharama (Ibrahim) and Samsadina (Shamsud din) managed to continue on is there?
The fatal flaw of these polities remains though, in their inability to get good horses as more western states control the prime horse breeding grounds and trade routes. I think even the Badayun Sultanate is cut off from these- I’m excited to see the next wave of conquerors from the west.
With the Badayun Sultanate, you mention that the Muslim ruling class is influenced by a relatively strong majority Hindu bureaucracy, which makes sense given the lack of mongol complete and utter devastation pushing Perso-Islamic literate refugees into Hindustan. States like that otl (looking primarily at the Deccan sultanates) were very culturally syncretic, which could be quite exciting. A common plague they faced was racial tension between Middle Eastern immigrants and native Indian Muslims- is that much of a thing ittl? Which caliph do the Indians follow, and have any made the step of declaring themselves caliph yet? Is there the otl consensus that sultanates are only legitimate if validated by the Abbasid confirmation, or was that butterflied?
Moving southwards, can I ask about the government structure and political culture of the seuna dynasty? I gather they were founded some years after the introduction of the Sultanate system to India, my question is did they adopt the Sultanate system as the Vijaynagar empire did later otl? It reduces the impetus on the king to distribute land to his vassals as in the sanskritic system so could be a factor in increased resilience- it definitely was for Vijaynagar, who took the title Hindurayasuratana before any traditional Hindu titles. Are andalusis or other Muslims present in the seuna government as advisors or bureaucrats? How’s the diffusion of gunpowder technology going?
Is Bengal more similar to the kingdoms of aryavarta or the southeast Asian Hindu Buddhist kingdoms?
Is indo Chinese intellectual exchange happening? I’d definitely imagine at least some embassies are being sent from the South and central Indian states to China.
Also I don’t think I ever really understood the whole hre vs papacy situation?
Apart from that, I’m just really glad this exists and I’m excited to see what’s coming next.
Concerning the religion in northern South Asia- what is the religion of the Khanate of the Panjab? Are they Muslim? If so does the steppe tradition mean there is less of an emphasis on Islamic orthodoxy as giving the right to rule, or is the lack of a Mongol empire enough to weaken that tradition? Has islamisation of the peasant population made any real headway? Is the state relatively bureaucratic or is it essentially a tribal confederation?
Have the Andalusis introduced the Algarvi crops to India yet?
With both the Tarazids and their successors, how is the interaction between the Persianate and the Sanskritic cultural complexes going on? With the survival of Hindu Buddhist cultures in Nusantara, (and continental Southeast Asia?) is the Sanskrit cosmopolis showing signs of retreat to India as otl or is it more sustainably trans regional? Obviously they remain primarily Persianate but are the Muslim conquerors identifying themselves more with it than otl, as I think they must have to have primarily Hindu successor states in the core of their realm.
Though the Tarazids have collapsed, I am incredibly impressed by the centralisation they managed to achieve in a single dynasty, as evidenced by its longevity (for a Delhi Sultanate) and the collapse upon dynastic change, and I think north India’s fragmentation into Hindu statelets is a legacy of this- the Tarazids must have kept a much tighter grip on their armed forces, preventing the rise of a Muslim warlord class able to create their own power base. I think the system created could well have been different from otls iqtadari system, but is it an earlier proto jagirdari system or something else entirely?
Otherwise I think it would have been more similar to otl in that dynasty after dynasty would be replaced by ambitious vassals, and the country would consist of a patchwork of fiefs governed by a semi independent Muslim military elite. Ittl, was it something more like the Bijapur sultanates use of Brahmins as revenue collectors and governors? I can’t imagine an early Muslim sultan of India patronising a class of Hindu military elite over a Perso Islamic one, so an overmighty bureaucracy makes sense.
Also there’s no chance the period where Persianate rulers adopted sanskritised perso Arabic terms such as Hindurayasuratana (Sultan among Indian rajas), Hammir (Amir) and personal names such as Ibharama (Ibrahim) and Samsadina (Shamsud din) managed to continue on is there?
The fatal flaw of these polities remains though, in their inability to get good horses as more western states control the prime horse breeding grounds and trade routes. I think even the Badayun Sultanate is cut off from these- I’m excited to see the next wave of conquerors from the west.
With the Badayun Sultanate, you mention that the Muslim ruling class is influenced by a relatively strong majority Hindu bureaucracy, which makes sense given the lack of mongol complete and utter devastation pushing Perso-Islamic literate refugees into Hindustan. States like that otl (looking primarily at the Deccan sultanates) were very culturally syncretic, which could be quite exciting. A common plague they faced was racial tension between Middle Eastern immigrants and native Indian Muslims- is that much of a thing ittl? Which caliph do the Indians follow, and have any made the step of declaring themselves caliph yet? Is there the otl consensus that sultanates are only legitimate if validated by the Abbasid confirmation, or was that butterflied?
Moving southwards, can I ask about the government structure and political culture of the seuna dynasty? I gather they were founded some years after the introduction of the Sultanate system to India, my question is did they adopt the Sultanate system as the Vijaynagar empire did later otl? It reduces the impetus on the king to distribute land to his vassals as in the sanskritic system so could be a factor in increased resilience- it definitely was for Vijaynagar, who took the title Hindurayasuratana before any traditional Hindu titles. Are andalusis or other Muslims present in the seuna government as advisors or bureaucrats? How’s the diffusion of gunpowder technology going?
Is Bengal more similar to the kingdoms of aryavarta or the southeast Asian Hindu Buddhist kingdoms?
Is indo Chinese intellectual exchange happening? I’d definitely imagine at least some embassies are being sent from the South and central Indian states to China.
Also I don’t think I ever really understood the whole hre vs papacy situation?
Apart from that, I’m just really glad this exists and I’m excited to see what’s coming next.
The Seunas existed OTL as a successor dynasty to the Later Chalukyas, so at their core they'd probably be modeled on the Karnataka/Deccan imperial system predating the Tarazid invasion for 400 years or so. They might since have tacked on northern-Muslim practices since conquering Gujarat and Malwa, creating an entity that evolved from similar circumstances as Vijayanagar but isnt quite the same. Provincial governance probably looks more like the Tamil system of subordinate dynasties more than the Vijayanagar Nayak system, since there was no Khilji/Tughlaq invasion to thoroughly scramble South India's administrative structures and make way for new ones.
EDIT: Personally, I think Hindu-raya-suratrana would be a less appealing title TTL since the term "sultan" lacks the same connotations of military supremacy over all India. Also (and I did not know this before) the form of Buddhism in the Pala Dynasty drew from the traditions of Tantra, to the point where it can be considered a precursor of Tibetan Vajrayana. So we possibly have Tibetan Bengal, how fun.
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Do we think that’s a sustainable system? Unless there is reform, i think all you need is a sultan whose united north India but can’t expand into Central Asia to begin putting pressure on it before it crumbles.
Has the institution of a centralised Lama hierarchy developed yet? If it did would the highest be an Indian, as Indians were in widespread demand as teachers of Buddhism in Tibet otl in this period or would there be a more nativist backlash centring the system in Tibet in a Buddhist government.
Ah, but in this case the Tarazids crumbled first! Of course, OTL the Bahmanids also crumbled first, for all the good that did Vijayanagar.
The Tamil multi-dynasty complex usually looked like one dynasty, based in its centuries-old stomping grounds, largely pursuing its own natural aims-- just with the help (or at least passive assent/non-interference) of the subjugated dynasties. The east-coast Pallavas and Cholas focused Southeast Asia, the west-coast Cheras looked to the Red and Arabian Seas, the inland Pandyas looked inward (which sounds bad but for what it's worth, Madurai is still the center of high Tamil culture a thousand years later). Crises led to usurpation, but not extinction-- a dynasty cast out of paramountcy could keep reigning in its own province and fight another day, I believe the Cholas and Pandyas both got two "terms of office" in before Malik Kafur's invasion.
So theoretically, if the Seunas maintain themselves as a hegemony centered on a northerly state with the natural aim of holding the line in Malwa (which might well be what they are already) then they may not fail too badly at that. I mean the Marathas had a similar model over more or less the same area, and while internal turf/prestige disputes were a nuisance the Holkars, Shindes, Gaekwads, and Bhosales did well in their spheres of choice, and never totally shattered-- they could still generally act in concert even after defeats like Third Panipat against the Durranis. But then again, they did lose at Panipat despite being the strongest entity in India at the time. But then again, the Durranis themselves were pretty much a non-entity from the moment of Ahmed Shah's death, and the Marathas successfully outlasted them... Simulating the results of new invasions from the west gets hard, but even if a Hindu dynastic federation loses the Gangetic plain, it might still get the last laugh if it holds together and its enemy doesn't. Within two decades of the loss at Panipat the Shinde family were the suzerains of Agra and Delhi.
A complicating factor for reform of the Seuna system is that, unlike the Maratha system, the dynasties under the Seuna umbrella probably don't share the same origin. They don't strictly owe anything to each other and have their own sources of legitimacy, rather like the Tamil system. The family that stands to benefit the most would be the one (if it's not still the Kakatiyas) that rules Telangana and its diamond mines.
By the OTL 1400s the Tibetans were in the middle of sectarian warfare between sects founded by natives, with the winner being Je Tsongkhapa's Gelug order. Bengali travelers could still be influential voices with the prestige to establish dissenting schools/their own reincarnation-chains and ally with noble houses to get access to their troops, but the existing political, economic, and military organizations behind Tibetan Buddhism might generally be more comfortable with debating Tibetan interpretations of older "original" Indian texts than accepting newer texts coming from the same place.
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I guess the question is has the Buddhism of the Radhas maintained enough vitality that Bengal is still seen as an intellectual centre as opposed to otl where Buddhism in India was less than a shadow of its former self.
That's the kind of thing that would appeal to the founder of an order more than his successor. In Europe plenty of noble houses had members in the Catholic Church, blurring the line between aristocracy and clergy and allowing each to appropriate the powers of the other. In Tibet, lamas tend to be recruited the same way, with similar effects. So a religious reformer could certainly be captivated by currents in Radha Buddhism and attract like-minded people, but eventually his order will become an institution with political motives, and intellectual decisions will bear the influence of that. Let's say the Radhas and Tibet start feuding over Nepal, for instance...
And People forgot that a lot of andalusi(specially merchants and nobility) like to get wife and concubines from northern europe, making the ethnic make up of the country even more diverse
Its going to be interesting i removed that part as i didn't want to sound weird such as how 'white' people are very diverse nordic and native iberian.
Its going to be interesting how nations form when religion takes a back seat as generally its based on ethnicity. Here its simply not the case, black jews, catholic greeks, a balkanised england.
Will cultural superiority be the new thing instead of racism?
Are Nordic woman the circassian woman of this world ?
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Circassian Beauties would still exist, the Bataids are just right there too.
Possible, very possible