"The world in question is the subject of countless years of trawling over, as it appears in many ways to be anachronistic in its ideological and social development. The general consensus is that this world diverged from ours during the crusades, namely that the crusades were far more successful, resulting in a permanent foothold being established in the Levant, Syria, and Lower Anatolia and the rapid unfolding of Seljuk authority in the region. The creation of a coherent political unit, as opposed to a spattering of ephemeral crusader states had immediate effects on European history. The Kingdom of Jerusalem became the first duty free region in the world, a concept floated in our timeline due to the belief that imposing duties on goods from the Holy Land would be improper but never allowed to develop, creating the basis for a formal economic interlinking of Christendom centuries early. The need to hold onto the region resulted in the Near Eastern carveout becoming the site of an intentional settlement program, reorienting the attention the European States. This contributed to, but was not the primary causal factor behind, the New World being discovered later, alongside the shifting balance within the continental labor market that typified the late 16th and early 17th centuries. By the turn of the 17th century then Europe was more populated, poorer, and also more interconnected than in our world. What would not be seen were things like the Protestant reformation, the creation of continental settler empires (of the same scale as OTL at least), or the calamity of the 30 Years War. Instead, something else happened.


What this ultimately resulted in was a pressure, concentrated initially in a papacy that had assumed more temporal power and awe than OTL, to chart a course of reform of the state structures and governance practices of Europe to be able to navigate the waning medieval system. This led to the development of the first corpus of Catholic social and legal doctrine in the 17th century as opposed to the 19th. A reformation without a reformation, the forces of Old Christendom would beat the Enlightenment to the punch. What followed was the failed attempt to create a universal state based around the ideas of land reform, incorporation, universal bureaucratic and scholastic standards, and the principle of subsidiarity. The idea that good government could be derived rationally, mathematically even, through the ennobling influence of surrender to God.

It was a failure because no such state came into being obviously, but what emerged from that failure was the dominant system of Christian statecraft into the modern era, that of the Subsidiary Commonwealth. These are massive states but at once horizontal, evincing the sense of both yeoman republics and syndicalist unions, operating under the principle that the organic human community and family, given dignity by their creator, knew well enough how to solve their own problems and should be assisted in doing so by a competent and transparent state. Not so much consent of the governed as it were, but the duty to govern well. This way of looking at the world is sometimes referred to by our analysists as Mathematicalism, not so much a reflection of what the locals call it as a nod to the dominant and interlocking form of metaphysics in this world. A point which will be returned to.
"

I just want to see if I understand this right. In this counterfactual scenario, the First Crusade was a success resulting in the creation of a stable Christian state in the Levant. The Papacy, embolden by this victory, wanted to create a universal state uniting all of Christianity but it failed. Instead, a new system similar to the modern Catholic subsidiary emerged in which Christian commonwealths were under the rule of the Papacy but still autonomous. Do I have this right?