Chapter 24
Bremen
March 1636
There was a lot of construction going on in the Neue Neustadt. Hinrich Bothmann had no trouble finding a job helping the foremen, doing routine but time-consuming calculations. That sort of thing wasn’t much restricted by guilds. It was vaguely semi-learned, almost a profession rather than a trade.
Duyts was as dour as usual, but bilingual—not that there was much difference between Dutch and Plattdeutsch—and a hydraulics engineer. He got work with the new dredging company. For decades, no seagoing ship had made it up the Weser as far as the city; they had to stop downriver and offload to shallow barges for the final leg. There were up-timers with money interested in dredging projects.
Gode Meijer hired on at the slaughterhouse. Barent Jansen thought about it, gagged, and found a large-scale teamster who needed someone in the stables. That he could do. It wasn’t the smell at the slaughterhouse that got to him. It was the blood.
And they waited.
Quite a bit of the waiting was in taverns in the Neue Neustadt, since that was where they had taken their one small room, which was barely furnished with four straw-stuffed mattress ticks on the floor and one wobbly stand for a ceramic oil lamp.
“You’ll have to buy the lamp yourselves, if you want one,” the indifferent landlady had informed them. “We don’t run to luxuries here.”
In the taverns, Gode and Barent listened to the CoC members, quite a few of whom were now parroting Daniel Bartoll’s ideas about how to play the political game. One evening, Meijer protested, “but the farmers.” It was made clear that his input was unwelcome.
On the other side of the river, Knaub and Jauch both reported to Frederik about Bartoll once more, expressing concern about his growing influence and the wider welcome of his approach among the politically interested in the city.
Münster
March 1636
Frederik never entirely understood why so many other people appeared to be impelled to do things that created problems that landed on his desk.
Right now, he was glad that he had ignored the logic that would have advised him to draw his staff from Holstein. He surrounded himself, predominantly, with men who originated from locations as far away from Holstein as a person could get and still be in the Province of Westphalia.
Why had his great-great-grandfather, King Frederik I of Denmark (albeit in his alternate incarnation as duke of Holstein-Gottorp) granted feudal rights of high justice over their serfs to the nobles in eastern Holstein? That had already been obsolete when he granted them in 1524.
Of course, he’d been having other problems that year—he had only managed to grasp the Danish crown the year before. Peasant revolts. Religious dissidents. Blame it on expedience. He’d been doing something to mollify the local nobles. Probably he’d thought he could retrieve it all later, which was the kind of imprudent thinking that led to all sorts of persistent problems.
Why had Gustav Adolf been stupid enough to get himself seriously injured the previous October? Aside, that is, from his being essentially who and what he was. Namely, a Swede. Sort of. The part that wasn’t German.
Why had Oxenstierna done what he did between the emperor’s injury and his effective recovery? Aside, that is, from his being essentially who and what he was. Namely, a Swede. Entirely.
Thank God, very sincerely, for Erik Haakansson Hand. Even if he was a Swede.
Thank God, very sincerely, that his father had held steady during those months.
Thank God, even, if a little reluctantly, for his little brother Ulrik, in spite of the fact that he, rather than Frederik, was betrothed to Princess Kristina and designated as the next high king of the Union of Kalmar.
There had been four months the previous winter during which those termed “reactionaries” by Stearns and his followers had hoped to reverse all that had been done since the Ring of Fire.
Which gave the nobles of eastern Holstein the idea that they could get away with . . . murder.
Call it high justice. Call it what you wanted.
It wasn’t as if escaping serfs were anything new. Frederik wondered how many serfs from southeastern Holstein were working at the USE shipyards in Lübeck. But even the lords in Holstein had been marginally prudent enough not to pursue them into that jurisdiction when either Gustav Adolf or the up-time admiral was in place to drive the pursuers out.
Why had someone decided to dig an Eider Canal? Well, the answer to that was fairly obvious, as was the potential profit from having a way to transport cargo from the Baltic to the North Sea during the months when the Sound was impassable.
Why had the nobles of Holstein reacted so . . . extremely . . . when some of their serfs decamped to work on that canal?
Why?
Things had been disrupted at the time of the battle of Ahrensbök, of course, but that had not lasted long—nowhere nearly as long as many of the campaigns of the current war. There had been no enduring occupation of the region.
Many of them were closely related to the now-mostly-exiled nobility of Mecklenburg, of course, which had been sharply jerked to attention by the events of the Krystalnacht and then jerked again as a result of its attempted counter-revolution during the Saxon uprising. Largely, though, that had not spilled over into Holstein.
Why?
Escaping serfs were like the biblical poor. You would always have them with you. Or, to be more technically accurate, no longer with you. Looking backward, a few serfs, even a few dozen serfs, simply were not important enough to trigger what had happened.
* * *
Rist’s assistant, Gerhard Schepler, found the governor in the private study he had created behind the public office in which he received officials and petitioners.
Schepler looked around.
The table was laden with paper.
The boxes on the table were stuffed.
The governor, draped in a linen smock, was standing at an easel, painting the portrait of a local worthy who sat stiffly on a three-legged stool. Schepler looked at the canvas critically. The governor’s technique was old-fashioned, in the stiff, brightly colored style of a century ago. Within that limitation, it was a competent enough job. The worthy, himself old-fashioned enough to be wearing a ruff, would probably be pleased.
Particularly for its purpose. There was currently no Roman Catholic bishop of Münster. In the other world, Ferdinand of Bavaria had lived another fifteen years. His then-successor, Christoph Bernhard von Galen, was, in this world, only thirty years old and an unlikely choice on the part of the Domkapitel, particularly with Bernhard von Mallinckrodt, his own uncle, fighting him tooth and nail for the position. The Stiftsadel would not be inclined to accept another pluralist Bavarian, either. Hopefully not a Fürstenberg, either. Let the Erbmänner of the city keep fighting the local nobility and the cathedral chapter through every court in the empire and keep the office vacant as long as possible, which was why the governor was doing Heinrich von Droste-Hülshoff, the forty-year-old son of the city’s late Bürgermeister, the honor of painting his portrait.
Schepler admired the portrait again. A man used whatever tools came to hand.
Having Franz Wilhelm von Wartenburg, another irritating Bavarian, alive, well, energetic, and legally installed effectively in partially Lutheran Osnabrück and officially in almost completely Lutheran Minden under the up-timers’ freakish devotion to religious tolerance, restoring and maintaining a Jesuit university right under the gubernatorial nose, so to speak, was bad enough. The Province of Westphalia didn’t need a second Catholic bishop in place. One was altogether too many.
“The lawyers are here,” Schepler said.
* * *
“If someone had deliberately set out to design a system that would be unanimously loathed by the up-timers, he couldn’t have done better than the one which has developed in Holstein,” Franz Gießenbier told him.
Frederik nodded. If anyone in Germany knew real estate law, it was his chancellor.
In Holstein, at least eastern and southeastern Holstein, real estate law and administrative law were, in essence, the same thing. Real estate law and commercial law were essentially the same thing. Real estate law and criminal law were essentially the same thing. The Gutsherr, the lord of a domain, held essentially absolute authority over the serfs, who were not only bound to the land, but also bound to personal service. If there were those who protested that it was not the same thing as chattel slavery . . . it bore an extraordinarily close resemblance. The unmarried children of a peasant in servile tenure were required to work on the lord’s demesne or in his quasi-industrial, quasi-agricultural enterprises—Holstein exported cheese by the millions of pounds every year. The peasants were required to fatten steers at their own expense, but forbidden to sell them at market: the export trade in cattle was reserved to the nobles.
“The up-time word,” David Pestel said, “I think, is authoritarian. Or the historians in England have referred to such nobles as overmighty subjects, those whose powers rival those of the king himself.”
The thought of overmighty subjects was not something that Frederik found appealing. The names “Corfitz Ulfeldt” and “Hannibal Sehested” passed through his mind. Like everyone else, he had been reading the up-time encyclopedias. The limiting conditions that the Rigsraad, the Danish Council of Nobles, had placed upon him in 1648 before they agreed to elect him as king were undesirable. If he were a man prone to nightmares, he would have them about that haandfæstning.
Fortunately, he wasn’t prone to anything of the sort.
He turned to his secretary. “Rist, check the linguistics of something for me. See if the Danish word haandfæstning is related to the up-timer term handcuffs.”
He turned back to the lawyers. “So Buchwald’s party claims that they did have legal right under the 1524 grant by the duke of Holstein, whereas we assert that they did not have legal right under the constitution of the United States of Europe.”
Gießenbier looked back over his shoulder at the note-taking law clerk, who nodded.
“That’s basically it,” Pestel said, flipping rapidly through the last couple of pages.
Gießenbier employed a lot more vocabulary but reached the same conclusion.
Frederik asked himself, Why me?
* * *
He had planned to create something in the way of a provincial militia, separate from those of individual towns; had assigned Christian Ulrik to the project, but he had not had time. Other things kept coming up.
He had been thinking about it ever since he was appointed. He had been working on it. Christian Ulrik had been working on it. They hadn’t gotten it done in time.
Frederik requested assistance from the USE army detachment stationed in Hamburg. The major who had been left in charge when the rest of Fey’s regiment was withdrawn rejected the request quite properly, on the constitutional ground that federal forces were constituted to defend the realm against foreign threats rather than to be used to quell domestic disturbances, and he had received no orders from his chain of command to make an exception in this instance.
The Hamburg council, in its role as head of a USE imperial city, also rejected his request to borrow some of their forces. Not only, traditionally, was a militia required to serve only in defense against external attack, which the council’s lawyers cited in extenso in their brief, but there were also practical political grounds. Those, of course, the lawyers did not cite. Frederik knew better than to bother asking anyone in Lübeck for assistance. The USE Navy went its own way and the mayor, Dieterich Matthesen, was even more strongly CoC-supported than Bugenhagen in Hamburg.
The city of Bremen would not cooperate because the city fathers were fairly sure that the USE was going to give them imperial city status and get them out of Westphalia. The public reason that the FoJP was putting forth for this was that it would “strengthen the USE’s naval position.” Frederik suspected that it was because it would give the FoJP another vote in the House of Lords, since the city’s political sympathies were strongly in that direction.
He didn’t expect any help from Gottorp. Duke Friedrich logically should provide assistance because, after all, the executed serfs had been retrieved from his lands and they had been working on his canal. However, he was a first cousin of Gustav Adolf on his mother’s side, and generally more inclined to favor his Swedish relatives than his Danish ones. Since he would classify Frederik as Danish in this instance, even though Gustav Adolf had appointed him to his USE position in Westphalia . . . no. Frederik had not been getting much satisfaction from Duke Friedrich, even from the perspective of information gathering.
If the emperor were willing to provide help, there would already have been some military forces at his disposal as provincial governor. That pretty much closed the circle.