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Description

The world in question is the subject of countless years of trawling over, as it appears in many ways to be anachronistic in its ideological and social development. The general consensus is that this world diverged from ours during the crusades, namely that the crusades were far more successful, resulting in a permanent foothold being established in the Levant, Syria, and Lower Anatolia and the rapid unfolding of Seljuk authority in the region. The creation of a coherent political unit, as opposed to a spattering of ephemeral crusader states had immediate effects on European history. The Kingdom of Jerusalem became the first duty free region in the world, a concept floated in our timeline due to the belief that imposing duties on goods from the Holy Land would be improper but never allowed to develop, creating the basis for a formal economic interlinking of Christendom centuries early. The need to hold onto the region resulted in the Near Eastern carveout becoming the site of an intentional settlement program, reorienting the attention the European States. This contributed to, but was not the primary causal factor behind, the New World being discovered later, alongside the shifting balance within the continental labor market that typified the late 16th and early 17th centuries. By the turn of the 17th century then Europe was more populated, poorer, and also more interconnected than in our world. What would not be seen were things like the Protestant reformation, the creation of continental settler empires (of the same scale as OTL at least), or the calamity of the 30 Years War. Instead, something else happened.

What this ultimately resulted in was a pressure, concentrated initially in a papacy that had assumed more temporal power and awe than OTL, to chart a course of reform of the state structures and governance practices of Europe to be able to navigate the waning medieval system. This led to the development of the first corpus of Catholic social and legal doctrine in the 17th century as opposed to the 19th. A reformation without a reformation, the forces of Old Christendom would beat the Enlightenment to the punch. What followed was the failed attempt to create a universal state based around the ideas of land reform, incorporation, universal bureaucratic and scholastic standards, and the principle of subsidiarity. The idea that good government could be derived rationally, mathematically even, through the ennobling influence of surrender to God.

It was a failure because no such state came into being obviously, but what emerged from that failure was the dominant system of Christian statecraft into the modern era, that of the Subsidiary Commonwealth. These are massive states but at once horizontal, evincing the sense of both yeoman republics and syndicalist unions, operating under the principle that the organic human community and family, given dignity by their creator, knew well enough how to solve their own problems and should be assisted in doing so by a competent and transparent state. Not so much consent of the governed as it were, but the duty to govern well. This way of looking at the world is sometimes referred to by our analysists as Mathematicalism, not so much a reflection of what the locals call it as a nod to the dominant and interlocking form of metaphysics in this world. A point which will be returned to.

The year is 1873 and Christendom in this world is thus oriented around variations of this theme of governance, all centered on the Petrine Commonwealth which holds the seats of Rome, Antioch, and Jerusalem (as well as overseas territories in the New World). Among the Commonwealths are the three senior and most loyal. Those being the European and Stanislean Subsidiaries on the Old World, and the Apicean Subsidiary in the New World. The red headed stepchild of the “Orthodox” commonwealths is Filadelfia. A heavily industrialized society, even more so than its Old World counterparts, Filadelfia has long asserted that is economic makeup gives it a unique character compared to the other commonwealths, requiring a greater emphasis on the urban and industrial masses over the traditional focus on a more general human subject. Filadelfia is, in this respect, closer to what we would call the Falangists of our world. It is also a monarchy, having “restored” (read: invented one whole cloth) its royal line a century after the other commonwealths abolished their own houses.

Orthodox implies unorthodox, and indeed there are commonwealths all but in schism with the Catholic order. Chief among them stems from Christendom’s former greatest modern triumph: the conversion of China. Kate’s conversion had always placed it slightly out of step with the rest of the Christian world. Much like their European brethren there was an immanent need to make Christianity accepted as the natural and inevitable progression of their civilization. While the Europeans were quick to insinuate that greats such as Plato had been unwitting prophets all along, the Kate were just as eager to make such connections, chief among them the legalist scholar Han Feizi.

Katean Christianity focuses heavily on a dialectic of justice and mercy. It only makes sense to speak of mercy when the law is just and properly enforced. To be excused or pardoned of a crime not committed when the law has failed is not mercy, it is merely proper justice. To be forgiven when one has been judged correctly and condemned rightly is mercy and an act of love. This is ultimately what gives grace its meaning, that Jesus, who fulfilled the law upholds it and yet still lets the condemned go free. This is often represented artistically in a local depiction of the Harrowing of Hell where Jesus (often accompanied by the Penitent Thief representing man’s acceptance of divine judgement) rescues the legalist scholars first who are also the first to recognize that he is God. A variation of this with Jesus taking Han Feizi’s hand is depicted in the upper right-hand corner of the map.

Kateans also differ from their European brothers in terms of practice, having adopted older traditions such as the use of bimahs and yads and the presence of deaconesses, who make up a disproportionate chunk of the bureaucracy due to the inability of women to become priests. What makes the Kateans unorthodox however is not their aesthetic and organizational sensibilities, but more practical political ones. Put simply, the Katean church has opted for complete “national” self-governance, a “recent” event (it occurred 90 years ago) which is still sending shockwaves throughout Christendom. That the Kateans are closer in principle and practice to other commonwealths than Filadelfia and yet are placed outside the bounds of fraternity is not lost on anyone, but as in all worlds it is gauche to admit realpolitik. Speaking of fraternities however, the Antipodeans have incurred a double indemnity among their peers for having sided with the Kateans in this unspoken standoff (leaving aside their cooperation with the half-Muslim Nyoongar as well!). Of course, there was little chance they wouldn’t have, Europe is on the other side of the world and Kate is on their doorstep. The locals of neighboring St. Edward’s Land (Tasmania) still make a somewhat performative display as last “loyal” commonwealth in the Pacific though.

Were this the only difference of its kind in this world it would render this timeline a curiosity, but it was not just the Christian world that experienced such an orthogonal ideological development. In a world where the Turks were pushed out of the Levant and the Ayyubids also stillborn the center of the Islamic world would eventually pivot to India. The Muslim states would ultimately inherit the legacy of the great Asiatic gunpowder empires. Where the Christian states experienced a pressure towards evening out, the Muslims experienced pressures towards centralization and the need to create ever expanding administrative as opposed to supplementary states.

This led to the development of scholasticism, otherwise known as rationalism by our observers. Informed by local religious sensibilities as well, the idea that human beings were the rationally endowed viceroys (and therefore representatives) of God on Earth, the university system came to be leaned upon as the principal unit of the state in the Muslim world. This also made the states of India and North Africa the first to achieve universal literacy and invent the public school system. Rationalism is a broad system and encompasses everything from orthodox “district federations” such as Mustafar and Africa, Sultanates that patronize scholastic states such as Nubia, palingenetic modernists such as the Recitation Society, and “fanatics” such as the State of All-Tomorrows.

All-Tomorrows is seen as fanatical due to its romantic and futurist bent. A settler colony around what we would call the Brazilian coast, they have evolved into a society that is equal parts French Revolution meets Technocracy. The only state to attempt to divide their land into perfectly equal square districts, they also invented this world’s analog to the metric system, which has frustrated the Old World since they’ve been successful in getting almost all the states of the New World to adopt it. In recent years they have experimented with computerized governance, first with punch cards and now with that wonder technology of the modern era: magnetic tape reels.

Rationalism has actually been somewhat more popular than Mathematicalism in appealing to broad groups of people due in part to its appeals towards upward mobility. Multiple non-muslim majority states have dabbled in forms of it, most notably the Mississippi peoples and the Nyoongar. Islamic governance has developed a reputation for encouraging development, and so is often a topic of study for up-and-coming powers and those states that live on the periphery of great powers.

A refrain and a return. As previously mentioned, the dominant metaphysics of this world is slightly different from our own. This is a world with no St. Aquinas, no Ibn Khaldun, no Maimonides, they simply weren’t born. Likewise, the breakoff from our world changed the interests of state crafters and religious scholars of law. In this world neo-platonism did not become as dominant from the 12th century onwards, instead a kind of mathematical realism dominated. The idea that the aesthetic functions of math were a necessary foundation of a rationally ordered universe were accepted. The fact that equations and series could themselves be mathematical constants became a part of common logical proofs for the divine simplicity and unity of God among the Abrahamic faiths. This of course had the result of advancing the practical development of math. Set theory and the concept of infinity were developed early, and a general solution to the cubic was found centuries early. The solution was “simple”, just imagine a negative volume in your head and invent negative and complex numbers in the form of shapes with variable dimensions from there. Done. If that sounds like nonsense for those of us who have difficulty even rotating a cube in our heads one must understand that the people of this world had elevated the practice to a divine art, making them rather inventive in finding solutions and more than willing to push their brains to the limit to do so. Modern generations are spared such torture though. As one can guess this also had some practical applications in the maintenance of state, though not always of course, and is one of the reasons why our analysts have settled on referring to the commonwealth system as the Mathematicalists.

It is at this point where we would usually move along but we would be remiss to not reveal something peculiar. More specifically it is peculiar in that we have found this phenomenon in every world observed. As said earlier, individuals such as Aquinas never came to be in this world, and yet there exists a kind of cultural impression, spontaneously developed oral traditions and mythological archetypes that are clearly analogs to these kinds of religious figures that do not exist in this world. A persistent belief that somehow immanentizes the effect these individuals would have had, although delayed. This effect has been noted in every world, which is to say that if a world lacks a figure of such a kind, one that is relevant to the unveiling of mankind’s logical, intuitive, or aesthetic apprehension of absolute reality, cultures in that world simply become convinced that an analog exists deep within their collective psyche and so that figure ultimately percolates anyways. As such there are figures that are culturally relevant but not historically “real” or verified in this world that are clearly, for instance, our Ibn Khaldun.

The same is true of our world.

OTL shares this phenomenon. We have discovered individuals in other worlds that are clearly the “genuine” analogs of semi-legendary figures in our world. In timeline D1240 “Morning Glory” there is an individual that is a 1:1 match to the semi-mythical figure of Justus of Beauvais spoken of in our world. Likewise, in every world where such an individual does not “really” exist, the “knowledge” of them always comes into being. To be clear we have never come across timelines that are the equivalents of works of fiction. Conan the Barbarian is not hiding out in the multiverse from what we know, but the mythical Jain sage Parshvanath? He’s been found in the proven historical records of three worlds already.

In this world the real life Princess Miaoshan was discovered. Her severed head is a Kate relic and much like Han Feizi has been inducted into their Christian Cosmology.

Perhaps then it might be best to return to something more mundane, more familiar. I wouldn’t be able to explain more if I tried anyways, but that is something you will just have to get used to in this business. This world does have some analogs to things that are pretty common sense to us, they do have an idea of bog-standard federal republics, more or less. These emerged out of the Turkic states of this world, Tartaria in particular. Its development appeared to have been an outgrowth of clan politics. Namely that the settlement of the major Turanian clans lead to the birth of geographically contiguous masses of discrete peoples. In most cases this would lead to nations, but as these societies were already adept at holding large diverse tracts of land together, they simply became the formalized subdivisions of large land empires. As a result, despite being federal systems as we understand them, they didn’t emerge out of the republican revolutions of our world or any equivalent. Thus they also make no real distinctions between non-descript federal systems and imperial systems wherein provinces correspond to pseudo-nations. This Turkic Federalism spans the gamut from things that we’d view as analogs to the United States up to the Russian Federation.

As federalism is seen as a non-partisan form of government it has been adopted by countries with wildly different traditions. Kidai-Nlo is an African Catholic state with a rotating position of Emperor that is shared between its 18 houses or provinces. The Latter Jin are a Jurchen state whose federal system emerged out of the local banner system. They are also home to this world’s equivalent to Cao Dai, an attempt to bridge the new Christian and Muslim populations of their lands with the local shamanist and Buddhist tendencies of their state into a new imperial religion. It has not won much acclaim for this abroad, though it is not meant to.

As one might expect due to its broad applicability there is a wide degree of overlap between the federalists and other systems. Various states have attempted to mix and match Turanism with Rationalism and Mathematicalism and even local traditions. Many have done so as a survival mechanism, such as the geriatric Oman and Transdeccan, but others have taken the middle path for other reasons. Persia is perhaps the greatest example. A major power in its own right the Persians have carved out a middle way within the Muslim world bringing together their own vassals, the Anatolian states and the Sawadi into a common market of federal republics running along the spine of the old Silk Road.

Bucking most trends of modern governance, the Aetheopic and Blemmean states, the descendants of the old Soldier-Princedoms, have adopted a model of collective sovereignty which draws upon Turanism and local tradition. Owing to the belief in a special covenant between the peoples of the Horn and God, it is believed that God will never allow the Ethiopian people to fall and so will grant them a high judge every generation. However, it is the duty of the land’s secular and religious authorities to find this person once they are born. Owing to rationalist tendencies, the Horn Peoples have developed an entire system of mystical childhood psychology to determine whom amongst their children has been sent by God.

This system has earned them derision and mockery from much of the world, most notably among modernist circles, however uncomfortably for its detractors though it appears to have worked perfectly for several centuries at this point.

The Catholic State of Equateur is an honorable mention among the mixed system. A federal system of more or less non-descript states it shares some similarities to the United States, including a tricameral government and a president with term limits. Its two dominant classes however are yeomen and scholar-bureaucrats, so if one wanted the genuine American experience it would be best to go the frontier states where there’s more farmers and less clock punchers, if one can ignore the state religion of course.

These categories do not encompass the whole world though. Whenever there are norms, rules, expectations, there are also always exceptions. There are five states of note in this world that have been listed as having noteworthy endogenous developments.

The Andeans have a queer system of government that has been described by some analysts as socialism but from the other end. Their local legal tradition starts with the assumption that all human relations are downstream of property rights, in that property owns humans, not the other way around, and as such there is a general and individual social duty to the whole productive capacity of their civilization, to do otherwise is to in effect “rob” the empire. There appears to be no codified system beyond this, instead a form of communal emulation occurs in which each subdivision models itself off the best performing equivalent.

The Uronshire live under a heredity judiciary, which is to say that several hundred years ago a family rose to prominence by way of mediating disputes between Uto-Nahuatlan states. Unfortunate for them, as the peoples of the western bend of what we would call Mexico decided that they had to mediate and judge for everyone else from now on. The House of the Iron Lands then is more an area that recognized the authority of the judicial family rather than necessarily a discrete polity. For the judges however it is a gilded cage, as they are not allowed to stop and not allowed to leave the “country”. They spend most of their time in royal districts constructed in the center of each land’s major cities. The invention of luxury air travel though means that they get to hop between their prison mansions in style now, and the invention of the (black and white) TV does offer entertainment opportunities for such cloistered souls.

The Soudanese Corporation is what it says on the tin, a corporate territory created for the purposes of selling and settling the part of Africa they conquered. Most of the settlers are from Europe and the Near East of course, but there is also a great degree of collaboration with local power players, mostly in the form of them buying stock in the corporation and siding with the privateers in exterminating their competitors and divvying up the land. The concept of equal opportunity war crimes for land and profit seems bizarre to us especially given the history of colonialism in our world, but what is even more out there is the fact that the African states on their border are assisting them. Both Kidai-Nlo and Nlemmu-Zenji prefer having a single entity with a controlled border to deal with than a porous expanse of neighbors to juggle.

The Two Malabars (which are actually four) are the remnants of a mercenary clique that had established control over the southern tip of India. The attempt to create a free state beholden to warriors-for-hire was short lived however, as their mass of new recruits, dredged up from the locals, simply performed a hostile takeover and executed their former partners in crime. The Malabars kept the structure of their forebears, albeit splitting it between the four most influential groups within the native clique, essentially turning them into a series of modern warlord states. What’s interesting to note is that the Malabars still offer mercenary services and host the most successful PMCs in the world, the profits just actually find their way into the hands of the locals now.

The Integrated Consensus began as an attempt to create a “Big Space” or to fuse together the colonial territories of the Sahalava Kingdom of Madagascar. This was a success and a failure. A success in that their mainland territories did successfully fuse together into an agglomeration similar to a Fordist state, and a failure in that most of the home islands actually rebelled against the idea of being forced to stand on equal footing with their territories. As a result, the Consensus, originally intended to ensure that the Sahalava state and its empire would last indefinitely has now become the foothold for a mainlander conquest of the island itself.

This world remains a point of interest and a prime candidate for continued observation. However, the eclectic nature of its development calls into question for how long such observation will prove safe. While the technological level of this world is obviously behind our own, it is also over a century in advance of where we were at the same time, showing a potential for sudden advancement and innovation. Likewise, the relatively alien nature of this civilization’s development of knowledge and philosophy may also risk them becoming aware of our presence before the general technological threshold that the multiverse would normally be discovered and may present little warning ahead of time before such a discovery is made. As such I would advise that you exercise exceptional thoughtfulness in your studies.

Description

The world in question is the subject of countless years of trawling over, as it appears in many ways to be anachronistic in its ideological and social development. The general consensus is that this world diverged from ours during the crusades, namely that the crusades were far more successful, resulting in a permanent foothold being established in the Levant, Syria, and Lower Anatolia and the rapid unfolding of Seljuk authority in the region. The creation of a coherent political unit, as opposed to a spattering of ephemeral crusader states had immediate effects on European history. The Kingdom of Jerusalem became the first duty free region in the world, a concept floated in our timeline due to the belief that imposing duties on goods from the Holy Land would be improper but never allowed to develop, creating the basis for a formal economic interlinking of Christendom centuries early. The need to hold onto the region resulted in the Near Eastern carveout becoming the site of an intentional settlement program, reorienting the attention the European States. This contributed to, but was not the primary causal factor behind, the New World being discovered later, alongside the shifting balance within the continental labor market that typified the late 16th and early 17th centuries. By the turn of the 17th century then Europe was more populated, poorer, and also more interconnected than in our world. What would not be seen were things like the Protestant reformation, the creation of continental settler empires (of the same scale as OTL at least), or the calamity of the 30 Years War. Instead, something else happened.

What this ultimately resulted in was a pressure, concentrated initially in a papacy that had assumed more temporal power and awe than OTL, to chart a course of reform of the state structures and governance practices of Europe to be able to navigate the waning medieval system. This led to the development of the first corpus of Catholic social and legal doctrine in the 17th century as opposed to the 19th. A reformation without a reformation, the forces of Old Christendom would beat the Enlightenment to the punch. What followed was the failed attempt to create a universal state based around the ideas of land reform, incorporation, universal bureaucratic and scholastic standards, and the principle of subsidiarity. The idea that good government could be derived rationally, mathematically even, through the ennobling influence of surrender to God.

It was a failure because no such state came into being obviously, but what emerged from that failure was the dominant system of Christian statecraft into the modern era, that of the Subsidiary Commonwealth. These are massive states but at once horizontal, evincing the sense of both yeoman republics and syndicalist unions, operating under the principle that the organic human community and family, given dignity by their creator, knew well enough how to solve their own problems and should be assisted in doing so by a competent and transparent state. Not so much consent of the governed as it were, but the duty to govern well. This way of looking at the world is sometimes referred to by our analysists as Mathematicalism, not so much a reflection of what the locals call it as a nod to the dominant and interlocking form of metaphysics in this world. A point which will be returned to.

The year is 1873 and Christendom in this world is thus oriented around variations of this theme of governance, all centered on the Petrine Commonwealth which holds the seats of Rome, Antioch, and Jerusalem (as well as overseas territories in the New World). Among the Commonwealths are the three senior and most loyal. Those being the European and Stanislean Subsidiaries on the Old World, and the Apicean Subsidiary in the New World. The red headed stepchild of the “Orthodox” commonwealths is Filadelfia. A heavily industrialized society, even more so than its Old World counterparts, Filadelfia has long asserted that is economic makeup gives it a unique character compared to the other commonwealths, requiring a greater emphasis on the urban and industrial masses over the traditional focus on a more general human subject. Filadelfia is, in this respect, closer to what we would call the Falangists of our world. It is also a monarchy, having “restored” (read: invented one whole cloth) its royal line a century after the other commonwealths abolished their own houses.

Orthodox implies unorthodox, and indeed there are commonwealths all but in schism with the Catholic order. Chief among them stems from Christendom’s former greatest modern triumph: the conversion of China. Kate’s conversion had always placed it slightly out of step with the rest of the Christian world. Much like their European brethren there was an immanent need to make Christianity accepted as the natural and inevitable progression of their civilization. While the Europeans were quick to insinuate that greats such as Plato had been unwitting prophets all along, the Kate were just as eager to make such connections, chief among them the legalist scholar Han Feizi.

Katean Christianity focuses heavily on a dialectic of justice and mercy. It only makes sense to speak of mercy when the law is just and properly enforced. To be excused or pardoned of a crime not committed when the law has failed is not mercy, it is merely proper justice. To be forgiven when one has been judged correctly and condemned rightly is mercy and an act of love. This is ultimately what gives grace its meaning, that Jesus, who fulfilled the law upholds it and yet still lets the condemned go free. This is often represented artistically in a local depiction of the Harrowing of Hell where Jesus (often accompanied by the Penitent Thief representing man’s acceptance of divine judgement) rescues the legalist scholars first who are also the first to recognize that he is God. A variation of this with Jesus taking Han Feizi’s hand is depicted in the upper right-hand corner of the map.

Kateans also differ from their European brothers in terms of practice, having adopted older traditions such as the use of bimahs and yads and the presence of deaconesses, who make up a disproportionate chunk of the bureaucracy due to the inability of women to become priests. What makes the Kateans unorthodox however is not their aesthetic and organizational sensibilities, but more practical political ones. Put simply, the Katean church has opted for complete “national” self-governance, a “recent” event (it occurred 90 years ago) which is still sending shockwaves throughout Christendom. That the Kateans are closer in principle and practice to other commonwealths than Filadelfia and yet are placed outside the bounds of fraternity is not lost on anyone, but as in all worlds it is gauche to admit realpolitik. Speaking of fraternities however, the Antipodeans have incurred a double indemnity among their peers for having sided with the Kateans in this unspoken standoff (leaving aside their cooperation with the half-Muslim Nyoongar as well!). Of course, there was little chance they wouldn’t have, Europe is on the other side of the world and Kate is on their doorstep. The locals of neighboring St. Edward’s Land (Tasmania) still make a somewhat performative display as last “loyal” commonwealth in the Pacific though.

Were this the only difference of its kind in this world it would render this timeline a curiosity, but it was not just the Christian world that experienced such an orthogonal ideological development. In a world where the Turks were pushed out of the Levant and the Ayyubids also stillborn the center of the Islamic world would eventually pivot to India. The Muslim states would ultimately inherit the legacy of the great Asiatic gunpowder empires. Where the Christian states experienced a pressure towards evening out, the Muslims experienced pressures towards centralization and the need to create ever expanding administrative as opposed to supplementary states.

This led to the development of scholasticism, otherwise known as rationalism by our observers. Informed by local religious sensibilities as well, the idea that human beings were the rationally endowed viceroys (and therefore representatives) of God on Earth, the university system came to be leaned upon as the principal unit of the state in the Muslim world. This also made the states of India and North Africa the first to achieve universal literacy and invent the public school system. Rationalism is a broad system and encompasses everything from orthodox “district federations” such as Mustafar and Africa, Sultanates that patronize scholastic states such as Nubia, palingenetic modernists such as the Recitation Society, and “fanatics” such as the State of All-Tomorrows.

All-Tomorrows is seen as fanatical due to its romantic and futurist bent. A settler colony around what we would call the Brazilian coast, they have evolved into a society that is equal parts French Revolution meets Technocracy. The only state to attempt to divide their land into perfectly equal square districts, they also invented this world’s analog to the metric system, which has frustrated the Old World since they’ve been successful in getting almost all the states of the New World to adopt it. In recent years they have experimented with computerized governance, first with punch cards and now with that wonder technology of the modern era: magnetic tape reels.

Rationalism has actually been somewhat more popular than Mathematicalism in appealing to broad groups of people due in part to its appeals towards upward mobility. Multiple non-muslim majority states have dabbled in forms of it, most notably the Mississippi peoples and the Nyoongar. Islamic governance has developed a reputation for encouraging development, and so is often a topic of study for up-and-coming powers and those states that live on the periphery of great powers.

A refrain and a return. As previously mentioned, the dominant metaphysics of this world is slightly different from our own. This is a world with no St. Aquinas, no Ibn Khaldun, no Maimonides, they simply weren’t born. Likewise, the breakoff from our world changed the interests of state crafters and religious scholars of law. In this world neo-platonism did not become as dominant from the 12th century onwards, instead a kind of mathematical realism dominated. The idea that the aesthetic functions of math were a necessary foundation of a rationally ordered universe were accepted. The fact that equations and series could themselves be mathematical constants became a part of common logical proofs for the divine simplicity and unity of God among the Abrahamic faiths. This of course had the result of advancing the practical development of math. Set theory and the concept of infinity were developed early, and a general solution to the cubic was found centuries early. The solution was “simple”, just imagine a negative volume in your head and invent negative and complex numbers in the form of shapes with variable dimensions from there. Done. If that sounds like nonsense for those of us who have difficulty even rotating a cube in our heads one must understand that the people of this world had elevated the practice to a divine art, making them rather inventive in finding solutions and more than willing to push their brains to the limit to do so. Modern generations are spared such torture though. As one can guess this also had some practical applications in the maintenance of state, though not always of course, and is one of the reasons why our analysts have settled on referring to the commonwealth system as the Mathematicalists.

It is at this point where we would usually move along but we would be remiss to not reveal something peculiar. More specifically it is peculiar in that we have found this phenomenon in every world observed. As said earlier, individuals such as Aquinas never came to be in this world, and yet there exists a kind of cultural impression, spontaneously developed oral traditions and mythological archetypes that are clearly analogs to these kinds of religious figures that do not exist in this world. A persistent belief that somehow immanentizes the effect these individuals would have had, although delayed. This effect has been noted in every world, which is to say that if a world lacks a figure of such a kind, one that is relevant to the unveiling of mankind’s logical, intuitive, or aesthetic apprehension of absolute reality, cultures in that world simply become convinced that an analog exists deep within their collective psyche and so that figure ultimately percolates anyways. As such there are figures that are culturally relevant but not historically “real” or verified in this world that are clearly, for instance, our Ibn Khaldun.

The same is true of our world.

OTL shares this phenomenon. We have discovered individuals in other worlds that are clearly the “genuine” analogs of semi-legendary figures in our world. In timeline D1240 “Morning Glory” there is an individual that is a 1:1 match to the semi-mythical figure of Justus of Beauvais spoken of in our world. Likewise, in every world where such an individual does not “really” exist, the “knowledge” of them always comes into being. To be clear we have never come across timelines that are the equivalents of works of fiction. Conan the Barbarian is not hiding out in the multiverse from what we know, but the mythical Jain sage Parshvanath? He’s been found in the proven historical records of three worlds already.

In this world the real life Princess Miaoshan was discovered. Her severed head is a Kate relic and much like Han Feizi has been inducted into their Christian Cosmology.

Perhaps then it might be best to return to something more mundane, more familiar. I wouldn’t be able to explain more if I tried anyways, but that is something you will just have to get used to in this business. This world does have some analogs to things that are pretty common sense to us, they do have an idea of bog-standard federal republics, more or less. These emerged out of the Turkic states of this world, Tartaria in particular. Its development appeared to have been an outgrowth of clan politics. Namely that the settlement of the major Turanian clans lead to the birth of geographically contiguous masses of discrete peoples. In most cases this would lead to nations, but as these societies were already adept at holding large diverse tracts of land together, they simply became the formalized subdivisions of large land empires. As a result, despite being federal systems as we understand them, they didn’t emerge out of the republican revolutions of our world or any equivalent. Thus they also make no real distinctions between non-descript federal systems and imperial systems wherein provinces correspond to pseudo-nations. This Turkic Federalism spans the gamut from things that we’d view as analogs to the United States up to the Russian Federation.

As federalism is seen as a non-partisan form of government it has been adopted by countries with wildly different traditions. Kidai-Nlo is an African Catholic state with a rotating position of Emperor that is shared between its 18 houses or provinces. The Latter Jin are a Jurchen state whose federal system emerged out of the local banner system. They are also home to this world’s equivalent to Cao Dai, an attempt to bridge the new Christian and Muslim populations of their lands with the local shamanist and Buddhist tendencies of their state into a new imperial religion. It has not won much acclaim for this abroad, though it is not meant to.

As one might expect due to its broad applicability there is a wide degree of overlap between the federalists and other systems. Various states have attempted to mix and match Turanism with Rationalism and Mathematicalism and even local traditions. Many have done so as a survival mechanism, such as the geriatric Oman and Transdeccan, but others have taken the middle path for other reasons. Persia is perhaps the greatest example. A major power in its own right the Persians have carved out a middle way within the Muslim world bringing together their own vassals, the Anatolian states and the Sawadi into a common market of federal republics running along the spine of the old Silk Road.

Bucking most trends of modern governance, the Aetheopic and Blemmean states, the descendants of the old Soldier-Princedoms, have adopted a model of collective sovereignty which draws upon Turanism and local tradition. Owing to the belief in a special covenant between the peoples of the Horn and God, it is believed that God will never allow the Ethiopian people to fall and so will grant them a high judge every generation. However, it is the duty of the land’s secular and religious authorities to find this person once they are born. Owing to rationalist tendencies, the Horn Peoples have developed an entire system of mystical childhood psychology to determine whom amongst their children has been sent by God.

This system has earned them derision and mockery from much of the world, most notably among modernist circles, however uncomfortably for its detractors though it appears to have worked perfectly for several centuries at this point.

The Catholic State of Equateur is an honorable mention among the mixed system. A federal system of more or less non-descript states it shares some similarities to the United States, including a tricameral government and a president with term limits. Its two dominant classes however are yeomen and scholar-bureaucrats, so if one wanted the genuine American experience it would be best to go the frontier states where there’s more farmers and less clock punchers, if one can ignore the state religion of course.

These categories do not encompass the whole world though. Whenever there are norms, rules, expectations, there are also always exceptions. There are five states of note in this world that have been listed as having noteworthy endogenous developments.

The Andeans have a queer system of government that has been described by some analysts as socialism but from the other end. Their local legal tradition starts with the assumption that all human relations are downstream of property rights, in that property owns humans, not the other way around, and as such there is a general and individual social duty to the whole productive capacity of their civilization, to do otherwise is to in effect “rob” the empire. There appears to be no codified system beyond this, instead a form of communal emulation occurs in which each subdivision models itself off the best performing equivalent.

The Uronshire live under a heredity judiciary, which is to say that several hundred years ago a family rose to prominence by way of mediating disputes between Uto-Nahuatlan states. Unfortunate for them, as the peoples of the western bend of what we would call Mexico decided that they had to mediate and judge for everyone else from now on. The House of the Iron Lands then is more an area that recognized the authority of the judicial family rather than necessarily a discrete polity. For the judges however it is a gilded cage, as they are not allowed to stop and not allowed to leave the “country”. They spend most of their time in royal districts constructed in the center of each land’s major cities. The invention of luxury air travel though means that they get to hop between their prison mansions in style now, and the invention of the (black and white) TV does offer entertainment opportunities for such cloistered souls.

The Soudanese Corporation is what it says on the tin, a corporate territory created for the purposes of selling and settling the part of Africa they conquered. Most of the settlers are from Europe and the Near East of course, but there is also a great degree of collaboration with local power players, mostly in the form of them buying stock in the corporation and siding with the privateers in exterminating their competitors and divvying up the land. The concept of equal opportunity war crimes for land and profit seems bizarre to us especially given the history of colonialism in our world, but what is even more out there is the fact that the African states on their border are assisting them. Both Kidai-Nlo and Nlemmu-Zenji prefer having a single entity with a controlled border to deal with than a porous expanse of neighbors to juggle.

The Two Malabars (which are actually four) are the remnants of a mercenary clique that had established control over the southern tip of India. The attempt to create a free state beholden to warriors-for-hire was short lived however, as their mass of new recruits, dredged up from the locals, simply performed a hostile takeover and executed their former partners in crime. The Malabars kept the structure of their forebears, albeit splitting it between the four most influential groups within the native clique, essentially turning them into a series of modern warlord states. What’s interesting to note is that the Malabars still offer mercenary services and host the most successful PMCs in the world, the profits just actually find their way into the hands of the locals now.

The Integrated Consensus began as an attempt to create a “Big Space” or to fuse together the colonial territories of the Sahalava Kingdom of Madagascar. This was a success and a failure. A success in that their mainland territories did successfully fuse together into an agglomeration similar to a Fordist state, and a failure in that most of the home islands actually rebelled against the idea of being forced to stand on equal footing with their territories. As a result, the Consensus, originally intended to ensure that the Sahalava state and its empire would last indefinitely has now become the foothold for a mainlander conquest of the island itself.

This world remains a point of interest and a prime candidate for continued observation. However, the eclectic nature of its development calls into question for how long such observation will prove safe. While the technological level of this world is obviously behind our own, it is also over a century in advance of where we were at the same time, showing a potential for sudden advancement and innovation. Likewise, the relatively alien nature of this civilization’s development of knowledge and philosophy may also risk them becoming aware of our presence before the general technological threshold that the multiverse would normally be discovered and may present little warning ahead of time before such a discovery is made. As such I would advise that you exercise exceptional thoughtfulness in your studies.