Hendryk
Banned
Inspired by Krall's AH challenge: Hispanic India.
The POD: in 1474, Portuguese explorer Joao Vaz Corte-Real is blown off-course while on a trip to the Azores and ends up, after drifting for weeks, in sight of the coast of Brazil. He sails home and tells King Afonso V of his discovery. This sets major butterflies in motion that others are free to explore, but here I'd like to focus on a specific consequence: in TTL, Portugual shifts its attention to the New World and largely preempts Spanish expansion into Cortia (the continent's official name from 1507 onwards), a situation formalized with the Treaty of Alcaçovas in 1479. Instead, Spain, having liquidated the Muslim presence on the Iberian peninsula in 1492 with the fall of Grenada, decides to take over African circumnavigation where Portugal left off. In 1495, Alonso de Ojeda's expedition doubles the southern tip of Africa (naming it Cape Trinity) and reaches the Indian Ocean. Two years later, an expedition led by Juan Ponce de Leon reaches India itself, and founds Esperanza, a trading outpost near Calicut (on the site of Pondicherry in OTL).
In the following years, Spanish trade with India increases exponentially, and Esperanza grows into a boomtown. In 1506, a 21-year-old Hernan Cortez disembarks from a galleon and realizes that nowhere as much as in India does the motto "Audaces fortuna juvat" holds true.
Meanwhile, in the North, a growing power is asserting itself, which in a few years will become the Mughal empire under the leadership of Zahir ud-Din Mohammed a.k.a. Babur.
What next?
The POD: in 1474, Portuguese explorer Joao Vaz Corte-Real is blown off-course while on a trip to the Azores and ends up, after drifting for weeks, in sight of the coast of Brazil. He sails home and tells King Afonso V of his discovery. This sets major butterflies in motion that others are free to explore, but here I'd like to focus on a specific consequence: in TTL, Portugual shifts its attention to the New World and largely preempts Spanish expansion into Cortia (the continent's official name from 1507 onwards), a situation formalized with the Treaty of Alcaçovas in 1479. Instead, Spain, having liquidated the Muslim presence on the Iberian peninsula in 1492 with the fall of Grenada, decides to take over African circumnavigation where Portugal left off. In 1495, Alonso de Ojeda's expedition doubles the southern tip of Africa (naming it Cape Trinity) and reaches the Indian Ocean. Two years later, an expedition led by Juan Ponce de Leon reaches India itself, and founds Esperanza, a trading outpost near Calicut (on the site of Pondicherry in OTL).
In the following years, Spanish trade with India increases exponentially, and Esperanza grows into a boomtown. In 1506, a 21-year-old Hernan Cortez disembarks from a galleon and realizes that nowhere as much as in India does the motto "Audaces fortuna juvat" holds true.
Meanwhile, in the North, a growing power is asserting itself, which in a few years will become the Mughal empire under the leadership of Zahir ud-Din Mohammed a.k.a. Babur.
What next?