Eric Flint: Grantville Gazette.Volume XII

Morris grit his teeth. "I said. It was just a job that needed to be done, and-"

"Enough, Morris," repeated Wallenstein.

Morris fell silent. The fact that the King of Bohemia had dropped the honorific "Don"-which was an informal term, but significant nonetheless-made clear that he considered the argument at an end. Whether Morris liked it or not, his new post as a general in the Bohemian army was a done deal.

"Follow me," said Wallenstein, heading toward one of the doors in the small chamber. Even though Wallenstein was only fifty years old, he moved like a man twenty years older. It was rather painful to watch.

After following Wallenstein and Pappenheim through the door, Morris found himself in a chamber in the palace he'd never seen before. The chamber, also a small one, was completely dominated by a large table in the center of the room. The table itself was dominated by huge maps that covered almost its entire surface.

Once Morris was close enough to see the map on the very top of the pile, he had to restrain himself from hissing.

So. Here it was. He'd heard rumors of the thing, but never seen it.

The map had no legend, but the title of it was plain enough even if invisible. The Future Empire of Wallenstein the Great, would do quite nicely.

Wallenstein and Pappenheim said nothing, for a while, giving Morris the time to study the map.

His first impression never changed. The map could also have been titled How Little Bohemia Became an Anaconda.

Indeed, the "Bohemia" that the top map projected into the future did look like a constrictor, albeit a fat one. On the west, serving for the serpent's head, lay Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. Then, came a neck to the east, in the form a new province that Wallenstein had labeled "Slovakia." Presumably, he'd picked the name from one of the future history books he'd acquired. Which was all fine and dandy, except that in the here and now there was no country called "Slovakia." What there was in its place was the region of the Austrian empire known as the northern part of "Royal Hungary," the rump of Hungary that had been left to it by the Ottoman Turks after their victory over the Kingdom of Hungary at the Battle of Mohacs in 1526.

So. War with Austria. Check.

Of course, that was pretty much a given, with Wallenstein not only a rebel from Austria but allied to the USE. Hostilities between the USE and Austria had died down lately, since Gustav Adolf was preoccupied with his war against the League of Ostend. But nobody much doubted that they would flare up again, unless he lost the war against the alliance of France, Spain, England and Denmark. Assuming he won, everyone with any political knowledge and sense at all knew that Gustav Adolf would turn his attention to Saxony and Brandenburg, and the Austrians were sure to weigh in on the opposite side.

Still, rebelling against Austria and establishing an independent Bohemia was one thing. Continuing on to seize territory from the Austrians that had never been under Bohemian authority was something else again.

It got worse. Or better, Morris supposed, depending on how you looked at it. He had to remind himself that, after all, this was the ultimate reason he'd come to Prague and decided to throw in with Wallenstein. The worst massacre that would ever fall upon Europe's Jewish population prior to the Holocaust was "due to happen" in fifteen years, in the Chmielnicki Pogrom of 1648, unless something was done to upset the applecart.

Morris had finally decided that the best chance for upsetting that applecart-a very intractable applecart, given the complex social and economic factors involved-was to ally with Wallenstein and rely on him to be the battering ram.

He still thought that was the best alternative. What he hadn't figured on was that Wallenstein would return him the favor and propose to make Morris the battering ram.

But he'd leave that aside, for the moment. He went back to studying the map.

East of "Slovakia," the proposed new Greater Bohemia starting getting a lot fatter, like an anaconda that had just swallowed a pig. The big new belly of the new empire would consist of most of the region that was today usually called Lesser Poland, a huge territory which comprised the southern half of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the future history Morris came from, most of that would eventually become part of Ukrainia.

War with Poland. Check.

Well… Being honest, Morris knew that was pretty much a given also, if he was to have any hope of forestalling the Chmielnicki Pogrom. The noble magnates who dominated the political life of the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth were bound to be hostile to any project which removed the corrosive social tensions in Lesser Poland. Much of their wealth and power came from those tensions.

From there, the map got rather vague. The northern boundary of Wallenstein's proposed empire followed the Dnieper river from its headwaters near Lublin, taking in Pinsk as well as Kiev. The southern boundary was less distinct, being indicated by a shaded area rather than clear borders, although it generally seemed to follow the line of the Carpathians and the Dnestr river. Morris suspected that Wallenstein wanted, if possible, to avoid any outright clashes with the Ottoman Empire. He'd take what he could, but stop short of challenging the Turks directly.

Marked in faint pencil lines further east was what amounted to a long tail that stretched into the southern regions of what Morris thought of as "Russia," although in the seventeenth century the area-this was true of much of Lesser Poland, as well-was very much a borderland thinly inhabited by a wide mix of peoples.

So. War with Russia and the Cossacks. Check. Tatars too, mostly likely.

Morris let out a slow breath. Maybe war with the Muscovites and Tatars could be avoided. As for the Cossacks…

Mentally, he shrugged his shoulders. Morris had as much sympathy for the Cossacks as any late twentieth century Jew with a good knowledge of history.

Zilch.

Fuck 'em and the horses they rode in on. The same bastards who led the Chmielnicki pogrom-and then served the Tsars as their iron fist in the pogroms at Kiev and Kishinev.

Wallenstein and Pappenheim still weren't saying anything. Morris leaned back a little and started scrutinizing the map again, west to east.

The plan was… shrewd. Very shrewd, the more he studied the map.

Morris didn't know exactly where the ethnic and religious lines lay in the here and now. Not everywhere, for sure and certain. But he knew enough to realize that what Wallenstein proposed to do was to gut the soft underbellies of every one of Bohemia's neighbors.

Silesia, in this era, was not yet really part of Poland, as it would become in later centuries in the universe Morris had come from. Its population was an ethnic mix, drawn from many sources-most whom were Protestants, not Catholics. And Wallenstein already started as the Prince of Sagan, one of Silesia's provinces.

Despite the name, "Royal Hungary" in the seventeenth century was mostly a Slavic area, especially in the north, ruled by the Magyars but with no real attachment to Hungary. Morris wouldn't be at all surprised if most of its inhabitants would view a Bohemian conquest as something in the way of a liberation. They certainly weren't likely to rally to the side of their Austrian and Hungarian overlords.

Moving still further east, the same was true again. "Lesser Poland" had little in the way of a Polish population-and that consisted mostly of Polish noblemen grinding under their Ruthenian serfs. As for the Ruthenians themselves, the name was not even one that they'd originated, but a Latin label that had been slapped onto them by western European scholars. In a future time, most of them would eventually become Ukrainians. But, in this day and age, they were a mix of mostly Slavic immigrants-with a large minority of Jews living here and there among them.