Moonlight in a Jar: An Al-Andalus Timeline

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: First Contact: Muslim Explorers in the Farthest West and the Sudan - Salaheddine Altunisi, Falconbird Press, AD 1999

3
Complex Societies​

The return of Ibn Mundhir from Kilwa sparked off a flurry of excitement in Andalusian merchant circles. While the trading networks of the Zanj had been known intellectually, particularly among travelers who had been on the hajj and met Muslims from these regions, they had formed a very distant link in a trade chain laden with intermediaries and middlemen, with most actual trade from the east filtering into Andalusia through friendly trading zones like Amalfi, the coastal cities of Ifriqiya and the island of Melita, which by now paid tribute to Sicily. All of these intermediaries toiled under heavy pressure from Genoa, Venice and Marsilles - and the 1343 earthquake which struck Amalfi would effectively end that city as a trading power, giving Genoa and the Grand Duchy of Provencia a free hand in Christian trading circles west of the Italian Peninsula.

The ability for Andalusian traders to circumvent the Mediterranean trade, in other words, was a welcome lifeline at a time in which key trade routes threatened to close on Iberian Islam and on the Maghreb. By 1346, two ships departed Isbili, entrusted by Hajib Husayn to a distant cousin, Hamdin ibn Wathima al-Hizami. This flotilla's objective was to reach Mecca by rounding the Sudan.

Ibn Wathima's voyage would never make it to Mecca. The ships stopped at the bustling trade port at Taj 'Akhdar and Marsa al-Mushtari, then continued south to follow the route of Ibn Mundhir. The stopover in Marsa al-Mushtari is the last recorded sighting of the vessels, and it's assumed that Ibn Wathima's expedition met the same fate as no small number of ships attempting to round Ra's al-Awasif: The area is prone to powerful storms and waves, making navigation treacherous, particularly for adventurers unprepared for the conditions there.

The failure of Ibn Wathima's voyage did not deter further exploration and efforts to make contact with the Eastern Sudan. In 1350, another explorer, the Saqlabi Darras ibn Ghalib al-Dani, set out with a charter from the Hajib, this time bringing two saqins and a tur full of precious goods. This voyage proved more fruitful than Ibn Wathima's: Ibn Ghalib and his fleet successfully rounded the southern tip of the Sudan, then sailed on to stop first in Sofala, then in Muruni in the Juzur al-Qumur.[1] Resupplying in Muruni, Ibn Ghalib continued on to the north, landing briefly in Mogadishu before rounding the eastern tip of the Qarn as-Sumal[2] and then to Aden. Finally, after a last stay there, Ibn Ghalib pressed on the rest of the way, through the Bab al-Mandab and finally up the Red Sea to land in the port of Jeddah.

Ibn Ghalib and his crew remained in the Arabian Peninsula for some time, trading goods and settling in until Dhu al-Hijjah, when they travelled the rest of the way to Mecca to complete the hajj.

Ibn Ghalib's return journey was not without challenge. One of his ships ran around on an unknown island, killing several of the crew. However, the remainder were able to be saved, and the crew was able to resupply the two remaining ships in Sofala before once more rounding the southern tip of Sudan and following the line of waystations home, following the South Atlas Current up the west coast of the Sudan and conducting a broad qus al-bahr out from the Bight of Sudan to return home via the Kaledats.

The journey of Ibn Ghalib set off an even greater frenzy of trade lust. For the first time, the Sudan had been circumnavigated, and a trade link directly to Mecca had been established - and with reports from Ibn Ghalib of Indian merchant ships on the sea, even greater trade possibilities began to percolate in the minds of the merchant classes in the Kaledats and in Isbili.

*​

In 1344, the aging Caliph al-Mustanjid finally died, much to the relief of those who feared a strong Umayyad Caliph holding influence over the Hajib. His successor, Al-Mustamsik, was one of his middle sons, a quieter and more retiring man with greater interest in religious concerns than temporal ones. With Al-Mustanjid having been stricken with dementia in his later life and in a steady decline, Husayn had already come to be more influenced by the merchant class in Isbili than by the Umayyads, particularly with the Caliphs sequestered in Qurtubah and Husayn's centre being in Isbili. This trend continued with Al-Mustamsik, with the key influencers of the Hajib mainly being key families like the Banu Angelino.

The prospect of new trade horizons enticed both the merchant class and Husayn. Already, Al-Andalus was experiencing a trade boom from these new routes: Not only were merchantmen bringing back luxury items like gold and ivory and consumables like the all-important pepper known as the habibat al-jana,[3] or more commonly, the Binu pepper. The spice, with its pungent flavour and citrusy undertone, became wildly popular, and trade in Binu pepper came to employ more and more people, creating spinoff jobs in the shipping and merchant sector. It became easier for commoners to find work on a trade ship, or at a harbour, with key ports like Isbili itself, Al-Jazira, Qadis and the cities in the Kaledats experiencing much of the boom. In turn, the agricultural and production sectors began to swell as farmers and artisans produced goods for trade to the kinglets of the Sudan. Rice, salt, olive oil, sugar, citrus fruits, textiles, weapons, indigo and manufactured goods made their way south, while gold, pepper, slaves, ivory and palm oil made their way back to Al-Andalus. The trade hubs at Taj 'Akhdar and Mihwaria steadily grew in size - as did the slave plantations in the Mufajias, far from official policing and able to bribe away attention. Growth also flocked to the trading cities in the western part of the Mali Empire, bringing with it political power and economic organization.

Even as trade rapidly picked up, exploration of the lands south of the Bight of Sudan continued apace. Some of these explorations were more fruitful than others, but most would portend local consequences.

The Wadi az-Zadazir had long proven a curiosity for Andalusian sailors: As a massive river in the deep Sudan, it had been considered a prime candidate for the long-hoped-for southern mouth of the Nile. Explorations of the river, however, had proven tentative and unfruitful in terms of reaching Egypt, and plunging too far up the Zadazir was considered perilous. An expedition of three vessels in 1346 probed the river but returned with only one half-full watercraft, most of the explorers having been killed or captured by hostile tribes upriver.

However, the kingdoms closer to the mouth of the river proved reasonably fruitful trading partners, primarily in slaves. Andalusian merchants found the Zadazir traders unwilling to accept gold and silver, but willing to accept shell money in various amounts, which the Andalusians exchanged primarily for slaves, but also for the useful palm fabric known as raffia cloth. It appears that it was this trade that introduced rice into the Zadazir; the first cultivation of Asian-style rice dates from this period. While the region had cultivated yams and bananas, the yam is difficult to farm and exhaustive to the soil. Rice proved simpler to farm and to harvest, with much greater versatility. Citrus and new crops from the Gharb al-Aqsa would take longer, but rice would form one of the key pillars which would eventually transform the Zadazir region.

*​

In the Gharb al-Aqsa, meanwhile, the outpost at Makzan al-Husayn seems to have persisted despite struggles with both the natives and the climate. The locals cultivated Andalusian crops like rice and citrus but soon added qasabi and slender beans[4] to their diet.

The group at the makzan - headed up by another cousin of Husayn's, Hakam - had set up a small plantation to grow citrus and sugar for trade with the natives. However, efforts to recruit locals to work there seem to have run into the problem of disease: Local workers from the Tupi and Marayu ethnic groups were much more susceptible to disease than the Andalusis, and even with treatment would succumb relatively quickly. While trade with the surrounding tribes seems to have been fairly steady, the population of the outpost also declined due to raids, and a palisade was constructed after several members of the expedition team were captured and allegedly eaten. A ship was sent back to Isbili after a couple of years, seeking new workers and new men - and readiness to hand off a shipload of local goods.

When Al-Mustakshif returned in 1348, it was with eight ships, five of them carrying Zanj workers. It was also with a new wife: He had taken Hadil as one of his wives between his two voyages, and she had apparently converted to Islam and become a fluent speaker of Arabic. She had also borne him a son, Muhammad. Having apparently recovered from a severe illness after the second voyage, she was considered an example at court in Isbili of the amenability of the natives of the Gharb al-Aqsa to Islam - proof, in some ways, that their nature was innocent due to ignorance of God.

Al-Mustakshif stopped off at Makzan al-Husayn to drop off the workers, along with a few families and the talented physician Al-Qurtubi. He was obliged to remain for a time to relieve Hakam, replaced by Hasan with a new governor, Abd' Allah ibn 'Amr, a Husayn loyalist from a rich family in Beja. After subduing Hakam and a couple of traders who had taken his side, Al-Mustakshif stopped in the settlement of the Marayu, then continued up the coast to resume his explorations. He visited and named many of the islands in the Sea of Pearls before making contact with the two largest ones on his route: Burinkan and Qisqayyah.[5] The voyage was cut short by an attack by the natives of Qisqayyah, who killed several of Al-Mustakshif's men and wounded him in the arm, and he ultimately returned home to recover, settling down to live out his ways in relative peace in Sheresh.

That same year, another voyage arrived in Makzan al-Husayn: Six ships under Mu'ammar ibn Al-Najib, carrying supplies and kishafa. Four of the ships returned home with another load of supplies, mostly timber, but two remained behind and pressed up the Wadi al-Baraa to try and deal with local tribes who had stymied exploration.

Ibn Al-Najib did not return, nor did his ships. Only a single rowboat made its way back with a dozen men in it, half of them wounded. While they reported they had found dense cities along the river, they had been ambushed at a river fork by canoes full of thousands of men attacking with arrows. Those who had been wounded but escaped died at the makzan not long thereafter, and Al-Qurtubi reported that the arrows were tipped with some sort of lethal poison.

The engagement was Andalusi traders' first run-in with the Tabayu people. While many of the most hostile welcomes Andalusis would get in the Gharb al-Aqsa would come from urban, centralized powers, the Tabayu were a chiefdom - probably the strongest in the Baraa watershed. The report of thousands of archers was probably exaggerated, but the tribe would prove to be an obstacle to trade in the region for decades.[6]

The more consequential voyage was that of Al-Tamarani, an Andalusian from the Kaledats, who bypassed the Makzan entirely and sailed west in 1351 on the back of a grant from Husayn. Al-Tamarani's three ships visited most of the Pearl Sea islands, circled but did not land on Shaymakah,[7] and continued on to explore the coast of the largest island in the chain, Al-Gattas.[8]

Yet the most intriguing discovery came when Al-Tamarani went west from Al-Gattas, following a tip from one of the locals.

~​

The distant cliffs of Zama[9] began to come into view entirely too late for them.

"They're still following us," one of the other rowers gasped as they paddled their canoe for dear life. The bags of incense sitting in the back, bound for the temple, felt entirely too heavy right now for the twenty-man watercraft, especially given what was behind them. Even as he pumped his oar, Ikal cranked his head back to see it again.

The biggest canoe he'd ever seen - larger than the largest watercraft, with shaggy men standing at its edges and shouting down at them. It had appeared out of the great water half an hour beforehand and had been chasing them down ever since.

There was a sudden hiss, then a splash just off to their right. Spray spattered in Ikal's face as a projectile hit the water - launched, no doubt, by one of the bizarre-looking weapons in the hands of the men. Soon something worse spattered the deck as another projectile - long and metal - punched into one of the rowers. With a gurgle, he toppled over the side, taking his oar with him.

The canoe wobbled uneasily with the loss of the rower, two more men jumping for cover. With a yelp, Ikal did the only thing he could think of as he felt the canoe slowing: He dove into the water.

Swimming away from the huge canoe seemed to be the only option, if they couldn't outrun it - or at least trying to dive away and seek shelter somehow. But then, was anything really feasible at this point? His head popped above the surface; he gasped for air, his eyes widening as he watched another man fall from the boat, stricken by that weapon he didn't understand.

Something cold grasped his arm. A hook of some kind, affixed to a pole. Flailing, Ikal struggled to shake himself free of it, but found himself being reeled in. Two of the shaggy men reached over the side of the huge canoe and lugged him aboard, dropping him roughly to the floor of it - a shockingly high floor made of flat planks.

"Don't hurt me," Ikal gibbered. "We are just going to the temple! The temple!"

The two men looked at each other for a moment - but no pain came. One of them finally crouched down in front of him and opened his mouth.

The words that came out were completely nonsensical to Ikal. The young sailor blinked at his shaggy captor. "...I don't understand you," he tried.

The man just blinked at him, before shouting something back. Another man soon joined them, a much darker man, his skin almost black and his body covered by colourful robes. He took a knee in front of Ikal with a small, calming smile - steadier than any of the other men Ikal could see here - and he began to move his hands in simple gestures.

He pointed at Ikal. Curled his hands in a little shrug. Is he asking my name? "...Ikal," he managed, his breath beginning to return, but his fear hardly abating. Those men with the weapon were, after all, still there.

The dark man made a few more gestures with his hands. Pointed to Ikal. Then the canoe, capsized - and off into the distance.

Ikal blinked as he realized what the man was doing. "O-oh," he stammered, before pointing to the canoe as well. "Canoe."

He pointed off towards the distant cliffs. The walls of Zama could just be seen, the structures of the city peeking over them. "To the temple," he explained. "Zama. See? Look - the walls."

"Temple?" one of the other men repeated in a barbaric accent.

"Yes," Ikal managed.

At the bow of the huge canoe, he could see two more men standing. One was the man with the weapon, and the other, a darker man with a thick beard and longer hair, staring at the walls of Zama with intent.[10]

[1] Moroni, in the Comoros.
[2] The Horn of Somalia.
[3] Grains of Paradise - the original name for the melegueta pepper.
[4] The common New World bean.
[5] Burinkan comes from "Boriken" - Puerto Rico. Qisqayyah comes from the indigenous name for the island of Hispaniola - "Quizqueia."
[6] Reports suggest that the Tapajos, based around OTL Santarem, numbered about 250,000 and could field a large army of bowmen and canoes, usually wielding poisoned arrows. Interestingly, they do not speak Tupinamba.
[7] Jamaica, from the indigenous Xaymaca.
[8] The Diver, or the Gannet - Al-Tamarani followed a flock of gannets to the coast. This island is Cuba. If Spanish existed, Cuba would be called Alcatraz.
[9] City of Dawn; that is, the other name of Tulum. The word "tulum" is Mayan for wall.
[10] The name "Cawania" is an extremely corrupted version of the Mayan k'uh nah - "Temple" - which the Andalusis corrupt to "quwunah." From Al-Tamarani's capture of Ikal, he comes to believe that the man comes from Zama Tuloom in the land of Al-Quwunah.

SUMMARY:
1348: Al-Mustakshif makes his third and final voyage to the Gharb al-Aqsa.
1348: Ibn al-Najib attempts to explore the Wadi al-Baraa but is killed by a Tapajo ambush.
1350: The Saqlabi seaman Ibn Ghalib circumnavigates the Sudan, reaching Mecca and completing the hajj.
1351: The mariner Al-Tamarani explores the coast of Cozumel, then captures a canoe of Maya traders. He sights the city of Tulum in the Yucatan, but does not land.

 

[Planet of Hats]

SOMEWHERE OVER THE ATLAS SEA

"I wonder how many native people who joined up with the first explorers," Iqal murmured with quiet wonder.

Outside the window, spray kicked up from the huge thrusters of the hydrocraft as it ripped its way across the Atlas Ocean, sweeping back towards Cawania. The rays of the sunset glimmered over the water, tinting the waves in splendid hues of bronze and gold and red, like a sea of liquid metal. Most of the students had dozed off at this point on the long ride. A few had quietly plugged in earbuds to discreetly play games on their handcoms.[1]

Iqal's preoccupation had gone elsewhere - to some of the screentexts he'd picked up at the various museums they'd visited on what had felt like an incredibly long field trip. The most engaging, however, had been the stories about explorers like Al-Mustakshif and Al-Tamarani.

Their explorations hadn't been conducted alone. The tale of Hadil had been illuminating, of course - but everyone knew about Hadil. The others had held more possibilities - like the story of how Al-Tamarani had captured Mayan men from a trading canoe to translate for him, or how other traders took or bought slaves and taught them Arabic in the hopes of having a local guide.

Not for the first time since he started reading the text, Iqal found himself ruminating on what happened to those local guides.

Hadil, of course, had been married - and she'd borne Al-Mustakshif children. But some of the native translators had apparently been men. Would they have lived the lives of slaves? Would some of them have converted to Islam in order to return to the life of free men? Could they ever find themselves free men within a new society - free men with wives and lives, making new lives for themselves, establishing a place in a world they could never have understood?

Would they have been tacit participants in the deaths of thousands of nations and millions of people?

"This got darker than I thought it would," the young man muttered to himself, hunkering down over the handcom and scrolling through to the next few pages - stories of Al-Tamarani, of the explorers of the Sea of Pearls, of the contacts with the first places of Cawania.

Next to him, Feyik continued to snore lightly, like he'd been for the past hour - and on the other side, the sunset sea streamed past like endless gold.

I wonder, Iqal ruminated yet again.

~​

On balance, they'd been pretty good to Ikal. The thing he liked most was that their god didn't require so much sustinence. The covenants of the Ixlan[2] with their Ala were made with words - regular words, to be sure, but at least it hadn't ended up with him bent over an altar. It baffled him that a god could be so merciful, and he kept suspecting that they'd given up something truly astonishing to buy themselves the favour of their spirit.

How could they not have? The tools and baubles they carried were splendid, and the places they lived were unbelievable. Ikal had spent most of his life in the lands around Zama, though he had been to other cities - he'd been on his way home from Ekab when their giant canoe (they called them the tzakin) had swept in and picked him up, and he'd seen the riches of his people, and even the wealth of the rich men from Mani who strutted through the cities as though all lords owed them something. But the place the Ixlan brought him to had been like nothing he'd ever seen. All the men had let the hair on their faces grow free, and the women tended to cover their hair at least a little. Their buildings were mostly stone and their temples were closed to the sky, and none of their altars ran red with blood.

He'd chalked the grandiosity of the place up to the sickness at first. They'd put him and a few others in the hold on their way home, and most of them had grown ill. Four other men had been with him; one died of his wounds, another of fever, and another man along with Ikal himself broke out in horrifying lesions that oozed fluid. He spent those days in a delirium of agony and pain, praying for death to take him like the other two men were taken.

Death had other plans. He'd emerged from the sickness a different man, his face and hands brutally scarred with the imprints left by the bizarre disease.[3] He'd awoken from the endless delirium in another place, in the place they called an alkazar, in the city they called Al-Jazirah, land they called Andalus, under the care of one of the Ixlan - a man who they told him was a healer.

He was certainly a more tender healer than any of them Ikal had ever known.

Some of them had taken the time to speak with him - though he'd remained in the company of the man who'd fished him from the water. He'd found out that the man's name was Hamza ibn Harith ibn Abd al-Qahir al-Tamarani - a lot of the Ixlan had long names, and Al-Tamarani's wasn't the longest he'd heard. As men went, this one was quiet but intense, with deep, dark eyes that seemed to rarely blink, and he sat with Ikal alongside a bearded scholar, patiently sussing out the meaning in the language of the Ixlan and managing to talk to them a little bit.

They asked him about his land. About where he had been. About his people. Told him they would be going back.

Ikal wasn't sure he wanted to. Life in Andalus seemed to be much more comfortable. And no matter how much he missed home, at least Ala seemed to be a god of mercy.

Maybe there was something to this Ala they talked about. He'd have to ask about it.

~​

Excerpt: First Contact: Muslim Explorers in the Farthest West and the Sudan - Salaheddine Altunisi, Falconbird Press, AD 1999

4
Blood Sea​

The story of sustained Muslim contact with the people of Anahuac and Kawania[4] is a story of deep culture shock, lucrative trade and calamitous change.

The voyage of Hamza ibn Harith ibn Abd al-Qahir al-Tamarani - a Kaledati merchant of Andalusi stock - had revealed that there were complex cities in the Gharb al-Aqsa after all. Much of the exploration of these cities took place under a blanket authorization from the Hajib, with few voyages receiving individual funding, though we know of them through the writings of various explorers in their journals and the merchant-historian Ibn al-Shereshi.

Trade and contact was launched from the frontier depot-station known as Makzan as-Salih, set up as a trading centre on the south coast of Qisqayyah.[5] This trading post, manned by a number of kishafa, dealt in various goods with the islanders of Qisqayyah and others in the Sea of Pearls, though attempts were made there early on to grow sugar. Explorers from this makzan probed the coast of the Gharb al-Aqsa and discovered a few new lands, with the Black Andalusi explorer Ibn Salmun discovering the Buhayrat Rakayiz and making contact with the people in that land.[6]

It was out of the fledgling Makzan as-Salih that Al-Tamarani sailed when he returned, bringing at least one interpreter with him who was fluent in Maya. The explorer made landfall not far from the city known as Tulum, choosing a cove far from the city itself. Rather than approaching, Al-Tamarani - accompanied by a contingent of kishafa for protection - set up signal fires. These apparently attracted curious indigenous people, and a successful transaction was concluded, with Ibn al-Shereshi noting that Al-Tamarani found the natives "willing to trade for gold and silver items, and of jade."

Not all of these contacts were successful. Al-Tamarani had brought several ships with him; one, striking southward to seek more cities, ran aground. Several of the ship's crew were promptly captured by a group of Maya. While some escaped to reach Al-Tamarani, the rescue expedition proved ill-fated.

Al-Tamarani himself and several of the kishafa made their way to Tulum with an interpreter to demand answers. The Maya made a show of welcoming the party of mounted men into the city, but soon led them to the city's temple, where Ibn al-Shereshi records the following anecdote:

"The men who returned from that place said that they were made witness to a horror as they had never seen. They had taken the men before an altar caked with blood, and one had been bent across it, and they watched in horror as his breast was pierced and his heart clutched from his chest. They told us with horror of how the polytheists screamed to their idols, and in that moment they knew that they could only be calling out to the shayatan. Their guides had told them that the idols demanded much of them, but they could not have known it would be such. So struck by horror were they that they struck out at them in fury and slew several of their number, before they were driven beyond the walls of Tuloom, and returned to their ships in the horror of what they had seen."

The account represents the oldest known experience Muslims had with human sacrifice in the Gharb al-Aqsa - leaving aside, of course, the lurid stories of human flesh-eating which often accompany tales of the Ard al-Baraa, often decried as dehumanizing fictions.[7] Ibn al-Shereshi reports that the Muslims returned to their camp and argued over what they have seen. The leader of the kishafa - Ilatig by name - recommended that he and his men return to Tulum and put the Maya to the sword. Al-Tamarani and most of his crew, however, noted that their party probably didn't have enough men to topple a fortified city full of people who knew they'd be coming, even if those men only carried stone weapons.

In the end, the decision was made to sail on, but to stay together as much as possible. The surviving crew of the damaged ship were taken aboard, and the ship sailed along the coast of Kawania with little further incident, eventually reaching an island they called al-Rumuz, for the number of icons of Mayan goddesses scattered there.[8] Ibn al-Shereshi describes tales of the residents here as "peaceful and intrigued by the visit of the Muslims," and Al-Tamarani was apparently able to trade there without incident.

Stories of hostile natives and blood sacrifices circulated - and among the Maya, stories began to circulate as well. Fragmentary records of the period speak of prophecies of "dark men from across the sea, the Ixlan," suggesting that tales of first contact circulated out from Tikal or other incidents.

Al-Tamarani's 1353 voyage would not be the only one. The next well-known voyage was that of the explorer Ibn 'Affan, who reached a place called Yobain and successfully conducted trade with the Maya. This group seems to have stayed awhile, and word seems to have filtered through the Maya world again of visitors. It's in this year that the ruler of Mani, then the peninsula's most powerful city-state - it was ruled at the time by an aging lord likely known as something akin to Glorious Resplendent Jaguar - personally seems to have become aware of visitors from the east.

It was twenty years after Al-Mustakshif's first contact, however, that a party of explorers under a Sudano-Andalusian sailor, Ibn al-Najjar, landed at the place they would call Makzan al-Thariya. There, they encountered a group of men from the city of Cempoala. These men were Totonacs, and they managed to make a few trades with Ibn al-Najjar in precious stones and metals. Impressed by both the goods and what he saw of their city from a distance, Ibn al-Najjar and his crew offloaded at the mouth of the River Cempoala,[9] just downriver from the Totonac city.

Ibn al-Najjar arrived in the region at a time of enormous political crisis: Ethnic groups through the region were beginning to grow wary of the rising power of the Tepanecs. In his six years on the throne, the warlord Xiuhtlatonac, tlatoani in Azcapotzalco, had set to work expanding the dominion of his people through both powerful alliances and force of arms, and many had begun to fear the Tepanecs' rising power.

The arrival of rich, well-armed visitors from the east would put Andalusi interests in the region on an inevitable course to collide with the interests of Xiuhtlatonac.

[1] In the future, smartphones exist.
[2] Ikal doesn't quite know the word "Andalusi" yet. He tends to blanket-refer to all these weird foreigners as "the Ixlan" - or rather, a corruption of "the Islams."
[3] Ikal is the lucky one who survived smallpox, though he emerges horribly pockmarked by the experience. In general, most of the indigenous interpreter candidates the Muslims pick up are at high risk of getting sick and dying, even with Andalusian advances in medical science; they still cannot cure smallpox, but they can try to treat the symptoms. Most of the indigenous folk who get picked up don't get that far and just die on the boat.
[4] The Valley of Mexico (really expanded to refer to much of the region of High Mesoamerican culture) and the Yucatan.
[5] Puerto Viejo in the Dominican Republic.
[6] The Lake of Stilts - Lake Maracaibo.
[7] The Muslims are discovering some of the quirks of the New World.
[8] Isla Mujeres, rife with images of the fertility goddess Ixchel.
[9] The Actopan, on the south side of the river. This location may seem suspiciously close to Veracruz, but it's also a perfectly logical one: It's closer to the Valley of Mexico than a lot of others, Cempoala is literally right there up the river, and Xalapa's not too much farther away. The other big thing is that these guys have money and precious metals.

SUMMARY:
1351: The outpost of Makzan as-Salih is established on the island of Qisqayyah by a team from Makzan al-Husayn.
1352: The explorer Ibn Salmun reaches the Lake of Stilts.
1353: A returning Al-Tamarani lands near Tulum. He manages to trade with the Maya in a few places but also becomes the first Muslim to report on the local tradition of human sacrifice after several of his men are captured and killed.
1357: The explorer Ibn al-Najjar establishes the trading post of Makzan al-Thariya near Cempoala, making trade contact with the Totonacs. Muslim traders first become a factor in High Mesoamerican society.

 

[Planet of Hats]

"On the polytheists of the Gharb al-Aqsa, who raise temples to their wicked idols, who would carve the breasts of the Muslims and raise the hearts to their idols, this is the judgment: Do unto them as by the words given to us by the Prophet, peace be upon him. Some of you have made covenant with the polytheists, and parley with them, and they have honoured you in their dealings and raised no blade against you. Of these, honour your dealings with them, until their term has ended. And yet, of those who disbelieve, and who break their covenants with you, then it is fard to smite the polytheists wherever they are found, and to raise war and ambush against them, and bring them to ruin.[1] For how can there be covenant between polytheists and the Muslims save for those who have come to you in the sight of God and heard the Word? For would you not fight a people who broke their oaths and determined to expel those who bring the words of the Messenger, and they have raised their hands against you? Indeed, fight them, for God will punish the polytheists by your hands and give you victory over them. And those who come to you and seek your protection, grant it to him so that he may hear the word. And if he should repent, then let him go on his way. For it is written: So long as they are upright towards you, be upright towards them. Indeed, God loves the righteous."
​

- Abd al-Gani ibn Mas'ud ibn Salama al-Hafiz, Maliki jurist, Anaza, Juzur al-Ajinit (Kaledat Islands), 1358​

~​

Excerpt: The Travels in the Farthest West in the Lands of Anawak - Ziyad ibn Jalsa al-Qadisi, AD 1369

This account is believed to attest to a voyage which took place in roughly 1358.

I descend into the valley, the one they call Anawak, which the guides say is the home of the greatest of the peoples in these lands. There I gaze upon the glittering surface of a grand lake, one that lies in the midst of the Anawak, and upon its shores, cities cluster. They are great, and filled with structures in the style of the ziqqurah, and they lie at intervals around the lake itself.

We descend with some time into a place that the guides tell us is called Tashquq.[2] Though the mushrikin are said to be barbarous, there is such beauty in this place that we could but stare with awe upon it, upon the terraces and the markets of great colour, where the curious wares and foods of the people are sold. The language they speek is different in this place, and our interpreters can understand only some of the people here. Most of those they speak to seem wealthier than the others of the al-Garbiyyin,[3] for their scant cloth is finer and they seem to carry themselves with confidence.

Many of them come to us with curiosity. They are amazed by the sight of our horses, and some of them grasp at our beards and our cloth, much to the consternation of Usem, the leader of the kishafa who has come with us. They are urged back by the guides, for they tell us that those here have never seen anything like our horses before. This seems to be true everywhere we have gone, for we have seen no beast of burden, nor beast of carriage; all of the al-Garbiyyin walk upon their own feet, even in the great heat of their land. Perhaps this is what gives them their hardiness and their sturdy ways, for all of them appear most healthy and strong, and there are clearly warriors among them.

When our guides speak to them, many of them let out a great cry of amazement, and some follow us as we enter the marketplace of Tashquq. Our guide Shuqtil[4] tells us that they speak to her of us in wonderment, and say that we have come out of the east like the wind. We do not understand what she means by this, but the people receive us with welcome, despite the stories we had heard from some that the al-Garbiyyin are bloody men who wield the knife and cleave the heart from the breast.

We see no blood spilt in Tashquq. We tarry there, and they trade for our wares of fine cloth, and for some of the olive oil we have brought. The goods they sell in the market are splendid. For some of it we are given a splendid vase that appears to be carved with fayruz,[5] and we marvel at the beauty of this thing wrought by the hands of barbarians.

Soon a procession of men comes to greet us, and we are brought to a great structure, where we are greeted by a man in a splendid headdress of feathers. He descends towards us and greets us in soaring words that we cannot understand, and with him there are two armed men garbed in furs, and each carries an odd spear studded with jagged black stones. The guide tells us that this man is named Ashqutuga[6] and that he is the lord of Tashquq.

The lord Ashqutuga asks of us what news the wind brings from the east. We show him the respect we may - for he has harmed none of us - and we tell him that we come from Andalus, and that we seek to know this place, and to trade what we may with the people of Anawak. This seems to satisfy him, and he welcomes us in the name of his gods - we have heard much of the greatest of them, that which they call Qishalguat, who is said to be a dragon.[7] He bids us welcome and sets a feast for us, and we accede to his hospitality, for he has done us no harm.

The food of the al-Garbiyyin is a strange thing. The meal we are given makes much of what is called mahiz,[8] and some of it is made from a vegetable that scorches the tongue like flame. For meat there is always little - Shuqtil tells us that there is nothing like the sheep or the cow in Anawak, and that the flesh of beasts is a thing enjoyed only seldom, by men of the hunt, or by the noblemen. The meat that is given to us is some manner of wild fowl, and the spice of it is strange and fiery. We eat it nevertheless. When we retire for the night, Usem complains of indigestion, and many of us are unsettled by it, though the taste was not unkind.

We tarry for a time in Tashquq. Here, it seems that the people are builders, and they are eager to trade. We speak again to the lord Ashqutuga in a blooming garden, and he tells us that Tashquq is part of a greater land, and that they are allies of the great power, the Tibanaqah,[9] who dwell beyond the other side of the lake, in a place called Ashqabuzaq. Their king, he says, is a great king who is named Shugatuneq[10], and he has a great many allies in Anawak. Many say he is the greatest of kings, the lord of the Tibanaqah. Ashqutuga tells us that his people, they who come from the tribe called the Qulwah,[11] conquered Tashquq itself some years ago with the aid of the people of Ashqabuzaq.

Once more, he asks us to tell him of the east, of the place of the morning star, as the guides explain it to us.[12] I tell him of the minarets of the Andalus, of the great mosque of Qurtubah. Another with us, the faithful Ibn Salih, tells him that we seek to know the world in the name of God. When he asks us, we tell him that we are Muslims, that we have heard the word of the mighty God and His Prophet, peace be upon him.

I do not know if he understands the word of God. But no harm is brought to us, and we leave the next day with many goods - the cargo we brought from the Makzan was cloths, pepper, oil and sugar, and they give us in turn fine cottons, gems of fayruz, small baubles of gold, the luxurious furs of strange beasts, and fine woven cloths in patterns we could scarcely imagine. We made our way south, following the directions of our guide to a place called Qulinjan.[13] The people here are also of the tribe of Qulwah, but the city is smaller, though not unsplendid. It is said here that the temple is dedicated to a heathen idol who commands the rain, but we did not remain long enough to see it, before continuing on to Shawlah.[14]

If you have not tried the kakaw drink, it is worth trying if visiting these places.[15] The people of Anawak make it from some substance they have traded to us, the beans called the kakaw. The drink is cold and somewhat bitter, but hearty, and they flavour it with curious spices and honey. We taste it in Shawlah, where our guides tell us that it can make a man strong. Usem complains of the scum upon it, and says he does not like the heat of the spice they place in it. It is called the chilli.

In Shawlah we trade the remainder of our goods, though we are troubled to find that one of the kishafa has swooned from the excess of heat that day. We treat him with our water and endeavour to find shelter for him. The night passes without incident, and when he is well in the morning, we begin to ply our route back to the Makzan.

It is said by some that the just approach to the mushrikin is the jihad, and indeed, many of the kishafa wish to chastise them, and to drive them out. But when we return, with the trade goods from our sojourn, the wali of the Makzan tells us that we shall stay our hands against those who have not raised their hands against the Muslims, but those who break their pacts and raise against the Muslims shall be chastised and driven out. Those of Tashquq, I am told, will perform the dire rituals before their idols, but they did not do so to us, and we saw none.

We remain at the Makzan, and await a ship for a time. Even then, some of the al-Garbiyyin come to us, most from the city nearby called Zampala,[16] and they come to trade. Some come to us with their sick, and we do our best to ease their affliction, for there is said to be much illness in the land these days. Those traders and kishafa who sail in from Qisqayyah tell us that many of the al-Garbiyyin there are badly afflicted. Perhaps they will become well, and in their time, come to know more of God.[17]


[1] The infamous Sword Verse gets trotted out a lot when it comes to dealing with hostile pagans in the New World; really, a lot of this opinion is cribbed straight from a part of the Quran that I'm trying to be careful with, since it's often OOCly thrown around on these here Interwebs without context and in bad faith. That said, the actual level of butchery is mostly attributable to disease, and Al-Andalus has significantly less overseas warmaking capacity than Christian Spain - though it's a fair bet that you'll see some jihad in the New World, alongside the more prevalent approaches of trading and slave raiding.
[2] Texcoco.
[3] The Westerners. These people are Acolhua, a Nahua group; while many speak a Nahuatl language, the ruling class actually speaks Otomi.
[4] Xochitl.
[5] Turquoise.
[6] His name is actually Itzcotocatl II, tlatoani of Texcoco. The Andalusians are having some trouble with the names.
[7] Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent.
[8] Maize. Interestingly, Arabic adopts the Taino word for it, suggesting that it's gotten around a little through Andalusi adventurism in Brazil.
[9] The Tepanecs.
[10] Ashqabuzaq is Azcapotzalco and Shugatuneq is Xiuhtlatonac, respectively.
[11] The Acolhua.
[12] The stuff about the Aztecs thinking Cortes was Quetzalcoatl seems to probably be a myth, but Quetzalcoatl is definitely the White Tezcatlipoca who has an association with the morning star. Itzcotocatl is at a loss to explain the arrival of these strangers who ride the deer and carry metal armaments and fine wares the likes of which Texcoco has never seen. He does not think the Muslims are gods, but he thinks they must know of Quetzalcoatl. In a way he's as baffled by the Muslims as they are by him.
[13] Coatlinchan, the old Acolhua capital, just to the south of Texcoco.
[14] Huexotla, one of three Acolhua cities.
[15] Chocolate.
[16] Cempoala.
[17] As always, there are disconnects between religious orthodoxy and pragmatism. The farther out you get from the Caliph, the more likely Muslim merchants are to want to make some money off these pagans, at least if no one's trying to bend them over an altar. There's not going to be one approach to New World adventurism because so much of this can be chalked up to individual actions. This chapter emphasizes that somewhat. Y'know, since this TL lives on grey areas and contradictions. The other interesting thing here is that the engagement of Muslims as a distinct political power in the Valley of Mexico is coming later, and contact overall is much slower compared to the Spanish knocking over the Aztecs in no time flat; Tepanec influence does not exist outside the Valley itself (they are a smaller and less objectionable empire than the Aztecs), and the Andalusians are less lucky than Cortes.

SUMMARY:
1358: The jurist Ibn Salama becomes the first to issue a ruling authorizing Muslims to wage the jihad against hostile pagans in the Farthest West. That same year, the merchant Al-Qadisi leads a caravan into the Central Valley known as Anahuac, visiting the lands of the Acolhua and meeting Itzcotocatl II, tlatoani of Texcoco, an ally of the Tepanecs of Azcapotzalco.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: First Contact: Muslim Explorers in the Farthest West and the Sudan - Salaheddine Altunisi, Falconbird Press, AD 1999

6
The First Monster​

While word had begun to filter back to Isbili about the religious practices of the indigenous people of the Algarves, by and large, efforts there were not led by organized government programs, but by individuals with at best sponsorships.

The gap in technical sophistication between Andalusia and Maghrib on one side and the Farthest West on the other was vast - but not insurmountable. While peoples like the Maya and Nahua did not have steel or metal weapons, they were skilled archers, and even flint-tipped arrows could kill if they struck home. But there was also the issue of skepticism. Andalusian religious personages had been hearing news of contacts with "polytheists" from the Sudan for years without issuing blanket jihad against them.

On a broad spectrum, Western Islamic reaction to human sacrifice was inconsistent and had more to do with the actions taken on opportunity than on broad ideological or religious dogma. For instance, on Ajinit in the Kaledats, there are reports that native Island Berbers were killed when it was alleged that they had thrown children off a cliff and into the sea as part of a ritual for the summer solstice. By contrast, explorers deep in the Sudan would occasionally come back with tall tales about sacrifice and cannibalism, most of which went ignored (and none of which have been substantiated by history.) Most often, these sorts of tales were spun for the sake of sensationalism, or as a means of asserting the superiority of the Muslim over the "uncivilized" peoples they met.

There is ample evidence that the complex societies of the Algarves - at least the Nahua and the Maya - did engage in human sacrifice. However, many took these stories as tall tales for some time. Even those who believed them tended to err on the side of jurists like Al-Hafiz of Anaza: Muslims were obliged to fight against those indigenous peoples who attempted to do them harm, but to deal fairly with those who did not. Most Muslims who visited the Farthest West did so with the expectation of trade, at least with the complex civilizations of Kuwunah and Anawak.

Sojourns in the Farthest West, however, were hardly idyllic, and Muslim visitors were involved in no shortage of bloody incidents beyond the incalculable death toll caused by the diseases they brought and spread. The first of these atrocities is, famously, the conquest of Qisqayyah.

When Al-Mustakshif first discovered the island in 1348, Qisqayyah was divided into roughly seven[1] chiefdoms, each ruled by a kashika.[2] The largest and most powerful of these chiefdoms was Mawana,[3] the main one on the island. At the time Al-Mustakshif arrived, this chiefdom was allied with the chiefdom of Kaishkimu,[4] taking up the southeastern jut of the island, through the marriage of the Mawana kashika Maniquatesh[5] to Samani, daughter of the Kaishkimu kashika Aymaku.

Al-Mustakshif's stop there had involved some basic trade contacts with the northernmost of the native people - the island was largely ruled by the Taino people, but minorities such as the Ciguayo people were present as well. He attempted to establish a trading post called Makzan al-Jamal at the northwesternmost chiefdom, apparently called Marien. However, the explorers evidently began to squabble with the natives. Relations broke down when one of Al-Mustakshif's crew kidnapped three native women to take as concubines. The Taino responded by attacking the collection of half-finished outbuildings, destroying them and killing several of Al-Mustakshif's crew. Al-Mustakshif himself took an arrow to the shoulder but survived, and he and his crew fled the island and returned home after watering at a smaller island to the north.

Success on the island began in 1351, when two ships arrived from Makzan al-Husayn carrying supplies and interpreters. These crews, led by Abu Bakr ibn Mutarrif al-Anzi, landed in a shallow harbour and made contact with kashika Maniquatesh of the Mawana. This contact went more smoothly, and the trading post of Makzan as-Salih was established, though it would not prove to be a permanent location.

The island of Qisqayyah grows progressively more humid the further inland you go, with arid zones in the south-central region. The "sweet spot" for Andalusi explorers was seen as the mouth of the Wadi al-Hisad,[6] where the Taino grew plots of qasabi. When a storm damaged Makzan as-Salih in 1352, Al-Anzi - by then assigned by the trade governor in the Kaledats to oversee trade with the Taino - simply moved the settlement to the mouth of the Hisad, re-establishing it as the Makzan al-Hisad. The successor to this settlement - Hisadah - is today the second-oldest Muslim-founded settlement in the Farthest West.[7]

A new group of settlers from the east arrived in 1355 - several dozen families, mostly poor people from the cities who had come in search of gold, guarded by roughly 250 Sanhaja kishafa and their horses, some of them bringing wives and children. This group was led by Mahmud ibn Asafu and consisted mainly of defectors from the Blue Army. At the time, it was typical of the Asmarids of the Maghreb to pay off members of the Blue Army with the promise of work guarding trade ships, and many kishafa in this period were former Blue Army men looking for money in a world where their traditional camel trade routes were ailing. Mahmud and his men arrived with a large chunk of money behind them, with promises that they would be able to make a profit trading gold.

Relations with the Taino had largely been peaceful to that point, with Al-Anzi making a point to try and befriend Maniquatesh. Trade between the two sides had been reasonably brisk, with the Muslims steadily collecting gold artifacts at a smaller scale. However, some in the Makzan insisted that more gold was to be found, and occasional scuffled with the natives cost the lives of a few traders, leading some to argue that the alliance with the Mawana and the Kaishkimu was not being honoured.

By 1356, a power struggle had begun between Mahmud and Al-Anzi. The kishafa outnumbered the initial block of Andalusian settlers and had force of arms on their side. Mahmud felt the quantity of gold they had received from the Taino was not sufficient to pay his men to be there, nor worth leaving the Maghreb for. The feud came to a head in 1357, when Mahmud - against Al-Anzi's wishes - gathered most of the Berbers and went to Maniquatesh themselves. It's clear that his intent was to try and get more gold out of the Taino, but with no objective account of the meeting extant, it's been left to interpretation: Mahmud apologists claim he tried to ask Maniquatesh where gold could be found, while the more typical view is that he threatened Maniquatesh with violence if he did not provide the kishafa with gold.

An infuriated Maniquatesh provided the Berbers with gold and sent them on their way. However, that night, the Tainos attacked the fort at Makzan al-Hisad and attempted to kill the kishafa group. The attack saw about 30 people at the Makzan left dead. The Berbers retaliated swiftly, massacring hundreds of Taino and capturing Maniquatesh's wife Samani, whom Mahmud declared to be his concubine. Mahmud justified his retaliation later in a letter to the trade governor in the Kaledats, which has survived in large part. In it, he claims that "the mushrikin violate their covenant with the Muslims, they make war upon us and conspire to strike down and slaughter those who know God, and what we have done to them is only what is appropriate."

A state of open war blossomed between the Taino and the small group of transplanted Sanhaja. While the Taino had the advantage of numbers and locality, however, disease was beginning to affect them, and the Sanhaja had the advantage of horses and superior weapons. They also had the advantage of increasing numbers of Al-Anzi's supporters on their side, many of them having lost family in the attack on the Makzan. Al-Anzi himself was ultimately killed in early 1357, apparently in another Taino attack.

The kidnapping of Samani infuriated her father, the kashika of Kaishkimu, and brought two entire chiefdoms into conflict with the Berbers. But the arrival of another 100 kishafa in 1357 bolstered Mahmud's forces, and he was able to solidify an alliance with Maniquatesh's rivals in the northern chiefdom of Magua. Over the next year, Mahmud and his northern allies brutalized the southern and southeastern Taino, notoriously capturing Maniquatesh himself and beheading him in front of hundreds of his people. Those Taino he captured were released but forced to collect gold and resources for Mahmud and his men, or to work on the sugar plantations which had sprung up on the island, and the women were often taken as concubines and slaves; those who disobeyed were brutally punished and often killed. Muslims in the Makzan, by contrast, were treated as a prestigious ruling class and given slaves from among the locals.

The result of all of this was a foregone conclusion, leading to the establishment by 1358 of the so-called Emirate of Mawana on the southeastern part of the island, with Mahmud acknowledged as its tacit administrator; he acknowledged the Umayyad Caliph.

The campaign on Qisqayyah is considered one of the more brutal and disgraceful examples of Muslim-and-native contact. Between 1351 and 1358, more than 100,000 Taino died, some by war, others by mistreatment and execution at the hands of the kishafa emirate. The land around the Makzan became a zone not unlike the illegal sugar plantations in the Mufajias, a grey area beyond the eye of the Caliph where unlawful sugar barons - and now gold barons - could ply their trade with a workforce of native tributaries.

Most of the Taino eventually came to pay tribute to Mahmud, who required that native peoples provide him with gold, slaves and other riches on a regular basis. Failure to provide would result in beheadings of men and enslavement of wives and daughters.[8] In the north, those Taino who had allied with Mahmud were allowed to go on with their lives. In the short term, this would result in gold flowing from the hands of rapidly-diminishing Taino and into the hands of the subjugators; the gold trade would be short-lived, though, not outlasting the century.

These factors and others would contribute to the rapid destruction of the native groups on Qisqayyah. In 1348, the island was likely home to as many as 600,000 people. By 1368, there would be less than 50,000 Taino left.[9]


[1] When Columbus showed up, there were five cacicazgos on Hispaniola. Butterflies here have created seven. There are two chiefdoms where Jaragua would be, plus a small one way to the north which has a lot of Ciguayo people living under its thumb.
[2] From the Taino kasike, which lies at the root of the Spanish cacique.
[3] Maguana.
[4] Higüey.
[5] His name is Maniquatex, but the letter X tends to be commonly transliterated as "sh" in Andalusi Arabic.
[6] Harvest River - the Ozama.
[7] Santo Domingo is just too good a location to pass up compared to the rest of Hispaniola. It's got a natural deepwater harbor, a more agreeable subhumid climate and access to a river.
[8] Some people are awful people. Mahmud al-Mawani is an awful person. The Andalusians and their mercenaries are not necessarily any better than the Spanish in some areas. The Tepanecs, Totonacs, Otomis and Maya, with their stone cities, webs of alliances and more complex social and military organizations, may be able to resist by force of arms. The Taino cannot.
[9] No matter what, at least some native peoples in the Americas were in for a bad time at the hands of bad actors like Mahmud. The Andalusians and Maghrebis are neither saints nor angels. Some of them are evil men. Not all of them are - but there are examples. Mahmud is an example of what I (and I suspect most) would consider to be an evil man.

SUMMARY:
1358: The rogue kishafa Mahmud ibn Asafu subjugates most of the Taino of Qisqayyah. The so-called Mawana Emirate emerges, nominally loyal to Isbili, built on the backs of Taino tributaries toiling in fear of the Berbers.

 

[Planet of Hats]

"There is only one proper approach to those who carve out the hearts of men," declared Caliph Al-Mustamsik. "And that is forcing them to change their practices!"

Within the garden of the Alcazar of Qurtubah, seven pairs of eyes turned silently to the Caliph sitting upright on his divan, leaning forward with intensity in his eyes. The fellow, his sandy hair long and wild and his beard poorly-oiled, was practically stiff as a steel pole, his eyes wide with zeal.

Sighing, Hajib Husayn raised a finger to his temple, rubbing in slow circles. "I thought we talked about that, Commander of the Faithful."

Al-Mustamsik was visibly taken aback. He lowered his hands to his lap and shifted uncomfortably in place, fussing with his florid robes. "Well, yes. But there is hardly any other option, is there? If the stories are true, then there are people over there who not only know nothing of God, but who carve out the hearts of innocents! What else can this be but something that must be stopped by intervention?"

"If the stories are true," Husayn reiterated with a small frown. "So let's say they are. Very well. Let's proceed that way. Do you want me to send an army to the Land of Anawak?"

"Well, yes, if it means bringing the true faith and saving those who might be sacrificed," huffed the Caliph.

Sliding forward, one of the viziers - old, white-bearded Zakariyya, the financier - raised his ledger. "Very well, then," he said with a flick of his quill.

The quill darted across the sheet in front of him. "So. An army to Anawak. First I'll need authorization from you for, oh, 200 ships, minimum. We will have to build them all, requiring either a substantial use of lumber from your hima - of which there is not much - or we buy it from Liwaril and pay the rates they set. Either that or we requisition the ships from their rightful owners. Either way, I will require significant numbers of dinars, and if we try it the second way, I will also require sufficient funds to compensate the merchants for the funding they will lose if they're not able to ship slaves and pepper during the peak season, and funds to pay all the dockworkers and foodsellers who will be without work during this shortage of trading ships."

The old financier flicked his quill again. "I will also need your authorization to raise sufficient troops and horses to man those ships, and to staff them with reasonably competent commanders. I will therefore need your authorization to either withdraw murabitun from the valley forts and from the front against the Rum and the Firanj, or you will need to send someone out to raise thousands of additional volunteers, as well as paying them enough to make the journey worthwhile. You will also need to purchase and train sufficient members of the Black Guard, or employ sufficient numbers of kishafa."

As Al-Mustamsik stared at Zakariyya helplessly, the old vizier clicked his tongue. "You will also need to provide sufficient food for each of these men, and their horses, and sufficient food for their return voyage. You will also need to supply sufficient equipment for them to build their own outpost once they reach the Gharb al-Aqsa. You will also need to provide accurate maps of the region and supply us with local guides who can assist the army in living off the land, assuming it is even possible to do so."

"And at that point, the army would either go into business for itself, or walk straight into the hands of the enemy," the burly general Mutarrif ibn Gharsiya pointed out levelly. "As what happened with that group who went over to try and fight the people of Al-Quwunah earlier this year. As I recall, those were mounted Sanhaja, and most of them did not come back."

"I assume you'll also want to launch an invasion of Binu," Husayn put in with a wave of his hand towards the flustered Caliph. "And possibly the region of the Zadazir. As you know, the Zanj there are also polytheists. We could probably do it. As well, we can also send an army down the Baraa to try and defeat the Al-Tabayu as well. We can fight all the world's polytheists within a few years, if you like."

"We would need several million dinars just to get started," Zakariyya finished helpfully. "What shall we sell to begin raising the funds, O Successor of the Prophet?"

With a huff, a thoroughly flushed Al-Mustamsik sunk back on the divan, practically sinking into his robes. His beard bristled with frustration. "Fine, fine, you have made your point," he grumbled. "But I still think it could be done very easily! Mahmud al-Sanhaji gained rule over Qisqayyah with a few hundred men, you know!"

"There are a lot more people in Anawak and Quwunah than on one island in the middle of the ocean," Mutarrif grunted. "It's a little different when you're talking about invading what we are told is a densely-populated valley with cities the size of our own. We might as well be trying to invade the Firanj, except we'd be resupplying the army from across an entire ocean."

"But we can do it," Zakariyya noted pointedly. "We are, after all, at the service of the wise decisions of the Successor."

"We're just trying to inform the Successor of what would be involved," Husayn noted.

"Alright, alright, that's enough!" the paper Caliph grumbled, sinking into a bitter sulk. "I say again that you have made your point. We can send teachers. But I will not prohibit striking against them where possible if they raise arms against the faith!"

"An eminently fiscally responsible conclusion, O leader of the ummah," Zakariyya answered blandly. Husayn had to turn his head to hide a snicker.

~​

Why is it that so many of the Muslims of Anawak light candles when the moon is full?​

~​

Excerpt: The Farthest Mosques: How Islam Spread in the Farthest West - Hedia Addinihn, New Moon Press, AD 2012


The predilections of Muslim conquerors in the Pearl Islands and the less developed regions of the Algarves are well-known and exemplified in the reviled figure of Mahmud ibn Asafu, the despot whose men subjugated Qisqayyah. But by and large, such approaches were not successful against the more complex and organized societies of Kawania and the Central Isthmian Valleys, also known as Anawak or Anahuac. Individual groups of kishafa may have been able to defeat disorganized chiefdoms, but the isthmian peoples represented what historians have taken to calling Central Algarvian High Culture, with urbanized societies, entrenched hierarchies and the ability to raise armies.

In 1356, it appears that a group of kishafa led by Blue Army defectors discovered this firsthand when they made landfall in Kawania and attempted to attack the Mayan city of Lamanai, likely pursuing rumours carried by Al-Tamarani's crew about Mayan religious practices. Stories of this group are fragmentary, but they seem to have consisted of about 150 Berbers, some of them mounted, and most of whom did not return. Adventurers in Kawania found the peninsula thinly-provendered, heavily-forested and quite rugged; living off the land was a challenge, and fresh water was a challenge to come by. Mayan civilization had adapted itself to make do with limited sources of water and slash-and-burn agriculture, but the Berbers had less familiarity with the surroundings and were apparently soundly defeated, with a few of them limping to Qisqayyah by boat with tales of Mayan ambushes and hidden traps.

While it would seem improbable that civilizations without widespread metallurgy or horses would be able to fight off modern warriors from the east, in fact the technological gap between the Andalusians and the Algarvians was not as vast as it appeared. Isolated encounters between rogue kishafa and indigenous warriors demonstrated that even the stone weapons of the Anawakans and Maya could be effective - and even on Qisqayyah, Mahmud ibn Asafu's conquest was completed largely through the aid of native allies from the north of the island.

With these difficulties, saying nothing of the greater priority of defending Al-Andalus itself against incursions from the northern Christians, invading the Central Algarves was never seriously attempted, and the official position of the government in Isbili was to trade and teach. As such, much of the contact with this part of the world comes through merchants and religious scholars (and through Sufis going into business for themselves), with outbreaks of violence mostly local and opportunistic.

When Muslims arrived in Anawak, they found a polytheistic faith heavily rooted in dualism and immediately noted by visitors for the role played by periodic human sacrifice. Contrary to some early accounts, it does not appear that most people in Anawak conducted sacrifice on the scale of thousands,[1] but there is ample evidence that humans were sacrificed. The people of Anawak seem to have been somewhat more ecumenical about it than the Maya, who preferred to sacrifice nobility, and only then on specific occasions. These rituals startled Muslim visitors to the region more than anything and sparked extensive debate in mosques and madrasahs in Al-Andalus and the Maghreb about what should be done about them.

Most cultural and local deities seem to have been a mix of both ancient traditions and more tribe-based ones, but some concepts seemed ubiquitous. Most groups in Anawak, for instance, believed in some form of dualistic pairing of the sun and the moon. Most commonly spread, however, are conceptual deities which seem to have appeared initially at the vast temple complex known by the Nahua as Teotihuacan, or simply the Old City.

Several of the oldest conceptual deities seem to have spread out from the Old City, many of them first recorded by the historian Abu Bakr ibn Mu'ammar al-Katib in his 1369 tome "The Spirituality of the Tribes of the Valley of Anawak"[2] and expanded upon further by later historians of polytheism. Al-Katib is representative of much of the early consensus among Muslims with experience in Anawak, characterizing the native deities as jinn. This seems to have been a natural leap of assumption: While the Anawakan groups describe their deities with the word "teotl," this word seems not to carry the same connotations as the word "God," but rather describes a more animistic and numinous conception of divinity. Indeed, some merchants reported being treated like gods by the Anawakans, likely a misunderstanding based on their being described as teotl in the context of being mysterious and spiritually evocative.[3]

Al-Katib's list of deities features several core concepts in Anawak. He records key figures like the Storm and Rain Jinn (known to the Nahua as Tlaloc and the Maya as Chaac), the Female Water Jinn (known to the Nahua as Chalchiuhtlicue), and the Flayed Mayiz Jinn (known to the Zapotec as Yopi and to the Nahua as the minor corn god Xipe Totec). These figures tend to be fairly ubiquitous in the various societies of Central Algarvian High Culture. Two, however, seem to have been particularly important at the time of the crossing.

The most auspicious was the Feathered Serpent, known to the Nahua as Quetzalcoatl and to the Maya as various permutations of Kukulkan. In Anawak, the Feathered Serpent was seen as a dualistic entity of wisdom, light and the wind, and as a serpent which flew, it was both a creature of the earth and a creature of heaven. As well, the Feathered Serpent was seen as having a more ambiguous relationship to human sacrifice than the other Central Algarvian deities, often being said to not favour it. As such, Quetzalcoatl was often seen by Muslims as "the good god" in the local pantheon.

A more troubling and ambiguous figure for early preachers was the Old Old God. This deity appears to be one of the oldest in Anawak, if not the oldest, and his worship was fairly ubiquitous. He appears to the Otomi as the Old Father. Among the Nahua, he is called Huehueteotl (literally "the Old Old God"), into whom ages the Young Fire God Xiuhtecuhtli; he was also commonly called Otontecuhtli ("The Lord of the Otomi"). To the Maya, he manifests as the concept of Mam, or Grandfather, often applied in Kawania to the oldest deities. The conceptual Old Old God long predates Teotihuacan and is associated with the domestic hearth fire, time, change, aging, renewal, balance, and the renewal of the 52-year cycle of the world. He also seems to have some role to play in creation.

The god, as Otontecuhtli, was the patron of the city of Azcapotzalco, the capital of the Tepanec tribe. A version of him also appeared among the Otomi, who were a ubiquitous minority in Azcapotzalco and other cities and commanded a network of tributaries outright around the north end of the Anawak lake complex, in a city the Nahua called Xaltocan and which has colloquially become known to the locals as "Dähnini."[4] In his guise as the Old Father, the Old Old God was their patron god, who was wedded to their most important figure: Zâna[5], the Queen of the Night, who represented both the Moon and the earth.

Most surviving statues of Huehueteotl, which usually represent the aged, bowed god sitting with a brazier on his head, have been discovered in residential houses, not in temples. He seems to have been a ubiquitous household god. But his priesthood also had a role to play in one of the most important and ancient rituals in the region: The New Fire ceremony, in which the fire of the world was ceremonially renewed every 52 years, a rite which was overseen by the priests of Huehueteotl.

The spread of Islam in Anawak was not facilitated by a grand invasion; it was led by Sufis and more orthodox scholars, who had to grapple with these conceptions of the world. The first such teachers seem to have arrived not long after first contact, likely without authorization from Sale or Isbili, and found their best reception among the Otomi. While it is believed that the Otomi and other speakers of similar languages, like the Mazahua, were the majority in the Valley around the time of Teotihuacan, by the time of the Crossing they were being ever more persecuted and pushed back. Otomi were a major part of the population in cosmopolitan Texcoco, but their ruling class had become increasingly more Nahuatl in their ways and even their language, and while Otomi seem to have been important in Azcapotzalco (sufficiently so that the Tepanec described their patron as Otontecuhtli), the Tepanecs spoke Nahuatl. This seems to have represented the consequence of a steady trickle of Nahua-speakers into the region,[6] the most recent being the Caxcan people, who had settled at the south end of the lake and established their city-state of Teocaltillitzin.

Xaltocan itself was at war on a regular basis, in a prolonged conflict with the Nahua city-state of Cuauhtitlan. Early in the conflicts, the Otomi were the stronger - their city was virtually impregnable, located on an island in the midst of Lake Xaltocan, accessible only by causeways.[7] However, around the time of the Crossing, Tecatlapohuatzin, the ruler of Cuauhtitlan, had begun to make overtures towards Xiuhtlatonac, the ruler of Azcapotzalco, in the hopes of receiving his aid in conquering the Otomi. Xiuhtlatonac himself was renowned as a genius in the fields of both diplomacy and military, and since becoming tlatoani in Azcapotzalco he had been working diligently to expand the city's hegemony.

Nahuatl speakers, in other words, were on the ascendancy, and Otomi speakers were reaching out for sources of relief. Many would find it in the visitors from across the sea.


[1] There has been no Tlacaelel to re-jig the religion, and there is no Huitzilopochtli to demand the very most sacrifices.
[2] Al-Katib is somewhat analogous to Bernardino de Sahagun.
[3] No, Cortes was not Quetzalcoatl. He was just a mystery.
[4] We do not have the Otomi name of Xaltocan. The term "dähnini" is a generic Otomi term for "the town" and suggests Xaltocan eventually becomes important. Incidentally, I'm using the term "Otomi" for the people who call themselves the Hñähñu because the Andalusians tried to figure out how to write "Hñähñu" and drew a blank: Otomi is a tonal language. The term "Otomi" is a Nahua name for them. Basically the Hñähñu call themselves the Hñähñu but are called the Otomi by the Andalusians.
[5] I'm trying to preserve accents as much as possible here because of the tonal characteristics of the language.
[6] This is actually highly controversial; we do not really know who built Teotihuacan and who was in the Valley before the Triple Alliance period. What we do seem to know is that the population of Teotihuacan was multicultural, but with what may have been an Otomi majority, and that after 1000 or so there was a steady inflow of Nahua-speaking Chichimecas into the Valley. The Tepanecs themselves worshipped a god described as "the Lord of the Otomi" and the Acolhua had an Otomi-speaking ruling class before switching to Nahuatl in the 1350s. By the time Cortes arrived, Nahuatl was the lingua franca, and the Aztecs actively suppressed and persecuted the Otomi. This seems to indicate that the Otomi were much more prominent two centuries before Cortes than they were in Cortes's time - but in decline.
[7] Xaltocan is like a tiny Tenochtitlan.

 

[Planet of Hats]

"Advisor, the disease is only getting worse," said Ndä K'eñänjohya.[1] "We have never seen a sickness like this before. What must we do?"

"Only faith in the One can save the city." said the advisor, not opening his eyes.

Silence hung over the throne room as the handful of men there stared blankly at the man seated on the colourful mat on the floor. As always, the dark, bearded man named Abdoulaye gave his advice cryptically at first, then with strange preachments. The ways he spoke of had been strange.

And yet, his insights were keen, and his knowledge of a world far to the east - a world of the dawn - had been valuable. Abdoulaye opened his dark eyes and looked up at K'eñänjohya steadily, no doubt prepared to give more of it.

"I abridge a little, Ndä, for you do not yet understand the language of the Prophet," he began in his melodiously accented rendition of Hñähñú speech, his chin rising slightly before falling into a tangibly more sonorous cadence - the cadence he always fell into when reciting from the word of his jwä.[2] "They who follow the guidance which comes from their Sustainer - it is they who shall attain a happy state. But there are those who close their hearts to this divine writ. And there are those who say they believe, and do not. And in their hearts is disease, and so God lets their disease increase, and grievous suffering awaits them because of their persistent lying. And when they are told, 'Do not spread corruption on earth,' they answer, 'We are but improving things.' Oh, but truly, it is they who are spreading corruption, but they perceive it not?"

K'eñänjohya blinked at him.

"...their telling is that of a people who kindle a fire," the man continued. "But as soon as it is illuminated all around them, God takes away their light and leaves them in utter darkness, wherein they cannot see. Deaf, dumb, blind. And they cannot turn back."

"...Are you saying that these plagues have been sent because another spirit has stolen the Old Father?" asked one of the priests anxiously, rubbing his forehead with one hand. "How could that be? How could the Old Flame be extinguished? We have given all that has been asked."

"And yet you are the man we speak of," Abdoulaye intoned with a crescent moon of a smile. The brilliant white of his teeth stood out like a slash against the deep blackness of his face and beard, his dark eyes twinkling like twin moons. "Are you not that, majä?[3] Are there not those who close their hearts? Has the word been false? All of what I have told you since I came from a place far to the east. Has it not been the word of the One? The message spoken by His Prophet? You tell me you raise worship to the Old Father and the Old Mother. And your disease increases."

The mystic smoothed his hands over his robes. "Because you have heard the Guidance, but you have not understood."

Moving to sink into a seat, K'eñänjohya pushed one hand through his dark hair, squinting at the advisor seated on the floor at the room's heart. "Are you telling me that we are being punished with disease by this God of yours? That it is some retribution for not hearing the Prophecy?"

"Understand what I have told you, Ndä. You have lived here long and given thanks to the Moon and the Sun." The mystic lifted his eyes to the ceiling and held his arms out as if to give praise to something. "But, you do not grasp that they are but part of what the Creator has allowed to be. For who was the creator of the heavens and the earth but God? Who appointed the angels? Who placed the jinn upon the earth with you? What is the Old Father but one wrought from smokeless fire? What is Zana but one born out of light? They walk upon this world and you behold them, do you not? But they are as clay. The pots from which you drink - were they simply created? Or did a potter not craft them with his hands? So it is with a Moon, and with a flame. You gaze upon the faces of jinn and you say, 'This is God.' But what you must understand is that there can be no works without a Designer.[4] For who can be higher than the One and Only?" Again he fell into that storytelling cadence. "For He is the cleaver of dawn and has made the night for rest and the Sun and Moon for calculation. That is the determination of the Exalted in Might, the Knowing."[5]

An eerie silence fell over the chamber. Several pairs of eyes stared at the dark man in wonder.

A lump had formed in K'eñänjohya's throat sometime during Abdoulaye's speech. The ruler swallowed it heavily, then slouched forward in his seat, his elbows on his knees and his eyes falling to the floor.

"What must we do to appease the One and Only," he asked after a long pause.

~​

Excerpt: First Contact: Muslim Explorers in the Farthest West and the Sudan - Salaheddine Altunisi, Falconbird Press, AD 1999


By record, the first significant group in Anawak to embrace Islam was the ruling class of Cempoala in 1359. The city lay closest to the Andalusian trading post at Makzan al-Thariya, and its leader, a man in his 20s, is recorded as reciting the shahada along with his entire court in the hopes of forestalling a disease which had befallen his city.

In general, the spread of Islam in Anawak happened organically, and the most important figures in spreading it were merchants and lone-wolf Sufis and other teachers who roamed beyond the coasts and into the valley itself. Within the Central Isthmian Valleys, it was the Otomi who were most receptive, under pressure as they were from the Tepanecs and their allies. But the spread of the religion is notable in this region because of how rapidly it caught on in certain regions compared to, for example, the southeastern archipelago[6], Persia or even Andalusia itself. Indeed, the closest comparable seems to be the quick uptake of Islam among the Berbers.

Traditionally, disease is seen as one of the key reasons Islam caught on.

Central Algarvian High Cultures tended to view disease as originating from three main sources: Magic, displeasure of the gods, and curses involving tlacatecolotl, or sorcerers. Similarly, certain illnesses were associated with certain gods. For instance, the water god Tlaloc was associated with delirium and pneumonia, while the Flower Prince or Tonsured Maize God was associated with boils. The Flayed God, meanwhile, was associated with ailments like scabies. These diseases tended to be interpreted as the consequences of offending that god. The diseases Andalusians brought with them, however, were largely unknown to the people of the Algarves, despite the fact that the Muslims had no idea they were spreading these illnesses and in many cases seem not to have noticed anything amiss.

With no ingrained immunity, native Algarvians proved highly susceptible to conditions like smallpox, measles, typhoid and other epidemics, and it was not long before a smallpox outbreak swept the Central Isthmus. This outbreak seems to have prompted the conversion of Cempoala. The ruling class there interpreted their diseases as unknown and sought out Muslims, believing themselves to have offended "the Ala." Fragmentary histories suggested that the senior religious scholar at the Makzan recited the Quran to the ruler of Cempoala and soon convinced him and his nobles to outright convert to Islam in order to cleanse themselves.

This reaction was not the only reaction, though among the Otomi of the Central Valleys, something similar happened: Muslims were viewed in Dähnini/Xaltocan as representing a god the Otomi had offended. It would appear that wandering Sufis were influential in promoting this belief, with one notable Sufi by the name of Abdoulaye al-Siddiq acting as an advisor to K'eñänjohya, the king of the island altepetl. It does not appear that K'eñänjohya converted. However, in 1360 there is a record of a ceremony held in honour of a deity called N'ahahontho, in which the people of the city were ordered by writ of K'eñänjohya to turn to the east at nightfall and chant prayers until dawn, when a huge bonfire was lit and a hummingbird was sacrificed.

These preachings formed the root of an early conception of Islam among the Otomi in Dähnini/Xaltocan. The existing moon goddess Zana was reinterpreted as an angel, and the Old Father was reinterpreted as a jinn, with both of them sent by a superior all-encompassing embodiment of the universe by the name of N'ahahontho - the One and Only. This early syncretic cult seems to be the origin of the tradition of lighting candles on the night of a full moon, representing the Old Father and Zana as the two greatest servants of God.

Reactions to Muslim preachers elsewhere were more obscure owing to the paucity of written accounts: Most languages in the Central Isthmus did not have verbal writing systems, instead relying mainly on pictoglyphs as storytelling aids. Much progress has been made in recovering these writings and carvings. In particular, a stone recovered from Azcapotzalco records that in 1360, tlatoani Xiuhtlatonac ordered three Muslim merchants ritually flayed during the month of Tlacaxipehualiztli following an outbreak of disease, giving their skins to the sufferers as part of a symbolic effort to cure the illness. This appears to be consistent with a ritual appeasement of the Flayed God, Xipe Totec.

While accounts are fragmentary even on the Muslim side, given the decentralized and individual nature of trade contacts with the area, it appears that Muslim merchants considered the Otomi more friendly to Muslims than the Tepanecs. Most trade was conducted with Otomi centres like Dähnini/Xaltocan and Nzi'batha[7], with merchants in the Acolhua centre of Texcoco, and with a handful of other cities, including some who made it to the lands of the Purepecha people. However, Xiuhtlatonac seems to have viewed Muslims as sorcerers associated with curses, and Muslims were viewed with suspicion both by the Tepanecs and by their powerful Caxcan vassals.

By comparison, Islam was a more difficult sell among the Maya. The harsh geography of Kawania left Mayan city-states largely spread-out and divided from one another, and while individual city-states chafed under the hegemony of Mani, for the most part the region lacked the intensity of political rivalries that took place in Anawak, Kawania apparently being in the midst of a gradual downswing when Muslim traders first arrived. Battles between Maya and kishafa were largely a stalemate, and Sufis seem to have met with interest mainly from the lower classes, with the upper classes maintaining a stricter hold on their religion than their counterparts in the Central Isthmian Valleys.


[1] ndä is an Otomi word meaning "king" or "master." K'eñänjohya is what happens when I cobble wordlets together but his name is supposed to be roughly "snake peace." He has some quetzal leanings, in other words. I have no idea if this was a real name, but Otomi names have not really survived.
[2] God.
[3] Priest.
[4] Al-Musawwir is one of the names of God.
[5] Surah Al-An'am 6:96. You may be getting the idea at this point that Abdoulaye is a West African marabout who has learned the Otomi language and caught on as K'eñänjohya's griot. He interprets the Otomi gods as jinns and incorporates their pagan perspective into teaching Islam.
[6] Southeast Asia.
[7] Metztitlan.

SUMMARY:
1360: Amidst an outbreak of smallpox in Xaltocan, King K'eñänjohya - guided by the advice of his griot, Abdoulaye al-Siddiq - orders the people of Xaltocan to pray to the God of Islam for relief. This translates into a syncretic ceremony in which God is interpreted through Otomi traditions as a creator spirit called "the One and Only."
1360: Xiuhtlatonac, tlatoani of Azcapotzalco, responds to an outbreak of disease by flaying three Muslims during the monthly festival of Xipe Totec.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: Trade Winds: Islam's Crossing-Era Economic Boom - Umar al-Sufali, Eastwind Press, AD 1997


It is tempting to fixate on matters in the Gharb al-Aqsa as the most fascinating frontier of the Crossing Period. The most immediate impacts on Andalusian life and economics came not from these new continents, but from the fallout of Ibn Mundhir's circumnavigation of Sudan in 1342 and Ibn Ghalib's maritime hajj in 1350. These voyages proved that not only could the Sudan be circled, but that one could sail around it and reach Mecca - and all the trade routes Mecca had access to.

A decade of remarkable discovery ensued. The spearhead of it was a remarkable explorer: Abd al-Malik ibn Qasi al-Shershi, who had been an 18-year-old deckhand on Ibn Mundhir's ship, was entrusted by the Hajib with four ships and dispatched to seek Hindustan. By all accounts, Ibn Qasi - a descendant of conversos who traced his ancestry back to a Gothic family - was a dynamic man with a thirst for adventure and profit, and he pulled together a crew of eager men before setting sail.

The voyage of Ibn Qasi was a long one, but uncovered much. The ships stopped in the Kaledats, continued on to Labu, then sailed on into the Gulf of Sudan, where they stayed at Marsa al-Mushtari on the island of Mihwaria. After months of travel and a difficult crossing of the Cape of Storms, the ships reached the Swahili Coast, staying for a month in the trade city of Kilwa. From there, Ibn Qasi and his ships followed the advice of local sailors and waited for the seasonal monsoons to begin. The fleet followed the monsoon winds east across the Hindu Ocean,[1] guided by Somali traders. While one of their ships sank along the way after having its sail ripped off in a fierce storm, the remaining three survived and sailed, battered but triumphant, into the trading city of Goa.

At the time of Ibn Qasi's arrival, Hindustan was in a state of transition. To the north, the Tarazid Sultanate was in a state of rapid fragmentation after the ruling dynasty's overthrow by an ambitious Karluk general, leaving Islamic power concentrated in the Indus River area. Islam had never truly caught on beyond that region, and power vacuums in Gujarat, northern India and Bengal were stepped into by local families. Goa had never been part of the Tarazid realm, owing its allegiance primarily to the Seunas of Devagiri at the time - but its busy port was no stranger to Islamic visitors or traders of myriad cultures and colours. The Andalusian ships were certainly a little unusual, but few raised an eyebrow until Ibn Qasi offloaded his cargo: Binu pepper, Sudani gold and precious dyes.

Ibn Qasi's return voyage took some time; following the advice of his Somali guide, he waited for the monsoon winds to turn before setting sail again, winding up back in Sofala. It was not until late 1352 that he returned to Isbili, bringing word that he had reached Hindustan. While several of his sailors died of scurvy during the voyage and a second of his ships remained behind at Marsa al-Mushtari after springing a slow leak.

News circulated quickly that it would be possible to reach Hindustan, however long the voyage. Circumnavigation from this point onward took on three purposes: Trade with Hindustan on east, exploration, and the hajj.

Exploration proved simple enough, though perilous. By 1356, Muhammad ibn Qays al-Shilbi reached the island of Lanka, and by 1360, Abd al-Qadir ibn Safwan al-Ghamri pulled his ship into the harbour of Aceh in the distant region of Melaka, discovering Muslims who bent the knee not to a Caliph but to the Emperor of China.[2]

Travelers for trade and the hajj proved more regular. Pilgrims began to travel to Mecca by circumnavigation as early as 1353, hoping to avoid entanglements with Genoese and Venetian traders in the Mediterranean or long overland jaunts through the desert. The sea route cost most and had its own perils, but wealthier sorts nevertheless took it up. The route was also enjoyed by those seeking to trade in ports along the Swahili Coast and in Hindustan proper, though most of these traders tended to set up shop in cities like Sofala, Kilwa and Zanjibar and trade with middlemen there - still a better prospect for both price and quantity than trading it through the traditional land-based routes.

Infrastructure was the first demand these sailors created. Existing trading ports in the Kaledats, Labu and Marsa al-Mushtari would swell and grow as a result of stopovers by these ships, and they would often stop at the mouth of the Zadazir as well, but the biggest gap in the route was at the Ra's al-Awasif,[3] where foul weather often made passage tricky and a lack of cities or natural harbours made it difficult for ships to find a good place to hunker down. Most ships seeking to wait for poor weather to blow over would take shelter north of the cape itself, in a natural bay with good shelter from the winds and deep water, but little prospect for farming. That suited the captains just fine. The bay became known as the Kawf al-Hujaj.[4]

The rigors of making the crossing would strain Andalusian saqin and tur-type ships to the limits of their design. While explorers in a well-built saqin could make longer voyages than virtually any other ship, including over endless kilometres of open ocean, most of these early traders would sail a larger tur, as a smaller saqins couldn't carry enough cargo or passengers to make a journey profitable. Yet even the tur was considered to have limits, and the race was quickly on to build larger, faster ships capable of more reliably weathering the brutal storms of the southern Sudan.

The development of larger ships would take the form of the qurqur,[5] which is first attested in literature around this time but likely emerged for the first time closer to 1340, probably as a development of the pepper trade. These ships were larger than those used by the first wave of Andalusian explorers, and they were used primarily by merchants more concerned with cargo and stability in rough waters than with the speed allowed by the earlier types of craft. A typical tur would weigh in around 250 to 300 tons, while an early qurqur weighed in closer to 600, a mass which would swell to displacements of more than 1,000 tons by the end of the century as shipbuilders perfected the new style.

It was these larger ships which formed the bulk of the eight-ship flotilla dispatched by the Hajib and the Banu Angelino in 1358, with orders to set sail for Hindustan and return with spices. These ships were the first Spice Fleet. It would become an annual tradition for a fleet under Hizamid hire to set sail from Isbili to Kilwa or Zanjibar, then follow the monsoon season to Hindustan to trade and return the next year with holds full of cinnamon, cloves, ginger, black pepper, and other goods such as fine silks and blackpowder.

The Spice Fleets proved to be the backbone of what would become an age of intense trade-driven economic prosperity. More trade money fuelled more exploration and allowed the Hizamids to earn more in taxation and tribute, which in turn led to more expeditions, more discoveries, more trade opportunities and more money. The rapid growth of the merchant class would result in economic booms not only in Al-Andalus, but in the Maghreb along the Dahab, in what was then the Simala Kingdom, after a powerful clan which assumed autonomous rule as the Mande Empire struggled and weakened beneath the raids of the Southern Blue Army. All the more remarkable about this period is that the Muslim powers held effective monopolies: Christian sailors did not enjoy the same advancements in ship technology enjoyed by the Muslims of Andalusia and the coastal Maghreb, though Basque and Galician whalers may have begun to adapt elements of it, and most ships in the Christian world remained either bulky coastal hulks or Mediterranean galleys (of which Al-Andalus and Ifriqiya each maintained fleets).

The Spice Fleets and other mercantile efforts in the Sudan, Hindustan and Melaka would bring not only wealth, but ideas. The most important of these was likely the introduction of barud weapons.[6]

Early firearms had made it to Al-Andalus through trade with the Levant, primarily in the form of the fire lance. The first record of their use comes in 1352, at the Battle of Atalayah Pass.[7] While no Arabic source for the encounter exists, the monk Pedro de Noia describes the Knights of Saint James being turned back by "a host of Moors brandishing Satan's fire, spewed from Hell itself," which allegedly disrupted a heavy cavalry attack on a smaller Muslim army. Reconstructionists tend to agree that this was the first notable appearance of a barud weapon in Western Europe. Through trade with Chinese merchants, barud weapons would increasingly become available to Muslims and slowly proliferate through Mesopotamia, the Maghreb and Andalusia.


[1] The Indian Ocean.
[2] The Strait of Malacca.
[3] The Cape of Good Hope.
[4] Pilgrims' Cove.
[5] The word "carrack" may come from this word for "large merchant ship." The development is not exactly like a carrack; a qurqur is visibly more derived from a dhow, but the requirements of ship geometry are gradually pushing it to be more solidly-built and chunky than the current sleeker designs the Andalusians sail. Ship design is adapting to the fact that Andalusians don't need exploration ships - they need things with a big cargo hold that won't sink if they hit a monsoon or a horrible South African storm.
[6] Gunpowder.
[7] Near Cebreros.

SUMMARY:
1352: The sailor Ibn Qasi becomes the first Andalusian to reach Hindustan.
1352: The Battle of Atalayah Pass. An attack by the Knights of Saint James is broken up when Andalusian forces unexpectedly deploy fire lances.
1356: Muhammad ibn Qays al-Shilbi reaches Lanka.
1358: With the sanction of Hajib Husayn, the first Spice Fleet - largely organized by the powerful Banu Angelino - sets sail for Hindustan, sailing heavier merchant ships called qaraqir.
1360: Abd al-Qadir ibn Safwan al-Ghamri reaches Aceh.

Authorial note: Yes, I'm still alive and still writing. Work and mental health consumed me alive. It's been a tough couple of weeks but I think I'm coming out the other end of it.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Good update. Wondering how long before Christian Europa start catching up on seatravel, or are they distracted on other fronts?

Christendom is at a controversial period: The Bataids are a major threat that's swallowing much of the Haemus, while in the west, there's a lot of grumbling that the Church is becoming too powerful.

France, meanwhile, is grappling with fallout from the War of Five Flowers: King Bernard was elevated to the throne around 1330 but had no direct male-line heir, and all the other male-line options were quite distant. He managed to hold on until 1341 but could not father a boy-child before his death. An attempt to revert to elective succession deadlocked when five dukes were nominated and none could win over a majority. This led to a three-year interregnum while every duke in Francia launched a bloody civil war over who would be king. The conflict was resolved in an unusual way: The Pope stepped in and supported Richard I's daughter, firstborn and sole surviving child - 18-year-old Princess Clarimonde - as a compromise candidate. This proved to be controversial and deeply precedent-setting. While the Salic Law has been used in property law for generations, there was no precedent as to whether agnatic succession also applies to the crown. (OTL, this was decided in 1316 in favour of Philip V; the Salic Law is not actually mentioned until this time.) Her biggest supporter was Aimeric, Abbot of Cluny, a former Richard supporter who wrote a long legal and theological opinion supporting the position that agnatic primogeniture did not apply to the crown, as it was not land. With the support of the Pope and the Church Knights, Clarimonde came to the throne with little real land in hand, with her holdings concentrated mainly in the Ile de France. A few nobles also supported her, partly because she was weak and would be unable to keep them from doing whatever they wanted, but mostly because they thought they could get the young queen married off to one of their sons and thereby gain control of France. By contrast, the Grand Duke of Provencia (already a French vassal in name only) refused to acknowledge her and has taken to calling himself the King of Provencia, and many viewed the entire scheme as a plot by the Pope to weaken France and benefit Provence, which has long been a source of bishops prominent in the "Strong Pope" cabal which currently calls the shots at the Lateran. One of the malcontent French dukes promptly ordered a hit on the Pope, which failed when the would-be assassins were spotted and captured by the Church Knights.

Complicating matters was that Clarimonde turned out to be shockingly competent and extremely cunning. She played her dukes against each other for years in an elaborate game of courtship as various highborn dandies vied to win her hand in marriage. The period is endlessly romanticized in later literature as the golden age of courtly love, with Clarimonde herself idealized as a paragon of beauty and wits. Both have some basis in fact, but in reality her biggest skill is being able to navigate interpersonal politics and take the blood out of the internecine wars for the throne, reducing them to a bunch of terrible flirting. Her biggest play was teasing a marriage to a son of the Holy Roman Emperor, which infuriated all her dukes, as it would've led to France passing into German hands - but she eventually made a big show of acceding to their concerns. She turned around and married Jocelyn de Rouen, son of Arnaut II, the Duke of Normandy. Arnaut is the most powerful duke in France, and Normandy is extremely rich due to its prominence in the sea trade. This - and the fact that she pulled back from a foreign marriage - allayed the concerns of neutral nobles and bought her an alliance with her strongest duke and his own network of allies, while infuriating the Dukes of Anjou and Burgundy. Jocelyn had to dodge assassins at his and Clarimonde's wedding and for four years afterwards before he was able to sire a child with her, a baby boy also named Jocelyn... who promptly died after mysteriously somehow smothering himself with a pillow. Two years later, Clarimonde had twins - a boy and a girl, Jocelyn and Ermessentz respectively - and ensured they were placed under heavy guard at all times.

The year 1360 finds Anjou at war with Normandy, while France herself remains under a co-monarchical situation. While Clarimonde is the queen regnant, she has declared King Consort Jocelyn her co-ruler, and he exercises many of her powers due to jure uxoris - but she's the mind behind him. France looks likely to pass to the De Rouen dynasty once she dies and little Jocelyn II inherits, giving him control of both the Ile de France and - once his dad dies - his family's significant and wealthy holdings in Normandy. He'll be the first French monarch in generations with real power in his hands, but it's still up in the air what kind of man he'll be.

 

[Planet of Hats]

"Look at this little cutie! Look, look!" gushed 'Amr ibn Shajara al-Qunki with delight as he gesticulated at the tiny figure in front of him. "He waddles right up to me as if we are best friends! Look at his little fins! Look at how he has no feathers!" He leaned forward and moued his lips.

"You forgot to put your feathers on, didn't you?" he cooed at the nonplussed avian standing about nine feet in front of him. "Didn't you, precious?"

The three-foot-tall black-and-white avian cocked its head back at him before turning and shuffling away.[1] Ibn Shajara's face fell. But he couldn't hold the disappointment for long.

Not when it waddled like that.

"They're not even that good to eat," shouted one of the crew from down the beach. "Why are you fixated on them?"

"Well, aren't you?" Drawing himself up, Ibn Shajara planted his hands at his hips and looked over his shoulder towards where the landing party had gathered to start a fire. Most of them had bundled up in their blankets, a few in the furs they'd traded with the al-Garbiyyin for earlier in the week. "They're like nothing we've ever seen before, right?"

Someone by the fire sneezed, then sniffled. Most of the crew hunkered deeper into their warm clothing. The creatures here may have been interesting, but Ibn Shajara could see why they might not appreciate the wonder of the creatures he'd taken to calling the tamayil, for the way it wobbled when it walked. The weather here was cold - colder than even the depths of winter in the north of Al-Andalus, and far more humid. The chill seemed to sink into the flesh and penetrate down to the bone. The men had complained of lethargy and weariness, and glimpses of the sun seemed somehow rare and inadequate here.

The explorer's ebullience dampened. The weather hadn't done them any favours, and neither had the relative poverty of the al-Garbiyyin who lived north of here, the land they'd called the Deepest South - Janub al-'Amiq. There was, simply, little for them to trade beyond furs and simple things.

"Whatever," he sighed as he dropped roughly into a seat by the fire, where some manner of fish was roasting. "At least it was better than that hideous seabird."

"The smelly one?" someone scoffed.[2]

"The smelly one." Ibn Shajara curled his lips with distaste. Yet another disaster on this voyage. His plan looked sillier and sillier the harder he looked at it: Try to find the southernmost end of the Gharb al-Aqsa, then cut around it to get to whatever the west of Anawak was like. But the Gharb al-Aqsa had stretched further south than he thought, and there had been no cities to find, and while it seemed that the land had begun to curve back to the north here, the land beyond this point seemed inhospitable, cold and empty.

No place for a tired, annoyed crew. Sullen, red-nosed faces looked back at the captain in various states of exhaustion and frustration, and Ibn Shajara looked back at them, unable to suppress a sniffle as the chill bit at his cheeks too.

"I know this has been harder than we thought," he admitted with a sigh.

"By God's eyeteeth it has," someone snapped.

"Okay. Okay, I deserved that. Thanks." Ibn Shajara hung his head with a grimace. "I will tell you what. When the morning comes, we will get back to the ships. The winds blow east from here. If we follow them and veer north, we should make it to the Zadazir and a friendly port with more money. Make sense?"

The proposal hung in the air for a few seconds before, finally, the crew began to nod various degrees of agreement.

Someone sneezed again. Off in the distance, a tamayil squawked.

~​

The shoreline fog was deep and all-consuming. In the dim light of a cloudy dawn, it felt like it was going to swallow Muhammad ibn Al-Mu'izz az-Zamardi whole. The crunch of the snow under his boots felt unseasonal at this time of year, for he'd never truly walked in it. The blanket he'd brought with him barely seemed adequate to stave the moist cold off. It seeped into the creases in his clothing and clung to his muscles, turning his breath to fog and his spit to crystals.

Wherever they'd found, it was misery. The six men who had come with him were the bravest of his crews from all three ships - ships full of men intent already on pursuing rumours of a land where the most daring fishermen from Lishbuna went to find vast catches of fish.[3] To find actual land was surprising enough. But then, there'd been quite a few discoveries in recent years.

Something about the Farthest West. Ibn Al-Mu'izz could've sworn that was just the Maghurins.

A tap on his shoulder got his attention - Bashir behind him, crossbow in hand. With a frown, Ibn Al-Mu'izz swung past a strange tree - mostly nude of leaves. He paused just long enough to wipe his nose on his sleeve before brushing through a stand of scraggly branches, some kind of bush, before moving towards the distant sound. Something moving in the trees. A person?

He rounded another grove of trees, squinting into the fog to try and spot whatever he could hear. It sounded closer now - possibly even too close. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

"Isa bin Maryam's beard, what is that?!" one of the crew suddenly shouted in a voice peaking with panic.

"What," Ibn Al-Mu'izz snapped, whirling towards the sound - and he nearly stumbled in wide-eyed shock at the sight of behemoth surging out of the mist. It was taller than any one of them, massive and with an immense, shaggy brow crowned by enormous prongs in the shapes of devilish hands, each big enough around to grasp a strong man and rip his life out. The monstrosity lurched unnaturally and let out a deep, rolling bellow that thundered through the frozen forest like the war cry of some impossible offspring of Iblis.

"What is that thing?!" one of the crew shrieked. The sound of a crossbow firing rang in Ibn Al-Mu'izz's' ears. There was a woody 'THWOCK' as the bolt smacked into a tree trunk.

"I don't care, run!" he shouted back at the crew as panic seized him. Whirling, he turned to stagger through the trees, bolting as fast as he could. The crew dashed with him. His leg snagged a stand of shrubbery, and he tumbled, catching himself with effort, throwing a look over his shoulder to try and see if the massive thing was still behind them, or if the mist had swallowed it. He could hear the men with him, shouting "Allahu akbar" as if to vainly defy their own panic. Darting past a tree, he looked behind him again, and turned --

And a pair of hands abruptly snaked out and grabbed him by the biceps. With a yelp, Ibn Al-Mu'izz was pulled towards a larger tree, suddenly finding himself staring into the dark eyes of a broad-faced man of middle years, heavily wrapped in furs, a spear in his hand and a bow slung over his shoulder. His gaze bored into the Andalusian beyond the wear lines in his face. For a moment, the explorer's breath caught in his throat.

Slowly, the stranger raised his hand to his mouth, eyes locked on Ibn Al-Mu'izz's as if to convey something to him. He held the hand over his lips for a moment, then lowered it to whisper something.

"Moos." The stranger nodded into the forest.[4]

"Is- is that what that is," Ibn Al-Mu'izz managed through his heavy breathing. In the distance, another bellow echoed through the trees. This time the tone of it was a little different.[5]

The stranger peered at him for a moment. "Tami tleyawin kil," he said, still keeping his voice down.

Ibn Al-Mu'izz just blinked at him.

The man stared into the explorer's face for a moment before, finally, breathing a sigh and letting go of Ibn Al-Mu'izz's shoulders. The Andalusian stepped back and straightened his blanket, grimacing. "...This is going to make for quite the conversation," he managed to mutter through the whirl of emotions, before he had to bring his arm up to sniffle gracelessly into it. As if the moos wasn't enough.

Wordlessly, the hunter shrugged off one of the heavy fur garments he was wearing. His expression was stoic as he held the garment open towards Ibn Al-Mu'izz, giving it a brisk shake.

Aware of his crew beginning to gather, Ibn Al-Mu'izz ducked his head gratefully and accepted the gift. The fur was warm as the hunter draped it around him. As he did so, the underbrush rustled again, and more hunters began to appear, one of them a younger man carrying two freshly-shot rabbits.

"Thank you," Ibn Al-Mu'izz attempted, folding his hands together and dipping his head as if to somehow convey gratitude with his body language alone. He'd never tried this before - speaking with someone he had no common language with whatsoever. "Thank you. Thank. You."

The strangers - about four of them, all armed and in layers of fur - looked among themselves. Then, all of a sudden, the young man with the rabbits laughed heartily, waving his hand towards the group of Muslims. He said something broadly that Ibn Al-Mu'izz couldn't follow, but he could see the patient smile breaking across the first hunter's face.

The first hunter said something. He gestured with one hand towards the explorers before beginning to step back into the thinning fog.

"W-what do we do?" asked one of the crew.

Ibn Al-Mu'izz blinked twice before pulling the fur cape tighter around himself. "...They want us to come with them. So let's go with them."

"Are you sure that's wise?"

"No." He grimaced. "But I'm sure they're good people."


[1] In which the Andalusians meet a penguin.
[2] Someone made the mistake of shooting a southern giant petrel. No, they didn't eat it. It's called the stinker for a reason.
[3] Not exactly Basque fishermen.
[4] In which the Andalusians meet a moose.
[5] The Mi'kmaq hunt moose through a number of means, including by imitating moose calls. If you haven't guessed, Ibn Shajara found Tierra del Fuego and Ibn Al-Mu'izz found Nova Scotia.

SUMMARY:
1364: The explorer 'Amr ibn Shajara al-Qunki reaches Janub al-'Amiq, the southern tip of the Gharb al-Aqsa.
1365: Muhammad ibn Al-Mu'izz az-Zamardi reaches the lands of the Mi'kmaq people, in the cold northern reaches of the Gharb al-Aqsa. He encounters a moose and then sits down for a meal of rabbit with a group of Mi'kmaq hunters.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: 14: The Century That Changed Everything - Christian Saldmare, Dragon's Hill Press, AD 2002


Ibn Al-Najjar had found the Central Algarvian Valley civilizations in 1357. It took scarcely a decade for even the passive touch of Andalusian presence to throw the entire region into chaos.

The effects of virgin-field diseases were devastating for the Otomi and Nahua-speaking peoples of the valley complex, driving various city-states into various reactions: The Otomi began to dabble in Islam, while the Tepanecs dismissed the Muslims as foreign sorcerers.

The harshest reaction, however, came from the Caxcan, recent arrivals who had settled to the south of the Great Lake and founded the altepetl of Teocaltillitzin. They had brought their god with them - a sun god they referred to simply as Theotl, likely analogous to the diseased sun god Nanahuatzin and the more obscure northern Chichimeca deity Huitzilopochtli. Speakers of Nahuatl, the Caxcan were notably more fervent in their religious practices than their neighbours, and they responded to the arrival of New World diseases by assuming they were the result of insufficient piety in the form of sacrifices to strengthen the sun god and forestall the end of the world.

As cities throughout the valley struggled with illness, relations between the Tepanecs and their Caxcan tributaries broke down. The Caxcan leader, Tonatiuhtlacati,[1] had given his daughter in marriage to the brother of the Tepanec ruler, Xiuhtlatonac. When news came down in 1363 that the illness had killed her, Tonatiuhtlacati furiously denounced Xiuhtlatonac for being so weak of faith to allow disease to punish his daughter. The Caxcan refused to continue paying tribute to the Tepanecs. Calculating as ever, Xiuhtlatonac responded by capturing 200 Caxcanes and sacrificing them all as a display of piety. Enflamed by the gesture, the Caxcanes geared up for war, and Xiuhtlatonac mobilized the Tepanec military and its tributaries against its angry vassals.

War among the Nahua took heat off the Otomi to the north. The cult of N'ahahontho continued to spread among the Otomi and the north end of the lake, though it would be followed by the more prominently-situated arrival of mainline Maliki Islam. In Dähnini, K'eñänjohya died in 1363, succumbing to smallpox. His son, the 22-year-old Hñunxuni,[2] acceded in 1365 to the approaches of the scholar Abd al-Qadir al-Mufassir and recited the Shahada along with his court, adopting the name Abdullah ibn K'eñänjohya al-Otomi.[2]

The decision to convert to Islam came in part to give the Otomi in Dähnini access to what help the Muslims could provide. In 1364, an attack on the island city by Nahua-speakers from Cuauhtitlan was repelled with help from a cadre of 50 mounted Berbers, likely part of the garrison from Makzan al-Thariya. No one in the Central Valley complex had access to horses or steel weapons and armour, and mounted Berbers were more than they could handle, along with the support of crossbowmen on foot. Conversion gave Abdullah Hñunxuni friendlier relations with the Muslims and the ability to buy in mercenaries who were impervious to the strange diseases, and it allowed him to buy steel weapons for his own men and even explore equipping some of his troops with horses. While these numbers were not large, they combined with the island position of his city-state to give Abdullah Hñunxuni a strategic edge - and converting also convinced many of his subjects that he was working to appease the strange god which had sent the sicknesses in the first place.

The war between the Tepanecs and the Caxcanes, at least, ensured the Otomi's position for the time being. Cuauhtitlan itself could not defeat the Otomi stronghold, and its Tepanec allies were busy and likely to be ground down somewhat. As more and more able-bodied men died, it became harder for individual city-states to project power - and with the Otomi already in a defensive crouch, they were better prepared to withstand than Tepanecs, for whom tribute and hegemony were critical.

Only the brilliance and ruthlessness of Xiuhtlatonac held the Tepanec tributary network together. By 1369, he had dealt a crushing defeat to the Caxcanes, defeating their armies and outright sacrificing Tonatiuhtlacati before a massive fire ceremony in Azcapotzalco. The victory cowed the grumbling and misery among the Tepanec tributaries - but it did nothing to slow the brutal toll of epidemic disease.

The Otomi received another benefit: An influx of Muslim conversos. While the numbers of converts were not great at first, the city gained a few hundred people as early dabblers in Islam - and those accused falsely of sorcery and spreading plague - fled persecution by the Caxcanes and Tepanecs, finding relief in Dähnini. Others would flee north, to the Otomi city of Nzi'batha/Metztitlan.

~​

Back in the Old World, meanwhile, the continent had largely rebounded from the Great Plague 150 years prior, leaving nations and kingdoms better able to mobilize - and increasing pressure for expansion. Nowhere was this more clear than in the Haemus, where Bataid advancement into southern Europe increasingly placed core kingdoms under threat.

Hungary had long served as Europe's eastern bulwark, holding dominion over both the Carpathian basin and Croatia. That dominion was challenged beginning in the 1350s as the Bataids of Rumaniyah began to push harder against Christian strongholds in their northwest. The reign of Al-Mansour the Great (1303 - 1335) saw the Bataids crush the Roman remnant in Greece. The most pivotal battle in that campaign was the Battle of Orchomenus, around July 7, 1324. It took place northwest of Athens, where 40,000 Bataid troops confronted a similar number of forces allied with the Romans - in fact a Greek core bolstered by Cuman, Epirote and Italian mercenaries. Al-Mansour himself led the Rumani forces onto the field, opposed by forces led by Emperor Stylianos II Vlastos and the Normano-Epirote leader Simon of Durres.

The battle was one of the largest in centuries in the western Supercontinent, and certainly the largest since the Great Plague west of the Steppes. While both forces could bring similar numbers to bear, the Rumani forces were better-led, with Al-Mansour himself being recognized as one of the greatest military leaders of his time and his commanders chosen from a multicultural selection of Patzinaks, Anatolian Turkmens and Islamic conversos of Greek and Bulgarian heritage. The Rumani cavalry were similarly more versatile and better-trained, bolstered by several thousand Cumans as well. Personally leading a cavalry charge at a decisive point in the battle, Al-Mansour managed to break the will of the Cumans, many of whom fled or defected, leaving the Roman core unprotected. Stylianos himself was unhorsed and lost in the shuffle before having his head severed by an Anatolian soldier, one Mahmud ibn Rashim[3] of Iconium.

The death of Stylianos and the capture of his son Christophoros triggered a general rout. The Epirotes quickly withdrew after suffering severe casualties, leaving the Greeks to bear the brunt of the attack by the Rumani cavalry. The battle left fully 25,000 of the Roman host dead to less than 12,000 of the Rumani, with many of the Roman survivors coming from the mercenaries or Epirote faction - units unlikely to be able to defend Hellas.

The Battle of Orchomenus marked the end of even the rump Roman Empire. By the end of August, Athens was in Al-Mansour's hands, and by the year's end the cities of Morea had surrendered to the Muslims. The Romans simply had nothing left to defend themselves with. The battle similarly left the Epirotes weakened, and in subsequent years Rumaniyah would simply steamroll them before pushing into Sirmium. By the end of his reign, Rumaniyah had swallowed Hellas, Epirus, Sirmium and most of Armenia.

The death of Al-Mansour in 1335 brought his son Al-Mansour II to the throne. While less of a martial man than his father, he was able to resist a concerted attack from the Papacy, Venice, Hungary and the Knights of Saint Stephen, turning them back at the Battle of Trauvunija in 1336 and a series of smaller skirmishes. But Al-Mansour II did not engage in a vast campaign of his own, obligated instead to spend several years suppressing Greek and Sirmian rebellions in the Haemus and clashing with the rising Mezinids over the bones of Van.

Al-Mansour II died in 1347 without an adult male heir, and his infant son Suleiman was overthrown within a year by his regent, Al-Mansour's brother, Abdullah Aslan - a ruler infamous in Christian histories.

It was under Abdullah Arslan that the Bataid threat crystallized in the minds of Europe. In 1355, the Bataids launched a massive push for Croatia, waging a series of battles over three years. The conflict reached a decisive culmination in 1359, at the Battle of Bihac, in which a Hungarian-Italian army of 30,000 was soundly crushed by 25,000 Bataids, including 8,000 Cumans (Cumans in fact fought on both sides of most conflicts at the time). The defeat, in which Hungarian Prince Gaspar was captured, forced Hungary to withdraw from Croatia, ceding the Bataids a swath of Adriatic coast up to Fiume and inland to Agram.[4]

Long accustomed to focusing on its own affairs, the Holy Roman Empire began around this time to view the advancing Bataids with increasing alarm: Not only had the Muslims consolidated in the former Roman Empire, but they were devouring Hungary and within striking distance of the Osterreich. Raids by Anatolian Turkmens into German and Italian territory began to step up in this period, exposing the underbelly of Christendom to the predation of Rumaniyah. Without the shield of the Havasok Mountains[5], the Bataids had the ability to strike into the heart of Hungary and raid up the Danube into German territory itself.

Into the 1360s, the conflict was carried out in the form of back-and-forth raids, many on the Christian side led by the Church Knights. Gradec was sacked by Rumani forces in 1364, while Venetian ships carrying French and German mercenaries captured Zadar in 1368, which they would hold for several years.

~​

Al-Andalus was by no means immune to the tides of war, and while Husayn is well-remembered as the Hajib who led his polity to discover the Gharb al-Aqsa, he's also notable for being the leader who reversed the steady decline in Andalusian territorial fortunes which had been going on for centuries. The profits from new trade routes in gold, spice, sugar and Indian goods flooded Husayn's treasury with revenue, and while much of it went to infrastructure, a large part of it went to one of the most important consequences of his reign: An overall improvement in the quality, training and manpower of the army.

The quality of Andalusian metallurgy had steadily increased with the advent of new technologies, particularly the advent of blast furnaces and waterwheel-powered forges almost a century before. But with more revenue on hand, the Caliphal administration could afford to purchase equipment which made the most of refinements to the technology. The Saqaliba and Black Guard fighters of the time were equipped with higher-quality iron equipment. Andalusian weapons and armour tended to be more durable and easier to produce than comparable European versions, resulting in more Andalusian troops with high-quality equipment and more reliable weapons.

The mailshirt-wearing Saqaliba of past centuries had given way to Black Guardsmen, Saqaliba and elite Andalusians wearing breastplates and armour skirts, while horse armour increasingly began to incorporate plate. Helmets gradually extended further down the cheeks to better protect the face. The increased weight of the armour saw Andalusian cavalry transition away from the riding of mares towards larger, stronger stallions, noisier but better able to carry the weight of an armoured soldier. While armour would never quite reach the level of full plate favoured by the French and Germans, the Andalusians of the 14th century went into battle much better protected than their forebears, riding powerful Andalusian warhorses that tended to be larger and more muscular than those of their neighbours.

These advantages became clear in the 1360s, when the elderly Husayn, then around 70, faced off against his northern neighbours once more. An attack by the Knights of Saint James saw Santiagonian troops sack the outskirts of Batalyaws in 1365. The elderly Hajib gathered his men and launched a punitive campaign northward.

The ensuing campaign would demonstrate the advantages of Andalusian equipment and horsemanship. While the Church Knights could equal the Andalusians in skill, Andalusian equipment and horses were more advanced and more numerous, and the real advantages came in the better quality of weapons and armour carried by the standard Andalusian soldier. This was best demonstrated in 1368, at the Battle of Almeida.

The battle saw an Andalusian army of 15,000, led by Husayn's son Abd al-Qadir, ambushed by Headmaster Alfonso de Vilalba of the Knights of Saint James, leading 20,000 Christians with the Knights at the head. Alfonso was able to catch the Muslims by surprise and attack the Andalusian flank, composed mostly of regulars from the new junds. However, despite being mostly on foot and outclassed in training, the regulars managed to hold and fight back with crossbows. The flank took losses but did not collapse, enabling Abd al-Qadir to lead his cavalry around to attack a surprised Alfonso and inflict losses of his own. The reversal forced Alfonso to regroup, leading to a battle in which the Knights of Saint James and their Santiagonian cavalry allies basically neutralized the Saqaliba and Black Guard - leaving the fight to be decided by the Andalusian regulars, who largely had better equipment than their Christian counterparts and inflicted casualties at a rate of about two to one. The Christians were forced to pull back, their rear savaged by pursuing Berber cavalry for two more days.

Bloodied by the battle, Abd al-Qadir quickly took advantage. The Christians were unable to reinforce several cities, and the Andalusians swept north to capture Porto. Braga was soon besieged, falling the next year, and the Andalusians settled in.

The gain of land west of the Duero and as far north as Braga represented a reversal in Andalusia's fortunes: Long pushed back in western Iberia, the battle marked the reclamation of land which had been lost over past centuries. Santiago was again forced to pay tribute, enflaming existing tensions within the kingdom, while Andalusia entered the next decade with the wind in her sails even as the aging Husayn advanced into the waning years of his life.


[1] "Sun-born"
[2] "Three hawks."
[3] Muhammad son of Erasmus.
[4] Rijeka and Zagreb.
[5] The Carpathians.

SUMMARY:
1324: The Battle of Orchomenus. Ar-Rumaniyah destroys the rump Roman Empire in Hellas, killing the last Emperor, Stylianos II. Greece comes under Bataid control. The last remnants of the Roman Empire are annihilated, save a tiny remnant in Cyprus.
1359: The Battle of Bihac. The Bataids defeat a Hungarian army and gain control of Croatia.
1363: K'eñänjohya of Xaltocan dies. Meanwhile, an outbreak of smallpox leads to war between the Tepanecs and the Caxcanes.
1364: An attack on Xaltocan is repelled with the aid of Muslim mercenaries.
1365: Hñunxuni of Xaltocan, converts to Islam.
1368: The Battle of Almeida. Better-equipped Andalusian troops defeat an army of Santiagonian troops led by the Knights of Saint James. The victory allows Al-Andalus to take Porto and Braga in their first gain of territory in generations.
1369: The Tepanecs crush the Caxcanes in a decisive battle. Tepanec tlatoani Xiuhtlatonac sacrifices his counterpart, Tonatiuhtlacani, in a massive ceremony.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: Spice, Economics and the Great Exchange - Jocelyn Picard, Sparrowbill Press, AD 1999


Through the 1360s, the ailing health of Hajib Husayn left Andalusia with the prospect of a surprisingly predictable succession: Everyone at court knew that his favoured successor was his son, Muhammad. Everyone at court also knew, however, that the real power at court would not be Muhammad.

In 1371, Husayn died in his sleep at the age of 77, giving way to Muhammad, then about 54. But even then, much influence at court had already devolved to his 25-year-old son - the figure known to history as Abd ar-Rahman al-Bahhar.[1]

Muhammad's reign is widely seen as a placeholder, overshadowed by the exploits of his son. We know a great deal about Abd ar-Rahman al-Bahhar's exploits, and his influence at court was enormous even as a young man. At just the age of 20, he had traveled to Anawak with the well-connected Jewish explorer Dawud ben Yusuf, crossing the Great Valley and traveling through the lands of the Purepecha to reach the coast of the Bahr al-Ghurub.[2] The journey seems to have instilled in Abd ar-Rahman a keen interest in foreign trade, new lands and the opportunities lying within.

As Muhammad ascended to the position of Hajib with little opposition or internal politicking, but with the Isbili mercantile class highly influential at court, Abd ar-Rahman found himself with an enormous amount of power and a broad range of connections. It is Abd ar-Rahman who is credited with the introduction of kakaw at the court in Isbili. Having encountered the beverage while traveling in Anawak, Abd ar-Rahman took a liking to it and brought it back to Isbili, along with a cargo of some of the flavouring agents used by the likes of the Totonacs - namely shukutil.[3]

As among the earliest converts to Islam in Anawak, the Totonacs traded openly with the Muslims at the local makzan. Totonac farmers were among the first people in the world to cultivate the incredibly finicky spice, which was used on occasion as a seasoning for kakaw, along with other flavourings like chilli and Shaymakah spice.[4] With many of the first explorers of the Gharb al-Aqsa being spice merchants and others interested in turning a profit through trade, these spices were picked up quickly and circulated in mainland Andalusia and the Maghreb, where those with sufficient cash to purchase them took an interest in some over others. The mild flavour of shukutil made it a quick favourite among the court crowd, though its high price point made access a challenge.

At the time, the region of Anawak was in turmoil. While the Tepanecs had handily defeated the Caxcanes, the toll of disease continued to put enormous pressure on Azcapotzalco to demonstrate to an anxious, diminishing populace that the world was not in fact ending. Hostilities flared up once more between the Tepanecs and the Muslim-allied Otomi, magnified by the steady march into the region of nomads from the north - the wandering peoples known to the Tepanecs as the Chichimeca.

The year 1372 marks the first case of official Andalusian military involvement in the politics of Anawak. With his father's blessing, Abd ar-Rahman landed at Makzan al-Thariya that spring with a force of 500 crossbowmen and 200 mounted Berbers - not a large force by any stretch of imagination, but enough in his mind to campaign against the enemies of the Otomi.

Abd ar-Rahman's activities in Anawak between 1372 and 1375 are known to history as the Kakaw War, largely owing to his efforts to protect Andalusian trading partners from their enemies. Allying with Abdullah Hñunxuni, the leader of Dähnini and the first to convert to Islam among the Otomi, Abd ar-Rahman and his men were able to repel a major attack by the Tepanecs and their proxies in Cuauhtitlan before pushing out of their island stronghold to try and put Tepanec leader Xiuhtlatonac on the defensive. By the end of the year the Otomi and their Andalusian allies captured the northern city of Tzompanco, then ruled by a group of Nahuatl-speakers allied with the Tepanecs.

Despite Abd ar-Rahman's large reputation, he was never truly able to make significant headway beyond that against Xiuhtlatonac. The young Andalusian was not known as a brilliant general so much as a brave explorer, with most of his military adventures in Anawak being spearheaded by his companion Ishaq ibn Sulayman al-Qurtubi. It is a testament to Xiuhtlatonac's military brilliance that he held the Tepanec dominion together in the face of rampant epidemic disease and unrest and presented a threat to the Otomi even with the considerable aid of foreigners with significantly more advanced weapons. Tepanec soldiers of the time began to develop innovative ways of dealing with Andalusian crossbows and cavalry, namely by trying to kill the Berbers' horses wherever possible. There is at least one account of a captured horse being sacrificed and its skull displayed in Azcapotzalco. On a few occasions Tepanec warriors are reported to have tried to put Andalusian crossbows into use, though more commonly they would press captured swords into service.

Abd ar-Rahman, for his part, was neither competent nor adventurous enough to press for a knockout blow against Xiuhtlatonac and the Tepanecs, who in turn were too plagued by disease and low morale to press their advantages, leaving the conflict in the Valley reduced to a series of skirmishes and raids - but preserving the Otomi and building goodwill for the Muslims among their allies. In that respect, trade in kakaw and spices was preserved. Abd ar-Rahman took away one more benefit when he took as his second wife Abdullah Hñunxuni's younger sister, who received the Muslim name of Qamar.

By 1374, with matters in Dähnini relatively quiet, Abd ar-Rahman swung to the north to respond to a call for aid from Nzi'batha, then under attack by raiding parties of Chichimeca nomads.[5] Skirmishes between Muslims and Chichimeca tribes were more of a running affair than the more formalized conflict in the valley, and the nomads proved to be crafty foes. Unlike the Tepanecs, some of the Chichimeca did capture horses: Most notably, several Guachichil managed to ambush and capture a group of Berbers alive by disguising themselves as hideous animals and scaring the horses. The Guachichil then made off with the animals and pressed them into service, while ransoming the Berbers off to Al-Qurtubi for a modest tribute. It would take time for horses to come into regular use among this group, but the Guachichil in particular seem to have recognized their usefulness quickly, and they represent the first recorded example of an indigenous group from the Gharb al-Aqsa adapting to the horse.

Abd ar-Rahman himself returned home in 1375, taking most of the surviving Andalusians and a hold full of kakaw and spices. However, Berbers and Andalusian mercenaries and advisors continued to flow into the Valley by way of the Makzan, selling their services to the Otomi and Totonacs. Nzi'batha in particular employed a number of kishafa to help defend against Chichimeca incursions, and the conservative Berber types attracted to those jobs quickly developed a healthy respect for the cleverness and resourcefulness of the Chichimeca, viewing them in some ways as kindred spirits.

***

The character of Andalusian exploration in the Farthest West made it inevitable that there would be a steady transmission of ideas and goods between the two worlds. Andalusian and Maghrebi explorers did not come with an eye towards conquest or territorial gain, and most military adventurism was in the nature of propping up trade partners or diminishing threats to merchants' profits. Indeed, many of the initial explorers were spice and pepper traders who viewed the new continent as a market and its inhabitants as people to trade with.

Spice and kakaw, of course, were the most important elements to cross the ocean. Shaymakah spice was more easily come by than others, and quickly found buyers when introduced to markets in Sale and Isbili. Shukutil, being a more finicky substance to grow and harvest, was considerably more rare; attempts to grow it in Al-Andalus would continually fail simply due to its exacting climatic and rainfall requirements, and it remained a luxury good obtained mainly from the Totonacs. Chilli and kakaw were introduced primarily through the ruling class, catching on in the Kaledats and at court first and foremost.

However, the most consequential early good to make the crossing from the New World was qasabi. The substance had been cultivated at the Makzan al-Husayn near the mouth of the Baraa almost since the establishment of the depot, but within 20 years it had crossed the ocean, turning up in the Simala Kingdom. Accounts of how this crop arrived vary, but it likely arrived via one of the numerous Sudani silent merchants hired by Andalusi and Berber explorers, or through these merchants themselves.

The consequences of the arrival of qasabi would be enormous. The crop is remarkable because it is a perennial which grows well in poor soils which receive little rain - a boon in the Sahel, a region noted for the importance of rain and drought. The arrival of qasabi furnished the Serer and Fulani people along the Dahab with something they quickly saw the value of: A crop which could grow well even on marginal land, sprout up even in bad rainfall years and provide flexibility both as a subsistence crop and a cash crop.

Farmers in the region would increasingly come to rely on qasabi as a staple crop, ensuring its spread throughout Subsahara. Its early arrival in the Dahab region would further ensure that the fruits of this crop would first be enjoyed by those cities along trade routes between Al-Andalus and the Farthest West, shifting power in the region towards the Dahab and cities like Tekrur and Labu and enabling the region to build an economic base capable of thriving outside of the gold and salt trade. It would take longer for mahiz[6] and slender beans to make the crossing, but the early arrival of qasabi (it would take longer to spread to the Zadazir) would form the basis of an age of prosperity south of the Sahara.

In fact, more than a few crops from the Farthest West proved amenable to growing conditions in Subsaharan Sudan. The kakaw bean in particular grows well along the Zanj Coast, and efforts would be made to cultivate it there by the late 1300s. The arrival of qasabi would set the stage for later arrivals, like ouadli[7] and the various nut species which would be transferred from the west. More than anywhere else, the arrival of crops from the Farthest West would benefit the Sudan, setting the stage for the development of empires to come.

The beginning of this transfer of goods marked the beginning of the Great Exchange - a transmission of ideas and goods between the until-then separate halves of the world. In these earliest years, however, the exchange was fairly one-way. While the civilizations in areas like Anawak did receive access to ideas and traded for crops like rice and livestock like sheep, for the most part what they got back from their new Muslim trading partners were diseases to which they had no immunity or resistance. Illnesses such as smallpox and typhoid fever would kill anywhere from 75% to 90% of the population of the Farthest West over the coming decades and centuries. The spread of virgin-field epidemic diseases, barely understood at the time, represents an immense human tragedy and remains a sore point in east-west relations to this day.


[1] Abd ar-Rahman the Seafarer.
[2] Sunset Sea - the Pacific Ocean.
[3] Vanilla. Taken from tlilxochitl - "Black flower."
[4] Allspice, so named because Andalusian spice merchants discovered it in Jamaica.
[5] Nzi'batha corresponds to the city of Metztitlan.
[6] Maize.
[7] Amaranth, after the Nahuatl "huauhtli"

SUMMARY:
1371: Hajib Husayn dies in his sleep. His son Muhammad is elevated to replace him, but is effectively a placeholder, with much power at court wielded by the Banu Angelino and by his son, Abd ar-Rahman the Seafarer.
1372: Abd ar-Rahman the Seafarer travels to Anawak with a small army, intent on reinforcing the Otomi against raids and attacks by the Totonacs in the hopes of preserving the survival of a reliable trading partner in kakaw and spice.
1374: Abd ar-Rahman the Seafarer travels to Nzi'batha/Metztitlan and wars with the Chichimeca. The Guachichil successfully capture several horses during this engagement.
1375ish: Cassava arrives in Senegambia.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: 14: The Century That Changed Everything - Christian Saldmare, Dragon's Hill Press, AD 2002


The reign of Muhammad ibn Husayn is mostly seen as a placeholder period in Hizamid history, but is remarkable for a particular encounter: The Andalusian embassies to China.

While not well-documented, it's reported that around 1373, Muhammad dispatched the learned man Abd al-Qadir ibn Sulayman al-Hafiz to bring tidings to the East. At the time, the Andalusian world was digesting its relatively recent understanding of the Eastern World from the Islands on towards China and Japan, and while contacts had likely been made at the level of merchant-to-merchant relationships, Al-Hafiz's relationship represents the first known official embassy from Al-Andalus to various Eastern courts.

It took Al-Hafiz and a flotilla of ships several years to complete their journey. He appears to have arrived first in Hindustan, where he stayed for about six months in Lanka, apparently converting a hundred people. From there Al-Hafiz continued on to the Dala Kingdom[1] and delivered indigo fabrics and fine oils to the rulers there, before departing after a few months to make landfall in the Aceh Sultanate. Al-Hafiz seems to have lingered there for another three months before setting sail for China.

Al-Hafiz arrived in China in about 1379 to find a divided realm.

The Song were one of China's most long-lasting and consequential imperial dynasties. However, by 1379, the Song had been beaten back from much of the north by the resurgent Khitans and their Tatar allies. The Song-Hei Wars left China divided between the Song in the south and the Hei in the north, with Song holdings in Gansu long since lost to the late Altai Taban Horde and its successor states. Al-Hafiz arrived to find not one but two imperial courts, with the Song ruled by the Leizong Emperor - a boy of just seven years old, holding court at Jiangning and operating under the thumb of his mother, Empress Xie.

Chinese sources have little to say about the arrival of the Andalusian delegation, noting mainly that "an emissary of the Da shi of Xihai[2]" arrived and brought a strong warhorse as tribute. The visit seems to have been little more than a curiosity, with Andalusian affairs simply passing beneath the notice of the very late Song. Hei sources do not report Al-Hafiz's visit at all, though an Andalusian source reports that the emissaries reached Yanjing in 1380 and brought gifts to the Khitan Emperor Ruizong.

The state of affairs in China would not remain so for very long: The Song had stagnated over the past several decades, and the loss of northern territories led to much chatter that the ruling dynasty had lost the Mandate of Heaven. Leizong himself would not live to his majority before being overthrown in a series of rebellions. By 1387, power would wind up in the hands of the Ru family, led by Ru Wenjun - the so-called Emperor Qingzu of the Wu Dynasty, and the progenitor of the dynasty which would lead China to become the first truly modern nation.

~​

The other major achievement of Muhammad's rule is typically credited to Abd ar-Rahman the Mariner, as Muhammad himself did not live long enough to see it to completion: In 1378, he authorized funding for a mission by the mariner Uthman ibn Maymun al-Dani to sail to the Spice Islands, namely Nusantara, and chart the route for future sailors. The mission would go down in history for an entirely different reason. Ibn Maymun would become the first sailor to successfully circumnavigate the world.

Setting out from Qadis in April of 1378, Ibn Maymum and his six ships set sail for the Spice Islands, going by way of the Sudan. The ships rounded the continent easily enough and followed the monsoonal routes first to Hindustan, and from there on to the Aceh Sultanate, arriving not long after Al-Hafiz's departure from the region. However, despite ties of religious kinship to the regional Sultans, Ibn Maymun and his crew ran into trouble in the city of Temasik[3] when a member of his crew was accused of assaulting the wife of a local merchant leader.

The dispute resulted in outright brawling between Ibn Maymun's crew and the local authorities, there with the sanction of the Chinese Emperor even at this waning period in Song history - while the Aceh Sultans were Muslim, they ruled with the tacit approval of the Song and the support of a Chinese garrison there to ensure that Malacca would remain open to trade. The Andalusian crew got the worst of the encounter; the crewman was captured and one of Ibn Maymun's ships was scuttled, the other five escaping a jump ahead of the local authorities. Word was quickly handed down and spread throughout the Sultanate that Ibn Maymun and his crew were to be considered outlaws, to be rounded up and imprisoned should they show their faces in the Sultan's domain again.

With the routes through the Spice Islands poorly-charted, a western route home seemed out of the question. The demoralized sailors continued on to the east, eventually stopping on the island of Borneo, in the poorly-documented kingdom of Po-ni - a Chinese tributary, yet one distant from the waning authority of the Song. Accounts of the voyage make a note of reporting that Ibn Maymun and his crew converted about 25 people to Islam during a two-month retreat there, but they soon set sail again, heading not west, but east. The mariner, well-versed in travelers' tales from the Farthest West and well aware of the spherical nature of the Earth, surmised that the ships could avoid entanglements in Aceh by simply sailing across the seas east of the Spice Islands, no doubt encountering new islands along the way.

Continuing on from Po-ni, the ships landed at the pagan settlement of Samboangan,[4] a site of Chinese trade but not a core area. One of the ships was abandoned there, damaged in a storm, and much of the crew dispersed onto the other four ships before they set sail to the southeast. The ships narrowly missed spotting the island of Palau before continuing on to a vaguely-defined landing site on the northeastern coast of the large island of Papua.

The four remaining ships struggled to make headway against the westerly winds of the Great Sunset Ocean, eventually finding themselves forced southward into colder, emptier seas. They eventually made landfall on the island of Kanak[5] and made efforts to trade with the Kanak people there, coming back with native pottery and a few foodstuffs, most notably bananas. They also came back without several crew members after being attacked by locals during a second landing while taking on water. Without enough people to crew four ships, Ibn Maymun was forced to scuttle the most battered of his vessels; the shipwreck can be found off the southern coast of the island in shallow water, decayed to little more than a few remaining metal artifacts and some petrified wood.

The grueling eastward trek cost Ibn Maymun one more ship, lost off the coast of an uncertain island after being attacked by "twinned canoes" helmed by "the Canoe People." Few details are recorded, but the encounters mark Europe's first encounter with the Tu'i Tonga Empire, then in a stage of cultural flourishing across much of the Sunset Islands. Ibn Maymun, wounded in the leg by a spear, did not stay to make contact, instead continuing eastward into open ocean and encountering only vast stretches of water interspersed with a few water-scarce islands, many of them uninhabited.

Plagued by water shortages, the remaining Andalusian sailors struggled to survive as they sailed into the east. Eventually sentiments boiled over, and Ibn Maymun's crew mutinied and put him off the ship, leaving him among the natives of Te I'i.[6] However, the second ship eventually circled back and the crew picked up Ibn Maymun again, evidently having a change of heart. The crew lurched eastward, stopping on the island to water, soon rejoining the first ship and reconciling with the mutineers - though not before two more were thrown overboard.

By the time Ibn Maymun and his crew made landfall, making their way to Yucu Dzaa[7] among the lands of the Naysavi,[8] it was October of 1383 - but the surviving crew were able to cross the Isthmus to one of the Makzans, sailing back to Al-Andalus with charts and tales. To this day, the island chain in Te I'i is known as the Maymun Islands among Muslim sailors.

They did not return to find Muhammad. He was dead by 1379, succumbing to smallpox and clearing the way for Abd ar-Rahman the Seafarer to rise to the office of Hajib.


[1] In present-day Burma.
[2] "West Sea." The Chinese refer to the Andalusians as Da shi - "Arabs" - largely because they are ignorant and uncaring about the distinctions between Arabs, Berbers and Andalusians. They mostly think of them as "Those Arabs with the boats who came over the sea from somewhere on the really far edge of the really far continent." Broadly, however, Al-Andalus is a minor issue for China and not a place Empress Xie gives a damn about.
[3] Singapore.
[4] Zamboanga in the Philippines.
[5] New Caledonia.
[6] On Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands.
[7] Tututepec.
[8] The Mixtecs.

SUMMARY:
1378: The mariner Ibn Maymun sets sail for the Spice Islands with six ships.
1379: The envoy Al-Hafiz makes diplomatic contact with the late Song Dynasty and the Khitan Hei Dynasty.
1379: Hajib Muhammad dies. He is succeeded by Abd ar-Rahman the Seafarer.
1383: Ibn Maymun lands in Tututepec with two ships running on a skeleton crew, along the way discovering several Pacific islands.
1387: The Song Dynasty's remnants are toppled and replaced by a dynasty led by Ru Wenjun, the so-called Emperor Qingzu of Wu.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: 14: The Century That Changed Everything - Christian Saldmare, Dragon's Hill Press, AD 2002


The pace of change in Anawak hit its crescendo in 1376, when the Tepanec tlatoani Xiuhtlatonac finally died - a quarter of a century after Muslim explorers first discovered the Central Valley cultural complex.

The disintegration of the Tepanec dominions in a remarkably short time following 1376 is a testament to multiple challenges, any one of which could obliterate a civilization. Epidemic diseases routinely devastated the population en route to killing the vast majority of indigenous peoples in the Valley complex. Technological change and new allies gave the Tepanecs' rivals new means to oppose them. The introduction of Islam into Anawak gave minority groups in the Valley something to rally around, while the arrival of wealth from new foreign trade routes created opportunities to shift power dynamics within the Valley. Yet the Tepanecs maintained many of their allies for the remainder of Xiuhtlatonac's life, and his reign is held up by some as an example of the validity of the "Great Man" theory of history: That history is defined by the actions of a few great men more than by overarching events.

Yet the decline of the Tepanec hegemony over the Valley was under way even before Xiuhtlatonac's death, and it was much in evidence in the 1360s, when the Tepanecs were obligated to brutally crush the Caxcanes. That conflict left many Tepanec tributaries grumbling under Xiuhtlatonac's ruthlessness, and by the time of his death, cities were looking for allies.

Following Xiuhtlatonac's death, his inheritance was unclear, owing to the death of his two eldest sons to epidemic diseases. The eventual victor was his younger brother, Tlacatzin, but he proved even more unpopular than Xiuhtlatonac, with little sign of his tactical or political brilliance. Fractures rapidly formed in the Tepanec tributary network, leading to revolts against Azcapotzalco across the valley. Tlacatzin was quickly deposed, set aside in 1378 by his cousin Ahuiliztli, supported by the priesthood. By then, however, preserving the Tepanec dominion was a fading dream: Court politics, shifting lines of succession and the rapid onset of disease after disease ensured that no ruler in Azcapotzalco would enjoy full support even within their own altepetl, and tributaries steadily fractured away.

All the while, the spread of Islam within the Central Valley proved rapid and organic. The dreadful toll taken by disease - and the tendency of Muslim travellers to not only appear immune to many of the plagues, but to sell their services as mercenaries, advisors and religious instructors - ensured that visitors from the Islamic east were among the few rocks of stability and reliability in a region beset by political instability. As populations declined even in regions where Islam caught on, indigenous people in Anawak looked at the situation through a religious lens. For many, the crises in the Valley were evidence that the current world was ending, and the arrival of Islam was seen as an entryway into the world which succeeded it.

The power vacuum following the steady crumbling of the Tepanecs was filled by powers united by this religion, spearheaded by the Muslim leader of Xaltocan-Dähnini - Abdullah Hñunxuni.

The exact details of Abdullah's machinations are unclear, but seem to have begun as an effort to form an alliance against the Tepanecs in the mid-1370s. By 1380, however, his approaches had borne fruit. Three powers in the Valley complex and one on its periphery joined together in what historians anachronistically call the Otomi Alliance. The partners included the Otomi cities of Xaltocan-Dähnini and Metztitlan-Nzi'batha, the Acolhua-ruled altepetl of Texcoco, and the Totonacs. All four powers were centres of Islam, with Xaltocan, the Totonacs and Metztitlan all boasting Muslim rulers and the Acolhua being heavily influenced by Muslim traders, with the faith blossoming among the lower classes there. The Acolhua tie to the alliance was strengthened all the more owing to the Otomi roots of the ruling dynasty: While the majority of people there were formerly of the Chichimeca, they had integrated with the Otomi in a fashion similar to the Tepanecs themselves.

Promoted by the rulers of the Otomi and Totonac cities and spread by an informal network of Sufis and imams, Islam rapidly percolated through the Valley, though not always along the most orthodox lines. Generally speaking, the upper classes in Xaltocan, Metztitlan and Cempoala tended to hew to a relatively orthodox form of Islam, guided by Maliki imams and advisors - some crossing with the sanction of the Caliph in Córdoba.

Converts among the commons, however, had a wider range of experiences with Islam, and many viewed the new religion through the lens of their own faith. Particularly in Xaltocan and the northern areas of the Valley Lake,[1] Islam spread syncretically through the cult of N'ahahontho, the One and Only, which interpreted the Islamic God as a superior entity above the Otomi moon and sun deities.[2] Among Nahuatl-speakers, meanwhile, Islam was seen as a sign that the fifth iteration of existence was dying, and the arrival of strangers from the east, speaking of the true god, was the revelation of the sixth world. Through this lens, God was associated with the sun.

Surviving contemporary codices produced by early convert communities often depict the Prophet Muhammad in the Nahua style, accompanied by Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent. While indigenous beliefs tend to be fragmentary, owing to the tribal divides and city-based differences in belief within the Valley, the Feathered Serpent was fairly universal, tracing back to the Old City of Teotihuacan. Many of the Valley societies considered the Feathered Serpent to be the creator of the fifth sun, associated with the dawn star, mercy, wind and justice. The symbolism of this pairing not only attempts to transfer the attributes of Quetzalcoatl to the new religion and depict the arrival of Islam as a handoff from the fifth sun to the next. The term "Chicuacentonatiuh" is sometimes recorded - "Six Sun" - and makes clear how Islam was interpreted: Common people in particular, with little of the formal Quranic instruction being received by the upper classes, saw the arrival of epidemic disease as the end of the Fifth Sun, and Islam as the beginning of the Sixth Sun, which would be the final and eternal world.

The disorganized state of Islam in the Valley did not go unnoticed. Indeed, correspondence from 1381 survives between Caliph Al-Hadi (who took power in 1375, following the death of Al-Mustamsik) and an imam in Nzi'batha, one Gazi ibn Harun al-Maliki. Ibn Harun appeals in his letter for the Caliph to send more teachers, complaining that the locals "create barbarous idols and call them God, as there are not enough learned men to guide them in the sunna, even as they wish to hear it." Al-Hadi, in his response, vows to "guide the al-Garbiyyin to the proper way."

The correspondence is likely the driving force behind the Mission of 1382, in which a fleet of ten ships left Andalusia and sailed to Anawak, loaded with scholars of Islam. While one of the ships was wrecked in the Sea of Pearls, most of the wise men made it to Anawak and dispersed throughout the region, serving as teachers, healers and advisors in an effort to guide the locals in Islam. However, even these wise men couldn't outpace the spread of Islam, pushed informally through the efforts of Sufis and Sudani marabouts who were more than happy to blend Islamic teachings with local traditions to invite natives in.


~


The period following the mid-1360s brought a similar upheaval in Kawania, where the loose authority enjoyed by the city-state of Mani had steadily waned. By 1367, the leader known as Glorious Resplendent Jaguar was approaching his seventies and wracked with illness and dementia, and he'd never enjoyed any sort of imperium over the other city-stated to begin with. The onset of disease disrupted trade routes and increasingly isolated the Mayan cities, though the tough terrain and thin provender of the Yukatan peninsula made conquering the Maya a challenge.

Islam was much slower to spread in Kawania, finding mainly a few converts among the lower classes. But it established its first firm foothold in 1374, when a shipload of kishafa led by the Kaledati adventurer known as Hasan al-Jalal[3] landed in Zama[4] and captured the city.

The story of Hasan al-Jalal is a treacherous political topic, owing to its centrality in the history of the modern Cawania. The national mythology built up around him initially lionized him, describing him as a kashaf from the Kaledats who had heard stories of the Maya and sought to bring Islam to the Yukatan. As the legend goes, Hasan arrived in Zama with a group of escorts to share the teachings of the Quran, but the local lords eventually betrayed him and tried to sacrifice his wife and sons. In a righteous fury, Hasan and his men overthrew the rulers of Zama and tore down the local deities.

This initial mythology has been heavily questioned since, not the least of that questioning coming from indigenous Maya activists citing what little evidence exists of who Hasan was. What documents and letters exist suggest Hasan was in fact a marginally successful merchant from the Kaledats who had traded for some years prior with contacts in Zama, but who had eventually gotten involved in a conspiracy to overthrow the local leadership on behalf of another Mayan candidate. From a fragment of a letter written by one of Hasan's companions to family in the Kaledats, it appears that Hasan effectively co-opted this coup following the death of the initial lead conspirator left a power vacuum at the top. The merchant seems to have stepped into the void with the support of his better-armed men and a few local allies, adopting some of the trappings of a Mayan lord but introducing Islam and empowering his Kaledati and Andalusian companions as his "ruling class" of sorts.

While the Andalusian takeover of Zama would mark the entrance of direct Islamic rule into the Yukatan, it would also portend a model which would be repeated in some other regions. Less interested in wholesale conquest than in trade, Muslim settlers would wind up ruling areas directly mainly through individual initiative and avarice, though such efforts would eventually lead to cooperations with Isbili. Indeed, similar things were happening in the southern part of the Gharb al-Aqsa, where the spread of illness had led to the beginnings of a widespread abandonment of villages along the Wadi al-Baraa.[5] Among the victims were the natives of Marayu, whose island effectively fell under the purview of the Muslim trading post at Makzan al-Husayn.

Exploration up the Baraa, however, continued to prove challenging, mainly owing to the resilience of the indigenous people known as the Tapajos. While less sophisticated than their urbanized neighbours, the Tapajos routinely attacked Andalusian efforts to explore the river. Their typical approach - canoes full of archers firing poison-tipped arrows - proved an effective impediment to Muslim adventurism. It is a testament to the effectiveness of Tapajo warriors that they proved a more effective brake on the spread of Islam than the more organized, densely-packed Mayan and Anawakan states - and it's a testament to the Andalusians' failings.

Broadly speaking, Islam spread most rapidly in areas of the New World where societies were dense and urban. It ran into the most trouble in less-developed areas, and particularly in areas of heavy tree cover, or along the Baraa, accessible mainly by boat. The more difficult a place was to reach, the harder it was for Andalusians to take it over, and the more urban it was, the more devastating disease proved to local politics, while still enabling Andalusians to exploit, usurp or co-opt regional power structures.

It would take longer for Andalusians to reach other areas outside those facing the Atlas Ocean, though epidemic diseases would precede them. Indeed, in the Kingdom of Chimor across the Andes Mountains, burials dating to the 1370s have been found to show evidence of smallpox, suggesting that eastern-world diseases had migrated even to the isolated mountain kingdom well ahead of any recorded Andalusian mission. It's likely that first contacts took place for which no direct evidence exists, leaving much of this period shrouded in conjecture.[6]

SUMMARY:
1374: Hasan the Majestic becomes leader of Zama after backing a local conspiracy. The traditional founding act of Cawania.
1376: Tepanec tlatoani Xiuhtlatonac dies. The Tepanec dominion steadily disintegrates.
1380: The rulers of Xaltocan, Metztitlan, Cempoala and Texcoco form an accord known as the Otomi Alliance. All four members are friendly towards Islam.
1382: A fleet full of Andalusian and Maghrebi religious scholars arrives in Anawak to try and spread orthodox Maliki doctrines among the budding Muslims of the Central Valley, in an attempt to stamp out syncretism.

[1] Lake Texcoco.
[2] Discussed in a previous entry.
[3] Hasan the Majestic.
[4] Tulum.
[5] The Amazon River.
[6] Yes, I'm alive! I spent some time traveling over the summer and didn't do a lot of writing - but I've still got a story to tell.

 

[Planet of Hats]

It had been entirely too long since he'd last breathed the familiar air of Zama. Years - though he'd been back on occasions since everything changed for him, each return visit felt like wrapping oneself in a familiar blanket, one woven of old memories and fond recollections, comfortable even for all that he had grown.

As the saqin slid towards the shoreline, Abd al-Jabar brushed back a fold of his indigo and red robe, leaning over the edge a little with a familiar smile that etched lines of comfort and warmth into his weathered face. The biggest difference from his childhood was the wooden dock sticking out into the water a ways, built to accommodate visits from Muslim traders - traders like Hasan al-Jalal, the man who had been vaulted into power in Zama between the man's last visit and now. He'd never known the man and he barely understood what circumstances had brought him into leadership of this place in particular, but among the men at court, Abd al-Jabar had a singular distinction: He not only understood both sides' languages, but their beliefs and their ways of life.

How could he not? Abd al-Jabar had lived them, back when his name was Ikal.

"So this is where you used to live," his wife mused as she stepped over the edge of the craft and onto the pier, taking care to keep her hair covered despite a warm breeze toying with her garments. Nuwayra's dark eyes took in the sight of the city on the cliff with quiet wonder. "It feels smaller than home."

"It is. But it was home," Abd al-Jabar conceded with a familiar smile, reaching out to take her by the hand.

Time had changed him - nearly thirty years' worth, more of his life lived in Al-Andalus by now than had been lived in the land they called Quwunah for some reason.[1] The years had shot Ikal's dark hair through with silver, though he'd never been able to grow a beard, no matter how much the other Muslims told him he probably should. Truthfully, his challenges with that didn't bother him all that much. He didn't like the feel of it.

His oldest son, Muhammad, was having more luck with it. It must've come from his mother's side. Nuwayra's father was of the Zenata and had a particularly rich, flowing beard, and it appeared to run in the family.

The names had taken some getting used to. When he'd converted, he'd named himself as the Andalusians did. It took him a long time to get used to thinking of himself as Abd al-Jabar ibn Chan az-Zami the teacher of Maya tongue, not as Ah Ikal Chan. Forgetting the name of his birth was simply impossible when his job was to teach aspiring merchants to speak the tongue of the people they would be trading with.

Shaking his head, he indulged in a low chuckle at the sight of a couple of porters from the ship carrying crates of incense along the dock. The sound drew a curious look from Nuwayra, her smile slightly bemused. "What is it?"

"Irony, I suppose." Abd al-Jabar scratched his cheek and looked from the porters back up towards the cliff and the shapes of the familiar structures above them. "I remember being a young man on a boat, taking incense to that temple up there. It almost feels like I have finished the trip, much too late."

Her smile softened a little, long fingers sliding neatly into the gaps between his. "Do you wish it had been different?"

"Not at all." He meant it. "If it had been different, I might never have known God. And I would never have known you, or known the children."

The rosy traces of a blush traced Nuwayra's cheeks as she glanced to one side, but she couldn't hide a hint of a pleased look in her eyes, little sparks dancing behind the pools of deep brown. "Such fond words for a man returning home with a young family," she murmured with a hint of affected shyness.

Soon enough, they were joined by the others. They'd had three children together - Muhammad the eldest, tall and broad-faced with a full beard, and their daughters Muzayna and Awriya, both in their teenage years, along with Muhammad's wife Hassana and the infant boy Jalhama dozing in her arms. The porters followed with the loaded pack horses as they ascended towards the destination Abd al-Jabar had been diverted from in another life, in another time.

A familiar song caught his ear, croaking and regular. It took his eyes a few seconds to spot the bird, perched on a branch off to one side. "Well, hello there," he murmured affectionately as he gazed up at the little avian, brown but with flashes of turquoise at wings and brow, its trailing tail and single dangling feather wagging periodically like the ticking hand of a clock.

"What is it, father?" Awriya asked, her voice hushed with wonder as the little family paused to stare up at it for a moment.

"The torogoz,"[2] Abd al-Jabar explained with a little smile. "Watch him a moment."

The bird cocked its head at them a moment, then boosted itself into the air with a flutter of wings, sailing past on a breath of air.

~​

~​

The torogoz darted overhead with a last croak of song before vanishing out of view behind a sprig of foliage, leaving Iqal to blink a couple of times in mild surprise. "Huh. Those don't come out to the cities much anymore."

"Maybe it got bored." One of the other students waved a hand dismissively as the rest of the class made their way down the hot concrete of the launch, one of many hydroliner berths lined up along the coast in the shadow of the lights of Zamah. They were home in Cawania now, ready to link up with the maglev that would carry them from Zamah to Shillah and back to their domiciles. The learning expedition to Al-Andalus had taught him a lot - and yet, questions still remained.

His eyes followed the direction the torogoz had fled, lingering a moment longer. Then he shrugged and sighed, moving back into the single-file line.

A quick trip later, the maglev streaked across the landscape, long ago a lush jungle, today more managed, dotted with hydroponic farms and replanted trees complementing the natural forest they'd never fully managed to tame. Beyond the window, the billow of seeded clouds let the gentle rays of sunlight through, enough to cool the day a little more and take another step towards healing the world of the heat-wounds inflicted upon it. Curious shadow patterns danced across Iqal's side as the light streamed through various pieces of scenery past which the tramcar shot, but his attention was entirely on the small screen in his hand and the text tracking slowly across it - something he'd dug out of one of the research libraries.

The academic language was dense enough that getting through it had been a nightmare, but the thesis of it was simple enough: Tracing the footsteps of settlers to the Algarves, especially in the earliest days, was no easy task, and from all accounts there was a lot of crossover. Andalusians and Berbers crossing over to live among Algarvians. Natives crossing over to live in Al-Andalus, then crossing back over, having adopted the ways of the Muslims. And no one keeping track of it all.

Not for the first time, Iqal vaguely wished he could go back in time and figure it all out, because the alternative bugged him: That he might never know who his ancestor was, and why the name 'Iqal' seemed to recur in his paternal lineage so often.

For all he knew, maybe he should've asked the torogoz after all.

But then, maybe the history books aren't where I need to look, he mused as he cupped his cheek in his hand and gazed out the window as the countryside of Cawania flew by at nearly 450 kilometres per hour. He barely saw it - not at this speed, anyway.

His mind was elsewhere. On a time before all this - not magnetic levitation or ground effect, but wood and sail, steam and steel. The kind of time he would've loved to return to.

END OF ACT VII "SAILING INTO A NEW WORLD"

SOON TO COME
THE EIGHTH ERA
OF MOONLIGHT IN A JAR

"DAYS OF SAIL AND STEAM"
AN AGE THAT WILL DEFINE A WORLD'S FUTURE​

~​

[1] It's your own fault, Ikal. Or I guess theirs.
[2] The turquoise-browed motmot.

 

[Planet of Hats]

The time is once again upon us for a new chapter, which can only mean one thing: Time for dat mapdate.

Click here to view the map in north-up orientation.​

Europe and the Mediterranean World

Santiago and Navarre: Grumbling and paying tribute to a resurgent Al-Andalus following the recapture of Braga. The Santiagonians - who are now ruled by an indigenous dynasty from Corunna - are looking to fight back, but for the first time in awhile they're at a disadvantage: Al-Andalus has early guns and a ton of cash with which to buy in mercenaries. The balance of power in Iberia, in other words, may for the first time in centuries be shifting towards the Moors, or at least shifting away from a tense status quo punctuated by occasional hallmarks of Andalusian territorial decline.

The Asmarids of the Maghreb: With the Northern Blue Army well and truly whomped, the Asmarids basically operate as an arm of the Caliph-Hajib combo in Al-Andalus. The Asmarid Emir rules his lands as he sees fit but also tends to support the government in Isbili, and trading efforts tend to be carried out somewhat cooperatively. This friendliness - and the increasing dominance over Maghrebi politics exercised by Berber-Andalusian traders in the coastal cities - has steadily transformed society in the Maghreb, leading to an expansion of agriculture and an increase in cosmopolitan attitudes. It also means Berbers are crossing over more readily into Andalusian society and finding themselves able to function.

The League of Ravenna: The current Pope, Laurentius II, is in the sixth year of his pontificate, and he's taking a personal interest in mustering Christendom against the Bataids - despite the fact that Christendom does not really want to muster and more than a few kings are sick of years of "Strong Pope" popes running roughshod with the help of the Church Knights. Assembled in 1376, the League of Ravenna consists of the Papal State and the Church Knights, Hungary, Meridiana and Venice, along with the Duke of Bavaria. The Holy Roman Empire and Italy nominally support the League but are too busy fighting each other to meet the Bataid menace. Already the League managed to prevent the Bataids from capturing Trieste. However, the members of the League don't necessarily trust each other, and tensions exist in the Christian alliance, particularly in terms of whether the Pope is in charge or the kings are.

Provencia: The Grand Duke in Marselha is toying with signing his correspondences as "the King of Romania." There was a nasty scrap with the Holy Roman Empire in the 1360s over control of a chunk of the Rhone Valley. The Germans won, and the Provencals had to strip the gold off the fixings in the ducal palace to pay the reparations demanded of them. Not their brightest hour, but they tend to make up for it by snarling at the Andalusians a lot and making mean faces towards the Balearics.

France: In a period of challenge but promise, the reign of Queen Clarimonde and King Consort Jocelyn has finally brought to France what the failure to launch of the Capets did not bring: A stabilizing ruler with sufficient land to his name to maintain his power. Jocelyn, of the House of Rouen, is also the powerful Duke of Normandy, and his son Jocelyn II stands ready to inherit both Normandy and France. Clarimonde herself is 65 and still hale, quietly managing things behind the scenes and grooming young Jocelyn II into an able heir who can bring France the strength it deserves. At the moment the kingdom is at peace for the first time in a few years, and trade with Angland has picked up, bringing prosperity to the Norman coast and putting a lot of Norman French traders in cities like London.

Angland and Scotland: Still smarting over losing control of Norway to the Danish, the Anglish managed to consolidate control of Ireland. A war with Scotland in the 1360s saw them gain control of lands up to Galloway, only to be beaten back from the limits of their conquests by armies personally led by brave Donald V, King of Scots. The war saw King Colmond struck down on the field by a mere Scottish soldier and hastily buried, but with Colmond having no children, his slow-witted brother Arvid IV was thrust onto the throne. A civil war then followed as Arvid was abruptly killed and the throne was usurped from his son Oliver by forces loyal to Erick, Earl of Lincoln. Erick has taken the throne and put the House of Lincoln firmly in charge, claiming right to the throne through descent from Colmond's aunt, who was Erick's mother. More broadly, the authority of the Roman church has somewhat waned in Angland lately: While they're still Catholic, papal decrees tend to be ignored quietly here, and most ecclesiastical matters tend to be seen to by the Archbishop of York, who is a supporter of Erick. In general, the Archbishops of York tend to be close advisors to the crown. The relationship between the crown and the archbishop has not gone unnoticed in the northern European world.

The Holy Roman Empire: Burst into flames as part of the last succession crisis in 1367, when the imperial title was asserted by Meinhard II, Duke of Bohemia. Meinhard is the head of the House of Geroldseck and controls not only Bohemia, but Baden, the Franche-Comte, Forez and - through regency to his mother - Lower Lorraine. By far, Meinhard is the most powerful noble in the Holy Roman Empire. While he did manage to win some support, especially among the Germans, his candidacy sparked a war with the Duke of Saxony, who wants the title for himself. Meinhard won the war and was crowned in 1373, but he's presently engaged in a war with Guido of Canossa, Margrave of Tuscany, who was crowned King of Italy by the northern peninsular lords and Party of the Church backers in opposition to Meinhard. He's also engaged in an effort to beat down Bataid raiders coming up from Croatia to plunder around Bavaria.

Hungary: The Hungarian ruling house died out in 1354, and the throne was succeeded to by Albert of Havelland, a German and the great-grandson of a prior king. It took him a few years to consolidate himself and bludgeon the nobility into shape, but the House of Havelland currently rules in Hungary. They've sought cozier relations with the Holy Roman Empire and joined in the League of Ravenna.

Denmark: Riding high off their consolidation of Norway earlier in the century, the Danish are in the midst of an era of prosperity, trading briskly with the English, Scots, Germans and others. They fence sometimes with rebels, but the biggest news here is that they're getting better at shipbuilding.

Livonia: Still has a German ruling class, but most of its aristocracy consists of Christianized Prussians and Baltic Germans, though pagan beliefs continue to survive in the country. A little frosty with Novgorod over rights to the region of Ugandi. (Not Uganda.)

Great Novgorod: Novgorod managed to swallow the Tavastian Kingdom in the 1350s or so, with the Finnish ruling class largely converting to Greek Christianity - or is it Slavic Christianity now? Under a series of vigorous Grand Princes, Novgorod has expanded its sphere of influence into the Baltic and up into the lands of the Nenets people, and it's begun to prosper as a fur trading kingdom. Novgorod itself is booming, as is the area around Kholmogory on the Northern Dvina, but the interesting place is a newish city at the mouth of the Neva, known as Nevsk. While the Old Novgorod Dialect is the language of state, a lot of this state's subjects are actually Finnic, and there's a heavy influence of Finns, Nenets and especially Votes. The Votes in particular are well-integrated. Novgorod is mostly getting snarly at Sweden right now over Swedish claims to Finland.

The rest of Russia: The pressure being put on the Cumans by the collapse of the Tabans and the migration of the Argyns and Tuvans has basically scattered Cumans everywhere. The re-centralization process being enjoyed in Vladimir and Galicia has crumbled as various local princes ally with rogue Cuman and Argyn khans, and it's now a free-for-all to determine which prince will emerge on top. (It won't be Novgorod; they're too busy with the fur trade.)

The Bataids: Expanding and making surly noises towards their foes. After a few decades of trying, the Bataids managed to devour the Roman remnant on Cyprus. More notably, though, is that the Bataids rounded from their conquests in the Haemus and spent a few years fighting the remnants of the Abbasid Caliphate. This stemmed from Bataid efforts to centralize themselves as "the centre of Islam," and the Abbasid refusal to move to Constantinople. That stopped when the Bataids invaded and supported a particular Abbasid contender as Caliph. There's a lot of debate within the faith now as to whether the current line of the Abbasid family is genuinely supported or chosen by the ummah, or if the position is up for grabs.



The Rest of Asia

Persia: The Mezinid Shahdom is in its ascendancy after smashing the weakened Gurkhanate. While the Mezinids are Kurdish and probably of Turkmen origin, they've nevertheless consolidated themselves in Rayy and gotten the region back on track, ruling as an ethnically Persian dynasty - the first in generations. They're fuelled by an immense wave of cultural pride here.

The Indus and the North of India: The Tarazids collapsed in on themselves not long before Ibn Qasi arrived, quickly being overthrown by the ambitious Karluk general Qaymaqar, who rules the mouth of the river. However, while he has a strong army, much of it was exhausted in an inconclusive war with the Mezinids. The inability of Qaymaqar to exert control over all the Tarazid holdings has led to fragmentation. While the Hindu Seunas have filled some of the void, the rest has fallen into feuding principalities, mostly Hindu. Only the Badayun Sultanate is still ruled by Muslims, though they're heavily influenced by a Hindu bureaucratic class.

The Jirghadaiids: Interesting in that they're a Persianized dynasty, but of Naiman origin. They're the last Naiman dynasty still out there, though they are Muslim.

The Taban Successor States: The collapse of the Tabans created four successor-states. The Khanate of Qocho has a Taban ruling class but is mostly controlled by Uyghurs. The Khanate of Almaliq, under a dynasty descended from Altan Khan's son Menggei, is a mix of Turkic, Taban, Naiman and Persianate people, with Nestorians and Buddhists most prominent among them. The Khanate of Khwarezm, under the dynasty of Altan Khan's youngest brother Khutughu, is largely pagan but with a mix of other religions. Of the three, Almaliq is the most powerful.

The Argyns and Tuvans, and Qimir: Many of the Tuvans in particular have adopted Nestorianism. These hordes are beginning to follow the great steppe superhighway east and are filtering into Russia and the Haemus in dribs and drabs, but many are also filtering into the former Black Olesh, particularly those who profess a Nestorian faith.

Qimir: The arrival of the Tuvans - and more than a few fleeing Naimans - has had huge ramifications for this area and the melting-pot people living there. The land now called Qimir is now ruled by an urbanized dynasty of Tuvan stock, who came in and basically took over before adopting the culture and shifting to the Kipchak-based language used in the area. Nestorianism is gaining ground against Greek-Slavic Christianity among the upper classes. A particular church in the main city at Hersones is now a Nestorian cathedral and has gained a bell tower that looks suspiciously like a square Persianesque minaret, and if you go in, you might hear a few people throat-singing hymns to Jesus.

The Radha Kingdom: A Buddhist kingdom controlling much of Bengal and the lands of Rakhine. There's a substantial Muslim presence here, and the Andalusians have begun to realize this is a really great place to trade, too. This is one of the most prosperous kingdoms in Asia right now.

Tibet: o/` back toge~ther~ o/`

Continental Southeast Asia: The Khmer are in a state of terminal decline, leading to new power centres forming. The biggest kingdom in the area is Lavo, which had it out with the Burmese kingdom of Dala and basically took the Irrawaddy delta for its own purposes. As a result, Lavo enjoys enormous prosperity and control over certain trade routes, bringing in a great deal of wealth. Meanwhile, in the mountains, smaller lordships persist.

Broader Nusantara: The Aceh Sultanate remains a loose client of Wu China, but the big story in the islands has been the meteoric rise of the Janggala Kingdom, centred on the area around Surabaya. They're a powerful Hindu-Buddhist thalassocracy and don't have a tributary relationship with the Wu yet. Some Muslims do live here, but they're a minority.

The Eastern Islands: The ones making a lot of money here are actually the kinglets in Ryukyu. Don't sleep on this one.

Wu China: Just coming into power and beginning to stretch their wings, the Wu are in a position where they have lost a lot of the Yellow River area to the Hei of the north. However, by this point, Ru Wenjun - Emperor Qingzu - has consolidated the nobility behind him and asserted his claim to the Mandate of Heaven. He has everything he needs, and then some, to push the Neo-Khitans back into the north and begin what he feels will be a great age.



Sudan (Sub-Saharan Africa):

The Ghanimids: The big power in the Hilalian Sudan, they are Arabs and Arabized Nubians ruling from what used to be Alodia, and they are Shia. At the moment they're making a lot of money with the trade to Egypt, as they're a source of two important things: Coffee and slaves.

The Ganda Emirate: Nilotic-speaking Shia Muslims are beginning to flood into the Great Lakes region, and at this point it looks likely that they will soon be in a position to overthrow Ganda's ruling class and form their own emirate. In general, Shia Islam - spread by the post-Hilalian Arabized Sudani nomads migrating down from the Nile - stands to be enormously influential in the east-central Sudan.

The Hussenids: Another group of Afro-Hilalians, these descended from Arabs and members of the Daju ethnicity. They are Shia, they are nomads, and some of them have settled along the Bahr Aouk River in what is, OTL, the northern Central African Republic. Most of these nomads - part of the broader "Lala" group - wander that broad area or live in small villages. Slave raiding tends to be a profit source for them, largely because they're coming in with an edge in technology and advancement and have connections with the wealthier kingdoms in the north.

Senegambia and the Niger: The Mali Empire got crashed into at high speed by an angry Blue Army, and while Mande authority still exists, the Blue Army remains a menace here well after being tamed in the north. The fragmenting of the Malian empire has led to the more Arabized Serer Simala Kingdom taking over the mantle of the main trading kingdom, with the smaller Niani Kingdom something of a Simala client at this point. The Simala love to use Fulani wanderers as soldiers and mercenaries. I'm sure this will never backfire, ever.

The Kongo Emirate: The impacts of Asian rice and Muslim trade gold are beginning to be felt here. The kingdoms along the Kongo are beginning to consolidate following the conquests of a particularly ambitious local group from Mpemba Kasi, originating as a group of Muslims with deep connections in the royal circle. While Islam is still not the religion of the masses, the new Emir considers himself a Muslim and observes the sunnah as best he can, though much like Mali, Islam is catching on here in a somewhat syncretic way.

Al-Qamar: The sea route to Mecca has its first beneficiary! Muslim traders are already present on the OTL islands of Comoros. Here, they've been more than happy to give some rest and relaxation to the rich folks coming by to perform the Hajj.



The Gharb al-Aqsa and the Sunset Ocean:

The Tepanecs: Currently falling apart amidst a wave of plagues and political unrest.

The Purepecha: Also currently falling apart amidst a wave of plagues, but they've held together somewhat better. Really, no one in Central America is not getting absolutely devastated by the epidemic diseases brought by the Andalusians and Berbers and spread by everyone who can possibly carry it. That said, it's likely the Purepecha will survive, in some form.

The Guachichil: Epidemic diseases are taking their toll, but the Guachichil are a bit more spread out than the dense urban folks in the valley. Those who survive have access to a few horses and are trading for more. They're by far the best positioned of the Chichimeca to survive the onslaught of germs coming over the ocean.

The Tapajos: Epidemic diseases are taking their toll, but the Tapajos are somehow managing to hold on to their little corner of the Amazon, preventing Andalusian explorers from getting much farther down the river. Despite the more advanced tech of the Tepanecs and Nahuas and the big cities of the Maya, the Tapajos are actually the most formidable resistance that Andalusians have encountered so far, proving able to defeat Andalusians in sophisticated ships and with advanced weapons.

The Haida: Their tributary network collapsed following the death of Raven Eyes, who will undoubtedly pass into legend as part of the Haida mythos.

The Tu'i Tonga Empire: Is it Tonga time? I think it's Tonga time. Don't look now, but Tonga's quietly getting big and spreading their language and culture around the Polynesian islands.

 

[Planet of Hats]

HDamn! This deserves its own update thats alot happening why didn't egypt come to the Abbasids defence? Also no harabid news, does this mean they will get their oen update?

Interesting-- so the Abbasids are now captives in Constantinople? Is the "replace the Abbasids" sentiment of a pro-Bataid bent (displace the Abbasids, the Bataids are the champions of the current ummah) or anti-Bataid (the Abbasids can't be trusted anymore, we need someone else to stand against the Turko-Greeks)? Did the Mezinids try to defend the Abbasids or get involved in some other way? Persia staying Sunni means that the country's heartland stays religiously in step with peripheries from Kurdistan to Tajikistan, so the "natural bounds" of the country could be much larger if they can avoid (or win) tussles with the Bataids over who's the real champion of Sunnism.

The "replace the Abbasids" sentiment is very much an anti-Bataid sentiment.

What sparked all this was the Bataid Emperor, the infamous Abdullah Arslan, trying to convince Caliph Al-Wathiq to relocate to Constantinople, which he saw as necessary to solidify himself as the champion of Islam. Al-Wathiq - an old man, but a firm defender of the faith - responded with a long and incredibly detailed letter pulling out verse after verse from the Quran and hadith, supported by citations from notable scholars past and present, which collectively demonstrated how absolutely ridiculous Abdullah Arslan's request was. The letter emphatically stated the opinion that the Muslim community can have only one leader, and it's the successor to the Prophet. Abdullah Arslan spent a few years trying to bribe and cajole Al-Wathiq into making the move, but those efforts really peaked when Al-Wathiq died.

While Al-Wathiq's successor was supposed to be his son, Al-Qa'im, Abdullah Arslan produced a letter which contained a scholarly opinion - written by several imams of Turkic extraction - supporting Al-Wathiq's nephew Abu'l-Abbas as the legitimate candidate, giving the young man the regnal name of Al-Mustazhir. Al-Qa'im set himself up in Baghdad anyway with the support of the Harabids, at which point Abdullah Arslan produced another letter insisting that there can be only one caliph and promptly marched his men to Baghdad.

The Abbasids allied with the Harabids during the conflict, but in all honesty the war over who would control the Caliphate was pretty tilted in favour of the Bataids and their dominion of Hello-Perso-Patzinak-Turkmen subjects. The Mezinids sat out the conflict, mostly due to being occupied wrestling with the remnants of the Gurkhanate in the Hindu Kush mountains, but the Harabids did come up and open up a front on the Bataids in the Levant. The Abbasids themselves couldn't muster that much of a defense, having grown somewhat sleepy and not having a ton of power in the region to begin with. Al-Qa'im himself was captured and locked up in a gilded room in the palace at Constantinople, and Al-Mustazhir was set up in his own little palace in Prusa, with Abdullah Arslan making a big show of proclaiming himself the designated servant of the Caliph.

This has created deep consternation among the Muslims because it makes explicit that the Caliph is basically a puppet of a Helleno-Patzinak who lives in the Bosporus and claims to be the inheritor of the Roman Empire.

To a lot of Muslim scholars - Arabs especially - the Caliphate is either vacant or still occupied by Al-Qa'im, as Al-Mustazhir is clearly illegitimate. To most among the Bataids, the opposite is true: The Muslim world's champion was clearly the Bataid empire to begin with, and Al-Mustazhir is the nominal spiritual leader of the largest and mightiest Muslim empire, as was intended. Turkmen scholars and Muslims are more likely to view the Bataid claim to the Caliphate as returning the office to the original intention of the sahabah, and they consider the Bataid pressing of his claim to be an example of the ummah making their decision. This view has some clout outside of the Bataid world, but the Mezinids are pretty frosty towards them and the Harabids outright do not consider Al-Mustazhir or his descendants to be legitimately chosen, instead continuing to place the name of Al-Qa'im in the khutbah, but there's some talk among Arab and Persian scholars as to whether the Caliphate is actually vacant.

The big problem these contesting claimants face is that none of them have a particularly strong claim to the Caliphate. The Harabid ruling house does not descend from the Quraysh or any of the sahabah. While there is a Hashemite emir who rules Mecca on behalf of the Harabids, they don't want to recognize him as Caliph because it would be wildly inconsistent with their position, which is essentially legitimist: That is, the legitimate Caliph is the ruler of the Muslims, not a pawn dancing from the strings of Patzinaks and Hellenes. The Mezinids, for their part, are a Turkmen dynasty who adopted Kurdish culture and became so assimilated to the Persian way of life that they forgot their origins, and while they sometimes claim a genealogy dating back to the era of Muhammad, it's not widely supported, and even they don't claim to have been among the sahabah. At best, the Mezinids can pretend to be an old Persian dynasty, not a dynasty with a die to the Prophet himself. There are more than a few sharifs and sayyids floating around Persiam and Iraq, of course, but the vast majority are Alids of the Twelver belief and aren't particularly beloved by the Mezinids, who are Sunni.

Basically there is a window for someone with a strong case and a lot of backing to come in and try to establish an independent Caliphate again, but because the basis of that window is a legitimist case, finding someone who has both a) the appropriate lineage and b) a huge army is difficult. There are watchful eyes on the Hashemites, though - they're known to command a lot of respect from the nomadic Bedouins in the Jazirat al-Arab in particular, who tend to have a lot of muscle behind them.

 

[Planet of Hats]

As we go into the next chapter, I've been working on my mapmaking skills:

 

[Planet of Hats]

A palm tree I beheld in Zama
Born in a place far beyond the sunrise
A place far beyond the wingbeats of the Entrant
Flying from home into exile
Flying on wings made of wood and canvas
Over the waters which once formed the bounds of earth
In the shade of his fronds lies the mercy of mighty God
In the breadth of his boughs, he encircles the very earth
​

- 'Ubayd ibn Abd-Allah al-Bayezi, 1427
A tribute to the famous poem of Abd ar-Rahman I​

~​

The discovery of the Gharb al-Aqsa and years of contact with the peoples both of the Farthest West and the deepest reaches of the Sudan injected concepts into the Andalusian worldview that it was frankly ill-prepared for.

Aside from independent military adventures in Zama and Mawana, contact with the Gharb al-Aqsa had largely been spearheaded by freelancing merchants, spice traders, fortune-seekers and mercenaries, with Muslim presence limited to the makzans set up at key trading stops along various coasts. The prevailing opinion in those early days tended to lean on a backdrop of the ruling of the Maliki jurist Abd al-Gani ibn Mas'ud ibn Salama al-Hafiz, an imam from Anaza in the Kaledats, who authorized jihad against those pagans in the Gharb al-Aqsa who raised their hands or broke their covenants against Muslim merchants, but in practice it was uncommon for military force to be brought to bear due to logistical difficulties.

A new challenge became apparent as time went on: Visitors to the Farthest West increasingly found cities abandoned or thinly-populated, and more than a few new lands appeared unpeopled altogether.

In fact this was a result of epidemic diseases rapidly outpacing Muslim explorers, following indigenous merchants along pre-existing trade routes and tagging along behind early Muslim adventurers to ravage native populations with no inbuilt immunity. However, even Andalusian medical knowledge - by then among the most sophisticated outside of China, with understanding of concepts such as hygiene - did not grasp what was happening. With no theory of epidemiology and no solid understanding of why disease would spread so rapidly among a virgin-field population, along with no prior knowledge of many of the settings they visited, all these early explorers saw in many places was abandoned cities or outright empty land, when in fact many areas had been widely populated only decades before.

In Anawak and Kawania alone, the toll of disease had created a gruesome societal disruption. Population figures prior to the Crossing are vague, but scholarly estimates suggest an overall population in the area of 17 to 20 million people. But early waves of five devastated that number within 30 years of contact. The rapid sweep of smallpox through Anawak killed an estimated seven million people within the first decade, followed by an even more severe wave of illness the Otomi knew only as the Dathi, or the Sickness. Science has been inconclusive as to the identity of this illness, and in fact it may have been several at once, but it claimed millions of lives over the next several years, as high as 10 million.[1]

From its pre-crossing peaks, the population of Anawak and Kawania collapsed to no more than four to five million people by 1381 - a death toll of 75% in just 30 years. By the turn of the century, it would drop to no more than 2 million to 3 million before beginning to stabilize.[2]

The societal toll was devastating to the native population, and urban areas were ravaged most severely. Entire cities were abandoned and swallowed up by jungle. In the Yukatan, the hegemony of the League of Mani crumbled as entire Mayan city-states were depopulated. The population of Zama fell catastrophically around the time of Hasan the Majestic's takeover, to the point that Hasan and his entourage - perhaps a hundred kishafa - were sufficient to maintain order in the city. Other settlements were outright depopulated, with a few becoming known to early Muslim explorers only as ruins, and even more going undiscovered for decades or even centuries, joining the bevy of already-extant ruins dotting the peninsula. Larger centres, like Mani, Zama, Chichen Itza and Ekab, held on despite rampant depopulation.

Andalusian explorers had no idea of the toll their exploration was taking. All many of them saw were sparsely-populated cities surrounded by empty land.

The toll of epidemic diseases was not always as severe in the Sudan, where existing trade networks ensured that the populations the Muslims met had immunity already. Some groups were more affected than others, most notably in the southernmost part of the landmass, where contact was much more sporadic.[3] But in many of these areas, the societies encountered by Andalusian explorers were hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads. While the cities of the Swahili Coast and the Bight of Benin were seen as relatively sophisticated, the lack of major urban areas south of the Zadazir raised questions.

Andalusian society had rested for centuries on a framework of racial hierarchy. Prior to the muwallad takeover of society in the wake of the Great Plague, Al-Andalus was effectively an ethnic hierarchy with Arabo-Andalusians at the top. The transition improved the lot of most Andalusis and Berbers, but new ethnic hierarchies had come to form as the purchase of Sudani slaves became more common and the employment of Saqaliba became more cautious. As exploration proceeded, these attitudes translated to the peoples Andalusi and Berber explorers encountered.

Andalusi attitude towards indigenous people of the Gharb al-Aqsa and the Southern Sudan is summed up by the naturalist 'Abd al-Qawi ibn Muhammad ibn Gharsiya al-Istiji, who described both groups as "people who know not God or civilization" and attributed their lifestyles to a lack of intelligence or constitution. These views, while abhorrent, permeated Andalusian upper society in various forms, ranging from a patronizing sense of superiority over the peoples of the Farthest West and the Sudan to occasionally a deeper dismissiveness, and in some cases even contempt. As to the ruins being discovered by some explorers, they were seen as curiosities.

The biggest question was what would become of lands the explorers viewed as empty. Early in his term as hajib, Abd ar-Rahman the Seafarer - who had traveled in the Gharb al-Aqsa and seen abandoned towns and lands in Anawak, even fighting against the Chichimecas - gathered influential men at court in Isbili to debate the question in view of sharia.

Emerging from the debate was a ruling of the imam Nuh ibn Muhammad al-Narixi, who established a key piece of jurisprudence which would guide how Abd ar-Rahman would view the New World. Al-Narixi determined that any lands captured in jihad (as in Mawana and Zama) must be considered war booty, and by sharia, one-fifth of the captured lands should be "for Allah, and to the Messenger, and to the near relatives, the orphans, the poor and the wayfarer," with the rest to be shared among the mujahidin who claimed it. In practice, this meant that explorers had the right to carve out territories in the Gharb al-Aqsa, provided they granted a fifth of the lands to the Caliph, or rather, to the hajib on behalf of the Caliph, for distribution along the lines of proper sharia - and provided they paid a persistent 20% slice of all revenue from their lands to the treasury in Isbili.

In Zama, Hasan the Majestic acceded to these new rules, and a large chunk of the city itself was set aside as a caliphal estate of sorts. The remaining Maya population of the city were treated as something below dhimmi, allowed to carry out their daily lives, but subject to taxation and bans on elements of their religion which went against Islam.

Mawana would prove more resistant. Mahmud ibn Asafu had died in 1375, leaving his son Tashfin to rule the island. Approached by the emissaries of Abd ar-Rahman, Tashfin refused to pay the taxes demanded of him, instead beheading the lead emissary and sending the head back to Isbili in a box. Abd ar-Rahman responded by mustering a flotilla of ships and loading them with 500 Saqaliba and 500 Andalusi soldiers, bankrolling the fleet and charging them with removing Tashfin by force of arms. The initial wave of kishafa in Mawana having grown old by that time, they had little chance of resisting, and the flotilla arrived and quickly assumed control, establishing a caliphal overseer on the formerly Taino-majority island.

The overseer, reporting directly to Abd ar-Rahman, assumed control to find himself ruling an island in which over 90% of the population had died. In 1348, the island was home to about 600,000 people, but that number was well below 40,000 by the time Abd ar-Rahman established control, with most of the surviving Taino either enslaved in the Mawana-controlled south or declining in the allied north. Mahmud and Tashfin's administration had been brutal, with the natives forced to toil in mines and on sugar plantations to try and extract profit for the kishasfa regime, devastating their numbers.

The regime put into place by Abd ar-Rahman was somewhat more merciful. The administrator - one Fulays ibn Abd al-Nur al-Qarmuni, an Abd ar-Rahman loyalist - lessened the work demands on the surviving Taino and ended the harsh punishments instituted by Mahmud. His regime continued to enslave the southern Taino, but permitted slaves to buy their freedom through mukataba contracts based on work. Slaves who converted to Islam were manumitted, though Al-Qarmuni continued to view them as second-class citizens. While overall productivity declined, life expectancy increased, and revenue actually began to trickle into Isbili.

Seeing that the Taino were particularly vulnerable to illness, Al-Qarmuni began to import slaves purchased in Tekrur or the Bight of Benin. Sudani slaves were viewed as hardier and more resistant to sickness and injury, and the long history of slavery in the region made obtaining labourers fairly simple. While in Al-Andalus and Maghrib, the majority of Sudani slaves were women, Al-Qarmuni pioneered the practice of utilizing male slave labourers, drawing on practices taking place in the Mufajia Island sugar plantations. In that respect, Al-Qarmuni, for all that he ended the worst cruelties, is viewed[4] as a figure of evil among many Algarvian indigenous movements, known as the father of the Intercontinental Slave Trade.[5]

The so-called One-Fifth Rule, or Spoils Rule, would govern how Abd ar-Rahman would approach matters in the Gharb al-Aqsa and Southern Sudan, including in lands the Muslims viewed as "empty." The approach came at a time when expansionism in particular would eye the Sudani coastline, with mariners seeking places to establish layover ports for the increasing number of Muslims seeking to go on the hajj via the sea route. These ports, and their associated fortifications, would be considered to be established on lands "won" from the pagan inhabitants and would be subject to the 20% tax.

As population decline gutted the Farthest West, this policy loomed in the background of Abd ar-Rahman's approach. Trade remained the focus, and merchants continued to wheel and deal with surviving natives, particularly the Totonacs and Otomi - but for other explorers, particularly those of a martial mindset, the promise of being able to keep 80% of what they could take raised the prospect of simply being able to sail into the west and seek a fortune.[6]

At a time when the Andalusian population was swelling, many would succumb to the allure of sailing into the west in search of their four-fifths of whatever they could find.

~​

"DAYS OF SAIL AND STEAM"
AN AGE THAT WILL DEFINE A WORLD'S FUTURE​

~​

[1] These figures somewhat follow the curve of how things went in reality, unfortunately, with a key mitigating factor: OTL, the epidemics of cocoliztli in the New World coincided with a megadrought. Here, it did not, but that's not going to stop a determined plague in a virgin field population.
[2] The population of OTL Mexico alone falls from about 20 million to a maximum of 2.5 million, in point of fact. In other words, epidemic disease and sporadic violence kill 87.5% of human beings in classical Mesoamerica alone. This is probably the single greatest tragedy in human history, and there's sadly no way for me to write a history without confronting what happens when Old World diseases meet New World populations.
[3] Khoisan groups in particular are vulnerable here.
[4] Rightly. Al-Qarmuni may treat his slaves with a more even hand than the monster Mahmud, but he's still a slaver. He is objectively a bad man.
[5] As always in this timeline, this is one of those things I hate to write about.
[6] Trade through the makzans remains the predominant model, but the unintended consequence of the One-Fifth Rule is that some avaricious Cortes type can take a crack at some land-grabbing and keep the other 80%.

SUMMARY:
1381: The imam Al-Narixi establishes the so-called One-Fifth Rule, which classifies lands taken in the New World and sub-Sahelian Africa as war booty captured from pagans and mandates that one-fifth of it be distributed evenly to God - in practice giving the Andalusian administration a 20% controlling stake in all overseas colonies.
1383: Abd ar-Rahman the Seafarer removes Tashfin ibn Mahmud, the son of Mahmud ibn Asafu, from his position as emir of Mawana. The administrator Al-Qarmuni takes over and ends the worst atrocities being committed against the native Taino, permitting slaves to buy manumission or achieve it by converting to Islam. But he also starts the importation of black slaves into the Gharb al-Aqsa.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: 14: The Century That Changed Everything - Christian Saldmare, Dragon's Hill Press, AD 2002


The reputation of Abd ar-Rahman the Seafarer comes not only from his promotion of overseas exploration, trade and settlement, but from his handling of the most serious conflict Al-Andalus would face in generations - the War of the Navarrese Succession.

Since the invasion of Guillermo del Toro, the northern border wars between Al-Andalus and the Christian kingdoms had settled into an almost performative routine of back-and-forth summer raids. The border changed little, with key losses being the city of Viguera from Al-Andalus to Navarre and the city of Braga from Santiago to Al-Andalus, but by and large, the Duero Valley remained in the hands of mostly Santiagonian nobles, who had begun to develop a series of villages and towns there around Norman-style motte-and-bailey forts. The border between Santiago and Navarre had also fluctuated, with Navarre gaining control of the disputed town of San Semilio during a time of dispute between the Normandos and the native nobility.

By 1387, however, it was Navarre's turn to struggle. The rule of the House of Austermane would prove entirely brief following the death of Gustavo II in 1382, sonless. His brother, Guillermo IV, succeeded him, but he too succumbed to an early death in 1386, leaving the kingdom in the tender hands of his son - a baby boy born just six months before Guillermo's untimely demise.

The infant - Gustavo III, or Gustavo the Young - was not particularly welcomed by the local Basque nobility, who tended to resent the House of Austermane anyway. A regency council was established, headed up by Gustavo's mother, Ynes of Santiago - herself a princess from Navarre's western neighbour. But suspicion of Ynes, who was viewed as a puppet of her brother, King Alfonso II of Santiago, led the nobility to move to topple her. A palace coup saw Ynes flee the palace with Gustavo and her retinue as a noble faction under Count Milian of Alava, a distant descendant of the former Navarrese noble house. Milian - fancying himself King Milian I - could further cite a claim inherited from his descent from Gustavo the Young's grandmother.

Ynes and Gustavo wound up in Santiago, and Ynes appealed to her brother Alfonso for help. The Santiagonian king responded, seeing the opportunity to settle old grievances with the Basques, and he promptly sent his men up the Duero in the spring of 1387 to lay siege to San Semilio. As a smaller kingdom than Santiago, Navarre struggled to respond.

An unspoken subtext came in the nature of Santiago's allies: Alfonso's wife was Melisende of France, sister to crown prince Jocelyn and son of Queen Clarimonde and King Jocelyn, Duke of Normandy. Prince Jocelyn himself was married to Agnes of Gascony, daughter of Duke Guy IV of the same, who had long sought to assert the old Williamate claims to Navarre. Milian feared that a conflict could see his kingdom dismantled, partitioned between Santiago and French Gascony.

These fears led to his appeal to an unlikely savior: The Umayyad Caliph.

*​

It wasn't unprecedented for the Christian kings to turn to the Moors to help mediate their various disputes - it had been done on occasions past. Navarre, for its part, had been grumblingly paying tribute to Isbili for some time, and while Milian might have wished to escape that obligation, he found himself in the position of being a usurper king with mainly local allies and powerful external enemies, and with few options to end the war before France could get involved. At the time, Al-Andalus - flush with wealth and benefitting from new technologies as yet unknown or uncommon in Christendom - outweighed Santiago militarily and had the potential to turn the tide of the war.

The fall of San Semilio in late 1387 accelerated Milian's timetable. His emissary was welcomed to Isbili, agreeing to continue the tributary relationship in exchange for intervention by the Caliph's agent.

For Abd ar-Rahman, the pressure to get involved was obvious. A long-time worry for generations of Andalusian rulers was the prospect of the northern kingdoms unifying or forging an alliance with France. The absorption of Navarre by a Santiagonian king with ties to France would upset the status quo and create a more formidable foe in the north. After some deliberation, Abd ar-Rahman placed his brother Sadiq at the head of a small army of Saqaliba and Berbers and sent him north. Milian agreed to continue to pay tribute to Isbili, while Abd ar-Rahman agreed to try and force Alfonso to the table.

By 1388, Navarre's western border had crumbled inward with the fall of Burgos, with Soria threatened next. Sadiq took his troops to Madinat as-Salih, sending out his scouts to determine the location of Alfonso's army. His first play was to present the Santiagonian king with a letter from Abd ar-Rahman, inviting him to accept Andalusian mediation of the Navarrese succession question. Alfonso accepted the letter and promised to consider it overnight.

The moment Sadiq was out of sight, however, Alfonso continued his march on to Soria. When Sadiq awoke the next morning to word of the Santiagonian movement, he mustered his troops into a rapid march northward. What he did not know is that Alfonso had already identified where the Andalusian army was, the size of their force and what routes they could feasibly take to get to Soria, which he correctly deduced that Sadiq would try to reinforce. Alfonso slowed his march and let his troops rest as they continued along the Douro, waiting for Sadiq and his army to cross through the more rugged terrain south of the Muslim-controlled border town Al-Mazan, then to cross the Duero itself, and finally continue through more rugged terrain. The more demanding march of the Andalusian forces left them tired by the time they came within sight of Alfonso's army, encamped near Tardelcuende.

On paper, the Andalusian forces had numerical superiority: Sadiq commanded about 6,000 men, including 1,000 Saqaliba, most of them mounted, while Alfonso had peeled off about 4,500 men from a larger force, most of them infantry, with most of his army left behind to reinforce San Semilio. But Alfonso's men were fresher and better-rested, expecting an attack, while Sadiq's were exhausted from a long march and surprised to find Alfonso's army in position to meet them. Made arrogant by his numbers advantage and greater proportion of cavalry, Sadiq led into the battle by sending the Saqaliba in to attack while dispatching the Berbers to attack the flanks, at which point Alfonso feigned withdrawal, luring the Andalusians into pursuing him.

In fact, Alfonso drew the Andalusian army into a pincer, and his own cavalry swept around to attack the Andalusian flank, cutting them off. The fresher Santiagonian infantry managed to withstand the Saqaliba's charge and inflicted casualties mainly with polearms. The force Sadiq came north with was primarily cavalry, with comparatively few crossbowmen, while Alfonso's vanguard was heavily stocked with pikemen. A powerful pike charge led by the Count of Astorga killed many of the Saqaliba, while the Berbers' ability to throw javelins from range was curtailed when the Santiagonian knights cut them off.

The Battle of Tardelcuende was a humiliating rout for the Andalusian contingent, and by the time Sadiq called the retreat, he had left nearly half his army dead on the field, including two-thirds of his Saqaliba. He had lost almost 3,000 men compared to barely 1,000 for Alfonso. The victorious Santiagonian king sent word back to his army and continued on to begin laying siege to Soria, while reinforcements began to move up from San Semilio towards the border post of Al-Mazan. Santiagonian forces would proceed to lay siege to both settlements.

Word of the humiliation at Tardelcuende reached Abd ar-Rahman, along with word that Santiagonian forces were now camped along the Duero, seeking to wear down the fortifications at Al-Mazan. The Hajib set to work mustering a much larger army, one better-equipped to confront Santiago.

The years of trade with China had opened up new technologies to Andalusian knowledge, transmitted through the Muslim world through contacts unknown to Christians at the time. Fire lances had come into use already, but by the time of Abd ar-Rahman's reign, blackpowder weapons were becoming more common, and new varieties had begun to enter service. Beyond that, the breakup of the Northern Blue Army had made Berber mercenaries more available, and the post-Great Plague population boom and societal restructuring had enabled Al-Andalus to build a much stronger Andalusi army. Advances in metallurgy enabled Andalusi troops to field more powerful crossbows, among other equipment.

As Abd ar-Rahman mustered his forces, however, word arrived from France that Queen Clarimonde had died, and her son, Jocelyn II, had succeeded to the throne. While the young man would see to his coronation first, common wisdom was that Al-Andalus and Navarre were on the clock for a French intervention.

SUMMARY:
1386: The infant Gustavo III, just six months old, succeeds to the throne of Navarre.
1387: A palace coup in Navarre results in Count Milian of Alava being named king. Gustavo and his mother, Ynes of Santiago, appeal to Ynes's brother, Alfonso II of Santiago, for aid. Santiago promptly invades Navarre. The War of the Navarrese Succession begins.
1388: With Burgos and San Semilio fallen, Milian makes a deal with the devil and appeals to Al-Andalus to mediate the dispute. Andalusian troops march north to try and keep the peace, but the numerically superior Andalusian force is routed by Alfonso in a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Tardelcuende. Santiagonian troops lay siege to Soria and Al-Mazan as rumour begins to spread of France coming into the conflict to try and partition Navarre between itself and Santiago.

 

[Planet of Hats]

The weapon of the Moor is not mere steel, for he does call forth the great billows of fire, and they consume the host with a great cacophony and a most awesome terror. He brings forth great spouts and cupolas that are said to contain the breath of dragons, yea, that it is said their wise men have tamed, and have found a means to capture their flame and cast it forth. In this way it is not merely sail and steed that do deliver victory to the Moor, but also alchemy.
​

- Memoirs of Ilduin de Becerrea, 1419​

~​

Excerpt: Sail, Steed and Alchemy: Reflections on the Andalusian Experience During the War of the Navarrese Succession - Jean-Marc Laframboise, for the Journal of Transpyrenean Histories, 2018


For more than one reason, the War of the Navarrese Succession is considered the war that marked the definitive transition from the Middle Ages to a new age. It is the first war in which blackpowder weapons were widely used (predominantly by one side) and it is the first war in Iberia in generations to include massive changes in territory and balance of power. For Andalusian history, it is important because it marks a definitive transition out of old paradigms and into a new, more stable position.

Much of Andalusian history following the Berber Revolt was marked by periods of economic prosperity balanced by gradual territorial decline and border stagnation. Gains in the Atlas Islands and discoveries in the Western World were counterbalanced by the expansion of Christian powers into the so-called Duero Desert, a former no-man's-land left behind as the Andalusian border gradually receded southward. Into that gulf had moved Normando and Iberian settlers, establishing motte-and-bailey fortifications and new towns and expanding the Christian universe.

But the Andalus across the Central System of mountains was not the same Al-Andalus that existed in the Great Plague period. In the aftermath of that mass die-off, society had been reshaped by a massive transition of institutional power from Saqaliba and Arabo-Andalusians to indigenous Andalusis. The need to rely on mercenary armies almost exclusively was greatly diminished, mitigated by the ability of the Hizamids to raise citizen soldiers and produce weaponry, and enabling slave-soldier castes to be reduced to mere elite soldiers rather than holding an absolute monopoly on the use of force. The prosperity and expansion of trade which followed the Plague, together with the transmission of Chinese technology to Andalusia both through existing Islamic trade routes and Andalusian contact with India and the Arabian Peninsula, resulted in the region experiencing a flying leap in technological sophistication, particularly in terms of shipbuilding, metallurgy and the use of blackpowder.

Perhaps for the first time in centuries, Al-Andalus found itself in the position of having prohibitive military advantages over its northern neighbours. The conditions existed in which Abd ar-Rahman the Seafarer could break the ancient stalemate in the Iberian Peninsula and begin to roll back the slow decline of Al-Andalus's territorial boundaries.

*​

Al-Andalus's entrance into the War of Navarrese Succession was fumbling, with an advance force humiliated at the Battle of Tardelcuende. With the fortifications at Al-Mazan besieged, Abd ar-Rahman hustled to raise his forces in defense.

Working to his advantage was that overtures between Santiago and France were slow. The recent death of Queen Clarimonde saw her son, Jocelyn II, seeing first to his coronation and the pacification of his more restive vassals. While Jocelyn was seen as likely to come to the aid of Santiagonian King Alfonso II, married as he was to Jocelyn's sister Melisende, it would take him time to consolidate himself in Paris and Rouen - time in which Abd ar-Rahman hoped to decide the fate of Navarre as a continued tributary to the Caliph and his agent.

Seeking to quickly turn the tide of the war, Abd ar-Rahman looked to the advantages Al-Andalus had over its rivals: Technology and mobility. Mustering his armies, he sent a force northward to relieve Al-Mazan, managing to break the Santiagonian siege after some months. This force largely consisted of Andalusian infantry and cavalry led by the remnants of the Saqaliba guard, eager to avenge the loss of their kinsmen. Santiagonian troops withdrew from Al-Mazan after dealing significant damage to the city's fortifications, but failed to capture it, and the Andalusian army swung to attempt to liberate a few Navarrese border towns.

But this would not be all of Abd ar-Rahman's forces. The Hajib personally joined a more select force of men, consisting primarily of the Black Guard and numerous Berber auxiliaries brought up from Al-Maghrib. Mustering a hundred ships from harbours along the southern coast - mostly of the tur type - the Hajib and his key field commanders set sail from Isbili with an army of several thousand men.

Muslim ship technology had begun to filter northward, but by and large, most navies at this time consisted of coast-hugging galleys. Santiago's own experiments with saqin-type ships were in their infancy. As such, Alfonso was totally unprepared when, in mid-1388, a hundred sail ships came sweeping out of the open ocean, made landfall at Corunna and captured a city that was supposed to be fully behind the lines and unassailable. The Andalusian army had simply sailed out into the ocean, looped around any potential interference by Santiago's coast-hugging galleys and dropped an army of thousands off behind the lines.

The sudden capture of Corunna put Moorish forces within striking distance of Santiago de Compostela, throwing Alfonso's war plans into chaos. Santiago struggled to mount a response, and a clumsy attempt by local forces to restore the city was beaten back with little difficulty. Abd ar-Rahman declined to advance on Santiago de Compostela directly, holding back the Black Guard and sending his Berbers out in mounted war parties to raid towns and villages throughout the northwest of the kingdom. Betanzos and Ferrol were captured in short order, while an attempt by Santiagonian galleys to destroy the Andalusian ship fleet was thwarted when the sailships revealed that they could fight: Galleys attempting to get close and ram found themselves barraged with fire arrows launched from the faster sailships' castles, while a contemporary report also documents the first use of fireballs (kurat naria) in the Iberian theatre.[1] These early fireballs were not dissimilar to the old naft weapons known among Muslims for centuries through contact with the Eastern Roman Empire, but adapted to utilize blackpowder - a design more akin to Chinese-style weapons, likely transmitted via steppe nomads like the Tabans through trade with Egypt and Ar-Rumaniyah.

Alfonso's efforts to break the naval link between Al-Andalus and the Bay of Corunna failed, and his troops began to pull back to try and mitigate some of the damage Abd ar-Rahman's select force was causing. By the end of 1388, the Berbers had burned much of Lugo and sacked villages and towns throughout the northwest, and troops and supplies continued to flow into Corunna as Andalusian ships simply swung wide of the coast to avoid entanglements with Alfonso's galleys. The Christian navy managed to retaliate in 1389 by attacking and burning the harbour of Porto, in Muslim hands for several years, an attack answered by a similar sacking of Vianna later that year.

By that point, the main army under the Andalusi general Abdullah ibn Gharsiya al-Marchuni had joined up with that of King Milian to break the Santiagonian siege of Soria and retake San Semilio. The Navarrese and Andalusian armies divided from there, proceeding on a steady march westward. Al-Marchuni's army swung down the Duero Valley, capturing several cities and laying siege to the key fort of Valladolid.

It was here that Al-Marchuni would be intercepted by a large force headed up by the Knights of Saint James. The Battle of Valladolid would prove decisive - and it would demonstrate just how far Andalusian technology had come.

*​

The numbers involved at the Battle of Valladolid are a bit vague, but likely come down to about 15,000 Christians against a similar number of Muslims. Of these two forces, the Santiagonian force had the advantage of training and discipline: Leading the army were 2,000 Knights of Saint James, well-equipped Church Knights armed with high-quality horses and armour and well-trained in their effective use. While the Andalusian army was led by some thousand Saqaliba, their numbers had been thinned by the catastrophic loss at Tardelcuende, and most of their force consisted of Andalusi regulars and auxiliaries.

What the Christians were not counting on was the effectiveness of new weapons. These are famously attested by the historian Ilduin de Becerrea, who was along with the Santiagonians as an archer and had a good view of most of the field.

Al-Andalus had made use of the firelance in prior wars, but advancements in the technology resulted in the weapon becoming somewhat more widespread by this time: The fire lances utilized at the Battle of Valladolid boasted metal barrels. The cavalry engagement turned decisively towards the smaller number of Saqaliba as repeated attacks by firelance-wielding ranks left the Knights of Saint James disoriented and caused their horses to buck and come up short in panic. Crossbow fire similarly took its toll on the Knights as their attacks on the centre faltered.

The Christian infantry advance, meanwhile, found itself confronting something entirely new: A weapon described by Ilduin de Becerrea as a spout containing dragon's breath, and by other sources as the "infernal machine" or "Mahomet's organ." Indeed, the Andalusian name for the tool was the tanin - a series of roughly ten iron barrels set up on a wheeled base, capable of firing salvos of ten anti-personnel iron pellets with explosive force.[2] It's likely that Al-Marchuni's army had more than one tanin on the field, with sufficient blackpowder to fire numerous volleys.

On its own, the use of the tanin would not stop an army - but it proved to be both frightening and damaging when it was employed. The Santiagonian centre rapidly crumbled under sustained blackpowder attack, decimating the Knights of Saint James. The repeated noise and fire of the attacks terrified many of the Santiagonian levies: Ilduin reports that hundreds of otherwise brave men fled rather than face what they assumed to be sorcery.

The Battle of Valladolid proved decisive, shattering Santiago's main army and leading to the surrender of Valladolid itself and of nearby Valdestillas. Through 1389 and into 1390, Al-Marchuni swept up the Duero, capturing towns and storming cities as he went, splitting off several detachments to besiege Salamanca while he set his sights on Zamora. Meanwhile, in the northwest, a Santiagonian attempt to recapture Arzua from Berber occupants bogged down. Pressure had been taken off of Navarre, bringing Santiago rapidly close to surrender.[3]

In the autumn of 1390, however, Alfonso got the news he needed: A missive from his brother-in-law, Jocelyn II of France, promising to secure the Way of Saint James and drive the Moors back over the mountains.

After years of anxious stalemate, Andalusia's biggest war in the north in generations had become a romp against a much smaller and less sophisticated foe. But France was an entirely different animal, outnumbering Andalusia in manpower, with a significant amount of wealth to pour into its armies, and a new king with his roots in the most powerful and prosperous part of the kingdom. Abd ar-Rahman viewed the entry of France into the war grimly and set to work trying to find some way to emerge victorious against what Al-Andalus had dreaded for centuries: A grinding war against one of the great powers of Christian Europe.

SUMMARY:
1388: Abd ar-Rahman the Seafarer surprises King Alfonso II of Santiago by swinging a large fleet out into the ocean, bypassing Santiago's galley fleet and landing a force behind Alfonso's lines. This force of crack troops takes Corunna and Ferrol and proceeds to wreak havoc through the Santiagonian countryside, forcing Alfonso to pull his troops back from Navarre.
1389: The Battle of Valladolid. An equally-sized Andalusian army defeats a better-trained Santiagonian force through the use of firelances and multi-barrel eruptors, demonstrating the effectiveness of blackpowder weapons. The victory results in towns throughout the Duero Valley beginning to surrender to the army of Andalusian general Al-Marchuni, while the King of Navarre proceeds to push the front westward with sieges in Palencia and the northern coast.
1390: France enters the War of the Navarrese Succession.

[1] The name used for a grenade.
[2] The Andalusians roll out the ribaldequin. OTL, Granada had cannon by the 1330s, and the English had a ribaldequin by 1340 and trotted them out during the mid-1400s as well, so this isn't too much of a stretch in my mind.
[3] This stretch of story and some of what's ahead may slake the thirst of those in the audience who like decisive battles.