1634: The Ram Rebellion (assiti shards)

by Eric Flint

  The farmers complained, of course, just like the townspeople. It couldn’t be helped. That was the nature of war. This summer, though, he couldn’t get out to raid because of the way these allies of the Swedes had burned clear every inch of land between Forchheim’s walls and their own perimeter. Every time he tried a sally, he was turned back. No matter which gate he came out of. He had no idea how the up-timers did it.

  But what in hell were the Swedes doing now? Or, more precisely, the up-timer? He knew that the forces outside Forchheim were no longer really Swedes, but he continued to think of them that way.

  One up-timer. Walter Miller, the visitors said his name was. He was living in Eggolsheim-Neuses and setting up the outlines of the local administration. Plus, there were five hundred or so soldiers. Not more, von Schletz thought. And a lot of laborers. Really a lot of laborers. But they were not building siege works.

  Forchheim, July 1633

  The mayor pointed out in detail that Forchheim’s economy was in ruins. The owners of the inns, the Ox, Moonlight, Lion, Crown, Apple, Seven Towers, Old Post, many others, had no commercial customers. The up-timers allowed people to come into the city. But only people. No goods. No money. They stopped all wagons and pack animals at the distant perimeter and diverted them away from Forchheim. Its citizens could stand on the parapets and see them go. Somewhere. Elsewhere. The people who had come and gone more than once reported that their purses were held by the soldiers watching the perimeter, but actually returned to them again when they left. No outsider was to purchase goods or services in Forchheim.

  The mill owners, too. They still had water power, but they had no supplies. Not just the flour mills, but the hammermills, the wire mills, the sawmills. They were all standing idle. There was no one around to buy their products, even if they had raw material.

  Many of the citizens wanted to leave. Not, however, at the price of having all their property confiscated. Von Schletz had told them that if they walked out, it would be barefoot in their shirts and shifts.

  Outside the perimeter, now, no road led to Forchheim. According to the visitors, the “heavy equipment” brought upon the order of the up-timer, plus just ordinary men and women with wagons and shovels, had dug up the trade route that had led through Forchheim for as long as documents existed. Dug it up. Covered it with topsoil. Plowed the soil and sowed it.

  There was a new road, the visitors all said. From Baiersdorf to Poxdorf to Pinzberg. From there to Wiesenthau and Kirchehrenbach. Then across the Wiesent to Mittlerweilersbach and then to the new town of Eggolsheim-Neuses. Another bridge, a beautiful, permanent, bridge, at Neuses.

  A beautiful road. Graded, ditched, and graveled. Smoothed and rolled, with ditches and culverts, bridges and security guards. A road that no rational traveler would abandon, even if the political scene should change again. Just far enough away from Forchheim that few travelers would bother to detour to the town. Especially not given the new inns that were being built near the new bridges.

  The permanent residents of Forchheim prayed very hard to their favorite saints. The three holy virgins:

  “Barbara mit dem Turm

  Margaretha mit dem Wurm

  Katharina mit dem Radlein

  das sind die drei Magdlein.”

  At present, it did not seem probable that even Barbara with her tower, Margaret with her dragon, and Catherine with her wheel, all combined, could save the town. They promised a pilgrimage. If and when they were allowed to make one.

  Colonel von Schletz approved. Prayer was a good thing for civilians.

  The people of Forchheim appeared to be praying a great deal these days. There were regular processions through the streets, to St. Martin’s church, to the chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The number of deaths, the priest told him, was almost twice as high as usual.

  Of course, his men were bored from such a long spell of forced inaction. They tended to take it out upon the members of the households where they were quartered. Sieges were difficult for soldiers.

  Bamberg, July 1633

  “I hope that you realize,” Vince Marcantonio said to John Kacere, “that the money that Walt Miller is spending on your brain child, on this wonderful new road around Forchheim, has eaten up the entire budget for road improvements in the prince-bishopric of Bamberg. We’re getting one luxury road for about fifteen miles. Nobody else is getting so much as a street sign this year.”

  “Don’t think of it as a road,” John said.

  “What should we think of it as, in your opinion?” Wade Jackson asked.

  “Alternative medicine,” John answered. “Believe me, a full-scale siege would cost a lot more.”

  Vince sighed. “True. But a regular siege would come out of the military budget. Not out of the road budget.”

  Forchheim, August, 1633

  Colonel von Schletz decided to try one more sally. The largest of the summer. He gathered his men and led them out in an effort to break through the perimeter that the Swedes had set. Idly, he noted that every woman in Forchheim had apparently decided to do her laundry this morning.

  With a final prayer for protection to Saints Barbara, Margaret, and Catherine, the mayor of Forchheim gave his orders. The gates closed behind the majority of the imperial garrison. And stayed closed, when the Swede’s soldiers drove them back toward the city’s walls. Held by men who had nothing left to lose. Men whose wives and daughters were on the parapets, pouring buckets of boiling water down on von Schletz’s dragoons.

  * * *

  “I don’t know,” Walt Miller said to the mayor of Forchheim. “You’ve still got the river. And a fair bit of infrastructure. But what’s done is done. The road is there and it’s going to stay. The administration is going to stay put, too. I expect that a fair number of your people can find work in Eggolsheim-Neuses. The laws we’ve put into effect there establish open citizenship. All they have to do is register to vote.”

  Walt was feeling a little apologetic, to tell the truth.

  “I’m afraid that your town has turned into a historical monument. On the bright side, though, in a couple of hundred years you’ll probably start picking up some tourist trade. Tom O’Brien’s on his way down to make sure that no imperial or Bavarian troops can ever fort up in the place again, but I’ll ask him to leave you enough of the walls to look scenic here and there. That’s about the best I can do.”

  Eggolsheim-Neuses, September 1633

  The company of riders who delivered the month’s payroll also brought the news about what had happened to Willard Thornton and Johnnie F. in Bamberg.

  Walt Miller barely knew Willard, but he liked Johnnie F. He didn’t have anything against Willard, either-a nice enough guy, the few times he had ever talked to him at the Home Center, back in Grantville.

  The riders also provided a synopsis of the generally prevailing opinion that the Bamberg officials had dared to try it, the fixed court and the flogging, because the Bamberg staff assigned to the Special Commission on the Establishment of Religious Freedom hadn’t been spending much time on the project, so they thought they could get away with it.

  “Damn,” Walt said to himself. “Talk about blowing it.”

  Then he went out for the day’s work. The formal ribbon-cutting for the opening of the Forchheim Bypass.

  In The Night, All Hats Are Gray

  Virginia DeMarce

  Bamberg, January 1633

  “Hi, Janie, what’s up?”

  Stewart Hawker wandered into the back room of the land tenures office in what had once been the official residence of the prince-bishop of Bamberg. He would have thrown himself into a chair, except that there weren’t any extras.

  Janie Kacere smiled. “Repenting my sins. Not any recent ones. The ones I committed when I was twelve and thirteen that inspired my parents, even though they were far, far, from prosperous, to decide that I belonged in a girls’ boarding school run by nuns until I graduated from high school. Nuns who thought everyone should take Latin.”
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  She hopped off her stool, wondering where the down-timers had gotten the idea that a desk was a slanted board set on a pedestal. Up-time, they only showed up as dictionary stands in libraries and in the annual TV show about Scrooge and Tiny Tim.

  “I don’t really think that the School Sisters of Notre Dame were the model for the famous PNDR who haunt so many ‘back when I went to parochial school stories’ for my generation, but they came close. Which means that I’m sitting here, freezing my feet and trying to figure out German land tenures instead of being back home in Grantville with central heating.” She picked up the brick that had been under her feet, carried it over to the fireplace, grabbed a pair of tongs, and substituted a hot brick at the base of her stool.

  Stew raised his eyebrows. “What’s a PNDR? Plain old Presbyterian, here, Janie. Not one of the initiated.”

  She laughed. “Purple Nuns of Divine Retribution. An imaginary teaching order. Heroines of many a legendary saga of chalk and rulers. We firmly believed that having eyes installed in the backs of their heads was part of the ceremony in which they took final vows.”

  “Gotcha. Why are you repenting your sins?”

  “Kleuckheim. Seventy-nine pieces of property divided among nine different owners. The law court belongs to Hochstift Bamberg, which means that we, now, have to adjudicate all the local squabbles or find some lawyer who will do it as one of our employees. But they pay taxes split between the collection office in Lichtenfels and a ‘canton’ of imperial knights. At least, I think that’s what the word means, but I thought that there were only cantons in Switzerland.”

  “Welcome to Franconia. May I borrow one of your hot bricks? I’ve brought you a list.”

  “What now?”

  “Independent lordships and imperial knights to be found in a triangle between here, Bayreuth, and Kronach, more or less. Mostly Protestant. Lots of people I sure would have never met if the Ring of Fire hadn’t happened. There’s a feud between families named von Kun?berg und von Giech. They both want to tell us their troubles. Regular Hatfield and McCoy stuff.”

  He moved over closer to the fireplace. “Fascinating places I would never have visited if I had stayed up-time: Schney. Plankenfels. Thurnau. Schmeilsdorf. Burglesau. Mitwitz. Nagel. Tuschnitz. Schmolz. Veitlahm. Wildenberg.

  “With castles. I never dreamed there were so many castles in the world. I read a National Geographic article about castles on the Rhine, once upon a time, for a school report. Those weren’t a patch on the ones around here. Big things, some of them, but more of them are about the size of that absentee owner’s house back home in Grantville-the one where they found the elephant gun. Or the one that the Clarks from New York built. Even the High Street mansion where we have the government offices now.”

  He tossed an envelope on Janie’s pedestal. “That’s the list. Right in the middle of the other guys, there’s a little place called Marktgraitz that belongs to Bamberg, so we’re going to have to think about getting the rights of way renewed. Plus, from the other direction, there’s a report on the legal status of the Benedictine Abbey of Banz. Wurzburg says it’s subject to their bishop, the guys here say it’s subject to the bishop of Bamberg, Fulda asserts some kind of a claim going back to the early middle ages, and the monks say that they don’t owe nobody nothin’.”

  He paused. “Um. By the way. The couple of monks I found there, rattling around in the buildings, said that Gustavus Adolphus, or some division of the Swedish army, at least, took the abbot prisoner last summer. They’d appreciate it if we would try to locate him and send him back home. There’s a note about that on the back of the report, if you would pass it on to Vince Marcantonio. Or to whomever is in charge of locating misplaced abbots.”

  “Thank you Stew. I think. What next?”

  “Next trip will be Kronach and up beyond it, if I have my itinerary straight. Further north. From what I’ve heard about Kronach so far, I’m not expecting a red carpet. It’s a big fortress. On the main trade route from Nurnberg to Leipzig. In a pinch, I’ll do what the Swedes did.”

  “What was that?”

  “Go around it. At least, for this time.”

  “Good luck.”

  “I’ll probably need it.”

  * * *

  After Stewart Hawker sat through the next day’s staff meeting, he was even more convinced that he would need luck. After he had listened to Matt Trelli’s report on Kronach. On what, as Matt said, Gustavus Adolphus “apparently sort of forgot to mention to Mike Stearns” before Grantville sent its administrative team down to Franconia. That the Swedes hadn’t actually taken Kronach. That it was still sitting, there, unconquered and closed up, a fortress defended mainly by its own residents. The city militia.

  When Matt got to the part about, “they have a history of making war, sort of independently, on the independent Protestant noblemen in the region,” Stew waved for attention. As soon as Matt finished, Vince Marcantonio recognized him.

  “I was working out of Lichtenfels, the last survey trip I made. It’s not really ‘sort of independently’ I think, from what I learned when I was going through the independent lordships up that way last week. There’s a little town called Burgkunstadt this side of Wildenburg. It belongs to us-it’s part of Bamberg, I mean. The Freiherren and the imperial knights that I talked to say that the people there and the people from Kronach actually do organized, cooperative raiding on the lands of the Protestant nobles in between them. And on their subjects, of course.”

  “It would be a good idea,” Vince said, “if we got the other side of the picture.”

  “It would be a great idea,” Stew agreed. “If the Kronacher didn’t start shooting at anyone who approaches their city walls. Which includes us. They haven’t been conquered and they aren’t about to be.”

  “Who is likely to know something about Kronach?” Wade Jackson, the UMWA man, asked.

  After a while, a silent while, Stew realized that he was going to have to say something. “Ah, Meyfarth maybe. Steve Salatto’s adviser over in Wurzburg. He worked for the Duke of Saxe-Coburg before he died. People say that it was probably Coburg troops, fighting for the Swedes, who skinned five Kronach guys alive last summer. Guys who sneaked out of the the city while the Coburgers were besieging it, to try to spike their cannon.”

  “Oh,” Vince said.

  “Sort of like scalping,” Stew added. “But all over their bodies.”

  “Ugggh,” Janie Kacere said.

  “Wasn’t the duke of Coburg the one who disapproved of burning witches?” Wade Jackson asked.

  “Yeah,” Stew answered, “but that was because he didn’t believe that witches really exist or do the things that their accusers claim that they do. He knew for sure that these guys were trying to spike his guns. Or, at least, his commander on the scene did. The old guy probably wasn’t with them-he was nearly seventy and already pretty sick last year. What was there was what was called the Coburg Ausschuss. That, as far as I can tell, is the part of a local militia that actually gets good enough at it to do some fighting beyond trying to keep foragers out of a village or throwing rocks down from the town walls. Compared to the local militia as a whole, who don’t usually. When Ausschusse get involved, the fighting tends to get sort of up close and personal, so to speak. Old grudges.”

  Stew seconded Cliff Priest’s motion to request that Tom O’Brien be sent from Grantville down to Bamberg to shore up the local military contingent. And asked that Matt Trelli be assigned to go with him when he rode up toward Kronach and points north.

  Bamberg, February 1633

  “The thing to keep in mind is that it didn’t start last year,” Johannes Mattheus Meyfarth was saying. Steve Salatto had sent him up to Bamberg to give the staff there a rapid seminar on Kronach.

  “Most of the Franconian imperial knights became Lutheran during the Reformation. No matter how small their territories are-no matter how ridiculous they look to you-they still were covered by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. By the cui
us regio provisions. They had the right to determine their own religion and that of their subjects. Which didn’t cause too much trouble until 1624, when the prince-bishop of Bamberg decided to try to force the knights to return to Catholicism. Part of what you call the Counter Reformation in your history books. Kronach lay on the border, of course, between the Catholic and Protestant princes. And was a strong point. So there have been armed conflicts ever since. With Coburg, with Bayreuth. Even though the independent knights don’t want to be absorbed by the Lutheran princes any more than they want to be absorbed by a Catholic bishop, to tell the truth.”

  John Kacere asked, a vaguely hopeful tone in his voice, whether their was any prospect of reconciliation.

  Meyfarth looked doubtful. “It’s been years now. And both sides have been equally brutal. Catholic soldiers and militias invade Protestant territories; Protestant soldiers and militias invade Catholic territories; each side retaliates against the other. The forces from Kronach have raided through the whole territory around Kulmbach. That belongs to the margrave of Bayreuth. Also through Coburg. They plunder travelers. They rustle cattle and drive them back to the city. The farmers call them a ‘nest of robbers’.

  “The soldiers, at least, are professionals. For them, the brutality is part of the job. It doesn’t really make much difference to them which side they are on. The militias, though, the people who are trained for civil defense-for them, it is more. The Protestants don’t have the slightest qualms about torturing the prince-bishop’s subjects. The Catholic militia from Kronach does things just as horrible in the villages subject to the prince-bishop’s Protestant neighbors. Nobody has any idea how to stop it. I most certainly do not, if that is what you were hoping for.”

  “Hell,” Tom O’Brien said emphatically. “I did not, ever, not once in my worst nightmares, expect to have a re-enactment of Northern Ireland on my back porch, so to speak.”