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Chapter 9


Amberg, Upper Palatinate

June 1635


The Crown Loyalist administration had assumed office, with an immense party in Magdeburg.

The USE started to blow up.

Krystalnacht. The dining room at the inn turned into a spontaneous session of self-appointed political analysts. Not limited to the reporters, who were supposed to double as political analysts. Everybody at every table joined in, with or without relevant expertise.

“Duke Ernst has to be even more worried about what Westerstetten is getting up to,” Sebastian Kellermeister said, “given his track records with witch trials. And what the Committees of Correspondence plan to do about it, considering…”

“As long as it’s the CoCs from the SoTF that carry out any measures that may be undertaken,” von Dalberg said, “I believe that Duke Ernst will consider it an internal matter for the State of Thuringia-Franconia.”

“It would be if Westerstetten was in Eichstätt,” Grube said, “because that’s in the SoTF now. But he’s not.”

“Who is this guy?” That was Paolo.

“Johann Christoph von Westerstetten. He’s…” Ranke stopped to think a minute. “He has to be over seventy by now. He’s only been bishop for about twenty years, though—he was a canon in the cathedral chapter for decades, one of the kind who collect the income and even do some work, but put off ordination for as long as possible, in case some better option comes along. Even then, he wasn’t elected bishop right away.”

Paolo raised his eyebrows. “So he didn’t start persecuting witches right away, either?”

Ach, nein. Oder, ja. I mean that he did, but not here. I’m not old enough to remember it myself, but that is something he started out right away, after his ordination. He went off to Swabia to become the prince-provost in Ellwangen. He was there for two or three years, during which time more than two hundred witches were executed. There were reports in the papers. If you want to find out, you should probably send someone to look at back issues of the Nürnberg newspaper. I’m sure that he will be a target of the CoCs.”

Paolo tossed out what first seemed to be a red herring. “I thought those witch trials were in Bamberg. There was a big fuss about a girl who escaped from a witch trial in Bamberg in the early days after the Ring of Fire and came to Grantville for protection. Lots of newspaper coverage. That was in the lectures that they made us attend at St. Mary’s, also.”

Ja, there were witch trials in Bamberg,” Stentzel Grube agreed. “A lot of them, with executions. Not your normal little village flurries with an accusation and then nothing else for twenty or thirty years. But Bamberg was not the only major sequence of witch trials.”

Then he went off on something of a tangent himself. “So Westerstetten was ordained as a priest right before he was appointed prince-provost in Ellwangen, which is over in Swabia, so the up-timers won’t be getting involved with the surviving persecutors there directly, I anticipate. I have no idea what Swabia may have in the way of Committees of Correspondence. If it has some, it will be up to General Horn to decide what to do about them. The coverage out of Magdeburg is focusing north, toward Mecklenburg, mainly. Some in regard to the Rhineland.”

“I agree that it’s unlikely that the up-timers will focus on Ellwangen,” Sebastian Kellermeister said. “Not the way they have on Bamberg and Würzburg, since those are in Franconia and fell into the SoTF. Although Eichstätt is also in the SoTF, so I don’t quite understand…” He ruffled the pages of notes in his hand. “Perhaps because it is in the extreme south. That’s a major part of the problem.”

He pulled out a couple of sketched maps, placing them next to one another on the table. “See, Paolo, this is a map of ‘Franconia’ as it existed at the time when the king of Sweden was the ‘Captain General’ and the parts of Thuringia that had fallen under the control of the up-timers were the ‘New United States.’ So, during the time that you and Carlo were in Grantville.”

Paolo looked. The map used for “civics” at St. Mary’s had resembled this one.

Kellermeister kept going. “Basically, it is a map of what was ‘Franconia’ during the Ram Rebellion. Margrave Christian had not yet brought in Bayreuth for himself—that territory is mostly east of Bamberg—and Ansbach on behalf of his nephews—that territory lies south.” He drew a circle with his finger. “This whole region, southeast of Nürnberg, coming down almost to Ingolstadt, was not a part of ‘Franconia’ then, any more than Christian’s lands were. It was not included in what the Special Commission did, nor did its inhabitants experience the ‘hearts and minds’ campaign.”

He pushed the two maps that were already on the table apart and tugged another piece of paper out of the sheaf in his hand. Paolo moved around the table and crooked his head over Kellermeister’s shoulder so he could see better.

“This is what we thought the boundary between the SoTF and the Upper Palatinate was last spring during the Bavarian Crisis—how it seemed to everyone that it had been delineated at the time General Banér took Ingolstadt. It ran along this sort of wavy diagonal line, from northeast to southwest.” His finger followed it.

“Then…” Kellermeister moved his finger to the third map. “Then, in July of 1634, the Congress of Copenhagen did all sorts of interesting things. Most of the focus in the newspapers published at the time was on the sometimes strange outcomes of its manipulation of the boundaries of the northwestern and Rhineland provinces. As far as the State of Thuringia-Franconia as it currently exists is concerned, however…” His finger described a circle on the new map covering the same region he had outlined on the first one. “It arbitrarily, almost as a footnote, threw this region away from the Oberpfalz and into the State of Thuringia-Franconia. A region that includes the widely scattered secular districts of what was once the prince-bishopric of Eichstätt. The bishop’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction is much wider than those districts, of course; it runs all the way down to the Danube and includes Ingolstadt. Which is still not the SoTF’s problem because the same arbitrary footnoter left Ingolstadt in the Upper Palatinate—a situation that makes no sense at all other than, I suppose, that Gustav Adolf wanted Duke Ernst to have some leverage in keeping an eye on it after Banér took it. Maybe. If the whole thing wasn’t an accidental slip of some clerk’s pen.”

Ranke cleared his throat. “Fortunately, Duke Ernst has been able to maintain an amiable and cooperative relationship with the administration of the SoTF. Let’s get back to Westerstetten. Then he was elected prince-bishop.”

Kellermeister interrupted. “That was in January of 1613.”

Ranke shook his head impatiently. “Between his election and when he fled from the Swedes and closed himself off inside the Jesuit Collegium in Ingolstadt, there were close to two hundred witch trials in the districts of the prince-bishopric, the districts under his secular government, and close to that many executions—more rather than less. He’s what you would call a true believer when it comes to eliminating witches—really the kind of fellow that Krystalnacht seems to be aimed at.”

“When did he flee from Eichstätt?”

“Late 1630 or early 1631. So he’s had plenty of time to foment mischief in Ingolstadt. The real point is that he isn’t just the bishop of Eichstätt and he isn’t just living in the Jesuit Collegium there, which is firmly in the conservative wing of the Catholic disputes over Vatican II. Ingolstadt is under his ecclesiastical jurisdiction—it’s part of his diocese, not part of the Regensburg diocese. He’s also the ex officio president of the university there. And bloody Ingolstadt is in the Province of the Upper Palatinate.”



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