Chapter 10
Magdeburg
June 1635
The Crown Loyalists conducted a raucous celebration of Wilhelm Wettin’s electoral victory. Make that most of the Crown Loyalists. Some of the more prudent, such as the landgrave of Hesse-Kassel and his wife, withdrew from the dancing and feasting and left town.
Frederik of Denmark had not even made it to town in the first place. He had sent a perfectly polite letter saying that something had come up, but he would try to make the parliamentary sessions later, once his vote was needed.
Everybody who knew Frederik was aware that he did not enjoy parties. Few people in Magdeburg knew him at all.
Gunther Achterhof and Gretchen Richter addressed the CoCs. Using the excuse that the assassination of Dreeson and Wiley had been done by anti-Semites, Mike Stearns and Francisco Nasi were orchestrating, with cold calculation, what they intended to be an irreversible and permanent change in the outlook of the Germanies. By removing the major obstacles to that change. Krystalnacht began.
Münster
June 1635
Frederik stood at his easel, mulling his options.
Martin Luther’s prescription for human behavior was that everything should be done decently and in order. That was clearly the preferable option. It was not always an attainable one.
Glückstadt should be safe enough from Stearns’ radicals. A modern foundation, it was in royal Holstein. Even if Holstein was in the USE now, most of the people in the duchy who would be termed “reactionaries” by Stearns and his ilk knew that Schleswig was to their north and Denmark to the north of Schleswig. Where there was a king who was still the holder of these specific lands, his Statthalter administering them from Segeberg; a king who was also the father of the provincial governor. Serious written gubernatorial admonitions to behave themselves ought to suffice. There was no reason to assume that Glückstadt would be a major CoC target.
Or anything else in Holstein. Unless . . . he hadn’t been to the duchy since he was appointed to office; not since the War of the League of Ostend.
It wasn’t all royal, or even mostly his father’s lands; nothing like Schleswig. There was the Gottorp portion. Which was not a consolidated place on the map. Holstein-Gottorp had four major sections, three separate ones in northern Holstein, one on the west coast, one in the middle, and one on the east coast. With a fourth in the far southeast, toward Mecklenburg. Plus some scattered exclaves. Not to mention the parts that were jointly administered by Gottorp and by the king of Denmark wearing a different hat as duke of Holstein.
If the nobility there or the patricians in Kiel did anything to draw CoC attention because they thought he himself was indifferent to what they were doing or might do . . . But admonitions would have to suffice for the time being. Some other day. He hoped that the CoCs of Magdeburg Province and Lübeck would have more immediate concerns in Mecklenburg.
As for Altona, the circumstances surrounding Count Ernest of Schaumburg-Holstein-Pinneberg’s granting the first permanent residence permits to Ashkenazic Jews in 1611 made it unlikely that it contained any significant number of anti-Semites. When a ruling count invited court Jews into an old city—yes, there was often resentment about the competition in the field of finance. Altona had been a fishing village before its shrewd ruler realized that he could make more money by building it up. A Jewish community in what amounted to a new town might cause resentment, but those who resented it usually lived somewhere else.
In this instance, in Hamburg, where that FoJP nuisance Albert Bugenhagen was now mayor. He and his CoC cohorts would have to deal with consequences of having anti-Semites in their own playground. For Altona, an alert ought to be sufficient, with a warning to the surrounding area.
Bremen
June 1635
“The instructions from Achterhof and Richter forbid us from touching ordinary reactionaries,” Peter Schorfmann complained. “That doesn’t leave us with much scope.”
They were at Breiting’s parents’ comfortable house in the Altstadt. Breiting was much better placed to cover the expenses of their meetings than anyone else in the movement. He spoke up: “I’m sure there are some anti-Semites in the city. They’re everywhere. But given that there haven’t been any Jews here for three hundred years or so, they haven’t had anything much to chew on.”
Gerrit Bemmeler laughed. “Yeah. And a pope said that there were witches in Bremen, but that was a couple of hundred years ago. Before the Reformation. And he was probably talking about the Erzstift, not the city. Even then, the edict that old Prince-Archbishop Johann Friedrich published—that has to be more than thirty years ago, now—made it practically impossible to have a witchcraft trial. The evidentiary standards that he established as a prerequisite, proving actual harm and damages, were so high that a prosecutor could hardly hope to get an indictment, much less a conviction. If there’s still anyone around here who persecuted a witch, he has to be doddering toward his grave.”
“So how do we handle it locally?” Bemmeler’s sister Agnes asked.
She had become a fan of up-time drama. At this critical juncture, the Bremen revolutionaries were in danger of becoming rebels without a cause.
“There might have been a couple of witchcraft trials over in Verden,” Breiting suggested hopefully. “I think.”
Tönnies’ sister Jisca motioned to the maid to bring in more beer.
“I am,” she said, “so sick and tired of listening to you guys argue politics. I’m going over to Marieke’s.” Her mother’s maid, Jutta, was too busy to accompany her through the streets; she made do with their chambermaid Trinke as a chaperone.
Alverich Knaub, who was incidentally to other things Marieke’s father, listened to his older daughter and her friends chatter. Then he sent a report to Frederik, predicting that chaos and uncontrolled rioting in the streets were imminent.
Emil Jauch conducted his observations in a more systematic manner. After several conversations with the ex-mayors and ex-councilmen, after multiple meetings with the younger and more agitated of Bremen’s patricians who had once had a reasonably entitled hope of ascending to mayoral and conciliar positions themselves if they did everything right, but now realized that they were almost certainly in a permanent minority in a city with a new FoJP majority; after consultations with the current FoJP municipal officers; following a few quiet evening consultations with both groups, lubricated by good food and better beer, he also sent a report to Frederik. Predicting that Bremen’s reactionaries would remain quiescent unless something unexpected stirred them up.
Quedlinburg
June 1635
“In the lands of Damenstift Quedlinburg,” the abbess said in a measured tone of voice, “there have been witchcraft persecutions. In 1589, one hundred and thirty-three persons were executed on a single day. Nor was that the first occasion when witches were executed under the authority of my predecessors. As for Brunswick itself, both the core duchy and the newly incorporated jurisdictions . . . I can only hope and pray that Duke Georg acts promptly.”
“That was a half-century ago. Or more,” the prioress protested.
“None of us are innocent.”
Münster
June 1635
Eric Stenbock introduced the up-time concept of Murphy’s law into the conversation over dinner: whatever can go wrong, will.
“I prefer to think of it another way,” Frederik responded. “Whatever contingency one provides for, what actually happens will be something that you didn’t provide for.”
“God warns of this, however,” the chaplain Lütkemann interjected, “to prevent us from becoming arrogant and unduly prideful, that we may avoid the fault that the ancient Greeks called ὕβρις, if only we listen to His word. Or, as the Dutch devotional writer Thomas à Kempis put it, homo proponit, sed Deus disponit. Derived from Proverbs 16:9, I should think. Or possibly Proverbs 19:21.”
“There is still nothing to prevent a man from providing for as many contingencies as possible,” Frederik commented to Christian Ulrik after the dinner broke up.
* * *
“Where are the greatest difficulties going to appear in Westphalia?” Frederik chewed on his lips.
It wasn’t as if he was unfamiliar with witchcraft persecutions. They were endemic in Denmark, enthusiastically endorsed by its Lutheran bishops. In Denmark, saying Catholic prayers was categorized as an act of witchcraft by some of the clergy.
“In Hochstift Verden, the pastor at Wiedensahl, Heinrich Rimphoff, is a known fanatic and has been gathering supporters in recent years,” Lütkemann said. “At Loccum Abbey, he’s been a leader in the persecutions for close to ten years; there have been several executions. He’s likely to put himself forth as a candidate for one of the cathedral canonries, but I have no way to predict what the upper bounds of his ambition may be.”
Franz Gießenbier, the Rinteln lawyer whom he had appointed as the province’s chancellor, nodded. “I had Eichrodt”—that was Johann Eichrodt, another of the Rinteln law faculty now attached to the governor’s office—“prepare an overview with documentation. You are directly responsible there, as bishop and not merely as governor. If you aren’t seen as reining Rimphoff in . . . ”
“Find somebody who works fast. Get the Cautio Criminalis translated into German, get the manuscript to a printer, and flood the whole province with copies.” Frederik slapped the table.
“The Lutheran clergy of Verden, or anywhere else, are not likely to be favorably influenced by a book written by a Jesuit,” Lütkemann suggested.
Frederik stood up impatiently. “Then attribute the authorship to someone else. A Lutheran someone else.”
“Copyright,” one of the lawyers said hesitantly.
Frederik was not given to cursing. He normally avoided, as a matter of principle, not only blasphemy, but also obscenity and scatology. However . . .
“Copyright be damned.”
The meeting proceeded at a rapid pace.
“The county of Lippe and town of Lemgo are particularly problematic.”
“Münster and Osnabrück, the Stifte, have had comparatively few witchcraft prosecutions. The town of Osnabrück, however . . . ”
“What shall we do over there?”
Frederik brought his hands together. “Tell young Gustafsson over there to get up off his nineteen-year-old duff and do something for a change; call on the exalted name of his father the emperor to keep the nobles and patricians quiet. Put leashes on the mayor and the council. Toss them into their own dungeons if that’s what it takes to keep them from interfering with the CoC activities in the town as long as they stick to their targets. I’m informed that they have lists. Whether the lists include villages that burned two witches twenty years ago, I have no idea. I have no idea where the lists came from. Gustafsson’s living in luxury on the revenues of the Hochstift, thanks to our gracious overlords the Swedes. Tell him to earn his keep.”
“The situation is similar in Minden. Few prosecutions in the episcopal lands, but within the jurisdiction of the city council . . . ”
“So most of the problems will be urban.”
“So are most of the CoCs,” Lieutenant Meyer noted.
“Whom I am inclined to allow to march on Wiedensahl and Kloster Loccum without interference. Let them bear the onus of what is going to be done.”
* * *
“As Jesus said to Peter, as recorded by Matthew,” Lütkemann chided gently the next time the governor came to confession, “‘thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.’ Every fatality that will come out of this campaign, the death of even the most reprehensible man as well as casualties among innocent bystanders, will still be the killing of one of God’s children.”
“True,” Frederik answered. “And in the same passage He asked, ‘what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?’ I doubt that any man knows until he has made the exchange.”
Bremen
June 1635
A CoC column pulled out of Bremen, headed for action in Verden. It met no government opposition on its path to Loccum, somewhat to the surprise of its leaders.
“If Master Tönnies gets himself killed,” Trinke remarked to Jutta as she watched them go, “Frau Breiting is going to be unhappy. He’s their only son.”
“I hope they have sense enough to keep him on the sidelines,” was the answer. “He’s headed for law school, not a military career.”
Bremervörde
June 1635
Captain von Bargen threw down the transcribed radio notice that the Tech (what was a “Tech,” he asked himself) had delivered, paced as far as the dimensions of his office in the episcopal chancery building would let him, opened the door with a jerk, slammed it behind him, and went out to pace the walkways of the formal garden. The flower beds were at their peak of bloom.
The Province of Westphalia wasn’t only a job, for him. Not merely another army assignment. He had volunteered to serve the new governor, coming out of the Congress of Copenhagen. He was a son of Niedersachsen. He had a mother near Bremen; aunts, uncles, and cousins scattered from here to Stade. A brother with four cute children of his own who had married a girl from Kronenborg and settled there, near Himmelpforten. The Province of Westphalia was home.
He had an old schoolmate in Minden.
“I am very much afraid,” Dietrich Blomberger wrote, “that based on newspaper reports about the occurrences in Mecklenburg, the known anti-Semites here, assuming that a cataclysmic Armageddon and calamitous apocalypse will descend upon them even if they do nothing at all right now, in which they are probably correct, may decide that, instead of merely continue to rail impotently against the Jews in general, they might as well destroy the specific Jewish community in Minden before they are killed themselves by invading CoC columns.”
It had taken von Bargen several minutes to wade through his friend’s page-long single paragraph with its cluster of dependent clauses and subjunctive verbs. One thing he admired about the up-timers he encountered was how short, in general, their sentences were.
He rounded the end of a planting of pink tulips, which were past their peak, and stomped down the tree-lined allée, past the lilies, toward the terrace. Mounting the steps, he leaned against the balustrade, looking out over the symmetry of the whole.
There wouldn’t be many indigenous members of the CoC in Minden at present; certainly fewer than there were members of the city militia. There weren’t a lot to start with and most of those, according to the best intelligence he had received, with which Dietrich incidentally agreed, were off fighting in either the outright civil war in Mecklenburg or the quasi-civil war in the Province of the Main.
He descended the steps, heading back toward the entrance to the chancery building.
The governor was preoccupied.
There were occasions when it was easier to beg forgiveness than obtain permission.
He would take unilateral action.
He changed direction, hurrying toward the small barracks where his half-company was housed.
Minden
June 1635
Minden’s reactionaries had been displeased when a Fourth of July Party candidate won the city’s seat in parliament.
They were going to have to turn the city government over to the usurpers too, now that the election results were certified. For today, they still controlled the militia.
There wasn’t much overlap between the anti-Semites and the witchcraft persecutors in Minden. Hardly any, to tell the truth. The anti-Semites tended to be artisan class, egged on by members of the parish clergy. The city fathers were more preoccupied with burning witches than persecuting Jews, who were occasionally useful when it came to banking and lines of credit.
But the CoC campaign would be directed against both groups. And, as Pascal Wenke, the brickmaker, said persuasively, it was much easier to identify a Jew than a witch; identifying a witch involved prolonged legal procedures before a trial and conviction got to the burning at the stake stage. Witchcraft persecutions necessarily involved jurists, learned opinions filed by law faculties, formal trials. So they should all cooperate. At the minimum, the council should not have the militia intervene if he and his friends moved against the Jewish community.
The reactionaries listened to Wenke’s presentation with more respect than they usually gave an ordinary working-class man. He left the meeting.
Some of his hearers thought that he had made his point effectively.
In a way.
“It may not be that easy to identify a witch to satisfactory legal standards,” Nikolas Tissen said. “But it is quite easy to identify an up-and-coming member of the USE House of Commons. If we can point their little mob in the direction of Dirk Waßmann, with any luck he will happen to be a collateral casualty in an anti-Semitic riot. Then we should be able to appoint a more acceptable successor in office before the parliament meets.”
Tielo Diederichs smiled. “Waßmann is an idealist. It shouldn’t be much trouble to have someone tempt him to come out and stand up for those ideals, defending the oppressed in the face of an advancing mob. That should improve the odds that the casualty will be a fatality quite a bit.”
“I’ll take those odds,” Jasper Wippermann said, “and raise you ten.”
Oddly, ironically, Hinrich Botterbrodt, the captain of the city militia didn’t see it quite that way. He, too, had been a schoolmate of Dietrich Blomberger. When von Bargen and his half-company arrived in Minden, they found a scene in which the Jewish community lay behind some rather effective improvised barricades, a mob mostly armed with Morgensterne, those long wooden posts with vicious spiked iron heads on the end, was moving to batter the barricades down, and in the middle the militia was trying to take the new Fourth of July Party member of the House of Commons into protective custody.
The members of the town militia generally had nothing against either expelling Jews or burning witches. However, they disliked working-class riots as a matter of principle. Additionally, most of them had sons in the city school and Waßmann was the schoolteacher. If the mob killed him, they’d have to go to all the trouble of finding a replacement.
The entire situation was complicated by the presence, a short way down the street, of
the mothers, wives, and daughters of Minden’s absent CoC members, loudly if somewhat unmelodiously rendering Gerrit Bemmeler’s Plattdeutsch translation of Woody Guthrie’s “Union Maid,” who had also turned out to protect the new parliament member.
Most of the militia put the women into the category of working-class rioters, right along with the anti-Semitic artisans.
Nobody ever knew who fired first. Sorting out the issue of who did what to whom in the four-way battle that broke out in Minden that day wasn’t easy.
About twenty minutes into the melee, Captain von Bargen was hit by a bullet fired by a city militiaman who was aiming in the general direction of the anti-Semites. Probably. Probably aiming at the anti-Semites. That the bullet had been fired by a militiaman was unquestionable, because only they had rifles.
While it was hard to sort out the issue of who did what to whom, presenting von Bargen as a hero was easy. The CoC pamphlets made the most of him. A hero, bringing in the troops against the reactionaries, the anti-Semites, the witch-burners.
A hero for what reason was a little murkier, but they glossed that over.
Münster
June 1635
“I barely got to know him,” Frederik said to Rist. “What little I did get to know, I respected. Claus von Bargen. Claus Christian, I believe, was his full name. Prepare a letter of condolence to his mother, for my signature.”
He paused. “Who’s available to take over his duties as my regent in Bremervörde?”
“No one comes to mind immediately.”