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Chapter 22


Holstein

January-February 1636


It was too early in the season, in the midst of these cold, unforgiving, winters, for serious work on the duke of Holstein-Gottorp’s new canal. Nobody was trying to dig through the ice.

The duke’s canal. That was what most people called it. The official name was the Eider Canal. The funding came from a large consortium organized by a broker at the money exchange in Kiel, the institution that provided credit for almost anyone in Holstein who needed credit, be they merchants, shippers, millers, manufacturers, or nobles who so overspent their incomes on modern luxuries that they were willing to mortgage their land.

This canal was the largest project the broker had ever undertaken to finance. It would either make him a spectacular fortune or bankrupt everyone involved.

Jochen Giese was willing to take the risk. There was a known reason why Kiel, the largest town in the Duchy of Holstein, even if not precisely a major urban center at eight thousand or so residents, had no longer been a member of the old Hanseatic League when its remnants disbanded a few years earlier under the stresses of the current war. Kiel had been expelled in 1518 for harboring pirates. The brokers of the Kiel exchange, many of them at least, had an instinctive understanding of the joy of piracy, even if not precisely on the high seas. Shipping and the annual Umschlag, the free market, meant that they had resources out of all proportion to the expectations most people had of such a modest little municipality, which could be advantageous. It wasn’t every market that attracted not only buyers and sellers, entertainers and con men, prostitutes and pickpockets, but also investors and lawyers. Even Hamburgers and Lübeckers found it advantageous, at times, to make a deal in Kiel. He, Jochen Giese, and Marcus Langemach, between them, would make this deal and make their lineages wealthy beyond anyone’s dreams.

If it worked out.

He stood, looking over the route proposed for one of the cuts that would reduce the transit time significantly as compared to letting the canal builders simply dredge the circuitous bends and twists of the Eider, and nodded. “Now,” he said, “as to the lock placement, what are the comparative costs if . . . ” He and Duke Friedrich’s agent fastened their hats down and pulled their cloaks tighter against the wind coming off the North Sea as they walked in a generally westward direction. He paid no attention to the occasional small groups of laborers who clustered around foremen who were directing their activities.

Giese had no particular interest in technology. He was a money man.

* * *

Hans Dubbels anchored one of the small groups of laborers. He was a big young man; a strong young man.

Also a smart young man. Twenty-two years old. Born in the year of 1614, according to his mother. Born a serf, because his parents were hörig. Belongings, if one thought of the basic meaning of the word. Es gehört mir. It belongs to me. Confirmed in the harshest form of that serfdom in the same year he was born, when the ruling nobles adopted new legislation.

Serfdom was not only accepted by the rulers and nobles of Holstein. It was the foundation of the rural economy on the great manorial estates. “Bound to the land” wasn’t the right way to describe it, except if that meant they weren’t allowed to leave. Most serfs were workers. Insten. Only a few peasants were permitted to rent farmland for their own use in return for their services on the lord’s demesne. Even those peasants’ children were Gesinde, bound, from the age of six years onwards, to forced labor for the lord. Starting as goose-boys or dairy-girls and continuing until they could, maybe, eventually, marry and rent land on terms as burdensome as those of their fathers.

Or with even more burdens than their fathers. If the lord had not decided to cancel the tenure and draw even more land into his demesne, making them into Insten themselves.

If the lord gave them permission to marry, which he could refuse.

If the lord didn’t conscript them and send them into some army to be killed.

No right to learn a trade without the lord’s consent.

Mostly, no schools, even though once the pastor had let slip that in most of the Germanies, all children were taught to read and write.

“Bound to the land.” Say rather, “in bondage to the land’s lord.”

He wasn’t a person, in the eyes of Lord Ahlefeldt. He was a tool, like the hammer in his hands was a tool.

Holstein was not all that large a duchy. Even a peasant boy could learn that there wasn’t much serfdom in the western part. If a man could get there and stay there. Of course, the law passed the year he was born provided that escaped serfs must be returned to their owner.

The foreman called out an order and he gave another swing of his sledgehammer against the thick layer of ice frozen over the door to the storage shed.

Canal work didn’t pay much, but something was better than nothing.

When Jürgen Rickerts heard the blow that told him how hard Dubbels was swinging that hammer, he frowned. The boy was too reckless, was likely to break something, would draw the attention of one of the duke’s agents to their work group, and someone would identify them.

Jürgen wasn’t intending to work on the canal permanently. He did hold a full farm on one of the Ahlefeldt estates and had left his wife and children there to run it during these coldest months. With care, they could keep the overseer from noticing that he wasn’t present himself. They needed the money he could make.

Every year, it seemed, the lord shifted more of the costs to his tenants and demanded more services from them. If he was to fatten as many steers each winter as the lord was demanding, with so many harvests failing because of the cold, he would need one of the new silos. A silo might pay for itself in the long run, but in the short run, the farmer had to pay for it to be built.

Lord Ahlefeldt certainly wasn’t going to make any capital investments on the tenant farms. He lived for excuses to abolish the peasant tenures and incorporate the land into the demesne he cultivated with slave labor. What amounted to slave labor. It was hard to tell the difference between the status of the Insten and the slaves of ancient Rome that the pastor talked about when he preached from the Book of Philemon. The pastor preached from Philemon to teach obedience and subordination. What Jürgen had gotten from the lesson was that he didn’t want to see his children decline into Insten.

Dubbels swung the hammer again.

“Take it easy,” Jürgen said, looking up anxiously as the duke’s local agent walked past them with an unknown, but suspiciously well-dressed, man by his side.

Lammert Cordes and Cai Reimers just stood there. Reimers was barely sixteen and not the most effective boy on the Ahlefeldt estate. If you told him what to do and showed him how, he would do it. If it was something within his ability. Many things were not. He would keep doing it until you remembered and told him to stop. You had to remind him to eat his noon meal. You had to remind him to stop when it got dark, and in winter it got dark early. You had to remind him to go to the fire and warm up when his fingers started turning blue.

They might have been better off without young Cai, but it seemed like every year, the overseer treated the boy worse. He couldn’t help being the way he was and his mother worried about him so much.

He didn’t have the strength to hammer this ice off.

Lammert was lazy. And a drunk, when he could get hold of liquor. He didn’t have enough skill to hammer this ice off.

Then there was Tönnies. Tönnies Dirkes. Not one of them. Not from the Ahlefeldt estate. His father did carting services out of Eckernförde, up north in Schleswig. Armies, both the king of Denmark’s and Tilly’s, had come, not quite ten years ago, but getting close to it, now. Plague had followed them. By the time it was done with Eckernförde, five hundred men had become fifty men. Who could tell where the people who lived in the town now had come from? Some scribe or clerk, perhaps, had a record. Tönnies had come slinking around the estate, tempting people with word of money to be made on canal work. A recruiter, he called himself. A troublemaker.

“Tönnies, take a turn with that hammer,” Jürgen said abruptly. “The rest of you go on over to the fire barrel.”

* * *

Magdalene von Brockdorff’s voice was shrill.

It had already been shrill the first time her husband, Otto von Buchwald, proud if less-than-prosperous lord of the estate of Muggesfelde, met her. Muggesfelde, which did not bring in enough money to support his Mecklenburg wife in the style to which she wanted to be accustomed, so he had to work as a provost for Duke Friedrich at Itzehoe.

She was five years older than he was, also. But she had managed to give him three children, then two more children when she was in her early forties, so the marriage had not proved to be a total loss, even though he would have to write off all the installments still owing on her dowry. The Krystalnacht in Mecklenburg last year had seen to that.

She refused to live out in the countryside in winter, of course. She and the children were staying in the family’s Freihof, untaxed townhouse, in Kiel. The purpose of the Freihof was to give them a base from which to do the estate’s necessary trading. Holstein’s nobility lived off agricultural exports. These last few years, the yields had been abysmal. Income was down. That didn’t prevent Magdalene from spending money like water, trying to turn a neat little red brick townhouse into a mansion. Interior, exterior, and furnishings.

She was fifteen years older than the other two women in the salon. Clarelia Reventlow, from Rixdorf estate, was married to his own friend and contemporary, Godske von Ahlefeldt, whose estate, Stubbe, was in Schleswig, up by Eckernförde. Beate Rantzau was Clarelia’s friend and her husband, Bendix von Ahlefeldt, a multiple-cousin of Godske, was younger, too. He couldn’t be much, if any, over thirty-five. His Gut was Haseldorf.

“Godske is going to do it.” The volume of Clarelia’s piercing soprano overwhelmed even Magdalene’s voice. “I told him that he isn’t going to let that carter’s son get away with recruiting serfs off our estate to work on Duke Friedrich’s canal. He’s planning to go get them back.”

Otto stopped, pulled his gloves off, and went back into the salon. “What carter’s son? Tönnies Dirkes?”

“Yes, that one.”

Otto frowned. Young Dirkes had been sniffing around Muggesfelde, too, in the fall, for no sufficient reason. He’d have to check with the overseer as to whether anyone was missing.

Clarelia’s older, unmarried, sister Mette opened her mouth. “He’s been on the Pogwisch manors, too. That Dirkes man has, I mean. Emerentia said so. Henning told her.”

Emerentia. His widowed half-sister and the world’s busiest busybody. Henning Pogwisch, Holstein’s hottest hothead.

He pulled his gloves back on. “I’ll go talk to Godske before I head out for Gottorp.”

* * *

It took several weeks for the lords to ascertain who was gone, given that they had to check the presence or absence of thousands of men and boys. Even then, the information was far from complete.

Some men had possibly gone to work on the canal, but had come back for the spring planting.

Otto von Buchwald recommended to Duke Friedrich that he should have his local agents check the status of the canal workmen and send away any who could be identified as serfs. “Otherwise,” he warned, “this is going to cause a lot of trouble for all of us.”

An occasional man had been absent during the cold season, but had spent it with a woman on a neighboring estate with whom he had been living in a status of not-married for a decade’s worth of winters and retorted with considerable indignation that nobody had ever complained about it before.

Otto von Buchwald was inclined to recommend that the most prudent course would be to quietly spread the word that if the men came back to where they belonged, then Nothing More Would Be Said.

Godske might have gone along with that, left to himself, but his wife was prodding him to Do Something.

Bendix, egged on by Beate, and Henning, who was courting Mette, put together a posse to retrieve the Haseldorf escapees, managed to find a couple, dragged them back, and had them flogged, after which Beate and Mette preened themselves all over the remainder of the small group of noble wives that constituted “high society,” such as it might be, in Kiel.

Clarelia was a Reventlow. Magdalene’s mother had been a Reventlow.

The Reventlows were not to be out-done by the Rantzaus.

Godske put together a posse of retainers, consisting of overseers, stablehands, and the like, from Stubbe, with Otto’s reluctant assistance providing a similar contingent from Muggesfelde. Bendix and Henning joined in with enthusiasm; they had been rather enjoying their hour in the sun as heroes of the counter-revolution.

The criminals were not hard to identify. Many of the men in the posse had worked with them for years.

Hans Dubbels

Lammert Cordes

Cai Reimers

Tönnies Dirkes

There wasn’t any resistance among the other canal workers. Most of them faded away as inconspicuously as possible.

Tönnies Dirkes, in exchange for being released into his father’s custody and agreeing to leave Holstein, readily identified Jürgen Rickerts from Godske von Ahlefeldt’s estate, who had already gone back home, as having been their foreman over the winter.

That involved the entire extended family of Ahlefeldts. Not limited to the immediate family of Godske but also cousins and in-laws (most of whom were also Ahlefeldts), all the way out to and up to the more distant connections serving Christian IV in Denmark.

Otto concluded that his old friend had gone mad. Or that the entire Ahlefeldt lineage had gone mad, with its Rantzau and Reventlow connections gone madder.

Godske not only dragged Dubbels, Cordes, and Reimer back to Muggesfelde and had Rickerts arrested at Stubbe, but not content with ordinary punishment, as Bendix and Henning had been, he put them on trial.

There was no such thing as public administration in eastern Holstein. Western Holstein, yes; the duke had his officials. Royal Holstein, yes; the king of Denmark had his officials. Eastern Holstein, no.

Serfs in eastern Holstein had no right of appeal to higher authority, such as an imperial court or ducal court. No right to sue. No rights.

Godske accused the four serfs of treason. Not treason against the USE. Not treason against the Province of Westphalia. Not treason against Duke Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp. He accused them of treason against himself, as their rightful lord. Acting, as under the grant of 1524 he had the right to do, as the accuser, the prosecutor, and the judge (there being no jury). He didn’t carry out all of those roles, plus that of executioner, personally—just that of judge—but the men who fulfilled them were his employees.

Otto, over the impassioned protests of his wife Magdalene that if, for any reason, serfs escaped strict discipline for resistance, it would be the beginning of the end for not only their own family but for every feudal lord in Holstein, the same way that the nobility of Mecklenburg had been destroyed, intervened with a remonstration that the boy Cai Reimers was known to be simple and should therefore not be held responsible for his actions, but rather, on the basis of all existing precedent, remanded to the custody of his mother.

Godske ignored him.

The court found the four men guilty of treason and ordered them hanged.

It turned out that Godske’s wife had arranged in advance for one of her connections in Westphalia to hire a man from a well-known Henkerfamilie and send him to Holstein. So there was an executioner available.

* * *

There weren’t any newspapers in Holstein yet, outside of Kiel. The weekly in Kiel was extraordinarily discreet. Those in Hamburg and Lübeck had minimal interest in the back country of Holstein.

Of the canal workers who had faded away, a few returned and followed the posse all the way to Muggesfelde, up to Stubbe, and back. Three of them were about twenty years old.

Gode Meijer from Lütjenburg, not far from Plön, up northwest of Segeberg, followed because his mind told him, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Barent Jansen, from Dithmarschen in the far west, had been brought up on stories and legends of medieval peasant freedom fighters in the marshes by his grandfather.

Hinrich Bothmann was the scapegrace, black sheep, son of a Lutheran pastor from Ribe in Denmark proper, hired on by the canal company to do mathematical calculations.

And a Dutch hydraulics engineer. Cornelis Duyts. That might well not have exactly been his name; it signified “Dutch.” He was about forty, good at his work, but his personality had never permitted him to get along well with bosses.

They made it to Lübeck, found a newspaper office, told the story of what they had seen and heard concerning these things to the publisher. Only what they had themselves seen and heard; they didn’t know anything about the background. Cornelis and Hinrich agreed with one another that it was properly the governor’s problem. Gode and Barent went along with them, although neither had a strong opinion. So they asked the publisher for permission to send it all by radio to Münster. Where Chancellor Gießenbier was a busy, preoccupied, man. It came to his clerk.

As it happened, the governor was in Stade. Radio being radio, that didn’t delay the delivery of the message to him by more than a couple of hours. But he was a busy, preoccupied, man and told Rist to have Gießenbier deal with it.

To the immense astonishment of Cornelis and Hinrich, the governor’s office radioed back, requesting that they come to Bremen or Stade if they were willing, authorizing travel expenses, and recommending that they get out of Lübeck into some place where they would be more anonymous whether they came to Bremen or not.

David Pestel was proud of himself.

Three weeks later, they arrived in Bremen, rented a room in the Neue Neustadt, mailed a notice to the address in Münster that they had been given, and picked up jobs as day laborers. There was no telling how long they might have to make the governor’s money last.


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