As Our Story Begins

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What Is Andalusada? | Point of Divergence | As Our Story Begins
Differences | Science and Technology | How Things Are

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Author's note: This began as a writeup for a B_munro map, and was always intended to supplement and be supplemented by one.

In 1793, Aragonese soldiers raised their flag over the city of Seville. The Crown of All Spains was born, Umayyad Seville died, and for the first time in more than a thousand years all of Western Europe was claimed by Christendom.
It is 20 April 1930, the Paschal Sunday — and Christendom is in crisis.

An Old World Will Fall

Since the War of the French Succession, the order of Europe was pax inter pares: an unspoken understanding that the great powers of Christendom — England-Scotland, France, and Russia — would never directly wage war against other. Perhaps they might compete for colonies, or feud over spheres of influence, or even back opposing sides and battle by proxy somewhere far away. Within Christendom, however, there would be only the peace of God, and Christendom's lesser powers — Saxony, Sweden, Poland-Ruthenia, increasingly Saxony, Switzerland, Saxony, always Saxony — worked hard to negotiate and uphold that peace.
Pax inter pares is dead. It died in 1905, when a Vechist firing squad shot Evgeny IV against a wall. Then it died again in 1916, face-down in a Stockholm gutter full of frozen blood, and a third time in 1917 in the Flamand fields. France and England-Scotland have tasted blood and learned to enjoy it — and Russia, their only equal, is not part of Christendom. Not any more.

• Portugal, even in its finest hour, was always understaffed and overworked; since the loss of Cabralia last century, the tears in its empire have become impossible to mend. Some of its wiser minds have seen the writing on the wall, and are fighting a silent battle to put the empire's affairs in order, to minimize the pain and bloodshed to come. The world, after all, will always revolve around Lisbon.
• A specter is haunting the Crown of All Spains: the specter of Umayyad Seville. What is dead cannot be destroyed, will not go away, and hates Spain with a perfect hatred.
• Italy writhes under the Reggenza's jackboots. Its satellites in Tunis and the Balkans fight to escape their leashes; a hundred political factions fight to hold them. Each fight ends with the Amici more ruthless and shameless than before, building a criminal empire that will outlast the Reggenza and perhaps Italy itself.
• Poland-Ruthenia survived the Thousand Days, but has lost the twelve years since. It was never prepared to ennoble so many people at once.

Even now, Saxony continues its heroic effort to preserve the peace. In less than twenty weeks, all their efforts will be for naught. Quietly, however, Leipzig is making contingency plans. It cajoles and coerces its neighbors into a Wehrverein. It arranges caches and stockpiles.
It is a foregone conclusion that the Vechists will march to war again soon, and Saxony will stand ready to die in defense of Christendom. Without allies, it is a foregone conclusion that Saxony and the Wehrverein will fall.

A New World Will Rise

In the darkness beyond Christendom's leftmost border, Great Russia is counting down to a general election scheduled for 1944. It does not wait idly: Tver hosts architectural exhibitions, scientific conferences, art galleries, fashion shows. It subsidizes research projects, polar expeditions, propaganda campaigns, and organized Dissent around the world. Great Russia is trying to embody the future, to become the future, and it is blood-marking conscripts and training them to defend the world it will create.
Who can stand against those endless armies? The Japanese Empire could. In 1904 it did, fighting Cossacks for Karafuto and shattering the Far East Fleet in the Second Battle of the Kuriles. Its leaders are even Christians, the oldest in the Pacific, and working hard to present their empire as "the sane man of Asia." Saxony knows, after all, that Japanese espionage put the Vechists in power and set the current crisis in motion.
Alaxia is home to the final variable, an unknown in Saxony's equations. That variable is a country capable of constructing its own navy and fighting England-Scotland to a standstill. Perhaps it could do that again. Perhaps it could do that to Great Russia. That country, however, is the Umayyad Caliphate in New Andalusia, the most powerful state in the Muslim world, successor to Umayyad Seville. They have been gone from Europe since 1793, and what would happen if they were invited back is a secret known to none but God.

See Also

• The B_Munro writeup. This is several years old and just as many years out of date, but it's included for historic reference.
• Ismail, his writeup of another GURPS world.

An optimist is a man teaching his sons Russian. A pessimist is a man teaching his sons Moorish.

— European proverb

Who Is B_Munro?

Bruce "B." Munro is one of the best mappers on AH.com, capable of rehabilitating the plots and premises of existing alternate-history fiction in a single wall-of-text post. All of them are accompanied by excellently crafted AH maps of the global situation at one specific historical stage of a given scenario.
Check out his DeviantArt for a sense of what he's capable of.

Where's the Map?

It was lost a few dead computers ago, and I'm computer-illiterate and have no real experience with graphic design. If anyone would like to help me with it, feel free to get in touch.

German Bias

Andalusada tends to be UCNA-centric, so it's worth noting that "As Our Story Begins" isn't: it's written from Saxony's perspective, for two very separate reasons:

• Saxony is an important player on the world stage — but as I write this (8 February 2018), nothing on World Anvil even suggests that, much less explains why.
• Unique among Andalusada's rising powers, Saxony (much like you, dear reader) is part of the Western world, and views the world through Western eyes. A happy side effect was that it made "As Our Story Begins" much more dramatic to read: Saxony isn't feeling wrongly optimistic about its future right now.