The Kingdom of Solms-America (American: Königreich Solms-Amerika), commonly Solms-America, is a country in the south of North America. It reaches from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of California and from the Kansas River to the Sierra Madre, and at 1.73 million square kilometres it is the largest state of the American world and the only one with a coast on both gulfs. It borders Mississippi to the north and east, Ludwigsland, Karankawa, the Counties, Río Grande and Nuevo León along and behind the Gulf coast, Mexico to the south, and Aztlan and Colorado to the west. Its capital and largest city is Dreifurt, at the three forks of the Trinity.
The kingdom is an absolute monarchy ruled by the House of Solms, a Hessian kindred of the Crossing that has held the oak country of the upper Trinity, with two interruptions, since 1727. Its law is the Scripture as read by the Plain Rule, the austere reform of American Christianity to which the family bound itself by the Oath of Braunfels in 1744. Its king is Warden of the Two Sanctuaries: the Mound of the Cross at Paquimé and the Black Hill at Chukson, the holy places of the Path, the prophetic religion of native North America, which the Christian confederations that conquered the continent took for the cradle of their own faith. Between two and three million pilgrims reach Paquimé for the Pilgrimage each spring.
The present state is the third that the family has built. Karl the Uniter retook Dreifurt with forty riders in 1902, took the Gulf coast from the Canadian Empire in 1913 and the Sanctuaries from their hereditary Keepers in 1924–1925, and on 4 July 1932 joined his two crowns as the Kingdom of Solms-America. Petroleum, struck in quantity at the Großfeld in 1930 and worked from 1933 by an Arabian concession, turned a kingdom of herders, pilgrims and cotton into the world's largest exporter of oil. The embargo it led in 1973 caused the first of the oil shocks, and the wealth that followed paid for a welfare state without taxes or votes.
Solms-America is a founding member of the American League, the Gulf Council, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting States and the Concert of Nations, and the oldest ally of the United States of Arabia on the continent. Its rivalry with the Christian Republic of Atlantica, fought since 1979 through governments, parties and militias from Oregon to Nuevo León, has organised North American politics for two generations. Since 2016 the programme called Aufbruch 2030 has set out to end its dependence on oil and has loosened much of its social code, while the concentration of power in the Crown Prince, the use of the death penalty and the treatment of dissent have drawn sustained criticism abroad.
Further information: Names of America, House of Solms
The kingdom is one of the few states in the world named for its ruling family. Solms is the name of a Hessian kindred that took it, long before the Crossing, from the Solmsbach, a stream that joins the Lahn below Wetzlar; the family has carried it in America since the fifteenth century. The compound Solms-Amerika was coined by the royal decree of 4 July 1932, which replaced the style "Kingdom of the Sanctuaries and of the Plains and their Dependencies" and made the dynasty's name the country's. Subjects are Solms-Americans in formal English and Solmser in everyday American; opponents of the monarchy, who dislike both, say simply "the Plains" or "the land of the Sanctuaries".
America is older than any of the states that use it. It is first written in the chronicles of the Crossing as Amerikê or Heimrike, and is usually explained as the Old American haima-rîki, "the home realm": the name the confederations gave the country they meant to keep, as against the old country they had left. A second tradition derives it from a chieftain's name, Amalrich, and is now thought to be a later rationalisation. Jolofian pilots carried the word into the charts of the Atlantic in the sixteenth century, and by the eighteenth it named the whole continent in every African and Arabian language.
American therefore names a people, not a citizenship. In its wide sense it covers every nation of the Crossing between the Pacific and the Mississippi that holds the American rite and sits in the American League, whatever it speaks: the German of the Plains, the French of Mississippi, the Castilian of Mexico and the Gulf, the Slavic of Cascadia. Atlanticans and Canadians, though their ancestors made the same crossing, do not use it of themselves. Arabian style guides have insisted since 1888 that the word is never applied to citizens of the United States of Arabia.
Main article: History of Solms-America. See also: Timeline of the Global Swap
The country holds some of the oldest securely dated human sites in the Americas. Stone tools at the Gault site and along Buttermilk Creek, on the kingdom’s southern edge where the black prairie meets the limestone hills, lie beneath the fluted points of the Clovis hunters and are some fifteen thousand years old; Clovis itself, and the Folsom points that followed it, are named for sites in the kingdom’s west. For ten thousand years after the great game died out the plains and deserts were the country of small bands of foragers, whose painted shelters in the canyons of the lower Pecos, begun more than four thousand years ago, are among the largest bodies of rock art on the continent. The quarries of Alibates on the Canadian supplied agate-banded flint to half of North America.
Maize, beans and squash reached the far south-west from Mesoamerica before 2000 BCE, and with them came canal irrigation, which the farmers of the Gila and the Salt carried further than any other people north of the Valley of Mexico. By the middle of the first millennium BCE the pattern that was to last was in place: irrigated valleys and terraced canyons in the desert west, mound-building farmers in the wooded east, and between them the open grassland that nobody yet could hold.
Main article: Turquoise Road
After the divergence the desert west did not remain a country of villages. The turquoise of the Cerrillos hills and the salt, shell and copper of the two gulfs moved south to the cities of Mesoamerica, and scarlet macaws, cacao and cotton moved north, along what later writers called the Turquoise Road. The towns that taxed it grew into kingdoms: the canal states of the Gila, the great houses of the San Juan, the mound cities of the Caddo on the Red and the Neches, and, from about the second century, the caravan city of Paquimé in the closed basin of the Casas Grandes, where the road from the Rio Grande met the passes of the Sierra Madre. Their script, a syllabary first cut on shell and later painted on deerskin and cotton paper, was in use from the Gulf of California to the Arkansas by the fifth century.
The kingdoms of the Road lived between two empires. To the south the City of the Gods, Teōtīhuācān in Nahuatl, ruled the Valley of Mexico from the second century BCE and held the rim of the kingdom's ground through its Northern March on the Tropic, at the observatory of Alta Vista, but never its heart; to the east the Fire-Keepers ruled the Ohio and the southern Appalachians from the Great Bottom of the Mississippi, beside where Cahokia would rise. The Road's tolls made three kingdoms rich: the Canal League of the Gila and the Salt, from about 350 BCE, its royal town Skoaquik; the Great Houses of the San Juan, from about 250 BCE, their seat at Chaco; and the Caddo League of the Neches, from about 200 BCE. The City's Northern Expedition of 26–24 BCE, 11,500 strong, was led the long way by its guides, besieged Skoaquik for six days and came home 3,900: seven men had died in battle and the rest of thirst and fever. The City took the lake city of the Nahua in 70, scattering them along the Road to Chukson, Paquimé and other towns, and made the Great Houses its client in 106. Their regent, remembered as the Turquoise Queen, broke with it in 268, took the Rio Grande towns, Paquimé, the canal lands and the City's own Northern March, was beaten on the Conchos and before Paquimé in 272, and was taken on the road east after the fall of Chaco in 273.
From about 300 the two empires fought through clients: the Caddo League under the Fire-Keepers, the Jumano of the Meeting of the Rivers under the City. The City's Eastern Expedition of 363, 65,000 men and 1,100 river canoes, went up the Red and down the Mississippi, won the field before the Great Bottom but could not take it, and lost its general to a spear on the Arkansas on the way home; about 28,000 returned. The clients' war ended at the Caprock in 554, where the Jumano broke the Caddo League and its king fell. The City had conquered the Canal League in 525, and in 570 its viceroy there, who had raised a shrine to rival Paquimé's, marched on the caravan city with 24,000 men behind a great litter; a spotted fever turned the army back at the passes, and he died on the road. The same year the Great Headgate on the Salt broke and the canal towns emptied, and later tradition set the Messenger's birth in that Year of the Litter. In 598 the City of the Gods burned. By 603 Paquimé, rich and alone, stood at the meeting of the roads of an empty board.
The older religions of the continent were already prophetic. The Nahua of the far west kept teoyotl, the worship of the single Lord of the Near and the Nigh, and the memory of Aztlan as a country promised and lost; the nations of the eastern woods kept the sacred fire and the word of the Peacemaker. Both reached the turquoise towns along the roads, and the Messenger of Paquimé was to claim both as his forerunners.
Main articles: The Path, Commonwealth of the Speakers
In 604 a merchant of Paquimé, remembered only by his title, the Messenger, began to preach that the Maker of the four roads was one, that the shrines of the turquoise lords were nothing, and that every person would answer for their own deeds. Driven from the city in 617, he was received with his followers at the oasis of Chukson, under the Black Hill; the Path counts its years from that Migration. He returned to Paquimé in 625, cleared the Mound of the Cross, whose four arms mark the roads of the world and the sunrise of the equinox, and died at Chukson in 628. Within a century his successors, the Speakers, had carried the Path from the Pacific to the Mississippi and south to the Valley of Mexico, and the Nahua and the fire-keeping nations lived inside their Commonwealth as peoples of an earlier word.
The Commonwealth did not stay in the desert. Its seat moved to the great mounds of Cahokia on the Mississippi in 742, and the country of the Sanctuaries became what it was to remain for a thousand years: a place of pilgrimage, governed for whoever ruled the rivers by the families that kept the shrines, and cut off from the wealthy east by the grassland. Drought, flood and the wars of its governors emptied Cahokia by 1350. When the first ships of the Crossing reached the Gulf, no power remained in North America that could have stopped them.
Main articles: The Crossing, American rite
Europe's tribal confederations began to cross the Atlantic in the 1400s, pushed by their own wars and by the raiders who fed the trade in Europeans, and they brought their sectional politics with them. They were Christians of an unlettered and tribal kind, and they came with horses, cattle, iron and the diseases of the Old World. Within two centuries the native population of the continent had fallen by more than half, and the confederations held the land: Saxons and Angles on the eastern seaboard, Franks along the Mississippi, Castilians in Mexico, Slavs in the north-west, and on the southern plains the Hessians, Swabians and Low Saxons from whom the Solms-Americans descend. On the open grassland they became what no native people had been, mounted herders, and the plains tribes of the Crossing, with their cattle brands, their blood feuds and their elected captains, are the Americans of every later stereotype.
The conquerors did not destroy the Sanctuaries. Pilgrimage was the wealth of the far south-west, its keepers were useful, and the preaching of the Path, one Maker, a last judgement and a line of prophets, was close enough to the Gospel for the confederations' pastors to make sense of it. The Synod of Chukson in 1571 settled the matter with the Doctrine of the Two Testimonies: the Messenger had been sent to prepare the West for Christ as the prophets had prepared Israel, and the holy places of the Path were therefore holy to Christians. American Christianity has kept the Pilgrimage, the four-armed cross and the reckoning from the Migration ever since, and the native nations that still hold the Path unmixed have kept their place at the shrines.
The first Christian Warden of the Sanctuaries, Heinrich, died in 1661, and the American church divided over his office. The party of the aldermen held that the elders of the confederations should choose the Warden; the Kindred held that it belonged to Heinrich's house. His son Konrad was killed with seventy of his household at the fords of the Gila on 10 October 1680, and the schism has never closed. Most Americans are Aldermannic. The Kindred confession became the faith of Atlantica in 1701 and survives in Solms-America among the farming towns of the upper Rio Grande and in the pine country of the Ostmark.
From the early sixteenth century the settled rim of the continent was gathered into the Canadian Empire, the Norse and Inuit monarchy of the St Lawrence, whose High Seat at Hochelaga appointed governors for Cascadia, Mississippi and Mexico, garrisoned the Gulf coast and named the Keeper of Paquimé. It never governed the plains. The interior remained a country of counties and tribal captaincies, among them the Solms at Braunfels, the Leiningen on the Arkansas and the Isenburg on the Brazos, whose feuds the empire's governors managed with subsidies and occasional punitive columns. Dreifurt remembers the period with six banners, for the six powers that have claimed the upper Trinity: the Caddo league, the Commonwealth of the Speakers, the Canadian Empire, the Mexican viceroys, the Leiningen and the House of Solms.
Main articles: County of Braunfels, Plain Rule
Count Philipp of Solms became lord of Braunfels, a stockaded town on the Elm Fork of the Trinity, in 1727. In 1744 he gave shelter to Johann Eberlin, a pastor expelled from the Brazos towns for preaching that the American church had buried the Gospel under saints' tombs, relic-dances and the cult of the Wardens. Eberlin's Plain Rule allowed nothing between the believer and God: no shrine but the two Sanctuaries, no ornament, no music in worship, and no obedience to a ruler who did not enforce the Scripture. By the Oath of Braunfels the count undertook to spread the Rule by the sword and the pastor to preach obedience to the count. The alliance of the two families has outlasted three states.
The first of them, the County of Braunfels, held the whole of the southern plains by 1790. Its riders sacked the Kindred shrine at the Gila fords in 1802 and occupied Paquimé and Chukson from 1803 to 1812, stripping the tombs around the Sanctuaries and turning back the Canadian pilgrim caravans. The High Seat called on its viceroy in Mexico. A Mexican army crossed the Rio Grande in 1811, retook the holy cities, and in 1818, after a siege of six months, levelled Braunfels; Count Ernst was taken to Hochelaga and beheaded. "Braunfels" is still the word with which a Solmser ends an argument about foreigners.
A cousin, Bernhard, drove the Mexican garrison out of the Trinity country in 1824 and set his seat at Dreifurt, twenty-five kilometres downstream. This second state, the County of the Trinity, never recovered the west, and after 1865 it was consumed by the quarrels of Count Friedrich's sons. In 1891 the Leiningen of Wichita, clients of Hochelaga, beat the last Solms army in the Cross Timbers. The family went into exile in Ludwigsland.
Main article: Unification of Solms-America
On the night of 15 January 1902 Karl of Solms, twenty-six years old, rode out of exile with forty men, climbed the wall of the Trinity Blockhouse and killed the Leiningen governor of Dreifurt at its gate. The Rotland, the Red River country where the Plain Rule was strongest, came over to him by 1906. In 1913 he took the Ostmark, with its ports and its Kindred towns, from a Canadian garrison that was needed elsewhere; by the Treaty of Neches in 1915 Sokoto, at war with the Canadian Empire and its Kongolese ally, recognised him as an independent ruler under its protection.
His instrument was the Brethren, plains tribesmen settled in farming colonies, taught the Rule and sworn to fight for it. With them he took Wichita from the Leiningen in 1921, the Kansa country and the Staked Plain in the following year, and the mountain valleys of Bergland. The war of 1914–1918 had meanwhile broken the Canadian Empire in North America. The Keepers of Paquimé, who had raised the American Revolt against Hochelaga in 1916 with Sokotan gold, were kings of the Sanctuaries in their own right, and their sons had been given thrones in Colorado and Mississippi. Karl's Brethren entered Paquimé on 13 October 1924 and the port of Waimas on 23 December 1925; on 8 January 1926 the notables of the holy city proclaimed him King of the Sanctuaries. Sokoto recognised his full independence by the Treaty of Waimas in 1927.
The Brethren wanted to go on, into Mississippi, Colorado and the protected states of the Gulf, and called the king's motor cars and telegraphs the work of the devil. They rose in 1927. Karl broke them with machine-guns mounted on lorries at the Salt Fork of the Brazos on 5 April 1929, and the last of them surrendered to Sokotan troops in Ludwigsland the next winter. On 4 July 1932 he joined the two crowns as the Kingdom of Solms-America. A short war with Nuevo León in 1934 ended with the Treaty of Camargo, which gave him the march of Chihuahua and fixed the southern frontier on the rim of the Conchos.
Further information: Petroleum
Oil had been known on the Gulf coast since a salt dome near the mouth of the Neches blew out on 10 January 1901, under the Canadians. It was the Großfeld, found in the pine country of the Ostmark on 3 October 1930, that made the kingdom. Karl, close to bankruptcy in the Depression, signed a concession with an Arabian company on 29 May 1933; its operating arm, Amaröl, shipped its first tanker from the Sabine in 1939. On 14 February 1945 the king met President Faisal ar-Rashid aboard an Arabian cruiser anchored off Sabine Pass. No text was signed, but the understanding of that afternoon, Arabian protection in exchange for access to American oil, has been the basis of the kingdom's foreign policy ever since. Solms-America declared war on the Kimfumu kya Kongo and Hindustan the next month and was a founding member of the Concert of Nations and, in the same year, of the American League.
Karl died on 9 November 1953, leaving forty-five sons, and the crown has passed among them and, since 2015, towards their sons. Philipp II (1953–1964) spent faster than the oil paid and was removed by a family council sanctioned by the Eldership. Ludwig (1964–1975) balanced the budget, abolished slavery in 1962 while still crown prince, introduced television and schools for girls against the protests of the pastors, and led the kingdom in the long contest with the republican officers of Mexico for the leadership of the American world. The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting States, which the kingdom had helped to found in 1960, gave him his weapon.
When Arabia resupplied Aztlan by air during the October War of 1973, Ludwig led the American exporters in an embargo on shipments to Arabia and cut production month by month. The price of crude quadrupled in five months. The kingdom's income rose from 4 to 22 billion thalers in a year, and Amaröl was bought out in stages between 1973 and 1980. Ludwig did not see the result: he was shot by a nephew at a public audience on 25 March 1975. Under Georg (1975–1982) the money built cities, motorways, universities and an army, and drew in millions of foreign workers.
The year that began in the winter of 1979 changed the kingdom more than the embargo had. In February the Atlantican revolution replaced a friendly president with a republic of Kindred pastors who called the House of Solms unfit to guard the Sanctuaries. In November the Kindred towns of the upper Rio Grande rose. On Good Friday, 4 April 1980, some four hundred armed followers of Gebhard Rau, a former sergeant of the Landjäger who announced that the end of the age had come, seized the precinct of the Mound of the Cross, five months after a millenarian band had done the same at the Masjid al-Haram in Makkah, and held it for fourteen days. Rau and sixty-two others were beheaded in eight cities on one morning. The family's answer was to outbid its critics in piety: the Wardens of Good Order were given the streets, the pastors the schools, and thirty years of oil money went to building churches of the Plain Rule from Oregon to Europe. In 1986 King Friedrich (1982–2005) replaced "His Majesty" with the title Warden of the Two Sanctuaries.
The kingdom paid for Mississippi's eight-year war with Atlantica and was repaid in 1990, when Mississippi annexed Ludwigsland and its army stood on the Sabine. Friedrich asked for Arabian troops. More than half a million assembled in the Ostmark for the Gulf coalition war of 1991, and their presence in the land of the Sanctuaries produced the kingdom's first open opposition: petitions from liberals for a constitution, and from the pastors of the Revival for a stricter one. The king answered with the Ground Order of 1992, which declared the Scripture the constitution and created the appointed Landrat. A lorry bomb killed nineteen Arabian airmen at Neches in 1996.
The most radical of the kingdom's critics were men it had itself sent abroad to fight the Derg intervention in Zanjibar. Their network, the Base, led by a construction heir from Waimas whom the kingdom had stripped of his nationality in 1994, carried out the attacks of 11 September 2001 on Jeddah and Umm al-Qura; fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Solms-American subjects. The alliance with Arabia survived, barely. The Arabian-led invasion of Mississippi in 2003, which the kingdom opposed and would not host, was followed by three years of bombings by the Base inside Solms-America itself, which the security forces had put down by 2006.
Albrecht (2005–2015) held the first municipal elections in 2005, appointed women to the Landrat in 2013 and sent 200,000 students abroad on scholarships. When the risings of 2011 brought down the president of Mexico, he spent 130 billion thalers on wages and housing at home, sent the Gulf Council's marines to San Juan to keep the King of Puerto Rico on his throne, and armed the opposition to the Cascadian government. His successor Wilhelm, who came to the throne in January 2015 at seventy-nine, handed the conduct of affairs to his son Karl Ferdinand, then twenty-nine.
Within three months the kingdom was at war in Nuevo León, leading a coalition against the Huastecas, who had taken Monterrey. The war was expected to last weeks and went on for seven years. At home the prince announced Aufbruch 2030 in April 2016, stripped the Wardens of Good Order of their powers of arrest, reopened cinemas and allowed women to drive from 24 June 2018. He was named Crown Prince in June 2017, after two older cousins had been set aside, and in November of that year confined some four hundred princes, ministers and businessmen in a Dreifurt hotel until they had surrendered assets said to be worth 400 billion thalers. The same months brought the blockade of Karankawa (2017–2021), the detention of pastors and of the women who had campaigned for the right to drive, and, on 2 October 2018, the killing of the journalist Jakob Kaschauer by a team of royal officers inside the kingdom's consulate at Hochelaga.
The 2020s have been quieter abroad. The kingdom restored relations with Atlantica in March 2023 in an agreement brokered by Nusantara, reached a truce in Nuevo León, and was negotiating recognition of Aztlan in exchange for an Arabian defence treaty when Armov's attack of 10 July 2023 and the war in the L.A. Strip ended the talks; its position since has been that there will be no recognition without a Californian state. It recognised the new authorities in Cascadia after the fall of the republic in December 2024, stayed out of the twelve-day war between Aztlan and Atlantica in June 2025, and was designated a major ally outside the Umm al-Qura Pact by Arabia that November. The winter of 2025–2026 brought an open quarrel with the Counties over the Southern Transition Council's advance in Nuevo León. Dreifurt is to hold the World Exposition of 2030.
Main article: Geography of Solms-America
Solms-America occupies the south of the continent between 26° and 41° north. It is about 2,000 kilometres from the mouth of the Sabine to the delta of the Colorado and 1,600 from the divide north of the Kansas River to the southern rim of the Conchos. It has 120 kilometres of coast on the Gulf of Mexico, between the Sabine and Galveston Bay, and some 900 on the Gulf of California, from the Colorado delta to the Yaqui. No frontier of the kingdom is a surveyor's line: all were fixed by treaty between 1915 and 1934 along rivers, watersheds and escarpments that the plains tribes already recognised as the limits of their ranges.
The country rises from east to west in four steps. The Gulf plain and the pine forests of the Ostmark, below 150 metres, give way to the black prairies and oak belts of the Trinity and the Brazos, the old heartland, and to the rolling red plains of the Red and the Arkansas. West of the hundredth meridian the Caprock, an escarpment as much as 300 metres high, walls off the Staked Plain (the Hochebene), a tableland of 90,000 square kilometres so level that its first crossers drove stakes to find their way back. Beyond the Pecos the land breaks into the basins and ranges of the Chihuahuan Desert, cut by the trench of the Rio Grande, which the kingdom holds from its springs in the San Luis Valley to the canyons of the Big Bend.
The west is mountain and desert. The Sierra Madre Occidental, the wall between the two halves of the kingdom, reaches 3,300 metres and is cut on its Pacific side by the canyons of the Yaqui. Below it the Sonoran Desert falls to the Gulf of California, the hottest and driest part of the country and the most densely peopled part of the west, because the Sanctuaries and their port lie on either side of it. The highest point is Blanca Peak in the Sangre de Cristo (4,374 m), on the frontier with Colorado.
Rainfall falls away westward, from 1,400 millimetres a year at Neches to under 100 at the head of the Gulf of California. The east is humid and subtropical, with long hot summers; the plains are semi-arid, with the widest daily and yearly ranges of temperature in the kingdom, the blizzards the herders call Nordsturm and the most violent tornadoes on earth, some 140 a year. Summer temperatures in the Sonoran lowlands pass 48 °C. The Pilgrimage, which the Path fixes to the spring equinox, falls in the mildest weeks of the desert year. The Gulf coast is exposed to hurricanes from June to November.
Unlike most of its neighbours the kingdom has rivers: the Arkansas, the Canadian, the Red, the Brazos, the Trinity, the Pecos and the Rio Grande all rise or run within it, and the east has never lacked water. The plains and the west are another matter. The Ogallala aquifer under the Staked Plain, fossil water laid down before the last ice age, was pumped from the 1950s to irrigate cotton and, under the wheat programme of the 1980s, to make the kingdom for a few years the world's sixth-largest exporter of wheat at several times the world price; water tables fell by more than forty metres, and the programme was wound up by 2016. The cities of the west drink from the sea. Solms-America is the world's largest producer of desalinated water, from plants on both gulfs, and pumps it 400 kilometres and 1,500 metres uphill to Paquimé.
The kingdom spans ten ecological regions, from cypress swamp to alpine tundra, and holds more species of bird, reptile and cactus than any other country of the American world. Bison, which once numbered tens of millions on the plains and were reduced to a few hundred by the hide trade of the nineteenth century, have been restored to royal reserves on the Staked Plain; pronghorn, black bear, puma and, in the Sonoran canyons, the jaguar survive, and the Mexican wolf has been reintroduced to the Black Range. About 17 per cent of the land is protected, the largest reserves being the Big Bend of the Rio Grande, the saguaro forests around Chukson and the sky-island ranges of the south-west. Overgrazing, the draining of the aquifers and the spread of mesquite and juniper into the grasslands are the chief pressures.
The kingdom is divided into thirteen marches (Marken), each under a governor of princely rank appointed by the king, and the marches into 136 districts. The two holy marches are administered with the advice of the native Keepers of the shrines, and the governor of Paquimé is by custom the king's senior adviser.
| March | Seat | Area (km²) | Population (2025) | Character |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dreifurt | Dreifurt | 197,900 | 10,200,000 | The prairies of the Trinity and the Brazos: the capital, the court and the old Solms country |
| Ostmark | Neches | 66,000 | 5,100,000 | Pine forest and Gulf coast: the Großfeld, the refineries and ports, and most of the kingdom's Kindred |
| Rotland | Waschita | 136,100 | 1,900,000 | The Red River plains: wheat, cattle and the strictest pastors of the Rule |
| Wichita | Wichita | 319,000 | 3,000,000 | The Arkansas country, once the Leiningen realm: grain, gas and horse-breeding |
| Kansa | Topeka | 151,200 | 1,300,000 | The northern frontier, down the Kaw to the border city of Kawsmund |
| Hochebene | Gelbhaus | 87,400 | 900,000 | The Staked Plain: cotton on the aquifer, wind farms and the bison reserves |
| Pecos | Pecos | 111,700 | 900,000 | The Pecos valley and the Big Bend: the oil and gas of the Pecosbecken and the great solar fields |
| Oberland | Tewa | 198,400 | 2,000,000 | The upper Rio Grande: adobe towns, native pueblos, Kindred farmers and the summer court |
| Chihuahua | Chihuahua | 146,200 | 1,700,000 | The desert south, taken in 1934: silver, cattle and the frontier with Nuevo León |
| Paquimé | Paquimé | 41,900 | 3,000,000 | The holy basin of the Casas Grandes and the Mound of the Cross |
| Chukson | Chukson | 77,400 | 2,100,000 | The Black Hill and the Messenger's tomb, and the saguaro desert south of the Gila |
| Küstenland | Waimas | 114,300 | 5,000,000 | The Gulf of California coast: the pilgrim port, the trading families and the new city of Morgenstadt |
| Bergland | Papigochi | 80,400 | 1,300,000 | The Sierra Madre and the Yaqui: terraced valleys, Rarámuri and Yoeme country, the coolest summers |
Main article: Politics of Solms-America
Solms-America is an absolute monarchy. The Ground Order of 1992 declares that the constitution of the kingdom is the Scripture, that rule belongs to the sons of Karl the Uniter and their sons, and that the king governs by consultation. There are no political parties and no national elections. In practice the king's power is limited by three things the Order does not mention: the consensus of the senior princes, the opinion of the Eldership, and the expectation of his subjects that the state will provide for them.
Main articles: House of Solms, King of Solms-America
The king is head of state, commander of the armed forces and, unless he delegates the office, Chancellor. He appoints the Council of Ministers, the governors of the marches, the judges and the 150 members of the Landrat, which may question ministers and propose laws but not pass them. The House of Solms numbers some fifteen thousand people, of whom perhaps two thousand hold the offices, commands and stipends that matter. Succession is decided within the family: since 2006 by the Council of Allegiance, in which each line of Karl's sons has a vote, and since 2017, in practice, by the king.
| King | Reign | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Karl ("the Uniter") | 1902–1953 | Count at Dreifurt from 1902, King of the Sanctuaries from 1926, King of Solms-America from 1932 |
| Philipp II | 1953–1964 | Eldest surviving son; deposed by the family council and died in exile in Masr |
| Ludwig | 1964–1975 | Fiscal reform; schools for girls; the embargo of 1973; assassinated |
| Georg | 1975–1982 | The boom years; the seizure at Paquimé |
| Friedrich | 1982–2005 | Took the title Warden of the Two Sanctuaries; the Gulf coalition war; the Ground Order. Incapacitated from 1995 |
| Albrecht | 2005–2015 | Regent from 1995; municipal elections; women in the Landrat |
| Wilhelm | 2015– | The war in Nuevo León; the Aufbruch; government in the hands of Crown Prince Karl Ferdinand, Chancellor since 2022 |
The second power in the kingdom is the clergy of the Plain Rule. The Eldership, a council of some twenty senior pastors appointed by the king, rules on doctrine and, when asked, on policy: it sanctioned the deposition of Philipp II in 1964, the storming of the Sanctuary in 1980 and the admission of Arabian troops in 1990. The descendants of Johann Eberlin, the Eberlins, have supplied most of its presidents and have married into the royal house in every generation since the Oath. The pastors controlled the courts, the schools and public morals for most of the twentieth century. Since 2016 they have lost the last two, and those who objected aloud have been imprisoned.
The law of the land is the Scripture and the custom of the confederations, the Landrecht, applied by single judges trained as pastors and bound by no precedent. Royal decrees, called ordinances rather than laws, cover what the Scripture does not: companies, labour, traffic, oil. A written code of personal status was issued in 2022 and a civil code in 2023, the first in the kingdom's history. Punishments include flogging, now largely replaced by prison, and death by the sabre for murder, rape, armed robbery, drug trafficking, witchcraft and sedition.
Main article: Foreign relations of Solms-America. See also: the key to North America
Three commitments have governed the kingdom's diplomacy since 1945: the alliance with Arabia, the leadership of the American and Christian worlds that the Sanctuaries and the oil confer, and the containment of whichever neighbour most threatens the House of Solms. That neighbour was republican Mexico in the 1950s and 1960s, Mississippi in 1990, and has been Atlantica since 1979.
Arabia. The relationship rests on the exchange agreed in 1945. Arabia is the kingdom's chief supplier of arms and its guarantor; the kingdom prices its oil in riyals, holds its reserves in Arabian debt and has, with exceptions in 1973 and 2003, supported Arabian policy on the continent. It has been strained by the attacks of 2001, the Kaschauer killing, oil prices and Arabia's own production, which since the 2010s has exceeded the kingdom's. The growing trade with Nusantara, now the largest buyer of Solms-American crude, gives the kingdom a second patron it did not have in the Cold War.
Atlantica and the Axis of Freedom. The Christian Republic disputes the kingdom's right to the Sanctuaries, and supports what it calls the Axis of Freedom: the government of Cascadia until its fall in 2024, God's Faction in Oregon, the Huastecas in Nuevo León, Armov in the L.A. Strip and a number of militias in Mississippi. The two states broke off relations in 1988 and again in January 2016, when the kingdom executed the Kindred pastor Niklas Rimmer and a crowd burned its embassy in the Atlantican capital, and restored them in 2023.
The Gulf. The kingdom regards the small monarchies of the Gulf, Ludwigsland, Karankawa, the Counties, Río Grande and Puerto Rico, as its natural sphere, and has led them since 1981 in the Gulf Council. They do not always follow. Karankawa's gas wealth, its broadcasting and its patronage of the Revival led to the blockade of 2017–2021; the Counties, the kingdom's partner in Nuevo León in 2015, became its rival there by 2019.
Aztlan and California. The kingdom fought in none of the American wars against Aztlan but paid for several. Its American Peace Initiative of 2002 offered recognition by every state of the League in return for withdrawal from the L.A. Strip, the East Basin and the Fremont Forests and a Californian state with its capital in the eastern half of the lake city. It remains the kingdom's stated position.
Nuevo León. The kingdom has intervened in its southern neighbour in every generation since 1934. The war of 2015–2022 against the Huastecas cost it perhaps 300 billion thalers, brought missiles down on Dreifurt and the Großfeld, and ended in a truce that left Monterrey in Huasteca hands.
Further information: the key to North America
Much of the continent is governed by bodies that no state recognises, and the kingdom's policy is made as much towards them as towards its neighbours. The table lists those marked on the map above, with the kingdom's dealings with each.
| No. | Actor | Where | What it is | The kingdom's dealings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pacific Liberation Committee | Cascadia: Puget Sound | Aldermannic revivalist coalition that ruled the north-western enclave from 2017 and took Boise in December 2024 | Proscribed until 2024; its transitional government recognised and financed since |
| 2 | Free Cascadian Army | Cascadia: the Canadian frontier | Opposition brigades under Canadian protection | Armed by the kingdom in 2012–2017 |
| 3 | Wiyohiyanpa | Cascadia: the upper Missouri | The Autonomous Administration of East Cascadia, led by the Lakota, Dakota and Nakoda, with Arabian air support | Funded reconstruction in 2018–2019; urges its merger into the new Cascadian state |
| 4 | Bismarck Garrisons | Cascadia: the Missouri towns | The National Defence Forces, loyalist militia of the fallen republic | None |
| 5 | Kingdom of Heaven on Earth | Cascadia and Mississippi: the Badlands | Millenarian movement that held a third of both countries in 2014–2017 | At war with it; it bombed Kindred churches in the Ostmark in 2015 |
| 6 | Thermopolis Garrison | Cascadia: the Bighorn basin | The New Cascadian Army, around an Arabian base | None |
| 7 | God's Faction | Oregon | Kindred party and army, founded with Atlantican help in 1982; the strongest force in Oregon until the war of 2024 | Proscribed since 2016 |
| 8 | C.L.O.–Victory | California: the East Basin | The Californian Liberation Organisation and its leading party, which administer the Californian towns of the East Basin | Recognised as the representative of the Californians; its largest donor |
| 9 | Armov | California: the L.A. Strip | The American Resistance Movement, which governed the Strip from 2007 and attacked Aztlan on 10 July 2023 | No relations since 2007; hosts its rivals |
| 10 | God's Faction in Deseret | Solms-America: the Oberland | Clandestine Kindred group in the upper Rio Grande valley, blamed for the Neches bombing of 1996 | Proscribed; its members are tried for sedition |
| 11 | The Huastecas | Nuevo León: Monterrey and the north-west | The "Supporters of God", a Kindred revival of the Sierra, allied to Atlantica | At war 2015–2022; truce since |
| 12 | Southern Transition Council | Nuevo León: Tamaulipas | Secessionist government of the south-east, backed by the Counties | Its ally against the Huastecas until 2019; its opponent in 2025–2026 |
| 13 | The Base in Mexico | Nuevo León: the coast | The Gulf branch of the network that attacked Arabia in 2001 | At war since 2003 |
| 14 | Santo Templo | Mexico: the Pacific coast | The "Supporters of the Holy Temple", affiliated to the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth | Supports Mexico's campaign against it |
| 15 | Florida movements | Atlantica: the Gulf coast | American nationalists among the Aldermannic minority of West Florida | Denies supporting them; Atlantica says it does |
| 16 | People's Knights | Mississippi: New Orleans | Atlantican opposition movement in exile | Unacknowledged contacts since 2016 |
The kingdom spends about 7 per cent of its output on defence, among the five largest military budgets in the world, almost all of it on Arabian and Sokotan equipment. The regular forces, 260,000 strong, answer to the Ministry of Defence. The Landjäger, 130,000 mounted rangers turned mechanised infantry, recruited from the plains tribes that followed Karl the Uniter, answer to the king and exist to protect the family from its own army as much as from anyone else. A separate guard of 30,000 keeps the Sanctuaries and the oilfields.
International bodies rank the kingdom among the least free states in the world. Parties, unions, public worship by other churches and criticism of the king or the faith are forbidden. The kingdom executed 184 people in 2019, 81 on a single day in March 2022 and more than 300 in each of 2024 and 2025. Its Kindred subjects are excluded from the officer corps and the senior civil service, and the native nations, protected at the shrines, have no standing as nations in law. Foreign workers, tied to their employers by the sponsorship system until its partial repeal in 2021, have had few rights and less redress. The government answers that it is reforming at the pace its society can bear, and points to what has changed since 2016.
Main article: Economy of Solms-America
Solms-America has the largest economy of the American world and the nineteenth largest on earth. The state owns the oil and, through it, most of the rest: petroleum supplies about 40 per cent of output, 60 per cent of government revenue and 75 per cent of exports, and two citizens in three who work are employed by the government. There was no income tax before the value-added tax of 2018 and there is still none on wages. The thaler has been pegged to the Arabian riyal, at 3.75 to one, since 1986.
Main articles: Amaröl, Oil shocks of 1973 and 1979
The kingdom holds about 16 per cent of the world's proven reserves of conventional oil, second only to Arabia, and produces some 10.4 million barrels a day, most of it for export, where Arabia burns most of its own. The Großfeld of the Ostmark, seventy kilometres long, was the largest field known anywhere until Ghawar was found in Arabia in 1948; the Pecosbecken, a stack of oil- and gas-bearing rocks under the Pecos valley and the southern Staked Plain, has been the larger producer since the 1990s; and the salt domes of the Gulf coast, where the industry began, feed the refineries of Neches and the Sabine, the largest petrochemical complex in North America. Because its fields are cheap to work and it keeps two million barrels a day of capacity idle, the kingdom can move the world price by opening or closing its valves, and has led the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting States since its founding in 1960.
Amaröl, founded in 1933 as the operating company of the Arabian concession and wholly state-owned since 1980, is the most valuable company in the American world. A sale of 1.5 per cent of its shares on the Dreifurt exchange in December 2019 raised more than any listing before it. Its processing plant at the Großfeld was struck by drones and missiles in September 2019, halving the kingdom's output for a fortnight.
Aufbruch 2030 ("the setting-out"), announced in 2016, is the Crown Prince's plan to make an economy that can outlive oil. Its instrument is the Kronfonds, the crown's investment fund, with assets of some 900 billion riyals, which owns stakes in foreign carmakers, technology firms and sports, and builds at home. Its showpieces are Morgenstadt, a new city on the Gulf of California south of the Colorado delta, planned around a single mirrored building 170 kilometres long and cut back repeatedly since 2024; resorts on the Sonoran coast; an entertainment city outside Dreifurt; and the restoration of old Braunfels. The plan has raised women's employment from 17 to 35 per cent, opened the country to tourists in 2019 and built the world's cheapest solar power in the Pecos march. It has not yet reduced the budget's dependence on oil, and the kingdom has run deficits in most years since 2014.
The plains tribes lived by cattle before they lived by oil, and the kingdom still has the largest beef herd in North America, some 13 million head, driven until the railways along trails that the pilgrim caravans had made. Cotton on the Staked Plain, wheat and sorghum on the Red and the Arkansas, pecans in the river bottoms and chile in the Rio Grande valley are the chief crops. Agriculture employs 3 per cent of the workforce and uses four-fifths of the water.
The Pilgrimage (Wallfahrt) brings between two and three million people to Paquimé in the week of the spring equinox, by quota from every American and Christian country and from the native nations, and some nineteen million more make the lesser visit in the rest of the year. Managing them is the kingdom's largest peacetime operation and the king's first claim to legitimacy. Crushes killed 1,426 pilgrims in a tunnel in 1990 and more than 2,400 on the Causeway of the Macaws in 2015; the precinct has since been rebuilt for a capacity of two and a half million. Religious travel earns about 12 billion riyals a year, the largest source of income after oil, and a high-speed railway has linked Waimas, Paquimé and Chukson since 2018. Non-religious tourism, negligible before 2019, reached 30 million visits in 2024.
The kingdom has 75,000 kilometres of paved road, among them the six-lane Plains Motorway from Neches through Dreifurt to Nordpass and the Sanctuaries. The Sanctuaries Railway, built by the Canadian Empire to carry pilgrims from the Mississippi and wrecked in the American Revolt, was never rebuilt; the high-speed line of 2018 follows part of its course. The chief ports are Neches and Sabinehaven on the Gulf of Mexico and Waimas on the Gulf of California; the chief airports are Dreifurt, Waimas and the pilgrim terminal at Paquimé, which handles 900 flights a day in the Pilgrimage week. Petrol cost less than bottled water until 2018.
The kingdom had 38.4 million residents in 2025: 22.6 million citizens and 15.8 million foreigners. In 1950 it had had about four million, half of them herders on the move. The citizen population is young, with a median age of 27, and 85 per cent urban; the fertility rate has fallen from seven children a woman in 1980 to 2.3.
| City | March | Population (2025, urban area) | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dreifurt | Dreifurt | 7,900,000 | Capital; a walled town of 30,000 in 1930 |
| Waimas | Küstenland | 3,900,000 | The pilgrim port and commercial capital of the west |
| Neches–Sabinehaven | Ostmark | 2,900,000 | Oil ports and the seat of Amaröl |
| Paquimé | Paquimé | 2,300,000 | The holy city; its inner precincts are closed to those outside the Two Testimonies |
| Chukson | Chukson | 1,500,000 | The city of the Messenger's tomb |
| Wichita | Wichita | 1,100,000 | The old Leiningen capital |
| Chihuahua | Chihuahua | 950,000 | Mining and cattle |
| Tewa | Oberland | 720,000 | The summer capital, at 2,100 metres |
| Nordpass | Pecos and Chihuahua | 700,000 | The crossing of the Rio Grande between east and west |
| Pitic | Küstenland | 600,000 | The farming centre of the Sonoran coast |
About 88 per cent of citizens are Americans of the Crossing, and most still know the tribe and the brand their grandparents belonged to: the Hessian confederations of the Trinity, the Red and the Arkansas, the Swabians of the Staked Plain and the Pecos, the Low Saxons of the Gulf coast. The remaining 12 per cent belong to the native nations, the O’odham and Yoeme of the Sonoran side, the Rarámuri of the Sierra, the Tewa, Tiwa and Keres pueblos of the upper Rio Grande, and the Caddo and Wichita of the east. The families of the western cities, who descend from four centuries of pilgrims who stayed, from Mexico, Atlantica, Europe and beyond, count as a people of their own.
The official language is American, the High German of the Crossing, written in Latin letters and standardised on the speech of the Trinity country. The spoken varieties differ enough that a herder from the Arkansas and a merchant of Waimas may fall back on the broadcast standard to understand each other. Arabic is the second language of business and of the universities.
Main articles: American rite, Plain Rule, The Path
All citizens are by law Christians of the American rite or, among the native nations, keepers of the Path; there is no provision for leaving either. Some 87 per cent of citizens are Aldermannic, most of them brought up in the Plain Rule, and about 11 per cent are Kindred, concentrated in the Oberland and the Ostmark. The Path is kept without the Gospel by perhaps half a million people in the pueblos and the Sonoran towns. The foreign population includes some four million Muslims and large numbers of Christians of other rites from Europe and South America, none of whom may build a place of worship.
The two holy cities are the centre of a faith of some 450 million people. The Mound of the Cross at Paquimé is the direction of prayer for the Path and the goal of the Pilgrimage; the Black Hill at Chukson holds the Messenger's tomb. The Plain Rule distrusts both as occasions of idolatry, and the kingdom has pulled down most of the older tombs, houses and churches around them, to the dismay of pilgrims and archaeologists. It has also enlarged them on a scale no earlier Warden attempted.
Two residents in five are foreigners, and they hold four private-sector jobs in five. The largest groups come from South America, Japan and the Philippines, Mexico, Nuevo León and eastern Europe; they build the cities, drive the lorries, staff the hospitals and keep the houses. Their numbers have been cut by levies and quotas under the policy of Solmserung since 2011, and some two million left between 2017 and 2020. Refugees from Cascadia and Nuevo León are admitted as "guests" without legal status.
Schooling is free, and until 2016 about a third of it was religious instruction. Literacy rose from under 10 per cent in 1950 to 98 per cent. The oldest of the forty public universities is King Karl University in Dreifurt (1957); the University of Petroleum at Neches (1963), the Scripture university at Chukson (1961) and the King Albrecht University of Science on the Sonoran coast (2009), the first in the kingdom where men and women study together, are the best known abroad. Women are now the majority of graduates. Health care is free to citizens; life expectancy is 78 years, and diabetes and road accidents are the leading causes of early death.
Main article: Culture of Solms-America
For two generations after 1980 the Plain Rule governed the visible life of the kingdom: shops closed for the five daily offices, men and women who were not related did not share a room, music, film and images of living things were banned or barely tolerated, and the Wardens of Good Order patrolled the streets. Sunday and the Pilgrimage week were the only holidays, and the king's birthday was not kept. Much of this ended between 2016 and 2019. The offices are still kept and the law has not changed its foundations, but the kingdom now marks Founding Day (22 February, for 1727) and Unification Day (4 July) with fireworks and concerts.
Men's formal dress is the plains rider's: a long pale duster over trousers and boots and, above all, the broad felt hat, white for summer and grey for winter, which is never removed before the king. Women's public dress was by law until 2019 a long black cloak and a head-covering; the law now requires only modesty, and colour has returned to the streets of Dreifurt and Waimas, though less to those of Waschita.
The old arts of the kingdom are arts of the word. The ballad of the cattle trail, sung unaccompanied or to the fiddle, and the long improvised verse contests of the tribal gatherings are still the most popular broadcasts, and televised poetry competitions draw larger audiences than football. The west has an older and richer tradition, the painted pottery, turquoise mosaic and adobe building of the native towns. Public cinemas were closed in 1983 and reopened in 2018; the kingdom now subsidises film production and holds a festival at Waimas. The winter festival called the Dreifurt Season has brought foreign musicians, wrestlers and comedians since 2019, and criticism for the performers who accept.
The national dish is beef: brisket, ribs and coarse sausage smoked for half a day over oak or mesquite, a technique the Hessian butchers of the Trinity towns brought from their smokehouses, served on paper with pickles and white bread. The west eats maize, beans, chile and mutton in the native manner, and the flour tortilla of the Sonoran towns has spread across the kingdom. The drink of hospitality is strong black coffee boiled on the fire, and refusing the first cup is an insult. Alcohol has been forbidden since 1952, though a shop for foreign diplomats opened in Dreifurt in 2024.
Horse racing and the riding games (Reiterspiele), the roping, cutting and bronc-riding contests of the cattle camps, are the old sports, and the King's Cup at Dreifurt is the richest race in the world. Association football is the most followed. The national side has qualified for six world championships, the clubs of the professional league, four of them bought by the Kronfonds in 2023, have signed some of the best-paid players alive, and the kingdom is to host the world championship in 2034. Motor racing at Waimas, boxing, golf and electronic sports have been bought in on the same terms, which critics abroad call the laundering of a reputation.
Until 2019 every Solms-American woman had a male guardian, a father, husband, brother or son, whose permission she needed to travel, study, marry or work. She could not drive before 2018, vote or stand in the municipal elections before 2015, or enter a stadium before 2018. Most of these rules have been repealed, and women now work in shops, courts, the army and the diplomatic service. A guardian's consent is still required for marriage, and several of the women who campaigned for the changes were imprisoned in the year they were made.
Eight sites in the kingdom hold World Heritage listing: the Mound of the Cross and the old city of Paquimé; the Black Hill at Chukson; the pueblo of Taos; the painted shelters of the lower Pecos; the mounds of the Caddo; the adobe quarter of Tewa; the pilgrim road from Waimas; and the ruins of Braunfels, levelled in 1818 and opened as a museum of the dynasty in 2022. The kingdom's treatment of the first of these is the most contested: more of the old city around the Sanctuary has been demolished since 1985 than survived the Mexican army.
In the Global Swap North America carries the history of the Middle East, as al-Mashriq carries North America's. Solms-America carries the role of Saudi Arabia on the ground of Texas, the southern plains and the far south-west, with the prophetic religions of native America standing where the Abrahamic religions stand in the outside timeline and the Christian confederations of the Crossing standing where the Arab and Turkic conquerors do. Geography does not move: the oil is where the oil is, and the desert is in the west. The master key for the continent, with its militias and unrecognised authorities, is on the Timeline.
Entries give the Controglobe name, the ground or date it stands on, and the outside-timeline history it carries. Custom entities, which have no single counterpart, are marked.
| The kingdom | ||
|---|---|---|
| Controglobe | Ground | History drawn from |
| Kingdom of Solms-America | The basins of the Kansas, Arkansas, Red, Trinity, Brazos and Rio Grande, and the Sonoran slope | Saudi Arabia (primary); Texas and the United States (secondary) |
| House of Solms; Karl the Uniter | — | The House of Saud; Abdulaziz ibn Saud. The name is that of a real Hessian house |
| Dreifurt · Braunfels | The three forks of the Trinity (Dallas) · the Elm Fork above it | Riyadh · Diriyah |
| Paquimé · Chukson · Waimas | Casas Grandes, a real archaeological site · Tucson · Guaymas | Makkah · Madinah · Jeddah |
| Neches · the Großfeld · the Pecosbecken | Beaumont and its salt dome · the East Texas field · the Permian Basin | Dammam and Dhahran · the Saudi fields, dated to Texas's: 1901 and 1930 |
| The Turquoise Road; the Canal League; the Great Houses | The Gila and the Salt (the Hohokam canals, real); Chaco Canyon (real) | The incense road; Saba and Himyar, and the Marib dam; the Nabataeans and Palmyra |
| The City of the Gods; the Fire-Keepers | Teotihuacan (real); the Ohio and the Great Bottom of the Mississippi | Rome, with Egypt; Persia, its capital beside where Baghdad (Cahokia) will rise |
| The Northern Expedition, 26–24 BCE · the Turquoise Queen, 268–273 · the Eastern Expedition, 363 · the Caprock, 554 · the Year of the Litter, 570 | — | Aelius Gallus in Arabia Felix · Zenobia of Palmyra · Julian's Persian war · Halima · the Year of the Elephant |
| The Path; the Messenger (custom) | The native south-west | The role of Islam in Arabia, carried by a native prophetic religion; its names and doctrines are Controglobe's own |
| The American rite; the Two Testimonies (custom) | — | The conquerors' adoption of the faith of the conquered; no single counterpart |
| Aldermannic and Kindred Christians | — | Sunni and Shia Islam |
| The Plain Rule; the Eberlins; the Oath of Braunfels, 1744 | — | The Wahhabi movement; the Al ash-Sheikh; the pact of Diriyah |
| The Brethren; the Salt Fork, 1929 | — | The Ikhwan; the battle of Sabilla |
| Warden of the Two Sanctuaries | — | Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques |
| Amaröl · the Kronfonds · Aufbruch 2030 · Morgenstadt | — | Aramco · the Public Investment Fund · Vision 2030 · Neom |
| The Landjäger · the riding games · smoked brisket · the six banners | — | Texas: the Rangers (and the Saudi National Guard) · the rodeo · barbecue · the six flags |
| Unification on 4 July 1932 | — | The Saudi year, the American day: the mirror of Arabia's 23 September 1776 |
| Neighbours and powers | ||
|---|---|---|
| Controglobe | Ground | History drawn from |
| Canadian Empire; the High Seat at Hochelaga | Canada | The Ottoman Empire; the Sublime Porte |
| The Keepers of Paquimé; the American Revolt, 1916 | — | The Hashemite Sharifs of Makkah; the Arab Revolt |
| The Leiningen of Wichita | The Arkansas | The Rashidi emirate of Ha’il |
| Mexican viceroys; the fall of Braunfels, 1818 | Mexico | Muhammad Ali's Egypt; the destruction of Diriyah |
| Sokoto | Nigeria | Britain, as protecting power in the Gulf |
| Mississippi · Atlantica · Ludwigsland · Karankawa · the Counties · Río Grande · Nuevo León · Puerto Rico | as on the map | Iraq · Iran · Kuwait · Qatar · the United Arab Emirates · Oman · Yemen · Bahrain |
| Aztlan · California · Colorado · Mexico · Cascadia · Oregon | as on the map | Israel · Palestine · Jordan · Egypt · Syria · Lebanon |
| The Gulf coalition war, 1991 · the embargo of 1973 · the seizure at Paquimé, 1980 | — | The Gulf War · the oil embargo · the seizure of the Grand Mosque, which Arabia's own history keeps at Makkah in 1979 |
North America's states, their places against the Middle East and the first drawing of its frontiers descend from A More Fractured Union (2023), an alternate-history map by Bemon (scenario, cartography, flags, editing) and Body25 (co-writing, flags, editing), from which Controglobe branched. Both also helped to shape the early timeline of the Global Swap before contact with them was lost. What this article adds is Controglobe's own: the peoples and languages of the Crossing, the native religions, the frontiers moved onto the ground, and the kingdom's history.
The structure, section order and register of this article follow the English Wikipedia articles Saudi Arabia (primary model) and Texas and United States (secondary models). Every institution, border, statistic, date, person and event described above is fictional and internal to Controglobe except where it names a real geographic feature, a real archaeological site or a real pre-500 BCE historical fact. Paquimé, the Gault site, the painted shelters of the lower Pecos and the Alibates quarries are real places; what the article says happened at them after the divergence is not. The religions described are inventions of the setting and do not describe the beliefs of any living people. The maps were traced in QGIS and finished in GIMP on Natural Earth coastlines and ETOPO 2022 relief.
Controglobe's North America began as A More Fractured Union: USA and Middle East swap, published on r/imaginarymaps in December 2023 by Bemon (u/kaselev), its scenario writer, chief cartographer, flag designer and editor, and Body25 (u/bodycornflower), its co-writer, flag designer and editor. The list of states, the pairing of each with a Middle Eastern country, the non-state actors and the newspaper framing of "Crisis in North America?" are theirs, and they gave their time to the first drafts of this timeline as well. The project lost touch with them soon afterwards, and regrets it. The door stays open.
Controglobe is an open-source worldbuilding encyclopedia. Text on this page may be reused and modified with attribution. Real-world encyclopedia articles are used as structural models only.
