1634: The Ram Rebellion (assiti shards)

by Eric Flint

  So here he sat in Bamberg. Taken by the Swedes on February 11, 1632. Taken back by Tilly on March 9, 1632. Taken again by the Swedes . . . Well, the up-time encyclopedias said on February 9, 1633, by Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. But in this world, Bernhard was a traitor to Gustavus Adolphus and February 9 hadn’t quite rolled around yet. In this world, the Swedes had taken Bamberg back again last fall, right after the battle at Nurnberg’s Alte Veste.

  But if Grantville had found the money to send special commissioners to Wurzburg, why not to Bamberg? As if Cliff Priest and his guys didn’t have enough on their plates already.

  * * *

  “Yeah, that’s the way it looks.” Walt Miller looked at Cliff Priest.

  “You’re telling me that there were a hundred seventy separate and individual fortified castles in this region? In the triangle of land between Bamberg, Nurnberg, and Bayreuth? Not counting the ones in the triangle between Bamberg, Wurzburg, and the northern border?” Captain Priest’s voice was disbelieving.

  “More or less. That’s the best that Matt and I can figure it,” Walt said. “From the information that Janie Kacere has picked up so far from the down-timers who are helping her figure out the land tenures, they’re thicker on the land here than anywhere else in Germany. That’s the number we’ve come up with as a starter, keeping in mind that we’ve only been here for a few months. Of course, not all of them are really in our jurisdiction, I think. Some of them belong to the margrave of Bayreuth and a whole batch of them belong to local independent petty nobles, Freiherren, or to imperial knights, Reichsritter. Think ‘robber barons’ for a lot of those. But some, like the lords of Aufsess or Egloffstein, have a fair amount of clout. Some of them-in fact, a whole batch of them-are Protestant. So Vince thinks they aren’t included in what Gustavus Adolphus turned over to us.”

  Walt looked at the coach-at the captain, rather. He still tended to think of Cliff as his coach, if he wasn’t careful.

  “I sort of thought that we ought to talk to Vince again. Find out what he wants us to do about it. Or try to do about it. Plus a bunch of other castles that belong to the bishop and are local administrative headquarters. Pottenstein, for example. And Goessweinstein, though that’s a sort of ex-castle as castles go. Most of it burned down way back when. The Swedes took Veldestein at Neuhaus and turned it over to us, so we have that one. But they pulled out the fifty men they had left in it as a garrison, so all by itself, now, it’s a place where we have to leave more of our not-very-large batch of soldiers than we really want to.

  “Maybe we should talk to the Kaceres as well as to Vince. A lot of the castles have been used for grain storage, recently-when the bishop’s officials collected the rents and tithes and taxes in kind rather than in money. See whether they want us to try to sell it. If so, does the money come to the administration here in Bamberg or do we have to send it to Grantville and wait for the congress to appropriate it back for us to use? Things like that.”

  “There is one bright spot,” Matt Trelli interrupted. “Like Goessweinstein, a whole bunch of them aren’t in usable shape for anything military. Some of them not even for anything else. There was a big feud through here about seventy-five or eighty years ago, between the margrave of Bayreuth and the bishop of Bamberg, and some of the castles have been in ruins ever since then. Their owners couldn’t afford to build them back.

  “More recently, there was a big castle at Ebermannstadt, but it’s been burned down by the Swedes. So has the one at Waischenfeld. It seems to be the preferred method of getting rid of them. The people of Waischenfeld were so pissed by having the local castle fired by the Swedes that after the Captain General pulled his troops back, they went out and burned down Rabenstein, which belongs to one of Gustavus Adolphus’ Protestant allies. Some imperials and some troops from Forchheim burned down the Streitberg last June. The Croats burned the castle at Muggendorf four weeks after that. So some of the ground has been cleared for us, so to speak. But there are plenty more. The Herren von Streitberg, the one who held that castle from the bishop, have another big one, called Greifenstein, that’s still standing. There’s no way to predict right now if they’ll play nice and decide that Vince is the bishop’s legal successor.”

  Cliff Priest looked back at his two lieutenants. Special assistants. Ex-students. Whatever you wanted to call them. He had coached both of them when they were in high school and he was a brand-new hire. All three of them had gone into Grantville’s military when Mike Stearns called for volunteers right after the Ring of Fire. Cliff had a B.S. in physical education. The closest he had ever been to a military organization before that was the Grantville Volunteer Fire Department. Walt Miller and Matt Trelli were both in their mid-twenties, ten years or so younger than himself. They had never been in the military before the Ring of Fire, either. Walt had been working at the waste water treatment plant, a job he got courtesy of his grandfather who had retired from the staff there, trying to save money for college now that he had gotten engaged to Amy Jo Prickett and finally made up his mind to settle down. Matt had been in his second year of college at Fairmont State, going part time and working part time for Dave Marcantonio. He was dating Julie Anne Abruzzo; they had graduated the same year but she had gotten a year ahead of him at State by taking more classes. She’d been going part time, too, though; full-time college cost more than most Grantville kids could think about. Cliff spared a thought for his wife Sarah and their three children back in Grantville. She was working as office manager for the congress of the fragile innovation they called the New United States. Then he brought his mind back to the matter immediately at hand.

  From the viewpoint of a professional army, they were babes in the woods, all three of them, even now, eighteen months after they first volunteered. But he was a military administrator, the other two were officers, and the three of them had to think about how to handle one hundred seventy fortified castles. Give or take a few.

  Matt cleared his throat. “There’s something else. Something that the king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus-that is, the Captain General-apparently sort of forgot to mention to Mike Stearns when he wished this job off on us.”

  Cliff raised his eyebrows.

  Matt continued. “When the Swedes came through here, they did a kind of Blitzkrieg. If they ran into a town they could take, they took it. That’s why we’re sitting here in Bamberg. It’s the capital of the prince-bishopric, but it isn’t fortified. The city council takes the precaution of surrendering to every army that comes along, in hopes that they’ll be able to come up with a high enough payment to minimize the destruction and plundering that go with being conquered in this wonderful century. The Swedes simply sort of gave it to us.”

  And then, Cliff thought, pulled their army back north. So that Grantville was trying to police what used to be the prince-bishopric of Bamberg with a couple of hundred soldiers. Five of them up-timers, which included the medic, a newly trained EMT. Who had, luckily, Bennett Norris’ wife Marion to help him full-time, even though she wasn’t officially on the payroll. She’d gone back to school after the Ring of Fire and qualified as a certified nursing assistant, a CNA. The rest of the NUS military in Bamberg were down-timers, cobbled together from the various mercenary troops who had surrendered to Grantville since the spring of 1631.

  “But,” he said. “Something else what.”

  “It apparently slipped his mind that the bishop had two honking big fortresses that the Swedes didn’t bother to take. One of them’s north of here, called Kronach. The other one’s south, called Forchheim. Forchheim has an imperial garrison in it, still. They haven’t tried to come out; waiting to see what happens next, I expect. Kronach is something else again.”

  “How?”

  “The fortress there is called the Rosenberg and it’s defended by its own people. The city militia. Two thousand or so of them. Stubborn as hell. It’s never, ever, been taken-not by anybody who attacked it. They have a history of making war, sort of independently, on the independent P
rotestant noblemen in the region.”

  “Well,” Cliff said. “Charmed, I’m sure. It occurs to me that it would be nice, really nice, if Grantville would send us just one up-timer who has some actual military training. Too bad they put Guy Hinshaw on some kind of detached duty. He was actually stationed here when he was in. He might have had some ideas for us.”

  Matt frowned. “Ask them for Tom O’Brien. He was in the National Guard, at least. And before the Ring of Fire, he worked for a construction company.” He grinned suddenly. “In the demolition end of things. Clearing out old stuff to make room to build new stuff. In lower management, not doing the demolition on the sites, but still . . . he’s probably the best that we have. If we can get him.”

  * * *

  “I don’t want to give it to you second-hand, Vince,” Cliff Priest said. “I’ve brought Walt and Matt along with me. They’re out in the reception room and I’d rather have them run through it themselves.”

  Which they did, after Vince invited them into his office. Although they had learned a few more things in the past three days.

  “There used to be even more castles,” Walt said. “A hundred years or so ago, the farmers had a big revolt and burned almost all of them down. One of the biggest penalties that was put on them was that after the lords put the revolution down, the farmers had to pay for building them back. Or a lot of them; some never were rebuilt.”

  “You know,” Vince said musingly. “If they burn them down again . . . I don’t think we’ll do that, guys. I’m not sure that we could prohibit the owners from rebuilding. But at least for the ones under our jurisdiction, we can keep them from making anyone else pay the bill.”

  * * *

  “One thing we could try,” John Kacere suggested, “is putting our regional administration for the northern sector in Teuschnitz. The castle there was burned last year, so we can get in. There’s a good-sized city hall. When the militant inhabitants of Kronach see that they’re missing out on the money that comes with people coming to do business at the courthouse, they might-might, mind you-open their gates.”

  “And if they don’t?” Vince Marcantonio asked.

  “We’ll think again.”

  “We could try publicizing voter registration, too,” Bennett Norris added. “If staying locked up inside the walls means that they don’t get to vote . . . Yeah, okay guys, I know it’s a bit lame, but we might as well try anything in a pinch.”

  “Is there any way we can do the same to Forchheim? Appoint some other town as the regional administration headquarters, that is?”

  “Yeah. Let me think which one,” Vince answered. “The real problem, though, is that it’s sitting right square across the main road from Nurnberg to Leipzig-the trade route. It was a big problem for Gustavus Adolphus last year, when he was trying to get supplies down to Nurnberg for the battle at the Alte Veste.”

  “Move the road.” That was John Kacere’s suggestion again. He was the economic liaison, after all. “If there’s anything that the US in the twentieth century figured out, it was how to make a town wither and die. Think how many small towns up-time were ruined economically when an interstate went in a few miles away and took the traffic off the old highway that went along the main street. Advertise to the residents what we’re doing. They may be less enthusiastic about supporting the remains of the imperial garrison, once they hear the news.”

  Eggolsheim, March, 1633

  The mayor of Eggolsheim was not certain that he was happy. The mayor of Neuses was certain that he was unhappy. This idea was going to mean nothing but trouble. Just because there was a ferry across the Regnitz at Neuses, the administration installed in Bamberg by the king of Sweden had decided that their little villages were to be combined, turned into a town and administrative headquarters for all of southern Bamberg, and outfitted with the appropriate amenities.

  This was going to upset accustomed routine. Not, of course, that accustomed routine had not been upset for most of the past several years.

  However. The Forchheimer were not going to like this idea. And the people of Forchheim, when they did not like things, had a tendency to march out in force and burn down neighboring towns.

  Of which Eggolsheim and Neuses were two.

  The up-timer, a man named Walter Miller, said that they would be protected.

  For what it was worth. There was an imperial garrison in Forchheim.

  Forchheim, April 1633

  Colonel Fritz von Schletz, Imperial-Bavarian forces, commander of the garrison, stood on the parapet walk that went around the walls of Forchheim. Nice, strong, walls. The bishops of Bamberg had started rebuilding the citadel about eighty years ago, after the feud with the margrave of Bayreuth. It wasn’t finished yet, but it was good enough, in his professional judgment, to withstand any attack that the Swedes could likely bring against it. The two Italian-style bastions that protected the prince-bishop’s palace were in particularly good shape. The walls varied from ten to fourteen yards high; the moat was up to thirty yards wide and had an iron barrier across the river on the north side of town so enemies could not enter through the waterway. On the outside of the moat, there were four-foot walls and a glacis. There were inner walls inside the citadel, with earthworks. The casements were pretty good. It would be a tough nut to crack. Overall, he was glad that he was on the inside looking out.

  The mayor stood next to him, pointing out in detail that things had been bad enough, this past year, without this. Namely, in December of 1631, the bishop had fled from Bamberg to Forchheim bringing along the cathedral treasure. Then in February a Swedish colonel named Hastver who had been besieging Hochstadt an der Aisch came down with a detachment, drove away the imperials who were camped along the Regnitz, and burned the wooden supports out from under the bridge across the Regnitz. Then in March, Field Marshall Tilly had come along, marching toward Bamberg with twenty thousand men. He had stopped at Forchheim to negotiate with the bishop. While he was at it, he had requisitioned almost all of the city’s reserve supplies. His army, of course, had brought disease with it. Since then, hundreds of people in Forchheim had died of hunger and typhus.

  Then, in May, Duke Maximilian of Bavaria had sent the colonel and the troops he commanded to reinforce the garrison. To “help” the bishop; Duke Maximilian had said frankly that Forchheim was too valuable to let the bishop manage its defense. Just barely in time, considering that the Swedes and the Nurnbergs had attacked again not two weeks later. And again in July. Beaten back both times, of course, for which the city fathers were duly grateful.

  After the Alte Veste, Wallenstein’s retreating army had come through, taking more food and leaving more disease.

  Then, when the bishop fled again in the fall of 1632 after Wallenstein’s defeat at the Alte Veste, he had left the treasure behind. That meant that the town-which meant the colonel-was now responsible for its safety. But rations were running out. Fast. While the mayor understood, of course, that the soldiers of the garrison naturally had first claim on what food remained, nonetheless . . .

  The mayor’s voice trailed off.

  Colonel von Schletz grunted. It wasn’t as if he had not heard the whole lament before.

  But what he was seeing now was something new. Not a siege. Most of what was happening outside Forchheim was in sight, but out of cannon shot. At least, out of shot of any artillery he had available in the city, which weren’t bad. He could shoot as far as the Regnitz bridge or the Keller Forest. Forchheim had the only powder mill in the prince-bishopric of Bamberg. He could keep the cannon supplied with powder until they ran out of supplies to manufacture it. Which they would, soon. But, at present, he did not have anything to shoot at.

  The up-timers ought to be sending a challenge. Something dramatic on the order of: “We will burn Forchheim to ashes!” That would allow him to reply something on the order of: “The city still has enough beer and wine to put out the fire without resorting to water.”

  It was a ritual. It wasn’t for nothi
ng that the Forchheimer had picked up the nickname of Mauerscheisser because of their mode of demonstrating that that there was still food inside the walls, too. After all, that which went in must come out. They figured that it might as well come out in a location that made a point.

  At that stage, the besiegers should start to burn down the surrounding villages, forcing the farmers to take refuge in the woods, hunting them down like animals. But he had a feeling that it was not likely. Instead, the farmers who were still around were planting undisturbed. The up-timers were, apparently, even attempting to provide them with draft animals.

  And they were undertaking some kind of construction.

  If it were an effort to divert the stream of the Wiesent, depriving Forchheim of its water supply, he could understand it. It could be done, he thought, if they started up around Gosberg. But there was no sign of that.

  The motto of von Schletz was: “I will hold this place.” Which he intended to do, no matter how hardly he had to treat the townspeople.

  For that matter, no matter how hardly he had to treat the gentleman canons of the Bamberg cathedral chapter. They had also fled to Forchheim and had not, most of them, managed to get out of town when the bishop did.

  For most of the past year, Colonel von Schletz had managed to do more than hold Forchheim. He had responded to every attack with night-and-day cannon shots, no matter what the weather, so they got no rest. They had taken away more losses than his own men. Then, when Tilly fell, he had become de facto the imperial commander for the entire region. Well, episcopal commander, of course, if one wanted to be technical about it. Through the summer of 1632, when he wasn’t dealing with the occasional besiegers, he had sent out dragoons and foraging parties, near and far, raiding through the area to deny its resources to the enemy. And, of course, bring in as much as possible, so it would be there when the next siege party came along.