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Chapter 3


Regensburg, Upper Palatinate

October 1634


The formerly independent imperial city of Regensburg, the Province of the Upper Palatinate’s protrusion into otherwise Bavarian territory on the south side of the Danube, had fewer up-timers than Amberg. To be specific, it had one up-timer. Herr Bozarth had been in Regensburg for over a year. His title was “trade representative.” His exact position in the government of the State of Thuringia-Franconia was vague. Carlo expected to sell one duplicating machine, at best when he climbed off the barge on the left bank, found a day laborer loitering around the dock in hopes of picking up some work, hired him to move the crate, crossed the bridge over the river’s muddy waters into Regensburg proper, oriented his general direction by identifying the cathedral tower, supplemented that by asking directions from one of the customs officials checking as to whether this crate might contain a taxable import, and headed in the direction of the USE Exchange.

The Exchange was new to Regensburg in the past couple of years, occupying premises in the main commercial district, but was not new to Carlo. He had seen similar arrangements—multiple traders occupying booths in one building—in the Netherlands. Unlike artisans, traders really did not need a shop to produce the product or a residence above the shop to keep an eye on their tools and inventory while housing their apprentices and journeymen. Unless a trader was a factor for a massive firm such as the Fuggers, in which case he had at least a nice, and sometimes luxurious, house, their lives were lived in inns, supplemented by warehouse space in cheaper suburban areas. And, with increasing frequency, rented booths in a mercantile center.

This would be—not bad. Perhaps he could interest other traders in a duplicating machine. But the skinflints would be more likely to band together and buy just one that all of them could use. Which was what they did: businessmen were depressingly alike in their desire to keep operating costs down.

Beyond the traders, though…

Shortly after his arrival in Regensburg, Herr Bozarth (somewhat to his dismay) made the acquaintance of one Georg Eckenberger, former Lutheran pastor in the Upper Palatinate, who had been without a parish since the Bavarians drove him out.

In one of his earliest reports, Bozarth, whose real position was “one of Mike Stearns’ cadre from the United Mine Workers,” and who was a staunch member of the Church of Christ, described Eckenberger to Stearns, who was technically a member of Enoch Wiley’s little offshoot of the Presbyterians in Grantville, as a “professional Protestant.” It wasn’t a bad characterization; both of them were familiar with the general type.

In Eckenberger’s case, the status was almost hereditary; his father-in-law had been a Lutheran whom the Bavarians had expelled from Straubing a generation earlier. When the emperor sent Duke Ernst to the Oberpfalz, Eckenberger had hoped to be appointed as court chaplain. No such appointment had occurred, although Eckenberger would have embraced the position with unbounded enthusiasm as an opportunity to defend the just and righteous interests of his miserably oppressed co-religionists.

As it was, the man remained in Regensburg as an unbeneficed gadfly. One who wrote enough pamphlets, and had enough supporters—Bozarth referred to them as groupies for some reason—that he could utilize a duplicating machine. The groupies took up a collection.

This came to the attention of the episcopal chancery.

The bishop of Regensburg was not delighted with the recent political dispensations instigated by the heretical up-timers, placed into policy by the heretical king of Sweden, and summed up to him, on one memorable occasion, by Brick Bozarth as, “I have news for you, buddy; the Protestants can’t keep the Catholics from holding processions in the streets and they can’t keep you from calling in Franciscan preachers to try to convert them. On the other hand, you can’t call on the Austrians or Bavarians to back you in throwing their exiles out. It’s called religious toleration.”

Regensburg had a political bishop, of course. All dioceses (Lutheran as well as Catholic, the Protestants would admit if pressed hard enough) that had exercised secular as well as religious governing functions prior to the arrival of the new dispensation in the USE had political bishops. Under the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, a prince-bishop had been…well…a prince. A ruler. With a seat in the Reichstag. A vote in the Imperial Diet. The last thing any prince-bishopric needed was a sanctified and unworldly type with his mind floating off into some spiritual cloud when he should be thinking about tax subsidies to fund campaigns in Hungary or canalization of a major river or new regulations to reduce the power of guildmasters in imperial cities when it came to restricting imports of tooled leather from Morocco. Leave religion to the mystics and theologians, not to mention the suffragan bishops and vicars general!

Albert von Törring-Stein wasn’t young; he was in his fifties. He’d been bishop for twenty years or so. Over those years, he had dealt with a frustratingly—in his opinion—large number of Protestants: Austrian noblemen exiled by Emperor Ferdinand II who took refuge in the Lutheran imperial city; wealthy merchants and industrialists, large landowners (both nobles and commoners, or would-be, alleged, nobles who nevertheless bore surnames such as Gewandtschneider or Holzschuher), Lutheran Landsassen whom Duke Maximilian had been forced to allow (under the pesky provisions of the Peace of Augsburg of 1555) to leave the Upper Palatinate with their fortunes fairly well intact during his decade of occupation from 1621 through 1631. Now there was the USE.

Things could have been worse, of course. As a prudent man, Bishop Albert had told his chancellor to hire a researcher at the famous library in Grantville. So… First, in this strangely changed universe, Regensburg had not been conquered by Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar in the name of the king of Sweden; second, he himself had not been driven into exile; third, that pestiferous Georg Eckenberger had not been appointed the court preacher for said Bernhard in his now (hopefully) never-to-exist Duchy of Franconia. Although, since Bernhard was now far away in Burgundy, in the Franche Comté, almost in France, entirely on the other side of the USE, it might be nice if he summoned Eckenberger to become his chaplain and got the man out of Regensburg.

He looked at his chancellor. “Call that factor in for an interview. Tell him to bring his machine; at least the manufacturer is Catholic, unlike the IBM people.”

The chancellor nodded. “I sent out a few enquiries. Vignelli is Italian, actually, born in Tuscany; it’s his wife who is originally from the Trientino.”

“Outstanding!” Bishop Albert clapped his hands. “The Lutherans will not get ahead of us in this matter. Send a messenger to this Carlo Rugatti at once.”

In the event, the bishop ordered several duplicators.

As did the city council.

Carlo shrugged and mailed the list off to Bolzano.

It took longer to be towed back up-stream to Amberg on a barge than it had taken to be poled down-stream to Regensburg on a barge. Still, it was far more comfortable than going overland, especially if one was accompanied by a crate.


Amberg, Upper Palatinate

November 1634


Paolo was stomping around the dining room at the inn when Carlo got back to Amberg, threatening to tear his hair out. He pointed toward the corner table.

“Another crate arrived from Bolzano. Where do they expect us to put these things?”

The wall behind the table now featured a poster displaying an exploded drawing of a machine called a typewriter (not yet in production).

“Look at those.”

Those were a pile of stencils for producing catalogs.

“The letter says that we are to produce the catalogs ‘on demand,’ whenever possible, with the potential customer observing as we run his (or her, if that should be the case) copy of it off. Prohorsky is objecting to the odor of duplicating fluid in the dining room.”

There were also stencils for standard forms, a ledger, and a stern letter from a clerk somewhere in Bolzano about the importance of following proper procedures, which they should remember from their training sessions!

Carlo shook his head in wonder. “The firm runs training sessions? Who knew?”

Prohorsky had come to the end of his patience, no matter how Frau Mechthilde coaxed and cajoled. These…Italians…could continue to rent one of the upper rooms, if they wished (it was after all, an inn), but they could not continue to use the dining room to run their business. No, not even for the additional customers they brought in during the slow hours. No, not even if they agreed to pay rent for a corner of it with a table. No…

Fortunately, Frau Mechthilde had a sister (a pain in the neck) who had a husband (a soap manufacturer who preferred a cash dowry to a share in an inn) who had a cousin (a tanner) who had a building (no, not a shed, there was a small street frontage) some three blocks away. Of course, he would not want to rent month to month. Real estate in Amberg was currently a seller’s, or landlord’s market. He would want a long-term lease.

“Six months?” Paolo asked. In the worst case, that wouldn’t cause them too great a loss if something came up and they had to depart from Amberg in an expeditious manner, especially if they could get a provision to pay monthly rather than up front for this structure. It was not a shed, but it was on a side street, nowhere near the market square nor close to having a view of the signature arches that marked the front of the Amberg Rathaus.

“Minimum of five years,” the cousin’s lawyer said, “paid quarterly in advance.”

Carlo, somehow, had found them an attorney of their own. A trained jurist, reduced by circumstances to doing work more suitable to a notary.

Werner von Dalberg gave the other man a predatory grin. “One year, maintenance to be the responsibility of the owner.”

Paolo and Carlo left the lawyers to it. Von Dalberg stood up to bow them out. Up, and up, and up.

They had an important appointment. One that involved not only a visit to the baths and barber, but new jerkins for both of them.

Of course, they weren’t important enough to get an interview with Duke Ernst, who was administrator of the province, second only to Emperor Gustav Adolf himself. They did have one with his private secretary.

Paolo checked a few notes that he had scribbled on the back of a business card. “His name’s Johann Heinrich Böcler; he has a good reputation.”

“By which you mean?”

“No bribes necessary. We only need to persuade him of the quality of the product, according to von Dalberg.”

“That doesn’t mean that we can’t take him out to dinner.”

Dinner, in Amberg, happened at noon.

Dinner needed to be a social occasion, not obviously connected to business transactions.

Böcler was young, in his twenties, a stocky fellow of undistinguished appearance, and according to what Sebastian Kellermeister said, didn’t get out and have fun often, if at all.

So they invited…not their unwitting intelligence sources, not their assets…oh, no…their amiable young acquaintances. Kellermeister, Ranke, and Grube were more than delighted to accept an invitation to have dinner with the administrator’s private secretary at the expense of Vignelli Business Machines. What reporter wouldn’t be?

“Do you suppose,” Kellermeister asked Paolo, “that we could eat somewhere that would be private enough for conversation, but still the fellows from the Forge and the Patriot, and the stringers for the Nürnberg papers could see us having dinner with the administrator’s private secretary?” He tried for a wistful expression. The result was more similar to that of a hunting hound eyeing a meaty bone.

Paolo pursed his lips. “I think we can manage that. I’ve noticed that the dining room at the Golden Lion has a small private parlor. The door into it is next to the fireplace. Frau Mechthilde doesn’t open it regularly, but few bottles of good Italian wine as an additional gratuity should do the trick.”

They had been in Amberg long enough now that Paolo had a reliable source for good Italian wine. Sometimes, when he stopped to think about it, that made him a little nervous.

Frau Mechthilde didn’t open the parlor regularly because, twenty years earlier, it had been refurbished for her late mother after she became too crippled to climb the stairs to the family quarters. She had no intention of letting the nice things in it be ruined by drunk patrons. For a quiet private party, though… The Italians paid regularly, in advance. Dionys and the children helped her push the big four-poster bed into a corner and she drew the hangings to close it off.

The dust wasn’t too thick. She cleaned the parlor every spring.

“Georg Eckenberger may qualify as a gadfly; I grant you that,” Böcler said after his second early afternoon glass of an Italian red that was very good indeed. He was not being indiscreet, at all, but considerably more expansive than was usually the case. “But Count Johann Friedrich over at Hilpoltstein is more in the category of a hornet.”

“Hornet?” That was Ranke from the Loyalty. The general editorial stance of his paper was that the dispossessed ruling nobles, the Hochadel, should, under the new dispensation, retain as many of their rights and privileges as they could manage.

“I will grant a certain misapplication of the seventeenth verse from the book of Jonah, Chapter One,” Böcler said, “for that is a great fish.” He was the son of a Lutheran pastor and knew his Bible. There was no frantic flipping through the pages to locate a pertinent verse for him. “You will find references to the hornet in Exodus 23:28 and Deuteronomy 7:20. Ever since Emperor Gustav Adolf sent Duke Ernst to administer the Oberpfalz for him…”

“That was in the late summer of 1633,” Grube interrupted. “It’s hard to recall that well over a year has already gone by.”

“Since then,” Böcler continued his thought, ignoring the interruption. It was not for nothing that he was the grandson of a Latin School teacher with a splendid talent for controlling unruly adolescents as well as the son of a pastor. “Hilpoltstein has been making full use of his status as one of the hereditary dukes of the Junge-Pfalz, even if, after his father died twenty or so years ago, as the youngest brother of Wolfgang Wilhelm at Pfalz-Neuburg, he only got three districts to collect revenue from and no actual sovereignty over those. As God is not afraid to push his chosen people in the direction he wants them to go, neither does this hornet hesitate to buzz behind the provincial officials to push them this way, or that, or the other.”

“Hilpoltstein got stinking little districts,” Grube commented. “Like a lot of younger sons of the Hochadel, no sovereignty and a piece of land not much bigger than the estate of a country nobleman who isn’t especially well-off. Basically, he got a place to live, one that he had to remodel and expand at his own expense before it made reasonable accommodations for his household, and an annual allowance; he couldn’t even prevent his brother from forcibly converting everyone in those districts except his own family and personal servants to Catholicism.”

Jacob Ranke, loyal Crown Loyalist as ever, felt some obligation to come to the count’s defense. “Ever since Wolfgang Wilhelm was killed fighting against Essen last June, though…”

Grube shook his head. “Hilpoltstein has been throwing his weight around. Or trying. Not that there’s much weight for him to throw; politically speaking, he’s a lightweight. For one thing, all of his children have died before they were three years old, so he doesn’t have heirs. I wouldn’t even guarantee that he would win a match against his sister-in-law. Not Wolfgang Wilhelm’s widow; she’s up in Jülich and fully occupied with securing her son’s inheritance in the Rhineland. The middle brother’s widow—August, his name was—the one who was allotted Sulzbach. That one has taken her children, five or six of them, I think, and established a base of Lutheran operations in Nürnberg.”

Paolo and Carlo leaned back, sipped their excellent wine slowly, and listened with delight. Gathering intelligence was a far easier enterprise than they had ever dared to dream. Disseminating it to interested parties was a matter of a few pieces of paper and a postage stamp. Simple coding and encryption were no challenge and they sent out a lot of mail these days. The clerk at the post office knew Carlo well.



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Framed