allrighty, then.

Part 22 is in the bag. On SHWI, anyway. Need to get it up on the web site, probably tomorrow. I type EA up on Notepad, turn off the line breaks when I am ready to cut and paste onto Usenet, run the spell-check, then send it off. The only way I have figured out not to have the formatting screwed up. Unfortunately, this means that I have to repeat the process to get it on the web. It is actually correcting my many misspellings that takes most of the time. So usually the web site lags a day or two behind.

I freely confess that I have been looking forward to taking the timeline back to Ultima Thule. I haven't calculated the sheer weight of words, but I bet there is more Europe now than I origionally intended. But we are back on track.

Some notes: I did my best not to turn the megafauna brought to Europe into a gimmick, but I figured it was worth a mention. Thus, the use of mastodons in a seige works out about as well as one could expect. They are a big fat target for a trebuchet or ballistae. Might work better against fortifications that are not as well-defended as Milan.

Siger de Brabant was a lucky find. Been doing some reading about the "13th Century Renaissance." Again I discover that there is a lot more going on in the Middle Ages than I would have guessed before I started in on this. I haven't finished it yet, but at this point I highly recommend 'Aristotles Children' by Richard Rubenstein. Covers the rediscovery in the West of Aristotle's works. Very interesting story, very well told. That is where I plucked Siger from.

Also definitely worth a read is 'The Ornament of the World' by Maria Rosa Menocal. Al-Andalus - "How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain." Good, good stuff.

Slower going has been "Buddhism in the Sung," edited by Peter Gregory and Daniel Getz, Jr. Interesting to be sure, but pretty darn scholarly for a novice to eastern religions like myself. But, Mu-lan-P'i needs to be developed as a setting and Buddhism and Confucianism play big parts.

So that's it. Next we have a North to South, East to West survey of the settlements in the New World. Christian, pagan, Cathar, Muslim, and Chinese.

And I need to get to work on a map ....

so, here's where European history goes TOTALLY off the rails ...

So, St. Louis is dead, the Tatars have devastated Lombardy, and the Pope is in Constantinople. But, as promised, the timeline is headed back to Ultima Thule. More tomorrow, on the blog anyway.

On Geographical Determinism

So. I am getting ready to get back round to Ultima Thule in the timeline. One thing that I have been thinking of is this. Of course, during our timeline (OTL) America became, in part, the home of religious refugees. Puritans, Quakers and Catholics set up shop in the English colonies, and neither of those groups were particularly favored in England.

Is it unduly, well, predictable to have Ultima Thule become the home of Cathars and Norse Pagans? I mean, after all, Spanish and Portuguese America OTL did not exactly become the land of refugees from Catholic persecution. The Inquisition even set up shop on this side of the Atlantic. A couple things have me thinking that Ultima Thule's fate might plausibly differ. First, the discovery of Ultima Thule predated the strong state in Europe. The Spanish Crown was very determined that empire-building in America be an enterprise of the monarchy, not some freelances setting up statelets with themselves as Dukes and so forth, having only feudal ties to the monarchy. So, effectively, the state apparatus does not have control over the colonization of Ultima Thule. Second is that there are obviously no natives. The Spanish had a great concern that the Amerinds not be led astray by heretics. After all, the Spanish had just expelled the jews and Muslims from Spain, largely on the basis that their presence somehow could "corrupt" good Catholics. No such concerns predominate in the EA timeline, although the Papacy has decided that UT was set aside by God for His People and the prospect of it being peopled by pagans, heretics, etc is worrysome. So, I don't think it is unduly, well, paralellistic for religious minorities to find haven in the New World, no matter what it is called.