1634: The Ram Rebellion (assiti shards)

by Eric Flint

  Steve had a whole report, with appendices for Bamberg and Fulda. “It’s harder to manage in practice, when so much of what we think of as civil government was run by the church here, because the ruler was a bishop. Plus, we’ve been ordered only to confiscate the property that actually belonged to the bishops and abbot as rulers. Not to take the church stuff that was in their names-the buildings where they have the altars and crosses, the stained glass and candles. We’ve got the bishop’s palace, the one he lived in, and are using it for office space. But not the convents and the monasteries and the hospitals and the old folks’ homes and the schools and the orphanages . . . We’ve got taxes coming in from a whole batch of rural real estate, and beyond taxes, the NUS is now the direct holder of a lot of agricultural and residential leases on which it collects the rent, which means that we can pay the Amtmaenner and their staffs. That’s a good thing. Paying your employees on time is a thoroughly sound idea, from a public administration perspective. It really cuts down on the temptation to graft.”

  He paused. “That reminds me. We could use a couple of auditors down this way, when you have them available.”

  Arnold Bellamy duly made a note.

  “Back to what we’ve been doing. I’m just sitting in the place of the bishop, so to speak, for that kind of thing. I’m the State, and I’m trying to figure out what’s properly Church and hand it off officially to this guy called the suffragan. Who’s the equivalent of a deputy sheriff for a bishop, the bishop himself having run off to the Habsburgs rather than staying here to do his duty.”

  Steve frowned. Misbehaving bishops offended his up-time sensibilities. “In some ways, that’s lucky. The bishop was a Habsburg crony named Hatzfeld from up around Cologne rather than a local, and hadn’t been on the job for long. He was only elected in August 1631 and the pope didn’t confirm him until January of 1632. After Alte Veste, he scrammed. People weren’t attached to him personally, so to speak. The Bishop of Bamberg just died last March and they haven’t replaced him yet. He was off in exile with the Habsburgs, too, living in Carinthia. Back in our world, the crony also grabbed that diocese. These guys don’t seem to pay a lot of attention to the rules about not holding multiple benefices.”

  “I hear a ‘but’ in your voice.”

  “But a lot of them, Amtmaenner whom we’re paying and all, don’t like the idea of separation of church and state, any more than they like our laws on witches or toleration. And, I think, a fair number of them are just doing a ‘wait and see’ for the time being. They’re just biding their time on this too, hoping that old Ferdinand of Austria will work some kind of a military miracle, restore the bishops, and they can go back to the way things used to be.”

  Arnold pushed his hair back nervously. “That’s the thing. That’s why I really came down from Grantville. I haven’t been able to get any kind of real handle, from anybody’s reports, from anywhere in Franconia, on how many people have that attitude and how many think that we’re doing at least sort of okay. Not just from you, Steve. I’m not pointing a finger. What I mean is, not from anybody. I’m really surprised that we aren’t seeing more popular response. Not just official comments from the city councils and such, but from the ordinary people. It’s not that you haven’t tried, I know. Press releases. Pamphlets. Broadsides. Handouts in the marketplaces. It’s like it’s all falling into a pit.”

  “It’s the wrong season,” Meyfarth commented cautiously. “You started this commission in the spring. That is planting time; then haying; then harvest. Farmers are starting at dawn and working until it is too dark to see; carters are hauling; farriers are shoeing; harness makers are repairing. By evening, they are too tired to think about all the propaganda that the commission is putting out or to express their opinions about the measures it is taking. Just about the only up-timers they see are your ‘hearts and minds’ men.”

  “When can we reasonably expect to hear from them, then?” Arnold Bellamy interrupted.

  “It has been too many years since they could work without interruptions and raids, confiscations from friend and enemy. Under the NUS, the taxes are still high, but at least they are clear about what they will owe and how it is apportioned. The armies, friend and foe alike, are not just ‘taking’ or extorting ransoms on pain of burning the village down. There hasn’t been a Brandschatzung anywhere in Franconia since last fall. It may be a good year. In spite of the problems with the weather.”

  It sounded to Bellamy as if Meyfarth were doing his analysis as he was speaking. “So what do we expect?” he repeated.

  “About October, everything ought to be inside from this year’s harvest, and the fall plowing and sowing done. Threshing they can do gradually, indoors. From November through February, farmers gather wood and do chores, but the work is not so heavy. They can go to the village tavern. They will start reading all those newspapers and pamphlets, broadsides and handouts, that have been piling up all summer in a stack on the corner bench. Then they will start asking themselves the real question: ‘What does this mean for Unteroberbach? What does this mean for Obermittelfeld? What does this mean for Mittelunterberg?’ That’s when you will start to hear from them. Or, more likely, to see evidence of what they have decided among themselves, in each individual village. The majority will try to exclude those members of the Gemeinde or citizens of the town who disagree with them. You will see people, whole families perhaps, on the move.”

  Meyfarth smiled calmly at the commissioners. “After all, you up-timers have a saying that describes it perfectly.”

  “And what,” Reece Ellis grumped, “is that?’

  “’All politics is local.’ And that, Mr. Bellamy, is why I have advised you not to set your elections on whether the Franconian territories will join the NUS until next spring. Late spring, or early summer; between planting and haying. This is my advice. Do not hold them until each village has had time to think about all of this and about what it might mean for them. They can’t know what it will mean. No man can predict the future with such certainty. But to think about what it might mean-that is possible. On this, the commissioners agree with me.” Reece, Paul, and Phil nodded.

  “The longer we wait to hold elections,” Saunders Wendell complained, “the longer the pro-bishop and pro-Habsburg and anti-us, or anti-NUS, people have to get themselves organized.”

  “And the more they will pick, pick, pick. File a complaint here; submit a petition there; write a letter to the king of Sweden; yada, yada, yada.” Scott Blackwell had minimal patience with the multiple avenues of political process.

  Arnold had an eerie sense that this was just about the point, back when he had been reading the diplomatic correspondence, that he had decided to come down to Wurzburg. “Look guys,” he said, drawing a deep breath. This was going to be a long, long, meeting.

  A Nightmare Upon The Present

  Virginia DeMarce

  July 1633: Near the Coburg border, Franconia

  Constantin Ableidinger looked up from the table at which he was working. The breeze was welcome, but strong enough to disturb the various piles of paper on which he was working. He had pressed almost every heavy item in the room into service as a paperweight. A small pewter plate, a candlestick, a small telescope.

  He had a housekeeper, too. She was glaring at him from behind his back. He could see her wavering reflection in the glass goblet of cold coffee that stood by his right hand. Undoubtedly, he had committed yet another infraction against her rigid housekeeping standards and she was planning to bring it to his attention. Respectfully, but without yielding.

  If he had been paying her wages, she would not be here any more. However, the ram was paying her wages. The ram had determined, some months ago, that his time was too valuable for him to spend it pulling up the featherbed.

  Or drinking in the Frankenwinheim tavern with Rudolph Vulpius.

  Or planting cabbages in his garden.

  His wife Sara had never complained that he was a slob. She had been agreeable and com
pliant, even when he walked in from the garden with his boots covered thickly in mud. Even on days when she had just swept the floor boards down with sand.

  Of course, his late wife’s pliancy had also led her to agree that he could bed her right there in the alley behind her father’s bakery in Jena. Which had led to his expulsion from the Faculty of Theology.

  And to his son, who was standing at the door in front of him. Who had, in this year and a half since the up-timers came to Franconia, stopped being a child. How had Matthias gotten to be fourteen? When would he have time to finish tutoring him so he could enter the university? Was that something else for which his own time was now “too valuable?”

  What university should he attend?

  “What is it, Matthias?” he asked aloud.

  “It’s Herr Schulte, again.”

  Ableidinger thought for the hundredth time that he had never properly appreciated Rudolph Vulpius. Heading a village council took a lot of work. That was obvious to anyone who had ever sat on a village council. But a teacher did not sit on the village council. He worked for it and for the consistory. For years, when he was teaching in Frankenwinheim, he had kept the council’s records, so he knew as an observer how much business the council did. Still, he had never understood how much maneuvering it took, before each meeting, to bring the contentious parties in a controversy to the point that when they came before the council, they were either willing to reach a solution between themselves or accept whatever solution the council proposed with reasonably good grace. He had never realized how hard it was to recruit “volunteers” for each of the necessary offices, from fire bucket patrol to bridge and ford inspector to vermin warden.

  He wished he had a suitable “volunteer” to listen to Schulte right now.

  Herr Schulte was in a feud. Not a formally declared feud, as had existed among the imperial knights long ago in the past, but a normal one, stemming from a brawl over property rights. The recently deceased duke of Saxe-Coburg had, some twenty years before, leased property that crossed the boundary line between Coburg and Franconia to a family of Protestant exiles who came from Austria by way of Bayreuth. The duke had done this because the son of the prior leaseholder, Schulte’s father, had abandoned the property, having found a more advantageous situation further south, in the Steigerwald part of Franconia.

  So it had remained. But in the awful winter of 1631-1632, Schulte and his family had been pushed out of the Steigerwald when the army of Gustavus Adolphus passed through. Like so many other farmers, he had been dislocated by the Thirty Years War. He was a refugee. So he had returned to his grandfather’s old village and was now suing the current leaseholder for return of his family’s “traditional” holding.

  Of course, one way to explain his actions would be to attribute them to avarice. The Bible itself said that the love of money was the root of all evil.

  But at least he had learned to distinguish between avarice and political power. Thomas Paine pointed out that,

  MANKIND being originally equals in the order of creation, the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance: the distinctions of rich and poor may in a great measure be accounted for, and that without having recourse to the harsh ill-sounding names of oppression and avarice. Oppression is often the CONSEQUENCE, but seldom or never the MEANS of riches; and tho’ avarice will preserve a man from being necessitously poor, it generally makes him too timorous to be wealthy.

  Constantin Ableidinger now knew more about lease grants than anyone except a territorial ruler or a lawyer ought to know. It was certainly more than he had ever wanted to know about them.

  Traditional.

  Schulte was, of course, appealing to the Franconian administration run by the up-timers from Grantville-or, more accurately, managed as far as principle went by the up-timers from Grantville and run on their behalf by a gaggle of German bureaucrats-for redress of his wrongs. Ultimately, if they did not settle it to his satisfaction, he would undoubtedly be appealing to the supreme court of the CPE, the Swede having occupied the city where the supreme court of the Holy Roman Empire held its sessions and annexed its personnel. If that court did not satisfy him, he would, if he survived so long, appeal ultimately to Gustavus Adolphus in person as the symbolic “good ruler.”

  What was the Swede likely to know about it?

  Nothing, of course. Der gesunde Menschenverstand. Schlichte Vernunft. Common sense. Thomas Paine, in the first American pamphlet Ableidinger had read, a year and a half ago now, had written:

  There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of Monarchy; it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required. The state of a king shuts him from the World, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly; wherefore the different parts, by unnaturally opposing and destroying each other, prove the whole character to be absurd and useless.

  Paine was as refreshing as cold spring water on a hot summer day.

  As Schulte talked, Ableidinger wondered idly if anyone in this famous Grantville had introduced the king of Sweden to Thomas Paine’s views on hereditary succession.

  To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and imposition on posterity. For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, and tho’ himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them.

  If not, perhaps he should send him a copy of Common Sense. It’s views on religious toleration were important.

  As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of government to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith. Let a man throw aside that narrowness of soul, that selfishness of principle, which the niggards of all professions are so unwilling to part with, and he will be at once delivered of his fears on that head. Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society. For myself, I fully and conscientiously believe that it is the will of the Almighty that there should be a diversity of religious opinions among us. It affords a larger field for our Christian kindness; were we all of one way of thinking, our religious dispositions would want matter for probation; and on this liberal principle I look on the various denominations among us to be like children of the same family, differing only in what is called their Christian names.

  But perhaps not. Paine had written other things. There was, for example, “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in Kings, is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an ASS FOR A LION.”

  Considering that Gustavus Adolphus was called “The Lion of the North” and what that would imply about the king, maybe he shouldn’t send him the pamphlet.

  A year and a half ago, he would have sent it.

  Today, he had to stop and think. He had responsibilities.

  Powerful people forgave some things more easily than others. They tended to find ridicule very hard to forgive.

  Prudence had to be among the more disgusting of the cardinal virtues.

  Perhaps the Swede’s officials would not be unduly influenced by Schulte’s appeal to tradition. Even in this matter, there was some comfort to be drawn from Thomas Paine, who had written: “ . . .a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”

  He only wished that he had time.

  Not only in the matter of Herr Schulte’s claims.

  There was scarcely a farmer in Franconia against whom some claimant did not have some ghost of a reason to file a lawsui
t.

  It was a situation that made men nervous. The majority of villagers were not primarily worried about the actions of their landlords, or even about the actions of their lords. With the war, landlords were happy to have tenants. Like a barren cow, untenanted farms did not provide milk-or rents, dues, and tithes. With the war, lords were happy to have their subjects within their own territories. Refugees, run into some safer jurisdiction, did not pay taxes.

  But an avaricious man, greedy for property, was very often willing to file a suit against the current lessee and the lessor, both.

  Claiming “tradition.”

  Tradition be damned. With any luck, the administrators sent by the thrice-damned king of Sweden might understand that also.

  A century before, in the Great Peasant War, der grosse Bauernkrieg, Germany’s farmers had based their demands upon tradition, upon a return to long-established ways of doing things.

  It had made sense, back then, when the landlords were trying to abolish the long established communal rights over pasture and woodlands. That was oversimplified. But in the Germanies, if one did not oversimplify, the forest definitely got lost in the thickets of individual trees. One reached the point that one could not find a general rule because there were so many thousand exceptions to it.

  Simplify, Thomas Paine had written. “I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature which no art can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered; . . . .”

  The man had been a dreamer. Or, at least, simplicity was not to be found in Franconia. Not in this summer of 1633.

  Even the up-timers had learned that. They spent a lot of their time trying to understand land tenure. They spent even more of their time trying to adjudicate disputes among and between various claimants to property rights.