Two Lucky Princes

Two Lucky Princes is an Alternate History written by AlternateHistory.com member SavoyTruffle.

The Point Of Divergence is the survival of both Miguel da Paz, once heir presumptive to the thrones of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal, and Arthur, Prince of Wales, who was Henry VII's eldest son into adulthood. This results into the unification of the Iberian peninsula into a single kingdom that like in our timeline would have a dominant colonial empire in the 16th century.

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Tropes used in Two Lucky Princes include:

• The Alliance: The Saxon League and its resurrected version, seeking to challenge the Emperor Charles V for a dominant political position in the Holy Roman Empire.
• Butterfly of Doom: The survival of the two eponymous princes results in, among other things, French annexation of the bulk of North Italy, the establishment of the Habsburg lands in the Low Countries as a kingdom, the Reformation taking root in France more and less in England...
  • On the other hand, some events occur similarly to our timeline, like the independence of Sweden from the Union of Kalmar spearheaded by Gustav I Vasa.
• Determinator/Failure Is the Only Option: The Elector (and later Duke) John Frederick of Saxony, one of the first converts to Zwingliism, decides to challenge the Habsburg's authority twice. And fails both times.
• The Empire: More obviously, the Ottomans. The Holy Roman Empire (see below) is not much of one.
• Holy Roman Empire: Similar to the fragmenting entity from our timeline, though how much it can stay together remains in the air.
• Irony: Our timeline's Henry VIII, infamous for his many wives and for breaking with the Roman Catholic Church, becomes in this timeline not only a priest, but the Cardinal-Duke of York, no less.