Eric Flint - 1634 - The Ram Rebellion

Across Franconia, the ram banners unfurled.

Chapter 12:

“I’m Sick To Death Of These Swaggering Little Lords”

Bamberg, May, 1634

“Looks like you have the current hot spot, Vince,” Steve Salatto remarked. “Or, at least, the hottest one.”

Vince Marcantonio stretched. “Spots.”

“Plural? I rode up because of a report of threats to the lives of priests, nuns, and monks by ravening hordes of perverted and monstrous peasants.”

“Threats,” his chief of staff Georg Rudolf Weckherlin added, “which are being reported in numerous illustrated pamphlets, but which nobody around Wuerzburg has been able to confirm.”

Vince yawned. “I’ve no doubt that there have been threats. Mostly made in taverns by people who are drunk and who don’t have any force to back them up.” He stretched again. “Sometimes I wish that I could just lie down and sleep for a week.

“Anyway, there was one threat that Stew Hawker thought was credible, but it was being made by a merchant in Nuernberg against a little convent with six old nuns in it. He has some kind of reversionary right when the last of them dies. He-the merchant, that is-bought it up about twenty years ago. It’s based on an agreement that was made sixty or more years ago between the convent and some noble who was secularizing church property in his lands after he turned Protestant, that they wouldn’t accept any new novices and he got the land after the last one died. The ones who were already in it have been frustrating the merchant by living on and on and on. I think all six are well over eighty now. Stew thought that he was planning to hire a batch of bullies, burn them out, and blame it on the ram rebellion.”

Vince stretched again. “I’ve brought the little old ladies into Bamberg and parked them with the nuns who patched up Johnnie F. and Willard after the beating last fall. If the rapacious mercantile bandit tries anything, he’ll find the convent occupied by several guys who are willing to shoot back.”

“If that’s under control,” Steve asked, “what are your other hot spots?”

“Well, there’s the city council election here in Bamberg. After their little revolution last fall, the new council threw out all the guys who were convicted of being in on the conspiracy to try Willard Thornton. But they didn’t replace them. It’s just been running short-staffed, so to speak. Now election time has rolled around. We’ve already been through the question of ‘who gets to vote’ and settled on ‘all adult citizens of Bamberg.’ That doesn’t get us very far, though, because a lot of the residents aren’t citizens. They’re citizens of Franconia in general, but not of the city, for purposes of local elections. So we have some candidates running on a platform of broadening out citizenship and others running on keeping the current laws. We have…” He paused.

“The ewe?” Weckherlin asked.

Vince nodded. “Frau Else Kronacher, herself, one embattled printer’s widow amid the embattled farmers of the ram rebellion, running for the Bamberg city council. If nothing else, the guilds are so focused on fighting her that, I suspect, two or three other candidates they might otherwise be opposing will get elected. Which, if I read that daughter of hers right, may actually be the reason that Frau Kronacher is running.”

“How old is she? The Kronacher girl, I mean?” Steve asked.

“Not a girl, quite,” Vince answered. “There were two or three kids who died between her and the older boy. In her mid-twenties, I would guess. Maybe a little more.”

“Well, then,” Steve said, “back to the ‘ravening hordes of peasants.’ If they aren’t threatening the defenseless clergy, what are they actually doing? From your perspective.”

“Cliff Priest, the military administrator in Bamberg, has ridden up to Lauenstein to talk to Margrave Christian of Bayreuth’s Amtmann there. We’ve got to decide what to do about a castle at Mitwitz. Big old thing, with a moat. Belongs to a Freiherr -one of the ones who has taken up arms against the SoTF.”

“Just what,” Steve asked, “is the question?”

“Do we and the margrave want to try to bring it down, between us? Or do we let the ram’s people do it?”

“Are there advantages, either way?” Weckherlin asked.

“If we take it, it should be a kinder, gentler, sort of conquest. For one thing, Margrave Christian has some cannon, which the ram rebellion doesn’t. So he could set up a siege and tell everyone to come out. If he wanted to ally with us publicly. Which he doesn’t, yet, no matter what his Amtmann at Lauenstein is trying to talk him into doing.

“Otherwise. The ram’s people at Teuschnitz have some kind of major difference of opinion with the Freiherr at Mitwitz, who has a Halsgericht -the right to impose capital punishment. He seems to have used it rather freely and not always against people who fit the ordinary definition of ‘criminal.’ If we, the SoTF or Margrave Christian, don’t occupy the castle at Mitwitz, the ram will level it. Some way.”

“Would it be a great loss to society if the ram did?” Steve asked.

“Not that I can tell,” Vince answered. “But burning to death isn’t a nice way to die. Not that there are many.”

Steve sighed. “Scott thinks we ought to let the farmers do the dirty work.”

“Scott would. He thinks like a military man. My deputy Wade Jackson thinks the same way. He’s UMWA, and they’ve always been a hard-fisted bunch. You and I, on the other hand, are proper civil servants. Bureaucrats, when you come right down to it. Honest and capable ones, sure, but we’re still pencil-pushers.”

He looked out the window onto the streets of Bamberg. “The truth, Steve? At least in the here and now, I agree with them. I’m sick to death of these swaggering little lords. Let the farmers make a weenie roast of that knightly prick at Mitwitz. Maybe it’ll encourage the others to learn some manners.”

* * *

Melchior Kronacher was watching his sister, instead of listening to the sermon. Mutti wouldn’t come to church any more. They had become Catholic under the bishop’s pressure in the late 1620s. Mutti said that enough was enough. She said that she had been to church enough to last any reasonable person a lifetime and she wasn’t going back again. Ever. To any church. Of any kind. Now that the up-timers said she didn’t have to.

Martha, though, shortly after Pastor Meyfarth had brought things in to be printed last spring, started going to the Lutheran services. Mutti said that either Melchior or Otto had to go with her because the streets were not as safe as they should be. Mutti blamed that on the guilds.

This week was Melchior’s turn to go to church with Martha. He wiggled.

Martha was paying close attention to the sermon. Or, more likely, to the sermonizer. Melchior couldn’t think of anything in a learned disquisition on John 3:16 that would bring such a calculating expression to Martha’s face. Sort of like she was bargaining with God.

Melchior shuddered. He thought that bargaining with God was probably a bad idea. He was pretty sure of it, in fact. Especially when Martha was doing the bargaining. God might end up with the short end of the stick.

* * *

“So,” Eddie asked, “how’s it going?” He looked out of the small room they were sitting in-just a very big pantry, really, with two stools-into the large kitchen beyond, to make sure that no-one could overhear them.

Seeing his somewhat shifty-eyed glance, Noelle sniffed. “Stop acting like a B-movie spy, Eddie. There’s nobody here, won’t be for at least a half an hour-and even if there was, it wouldn’t matter anyway.” A bit smugly: “The whole kitchen staff is with the ram. By now, I’m sure of that.”