The Spanish War of Succession, 1702-1714
The Spanish War of Succession was globally waged, despite starting as an internal Spanish conflict between Castille and Aragon over who would succeed the Spanish crown.
After the unexpected death of emperor Maximillian V, his son-in-law Henry Chalon, a Dutch nobleman, stood prepared to inherit the throne. Chalon was an ardent colonialist, a member of the Dutch “Amerikaaner” faction which hoped to expand and maintain their wealth by protecting the Spanish-Dutch colonies of the New World, Africa, and the Indies through a navy financed by taxes from Spain and Italy.
It was this attitude which caused the Cortes of Aragon [1] to declare that they would not recognize his inheritance and instead offer the throne to the Austrian Hapsburg monarch, Emperor Maximilian’s brother Rudolph. The British and Portuguese monarchs saw Chalon as a ruthless competitor to their interests and backed Rudolph; the Amboise saw him as a natural ally, since Chalon was the current heir to the throne of France. And thus the war exploded onto Europe-and spread throughout the world.
The European Theater
The Spanish War of Succession in Europe would begin with the French invasion of Aragon in 1702 AD at the request of Chalon. He hoped that the French and Castillian forces could create a show of strength that would cow the rebellious Aragonese. He was not able to join with the French due to a Portuguese invasion which drew his army away and left the French mired in Catalonia.
Even worse was when the British invaded the Spanish Netherlands, attacking and destroying dikes and burning the cities. Despite incurring massive casualties from their initial foray, they were beaten back by the Dutch-but maintained a blockade of the country for several years, essentially ending the Dutch sugar trade. Attempts to break the blockade in 1708 partially succeeded, but in resupplying the Dutch the Castillian ships doomed them; shortly after they brought supplies of food from the Americas, outbreaks of Columbian potato blight destroyed potato harvests and doomed much of the rural Netherlands to starvation.
The Austrian Hapsburgs were not actually very interested in Aragon, but egged on that invasion in the hopes of forcing a bargain where they regained the Netherlands from Chalon. They did not actually become militarily involved, being warned by the Pope from invading Italy and forbidden passage to France through Germany.
Without the ability to outflank the Castillians and French, the Portuguese and English could not decisively end the war. By 1712, the Tudors and Brandons had defaulted on their debts due to the cost of the war. By 1714, they managed to get loans-from the French, as part of a peace agreement. The Aragonese grudgingly accepted Chalon as king, and Chalon forswore his claim to the French throne. The French pulled out of Aragon, but maintained their fortresses in the Pyrenees ostensibly in case “our dear nephew Chalon” would require future assistance. This was a mere consolation prize, since Batiste I’s Italian ambitions were cruelly dashed by the Pope and British crowning a neutral monarch in Spain’s former northern Italian holdings.
The African Theater
In South Africa, the war between the Spanish and the Portuguese would be fought by proxies, with the native peoples between each power’s colonies armed to fight each other.
Criss-crossing the veldt, the Spanish gave arms to the Sotho and to some of the more minor Nguni clans such as the Zulu. The Portuguese crossed the same territory to deliver guns to the Xhosa and armed their own collaborators among the Nguni elite. The resulting war is known as the “Mfecane” or “Crushing”-and was largely fought independently of the instructions of either European power, as the armed Africans largely figured that it was not worth pissing off a potential ally in favor of whichever foreign kingdom was currently arming them.
The end result was that the Nguni and the Sotho unified. In each tribe’s case, a powerful monarch took over and crushed dissent-brutally so in some cases, as the Zulu clan was annihilated by the Portuguese with the aid of the Xhosa due to its collaboration with the Sotho.
The Xhosa did not unify under a king but did federate, with the various Xhosa clans assembling and agreeing to present a united front both in aggression and diplomacy. This sea change in politics would allow the Spanish and the Xhosa to enter treaties where previously they had hostile relations.
The biggest change from the perspective of the European colonists in Africa was the appearance of a new power which appeared in 1709 A.D. looking to find a way to the east. The Danes were looking to get in on the spice trade, and with their navies tied up in war the Spanish and Portuguese governors of southern Africa agreed to let the filthy heretics pass into the Indian Ocean unmolested. From around the cape the Danes would explore much of the Indian Ocean, colonizing the island that would never be known as Mauritius after the small Spanish outpost on it was abandoned and attempting (with mixed success) to perform cultural outreach to the rising Muslim powers of southeast Asia.
The Columbian Theater
In the Columbias, the war essentially stalemated early on. The Dutch sugar trade was ended by British and Portuguese blockades, and the Lesser Antilles were attacked and occupied by the British, who were in turn partially pushed out by the French. Spanish and Dutch privateers ravaged the English and Portuguese treasure fleets, and were erroneously credited with ending the massive silver trade.
In the southern cone an outright victory would be denied to the Spanish and English powers by the internal politics of the Mapuche. As the subordinate of a chief Puelco could not make a general call to arms and expect to be obeyed. He had to go from village to village among Pikun’s neighbors and call for volunteers and arms when he got wind that the Spanish and English had finally come to blows.
In the time it took to raise his army, his chief Nahuel took a canoe north and warned the Spanish base of San Francisco (OTL: Montevideo) about the impending attack. Nahuel was disappointed by the results. He hoped that the Spanish would crush his rival for him, but instead the Spanish retreated north to Puerto Patos (OTL: Porto Alegre), a base hidden in a freshwater bay from roving English ships.
Nahuel’s gamble failed, and he was overthrown and replaced with Puelco. With the Spanish gone, however, Puelco decided that the English were now a liability and needed to be taught a lesson. In 1711 AD, Puelco lead the Mapuche of Pikun and its allied villages in an attack on Belair (Buenos Aires). Multiple outlying settlements and farms were attacked and torched, the inhabitants either killed or enslaved by the Mapuche. Belair proper was warned by a man named John Smith who had previously served as Puelco’s Spanish to English translator.
John Smith had moved away from Belair due to disputes with that colony’s leadership. But when he got wind of the attack, he abandoned his homestead and urged the other workers on it to flee and hide in the woods. He rode straight for Belair, warning them in time to prepare for the upcoming assault.
The British managed to stave off Puelco’s initial assault. In order to keep his men from deserting, Puelco had to gather them together to give speeches and resolve their grieviances (mostly related to how the booty of this war was to be divided). The terrified colonists hastily reached a rough consensus that John Smith should direct them now. He ordered that they evacuate the colony and flee to San Francisco, taking up that abandoned colony and making it their own. There, the British would work harder to maintain good relationships with the local Natives, giving them a rent of European goods to ‘keep the land’.
The East Asian Theater
The East Asian theater of the war was the one where Chalon Spain would suffer its most devastating losses. The British and Portuguese would cripple the Spanish by arming the Sulu sultanate. Eager to end the forced conversions of the Javanese to Catholicism, the Sulu attacked the straits of Malacca and sparked a rebellion among the local nobility with the aid of their ally the Batam Sultanate[2], while the British viceroyalty of Luzon launched attacks against the Spice Islands.
Unable to defend both and facing massive popular uprisings on Java, the Spanish governor ordered their few ships to defend the spice islands (and perhaps not coincidentally, himself) and abandon Java. They fought off the British, and in the face of the Islamic victory in the straits negotiated the release of high-ranking prisoners from the Batam court.
The British hoped to continue prosecuting the war, but their Muslim allies had no desire to completely remove the Spanish. The Sulu sultan in particular saw their presence as a useful counterweight against the other European powers, and Batam was now replacing the Spanish’s violent Catholicization with a less violent but equally vehement campaign of Islamic purification and had no time to continue to wage the war. British victory was pyrrhic-they gained no valuable land and while the Spanish had lost the doorway to the east, this was now in the hands of non-Europeans who were liable to do all sorts of unpredictable things. By the end of the war, Batam had received emissaries from the Danish heretics and were not only allowing these Protestants access to the East Indies, they were granting them favored trade status!
At least the courts of London and Portugal could look forward to one thing: the return of the treasure fleets, with their valuable cargo and lifeblood of silver for Europe’s economies. But the ships did not come. Sheepishly, after much stonewalling, the captains of the treasure fleets admitted the truth to the governors, who passed the terrible news to the monarchs: the silver was gone, and the Pachayep kingdom had closed itself off. While the Europeans had fought each other, their easiest source of currency had vanished.
[1] The nobility in Spain have consistently become more and more empowered since the passage of the plagues. Now monarchy is pushing back.
[2] No, not Banten, Batam, on an island at the southern end of the Malay peninsula. ITTL, it has become the center of a powerful state run by refugees from Spanish Java.
Notable new nations: The sultanate of Batam, in southern Malaysia and Java; the Xhosa confederacy, and Sotho and Nguni kingdoms; and the little colony of Denmark whose name I will make up at a later date in the Indian Ocean.
