Chapter 32
Magdeburg
October 1636
Mark Early had not expected his work, way back in the spring of 1633, before the USE even, when Grantville was the capital of the New United States, to come back to haunt him. But he’d been on the Special Commission on the Establishment of Freedom of Religion then and it looked like someone needed something of the sort now.
He hadn’t expected to be the first up-timer that almost anyone involved in the administration of the Province of Westphalia had met, either.
But he was. Christian Ulrik displayed him like a prize 4-H pig at the Grantville fairgrounds.
Westphalia was a reality check. When Mark finished—it took him a good six weeks of talking to persuade the residents of Stadt und Stift Osnabrück that they were going to have to change their ways whether they wanted to or not—he went back to Magdeburg with a pretty urgent sense that he needed to get across to Ed Piazza, to the whole bunch of the guys who lived in the Grantville to Erfurt/Jena to Magdeburg to Lübeck bubbles, that for a lot of the USE, they still might as well be aliens from Mars.
“Goddam, Suze,” he said to his wife. “They’re not listening. We knew better than this in the beginning. Remember all the ‘hearts and minds’ stuff that we did down in Franconia? Still are, for that matter. And over around Fulda? Boots on the ground.”
“Yeah.”
“Now it’s all big picture. Religious toleration? Gustav Adolf passes a law. Witches? Send in the CoCs. Anti-Semitism? Send in the CoCs. Check that one off the bucket list; we’re done.”
“We’re not?”
“Not by a long shot. Not when it isn’t all ‘big picture’ loathing, kind of abstract hatred. Not when armies for both sides rampaged through there back and forth; each one did horrible things; about everybody lost something or someone. That’s what I was running into—over at Osnabrück and the way Rist explained it to me, it’s pretty much the same all over the province. A Lutheran mom, ‘the Jesuits took away my son’s scholarship to the council school to add to funding for their Collegium when he was fifteen, so he lost his chance and now he’ll be a landless peasant all his life.’ A Catholic father, ‘the Swedes confiscated everything our village had in storage for the winter and over thirty people died.’ Maybe there’s some exaggeration, but basically, they’re all telling the truth. Nobody’s innocent; no, not one. And if we keep blinkers on, it’ll all fester and fester until someday, someplace, there’s a Kosovo massacre and we the true, we the brave, we the pure-hearted will proclaim that we’re ‘shocked, shocked, shocked’ and claim no responsibility. That unpleasant governor! Those horrible reactionary nobles! Well, what could we have expected?”
“It’s not as if there’s anything we can do about it.”
“One thing we—the up-timers—fucking well could do about it is stop pretending that it’s safe to ignore the second-largest province in the USE, population-wise, just because the FoJP has a grudge against Gustav Adolf’s having appointed Christian IV’s son as the governor. Which, you’ll notice, they don’t take out on Gustav. They take it out on the administration over there, which ultimately means on the people over there. As long as the navy has its precious access to the sea by way of the Elbe open, we figure that it’s all good.”
“You like Frederik?”
“Only met him once, for about fifteen minutes. He didn’t strike me as ‘Mr. Cordiality’ during that time. I spent a lot more with the half-brother, who does know him well; who definitely doesn’t dislike him.”
Mark laughed.
“And talking to the half-brother’s wife Bente. She’s a hoot. Keeps up a lively correspondence with her father, sisters, brothers-in-law, a whole batch of them who are up in the northern part of the province, around Hamburg. They’ve seen more up-timers; gotten hold of more of the book reprints, know FoJP and CoC people.”
“So then, after I finished in Osnabrück, I went up north—actually stayed with Bente’s father for a couple of nights. Hellish roads—worse than in the interior of Brunswick. Frau Hedwig of the dramatic escape from Saxony was in town; she remembered me, asked to see me, talked for a while. She showed me a cartoon that a FoJP newspaper in Hamburg published. Captioned ‘Prince of Westphalia,’ of course. Pretty good caricature. The words coming out of his mouth were, ‘Never apologize. Never explain.’ No idea if either she or the cartoonist connected the saying to Henry Ford. She’s working hard.
“Honestly, Suze, we ought to do something. We can’t write off close to a million people as hopeless, having neither hearts nor minds that we could persuade—not even if the urban FoJP politicians in Hamburg and Bremen act like they’d be perfectly happy to squeeze the entire place into abysmal rural poverty if that’s what it would take to pressure Frederik not to put up a fight when independence for Bremen comes up in parliament. Does the FoJP still want to push for Bremen’s vote in the House of Lords since the governor bargained with Piazza?” He shook his head. “I hate politics. The political process is another name for blackmail and extortion.”
Susan patted his shoulder. “If we did make . . . overtures . . . if you want to call it that. Offered agricultural extension programs through the Grange, for example. Or . . . what? Do you think that the Prince of Westphalia would welcome them? Welcome a ‘hearts and minds’ effort. Welcome us?”
Mark shrugged her hand off and paced around the room, his hands clasped behind his back. “I don’t think he’d refuse out of hand. Welcome us? No. The last thing anyone would call him is a gung-ho reformer. But I do think he’d use us to buck up the economy, if he thought it would help. There might be some possibility for textile manufacturing if they could get it going. There’s an awful lot of material reconstruction that still needs to be done. Buildings, of course. Christian Ulrik probably had two dozen reports on his desk that could be summed up, ‘the old chapel building that was desecrated nine years ago is so decrepit that the schoolmaster can’t use it any more and has to meet the children in the tavern.’ Drainage. Bridges. Even improved fords would be better. Yeah, I think he’d use us.”
“But . . . ”
“As we would be using him.”
Mark turned around. “I’m putting in for a few weeks of leave.”
Erfurt
October 1636
“Steve, it made me sick.”
Steven Salatto was at his desk in the SoTF’s Erfurt Administrative Center. He’d come out of Franconia in 1635 totally exhausted. Würzburg, the Ram Rebellion. That assignment had stripped him to the bone. He’d welcomed a nice desk job. He and Anita both. Having the older girls back with them and with Diana an active toddler . . .
But it had been a year. A little over. They’d managed to catch their breath.
Now Mark was here, whirling around his office with passion.
“ . . . because Oxenstierna had a grudge against the king of Denmark and stuck those people with a governor who . . . ”
“Who what?” Steve laid his pen down.
“ . . . who Mike was likely to pick up the grudge against, too. Because of who he was; no matter what he ended up doing, one way or the other. Which has pretty much ended up in the category of trying to make bricks without straw.”
Steve heaved a sigh. “I’ve got three meetings on my agenda this afternoon. Come on over to supper this evening, why don’t you? At the house. I’ll call Anita; she’ll tell the cook. We can hash this over. Get in touch with some of the others, if it seems worthwhile. Johnnie F.’s the only one who might have resources. SoTF Secretary of Agriculture and all that. Almost everyone we worked with during the Ram is piloting a desk in Bamberg now. And needed there. Even in the SoTF, life isn’t all hunky-dory. The National Guard presence in Würzburg isn’t there to be ornamental. Lowry Eckerlin says they put in a fair amount of time squelching this or squashing that.”
“As if everything was just great up-time!”
“There’s that.”
* * *
“The place has some financial potential. It’s not going to make anybody a mint, the way mining does. I don’t have any idea what kind of industry it might support, with Hamburg out of the economic equation because it’s an independent imperial city. Bremen’s a fairly decent port for their exports—how long the province can hang onto it though, I wouldn’t predict. That’s politics. I hate politics.
“But before the war—not our war, but their war—those prince-bishoprics brought in a nice income for the noblemen who got slotted into them. It wasn’t just the Reichstag vote that had lords and dukes growling over them like three or four hounds who wanted the same bone. The old lady—Hedwig, Frederik’s regent up in the Erzstift—told me that in 1600 or so, it brought in about a hundred thousand Thaler per year over and above expenses for secular administration and the parishes. Which was nice if you could get it, and explains why old Johann Friedrich could build a castle for his mistress if he felt like it. Income’s down, now.”
“What are they doing with it now? The income?” That was Estelle McIntire. She was still an auditor, now in the less adventurous confines of the Erfurt Administrative Center, but still with a suspicious mind. That sort of went with the job.
“She, Frau Hedwig, is pouring most of it back into infrastructure. The way she sees infrastructure, which isn’t the same way we would define it. Not with the same priorities. We’d think transportation and manufacturing; maybe law enforcement. She thinks church roofs and chalices, replacing the stuff that was stripped from them during the Edict of Restitution period. A couple of poorhouses, almshouses, here and there; one of her requirements for propping up a collapsing Stift, whether male or female, is for it to do charity stuff from now on. She does put a fairly large amount into schools, but those are so connected to the churches that in most of the province, you can’t tell them apart. It’s only the big towns, and by “big” I mean between five and ten thousand people, that sometimes have a school that’s directly supported by the city council.”
“The largest town has ten thousand people?”
“Outside of Hamburg, which isn’t in the province; and Bremen, which doesn’t want to be. Maybe Münster is bigger, now that all the activities of the provincial capital are there. It’s growing, but I doubt that it’s hit fifteen thousand. Westphalia’s rural, rural, rural, with the CoCs almost entirely in the towns. They haven’t even tried to penetrate the villages; most of them are town boys themselves and have the kind of casual contempt for peasants that you might expect. Rubes and hillbillies. Are there flatland-billies? Ten percent of the population is in the towns, maybe—if you take ‘town’ down to two or three thousand people. If you’re willing to grant that every little burg with a municipal charter that it got from an extinct line of dukes back in the thirteenth century qualifies as a town.”
“There’s one big economic obstacle that you aren’t factoring in.” Estelle put her fork down. “Almost every town and village that’s still standing over there is heavily burdened with debt. Mostly from borrowing to get the sums that various armies demanded as ransoms in order not to burn the place down. The ones that didn’t borrow are the ones that are sodden heaps of soot and ashes, even now, contributing nothing to the tax rolls at all. Brandschatzungen. The governor’s financial people will have a list of them somewhere. I can guarantee that, practically.
“A lot of those debts even pre-date the Thirty Years War; the Spanish and Dutch were raiding all through there during the Eighty Years War. After the Twelve Years Truce expired in 1621, those raids started up again. The armies are gone. Whether the soldiers were Mansfeld’s, Tilly’s, or the Crazy Halberstadter’s, the debts are legal contracts with the financiers. The interest rates are high enough that even if the towns put the maximum into paying them off, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them will still be at it a century from now. That’s going to slow investment a lot, when it comes to local resources. I don’t think you want to set up a situation where the whole province will be basically owned by absentee investors out of Grantville and Magdeburg. Or Hamburg and Kiel.”
Mark groaned. “I didn’t need that.”
“You needed to know it.” Estelle was not a woman to tolerate nonsense. She waved her fork. “Have they even thought to ask someone like Phil Hart about the possibility of a consolidation loan? Province-wide, so the towns can pay off early. To get some control over those usurious interest rates.”
“I sort of doubt,” Mark said, “that any of them have even heard about the concept. Economic theory isn’t the strong point for any of the folks I met. Hey, it didn’t even occur to me.”
Estelle stayed focused. “What kind of budgetary oversight is there? Systematic oversight?”
“None, or not much. They have accountants who keep track of income and outgo meticulously, but there’s nobody with the kind of a responsibility that we’d think of as an inspector general. Each of the canons at every cathedral has his own budget; they’re jealous of each other and fight over the scraps like the lords and dukes fighting like hounds over the big bones. That’s not efficient, but they do sort of know where the money goes because they keep an eye on each other. Systematic it’s not.”
“How much malice aforethought?”
Mark laughed. “Are we using up-time West Virginia as a corruption standard here?”
“There’s that.”
* * *
“It wouldn’t be the same as Franconia,” Johnnie F. pointed out. “Anyone we could send over there wouldn’t have any enforcement authority. It’ll all be persuasion. Whether they’re talking to your acquaintance Christian Ulrik at close-to-the-top level of the administration or a peasant in a village, it’ll still be persuasion. For the peasants, at least, persuasion by people who fall into the category of ‘furriners from somewhere else.’ I don’t see . . . ”
“They’ve managed to set up election districts,” Mark said. “On their own, without any ‘I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help you’ input, because the federal government didn’t bother to help them. And the census is close to done. If they combined those two sets of information and created agricultural extension districts with elected boards out in the rural areas . . . and we sent people in as advisers from an NGO. Not from the SoTF, at least not officially.”
Johnnie F.’s head perked up.
“For the peasants, I sort of doubt that any up-timer who showed up would be more ‘furrin’ than Danes and Swedes. All folks from somewhere else.”
“I don’t have any up-timers to send. Stretched thin. Gone as far as possible with the people I have available.”
“How many down-timers have you trained?”
“Lots. I’ve got a good-sized cadre in the field now.”
Mark smiled.
If he could organize some financing, then . . . If he could, he wished he could draft Steve Salatto into organizing the project, or at least showing them how to organize it. Steve was getting a little antsy, sitting at that desk in Erfurt.
There was one big problem with that.
Steve and Anita were Catholic.
The governor of Westphalia, when you came right down to it, wasn’t all that fond of Catholics. Was enforcing toleration, presumably because it was the law. Why else? Because sometimes it worked to the advantage of Lutherans? Because he didn’t have any other option, given the religious distribution of the population? No way to tell.
The people around Frederik, though? The ones who worked for him directly? The ones he saw every day or so? Not a Catholic in the lot. Hardly any Calvinists.
Catholics were way out of the man’s comfort zone.