The obvious treasury official was one Johann Friedrich Krausold. He was indeed a former Saxe-Weimar and now New United States Kammerverwalter assigned to Jena. The four young men were the next generation of trainees. Johannes Elias Fischer, from Arnstadt; Michael Heubel, from Stadtilm; Samuel Ebert, from Saalfeld; Ambrosius Wachler, from Weimar.
Meyfarth smiled at the young men quite genuinely. Not so much in greeting as because he recognized the eternal verities. Having brought astonishingly few bureaucrats from the future, the up-timers were now growing a supply. Government would go on. He led them into Steve’s office.
* * *
“The books and encyclopedias in Grantville that told those of us in the administrative teams that got sent to Franconia about such general concepts as cuius regio as deciding a principality’s religious allegiance and the requirement that subjects accept the religion of the ruler…”
Steve Salatto placed his hands on the desk, leaned forward, and gave the three lady auditors sitting in front of him a smile. “I won’t go so far as to say they were junk. But they were at least as misleading as they were useful. Or maybe the problem’s been with us, and our assumptions, coming to it out of an American background. We thought there would be one piece of ground here and all of its residents would be Catholic; then there would be a border; then another piece of ground over here and all of its residents would be Protestant.”
He shook his head ruefully. “When it came to Franconia-dream on!”
He gestured toward the window. “For instance, the Steigerwald-or Steiger Forest, we’d say-takes up a space roughly twenty-five miles or so from Volkach to Bamberg, west to east, and a little under fifty miles from Knetzgau down to Windsheim, north to south. Or, maybe, five miles or so more in each direction, depending on how you count it. Also, it isn’t all forest. There are a lot of clearings in it with villages and agriculture.
“The people who lived there swore their oaths of allegiance to a lord. But they have the right to move, which means that they don’t necessarily live within that lord’s territories. They might rent a farm somewhere else. Or sometimes what once was a single piece of territory has been split up between two lines of heirs, one Catholic and one Protestant. Or a family of lords who were Catholic died out and their estates escheated to a Protestant overlord. Or vice versa. Anyway, what it means in practice is that we’ve run into villages where eighteen of the families are Catholic and fourteen of them are Protestant, depending on who is their lord. It might be the count of Castell on one side of the street and the bishop of Wuerzburg on the other side. Or, sometimes, if people have moved into houses across the street, all intermixed.
“For every rule, there are a half-dozen exceptions.”
“How long has that been true?” Estelle McIntire asked. “The part about everything being mixed up, I mean.”
Salatto considered the question, for a moment. “Well… say a century or so. Since the beginning of the Reformation, in lots of places. In the Steigerwald area, for sure. There was a very famous lady named Argula von Grumbach-yes, that was her name, believe it or not-who corresponded with Martin Luther and brought Lutheran preachers onto her estates already in the 1530s. When our team went there the first time, some of the local farmers from a village called Frankenwinheim took us to see the house where she lived, and the pulpit from which the first Lutheran pastor preached.”
“In other words,” Maydene Utt interrupted, a bit impatiently, “’Catholic’ Franconia has a lot of Protestants in it. Lutherans, like in Thuringia?”
Salatto nodded. “Most of them. But a few are Calvinists-and some others are Anabaptists or Jews. They’re not supposed to be there at all, in theory. But there they are, anyway.”
For the first time, one of the auditors smiled. Willa Fodor, that was, whom Steve had already tentatively pegged as the most easy-going of the trio.
“Sort of like illegal aliens back in the USA up-time,” she said.
Steve returned the smile. “Pretty much, yes. Except there’s no Immigration and Naturalization Service here to chase after them and get them deported. Not on a national scale, for sure, or even a regional one. Now and then, one of the local authorities carries out a little campaign. But all that does is just mix everything up still further. Franconia’s even more of a crazy-quilt of principalities than most of the Germanies. If a group gets rousted from one area, all they usually have to do is move a few miles and they’re in somebody else’s official jurisdiction.”
Fodor was still smiling, but Maydene Utt had a frown on her face. “It sounds a lot more… I don’t know. Tolerant, I guess. Than what I’d expected.”
Salatto leaned back in his chair and shrugged. “It is, and it isn’t. Depends on the time and place. The Catholic parts of Franconia actually had even more Protestants in them until just shortly before the Ring of Fire. But during the years 1626-1629, the Bishop of Wuerzburg started a big campaign to force the re-Catholicization of the Steigerwald.
“And by ‘force,’ I mean just that. He sent troops into villages that had become Protestant to drive out the Lutheran clergy, confiscate their rectories and any tithe grain they had in storage, re-program their churches to be Catholic, and generally pushed pretty hard. In some villages, if there was resistance, the episcopal troops took the adult men as hostages, carried them off to prison in the nearest walled town where they had a garrison, and told the rest of the people in the village, ‘either promise to convert or we start shooting your husbands and fathers one by one.’”
All three auditors were frowning, now. Steve continued:
“That’s made a lot of the Catholic administrators whom Grantville sent down to Franconia really uncomfortable, as you can imagine. But that’s what the bishop was doing, and we can’t close our eyes to it. Because of the bishop’s campaign, it isn’t really surprising that a much higher percentage of the population in the Prince-Diocese of Wuerzburg was Catholic, officially at least, in 1632 than had been the case five or six years earlier. It also isn’t really surprising that a lot of the ex-Protestants are still holding grudges and think that a new administration installed in the episcopal palace ought to be a good time to start getting their own back.”
Willa Fodor chuckled. “What a mess. I imagine you weren’t all that happy when the NUS administration hit you with the Special Commission on the Establishment of Religious Freedom.”
Steve matched her chuckle. “Well… we certainly had mixed feelings about it. Just when we thought we were starting to get a handle on things…”
He shrugged again. “But I’m not complaining. The Commission probably helps more than it causes me headaches. Truth be told, I’m a lot more bothered by the ongoing corruption in the area. Government in Franconia-if you can even call it that-has been so screwed up for so long that people have gotten accustomed to cronyism and personal contacts and swapping favors as the way to do things. Can’t say I even blame ‘em, really. But I’m bound and determined to get that problem turned around, at least, by the time we can think of scheduling a regional election sometime in the spring of next year.”
He gave the three women another smile. “That’s why I asked for auditors to be sent down here. Whatever else, I’ve got to see to it that those ingrained habits don’t start infecting our administration.”
“What are you mostly concerned about?” McIntire asked.
“Contracting problems,” Steve replied immediately. “Every time we put out a contract, I know blasted well that most of them wind up getting steered to somebody’s friend or relative. People here don’t even think about it, really. Cronyism has gotten so ingrained in their habits that they take it as a law of nature.”
Maydene Utt’s frown deepened. “We can fix that.”
Steve thought she was over-optimistic. Wildly over-optimistic, in fact. But he figured Utt and the other two auditors could at least make clear to everybody that from now on they’d have to hide their corruption.
That was progress of a sort, he supposed. Thinking ruefully-and not for the first time-of those innocent days when he’d been an administrator for Baltimore County, Maryland. Not that Maryland, or West Virginia for that matter, had ever been anyone’s ideal of “clean government,” he’d admit. A high percentage of the state’s politicians, including governors, had wound up in prison, after all. Still, by the standards of down-time Franconia, even the most sticky-fingered West Virginia politician had been a veritable paragon of public virtue. Arch Moore excepted, probably.
Willa Fodor interrupted his musings. “We’d best get started, then.”
“I’d say so!” That, from Maydene Utt. Very firmly.
Estelle McIntire didn’t say anything. She just nodded. Very firmly.
Steve ushered them out of his office, smiling all the way.
Chapter 2:
“Helmut, Speaking For The Ram”
September, 1633
“And just who are you?” demanded the head of Bamberg’s city council, after he and the rest of the council had been ushered into the room at the back of the Ratskeller. The man’s name was Seifert. He was big, beefy, and had a bluff personality that he was doing his best to summon.
Under the circumstances.
Which were … not good for bluff and beefy Bamberg city officials.
Not good at all. Herr Seifert had only to consider the fact that the Ratskeller in the basement of his own city hall was now filled with men-some of them considerably beefier than he was, and not a few obviously Jaeger-who were in no sense under his control.
Quite the opposite. He had no doubt at all that the three men who had escorted him and his fellow council members into the back room were Jaeger. Seeing as how their method of “escorting” consisted mostly of prodding the council members forward with the butt of their rifles.
It didn’t help that Seifert’s expensive clothing was torn and dirty from being slammed to the cobblestones of the square where the American heretic was being flogged, when the mob erupted. Or that he sported several visible bruises, and was certain that he had several others under the clothing that were worse yet.
Especially the one on his right leg. He’d had to limp into the meeting room at the back of the Ratskeller.
Still, proprieties had to be maintained. So, again, he demanded:
“And just who are you?”
* * *
Constantin Ableidinger considered the question, and how he should answer it.
Stupid of him, really, not to have given any thought to it before. Sooner or later, after all, it was bound to come up. He ascribed the stupidity to a momentary lapse; the product of the constant activity he’d been engaged in since he arrived in Bamberg after being hastily summoned from the Coburg border.