MotF 81: This Land is Ours

Well, I think this is much more like a proof of concept than a good map idea, but this is supposed to be something like a photograph of my workspace in the relevant ATL.

Also featuring a disputed region who's boundaries are themselves disputed.

To top that one off, an area that is disputed by everyone in it!
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Few years were as important for the populist movement as 1900. A populist candidate won in a US election, the Prussian absolutists were ousted, the Habsburg Empire was forced into the Imperial Confederation of the Danube with significant amounts of autonomy for the various kingdoms, and the Tsar's regime collapsed.

Of course, not all was pleasant in Mother Russia. Filibusters from around the world set up their own states in the former empires--and the death of Tsar Alexander IV and his family caused many of the powerful nobles and landowners of the empire to impress the local peasants into an army and declare their own Tsardoms.

Strangely, one of the earliest areas of stability was the Caucasus region--the local lords swore fealty to the Tsar in Astrakhan, Nicolas I Bazin. However, Nicolas's death in 1907 caused his empire to begin its disintegration into petty states. Russian lords founded the Tsardom in Sevastopol and the Kingdom of Georgia, Muslim revolts built states like Chechnya, the Hashimid Shahdom, and utopian Caucasian socialists created the Union of the Caucasus.

With all this tension, it made perfect sense that by 1910, when the Union of the Caucasus invaded the ancient Ottoman Empire, revolts would already be spreading across that nation. Danubia, finding itself all the stronger for its new system and the undisputed ruler of central and eastern Europe (along with its Bavarian lackey), allied with the Greeks to reconquer the city of Constantine--though Vienna wasn't willing to even let Athens take more of than West Thrace.

The Unionists were defeated, naturally, but with the war in the west, the Ottomans weren't able to hold the dominant Arab portions of their empire; Mesopotamia was annexed into Iran, and the Saudi dynasty took control of all non-British Arabia and some of Jordan (an expedition of radical Zionists seized control of the Palestine region quickly, including swaths of OTL Jordan. It's less hated than OTL, and London likes having a pro-british counterweight in the region). However, the biggest problem for the collapsing empire was the Armenian rising, started by the Armenian-American millionaire Abisak Kasabian and funded by a group of Armenian millionaires in London and New York.

Not to be outdone, George Parthenou, a Greek-American billionaire, set himself up as the Grand Duke of Trebizond in 1911.

The Most Serene Republic of Baku revolted from a rather anti-business Shah in 1904. It's not the most stable nation in the region, but its better than Chechnya.

In 1918, the region has quieted down. The Bakunian Secession has become merely a border war, and the Iranian intervention in the region has effectively forced the Hashimid Shah to agree to an armistice. The Georgian-Unionist war has turned into a standoff, and only in the militia-controlled areas of the region does extreme violence continue.

Armenia and Trebizond have taken two different paths on their way--Armenia has begun to terrorize its Islamic population into peace, in part by separating them from the Armenian minority, whereas the Grand Duchy has taken the path of forced expulsion and occasional amounts of ethnic cleansing. The Great Powers tut about it, but don't do anything.

The Ottoman Sultanate has stabilized, and Suleiman the Deliverer now has an iron grip on his realm, and is looking towards some of his empires former lands, quietly sponsoring Islamic revolts in Armenia and subverting the Sultanate of Syria to his own wishes--two very successful ploys.

Despite all this, the region's claims overlap, and the engines of war are never all that far away. Georgia, the Hashimids, Baku, and Trebizond are all doing their individual bests to bring in the Great Powers on their side, hoping that that is all it will take to tip the balance.

And, of course, the various Tsardoms are all vying for power--and the most legitimate, in Sevastopol, just so happens to be in a perfect position to take its birthright.

The year is 1918, and all it will take to redesign the maps is one little spark.
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Mega-size:

Here is mine. Part of my greater TL. South Africa has gathered in some German emigres from a German Civil War and Gandhi decided to stay in SA. This led to some higher tensions but the Boers are more outnumbered then OTL. Various reasons pushed the borders to how you see them now. Gandhi was shot and killed near Durban and the UK sent 'Special Ambassador" The Earl of Halifax to deal with the SA goverment. He was killed by Boer radicals causing a massive rupture between London and Pretoria. After the dust settles, it stands as it is. North-West Africa (ie, Angola) has been removed from South Africa and Rhodesia is refused to form any union with them, despite popular local support for such a move.

TURKISH EMPIRE

Instead of the Ottomans, a unitied front of Turks made Turkey a massive empire, after having caused the fall of the Byzantines. But now the Empire is about to fall, or is it? The Turks desperately try to save as much land of the rebellions as possible. Will they succeed? At this moment, in the year 1791, Turkish control in the Levant is gone... What's next?

[QUOTE="The History of Croatia" by Allen Spencer (Macmillan Publishing, 1961)]Having struck down the Serb uprisings, the SP proceeded to sign into law a series of measures to strengthen the Croatian nation in the face of Serb and Communist agitation. Foremost among these were the Law on Religious Establishments (Zakoma o vjerske ustanove) 1926, which established Catholicism as the state religion and prohibited the worship of any other Christian tradition; the Law on the National Language (Zakoma o narodni jezik) 1926, which established Croatian as the national language and Ljudevit Gaj's Latin alphabet as the national script, and made the publication of documents in other scripts or languages for non-educational purposes punishable by a fine or prison sentence; and the Law on Regions (Zakoma o okruge) 1927, which divided the country into twenty-nine regions and six independent cities, and set up a system of government for these that would link them together more strongly than the old provinces and prevent the takeover of their governments by forces hostile to the Croatian nation...

Around Christmas of 1928, shortly after the reorganisation of the country, the issue of Dalmatia came to the fore as the civilian government in Italy (or what was left of it) was ousted in a military coup. The German Government, hard pressed to maintain order in their own nation, caused a stir in international relations by announcing their support for the military government the following February, prompting Croatia to send a formal request to Venice for the turning over of the lands around Zadar and Dubrovnik, which were occupied by the Italian military in the aftermath of the SEW and subsequently annexed into Italy. The Croatian Government, having never recognised the annexation to begin with, now argued that they were in a better condition to govern the lands in addition to having a stronger previous claim to them. The Italians did not respond to the request to begin with, but when Zagreb sent a second note, putting forth what were essentially more strongly worded versions of the same demands, they responded with a call to formally recognise their ownership of the lands, citing previous claims to them going back to the Italian republics of Venice and Ragusa (modern-day Dubrovnik), which had held the lands for much of the early modern period. Zagreb, in turn, cut off diplomatic relations with Venice and sent army forces to bolster the garrisons at Rijeka and Knin. The situation continued for much of 1929, with neither side backing down or declaring war, until Germany moved a significant portion of its military into Krain, put its garrisons in Venetia on alert and sent threatening notes to both governments. This caused both sides to back down, and though Croatia failed to get its way in the dispute, the Italian occupation of parts of Dalmatia remained unrecognised by them.[/QUOTE]

Thanks to Nofix for helping out with translations.

The Mozambican Civil War

The explanatory text is in the map.