Chapter 4
The following week, the hornet’s sister-in-law announced, with considerable pomp and advance publicity, that she was coming to town for serious discussions with Duke Ernst.
“She’s been in Amberg before,” Sebastian Kellermeister told Paolo. “Since the Swedish takeover, I mean. She’s been here lots of times. Why is she making such an occasion of it now?”
It was probably reparations.
So reparations became the theme of that evening’s conversation.
“Almost the first thing that the Swedes had to deal with after they conquered the Upper Palatinate in 1632 was reparations demands of their own by the exiles, the Exulanten, who had been faced with the ‘convert or emigrate’ demands of Maximilian of Bavaria’s officials after Ferdinand II turned the Oberpfalz over to him as ‘war reparations’ in 1621.”
“He’s talking about the Lutheran exiles,” Ranke pointed out. “Since the Calvinists weren’t covered by the provisions of the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, the Bavarians could throw them out and didn’t have to let them take their property. I’m sure that a lot of them were glad enough not to be executed.”
Kellermeister wrinkled his nose. “Anyhow, there were several months when, almost every week, there was a headline saying something like:
Von Gleißenthal Returns from Saxony
or
Portner Arrives from Altdorf; Petitions for Return of Lands at Theuern.”
He winked. “The one that really warmed my father’s heart was:
Confiscations of Property of those Emigrants Who Attached Themselves to the Swedish King to Be Reversed.”
Ranke’s explanation was more pedantic. “To maintain legal legitimacy, Maximilian’s officials did have to allow the Lutherans to sell or take along their personal property, and give them time to arrange the sale of real estate, which some of them managed to drag out for years, not to mention that a lot of them used ‘inability to find a suitable buyer’ as an excuse to come back for visits from wherever they had perched themselves.”
“Most of them didn’t go too far,” Grube added. “After all, there was a war on, so they kept hoping that the other side would toss Maximilian’s officials out in turn, which the Swedes eventually did.”
“If they had gone through with what amounted to a forced sale, though, now they wanted their property back. When von Dalberg first came to Amberg,” Ranke added, “he was hired to represent the title claims of Catholic buyers during the Bavarian occupation.”
“Such as they were.” Kellermeister wriggled. They’d been sitting on this unpadded wooden bench for the better part of an hour. “Most of them claimed to have bought in good faith, even though they must have realized that real estate in the Upper Palatinate was a pretty risky investment, given that Maximilian got it through the tides of war and the war was far from reaching a decisive end.”
“He didn’t stick with it very long.” Grube shifted position, too. Cushioned benches would be nice. Of course, in a room like this, they would soon be hopelessly filthy from spills and messes.
“Who didn’t stick with what very long?” Carlo had lost track.
“Von Dalberg with Catholic land titles.” That was Ranke.
“I was thinking that it’s too bad there’s no way to have cushions on these benches,” Grube readjusted his position again. “But there’s nothing that Frau Mechthilde could wipe off the way she does the tables.”
“There is in Grantville,” Paolo said. “I’ve sat on it. It was called vinyl.”
“Didn’t know you’d been in Grantville.” Ranke never missed a beat.
“Factors—excuse me, sales representatives—get around.”
Carlo grinned. “Sometimes, the cushions covered with it made funny farting noises when a man sat down. I loved it when they did that.”
“Vinyl is one of those things the up-timers say there won’t be any more of,” Paolo said. “Or, if there is, none of us will live to see it.”
“A person could use leather, maybe?”
Carlo pursed his lips. “Even leather soaks up stains the way that vinyl didn’t.”
“Maybe oiled leather?”
“What kind of oil?”
“Does this have anything to do with what we were discussing?”
“No. But, however, that may be,” Grube answered, “cushions would be nice, and there were endless demands for reparations, resulting in lots of work for paper pushers.”
Carlo picked up his beer. “Actually, he’s our lawyer. He’s supposed to drop by in a few minutes with some final paperwork, so we can move all this stuff over to the shed…err…shop. I’ll introduce you.”
***
The shed-to-shop transformation involved a surprising amount of work.
A couple of laborers spent a day scrubbing the grime off the interior with lengths of old hempen rope and harsh lye soap, ruthlessly evicting spiders and beetles. When Paolo examined the result, his eyes blinking a bit from the soap fumes, he hired them for a second day and bought four large pails of whitewash. The next evening, the not-a-shed smelled like chalk, which was an improvement on lye soap, and far better than whatever it had last contained before it was cleaned. But the white walls reflected light and made the floors look worse.
He had suspicions about what might have been the previous use of the place, involving an unsuccessful effort to cultivate mushrooms that had left trays of the fungus to rot in place. If it had worked, though… Paolo liked fresh mushrooms. Maybe…
Whatever had been in them, the floor was marked by odd, tray-shaped, stains. Those required hiring the laborers for a third day, more old hemp rope, more lye soap, and a lot of linseed oil. Linseed oil stayed sticky for weeks, but eventually cured well on wood. They didn’t have time to wait, so they would have to move into a building that smelled like flax, which wasn’t pleasant, but the odor should be gone in a month. Or two.
Right now, he looked at the reporters hopefully. Young men, strong backs. He would rather not have to pay the laborers for a fourth day. His savings were suffering from all this.
“Do any of you know where we could borrow a couple of wheelbarrows?”
As it happened, they did. After the wheelbarrow parade down the street the next day, which was punctuated by Paolo’s anxious admonitions of, “don’t bounce the barrow on the cobblestones like that—some of the machinery is delicate,” the well-lubricated amateur moving crew retired once more to the inn. To even more beer. To even more conversation.
The beer ended up costing as much as hiring the laborers for a fourth day would have.
At the end of the evening, the delighted Carlo remarked, “Sometimes, I think they like to talk even more than they like to write. What was that song about words that a girl sang in one of the plays we saw at the high school in Grantville? About words all day long, until she was tired of hearing words? I never get tired of hearing words. They’re often so informative.”
***
Now they had added their attorney to the group that talked. And talked. And talked. Not as a regular member, but von Dalberg was an occasional visitor.
“Interesting man,” Sebastian had said after the lawyer left the first evening that he joined the group who drank Frau Mechthilde’s beer. “He’s sure never going to have a problem looking over the heads of other people in a crowd.”
Ranke frowned, picking up the previous evening’s dissection of the impact of the Bavarian occupation on real estate. “He’s Catholic.”
“What does that have to do with how tall he is?”
“Nothing. As I was saying, the Bavarians, and by ‘Bavarians’ I mean Catholics whether they came from Bavaria or someplace else, confiscated all of the churches and church property—that included almost every school, of course—and turned them into Catholic equivalents.”
“There were lectures.” Carlo leaned one elbow on the table. “While we were in Grantville, after the Wartburg. That was 1632. Part of what happened in Grantville were ‘civics’ lectures for the former mercenaries who had survived the up-timers’ early battles. Some had been taken prisoner; some had come in as refugees.” He added a second elbow. “We are Catholic, of course, Paolo and I, so our lectures were mostly at the Catholic church—St. Mary’s, it’s called. Pretty stained glass windows, made in Austria, so the wonderful America didn’t have everything; they had to buy some things from us. Or from our many-times great-grandchildren. The colors in the glass were too pale, I thought, but there’s no accounting for taste.”
“Rugatti!” Ranke rapped his knuckles on the table. “Get to the point. We don’t care about…”
“Someone might. Father Heinzerling talked about something called the Counter Reformation, the Council of Trent, and that Catholics would rather call it the Catholic Reformation. He went on and on and on.” He grinned. “I think he’d avoided the whole movement, himself. He was married with children.”
Grube stuck his tongue out. “Aren’t ninety percent of priests who haven’t taken monastic vows? Even if the rigid celibates insist that the ‘housekeepers’ are concubines rather than wives?”
Ranke ignored the interruption. “What Duke Maximilian’s version of the Catholic Reformation, or Counter Reformation, or whatever the up-timers decided to name it, meant here in Amberg, in the Upper Palatinate as a whole, was that everyone had to decide whether to return to the ‘old belief’ or leave. Expatriation, that’s what they called it when they left.”
“I wasn’t here,” Stentzel Grube said. “My family was still in Moravia.”
“Mine was in Saxony,” Ranke admitted. “Make that already in Saxony, to be precise. My mother had inherited some property there. She wishes I’d give up journalism, go back, and run it.”
“Mine decided to leave,” Sebastian said. “I came back from Bayreuth right after the Swedes arrived, but my parents have stayed there. It was mainly the richer families who left; they had the funds to settle and make lives elsewhere. Men like Kaspar Maier—he was one of the four Bürgermeister at the time Maximilian issued the edict.”
“Why four?” That was Carlo.
“They serve in three-month rotations. Normally, they are chosen from the most prosperous patricians of the town, but they still have businesses to run, after all. Full-time office holding would be a major burden,” Ranke answered.
Kellermeister continued, undisturbed by the interruption. “That isn’t relevant to the choices that most people made about emigration, and that includes most of the fifty or so members of both city councils who obligingly converted. What was the average shopkeeper or artisan to do? There’s never any guarantee, if a small shop owner or artisan leaves his home town, that the guilds will allow him to reestablish himself somewhere else, wherever he ends up or that any other town will accept him as a citizen. Much less the peasant farmers.”
“Somehow, you don’t strike me as coming from the rich ones,” Paolo said.
“No, but my parents could afford to make that choice. My family certainly was not among the wealthy, but my father can find a job anywhere he goes. There’s no such thing as a school teachers’ guild and you don’t need capital to buy into that employment. The human mind is a portable commodity, even if businessmen tend to look down at those who live by it and ask, ‘if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?’”
Grube poked into the conversation. “The peasants couldn’t afford to leave, but the landowners, the Landsassen like Hans Friedrich Fuchs auf Winklarn could, in hopes that they could continue to collect the rents from the peasants for the time being, get a substantial amount of capital if the forced sale went through, and buy in somewhere else.”
Werner von Dalberg jerked his head up. “Fuchs!”
“Hans Friedrich Fuchs is an honorable man,” Jacob Ranke said stiffly. “He’s from the Fuchs von Walberg family up around Tischenreuth in the north. He was the Landmarschall of the Estates before the Bavarians took over. That is perhaps, something like the speaker parliament. He’s nothing like that man over in Franconia who caused so much trouble for your beloved up-timers during the Ram Rebellion. Since the first intervention of the Swedes in the conflict, he has served Gustav Adolf with complete loyalty, first as his commissary in Nürnberg and then…”
“Enough. I take your point,” von Dalberg answered.
“Well, to get back to what I was saying then…” Kellermeister put down his stein and waved to Frau Mechthilde for a refill. “If a peasant gave up his lease, he wasn’t likely to find another one. If he went to Saxony or Ansbach, he’d run the major risk of ending up as a day laborer; a hired man in service on an annual contract if he was lucky. At that, a peasant had more choice than household servants or apprentices. They aren’t permitted to walk out on their masters, no matter what their personal consciences may tell them, until the contract expires.”
Ranke put his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers. “Martyrdom may be meritorious, but it’s not easy on the people who choose it; more than one of the Exulanten died in poverty, if you examine the records.”
Von Dalberg nodded his agreement, if a little reluctantly.
Ranke kept expounding on his theme. “The most fortunate daughters of prominent families married Swedish officers and their brothers studied at universities or became junior officers themselves. The less fortunate daughters of prominent families ended up in service to glass blowers or brewers and their brothers considered themselves fortunate to be allowed to join a regiment as a common soldier.”
Kellermeister looked at Carlo. “Figure that ten percent of the population left. The remainder decided that they might as well be Catholic. After all, if you’ve already been jerked around several times by the rulers from Lutheran to Calvinist to Lutheran to Calvinist—what’s one more conversion? I’d say that every person who went into exile had at least one brother or cousin or in-law who took the conversion route and was in place to claim the family’s estates if the Bavarians confiscated them.”
It might be reparations that were bringing the countess of Pfalz-Sulzbach to Amberg this time. But, then again, it might not. As a good reporter should, Sebastian Kellermeister set out to find out. He was absent from the Stammtisch for several days.