Foreword
The maps depicting the boundaries between the State of Thuringia-Franconia (USE) and the Province of the Upper Palatinate (USE) that Sebastian Kellermeister references in Chapter 9 are, essentially, those that appeared sequentially in: Eric Flint with Virginia DeMarce, 1634: The Ram Rebellion (Baen Books, 2006); Eric Flint and Virginia DeMarce, 1634: The Bavarian Crisis (Baen Books, 2007); and Eric Flint, 1636: The Ottoman Onslaught (Baen Books, 2017).
Those three books, along with Flint’s novella “Four Days on the Danube” (Ring of Fire III, Baen Books, 2011) are the works in the 1632 series most closely connected to The Unexpected Sales Reps.
The USE Province of the Upper Palatinate includes more than the historical Oberpfalz proper. It incorporates three smaller Junge-Pfalz territories (Neuburg, Sulzbach, and Hilpoltstein) formerly held by cadet branches of the Wittelsbach counts Palatine, the former imperial city of Regensburg, the former Bavarian fortress city of Ingolstadt, and a half-dozen or so even smaller previously independent or quasi-independent jurisdictions. It sprawls along the north (mostly) side of the Danube River, shaped essentially like a boomerang with the points to the south, from Donauwörth to Passau, about 120 miles west to east. North-south, the distances range from a few miles at the narrow Donauwörth end to about seventy-five miles going north from Regensburg to the border beyond Tischenreuth and Waldsassen. As of 1636, on the east, the province borders Bohemia; to the north, Saxony; to the west, the State of Thuringia-Franconia.