1635-The Tangled Web

by Virginia DeMarce

  "How did it work?" Von Buchenau looked at his colleague. Von Ilten had a suspiciously scholarly bent, but on the other hand, it saved his friends a lot of work, because he read the books and explained things to the rest of them.

  "Well, the national government was made up of a group of 'states' just as the Holy Roman Empire is constituted from the different states of the Germanies. And Bohemia, of course. But for the 'citizens' within each state—and they are very oddly named, I must say, I cannot pronounce some of these at all—the 'state' did not stand between them and the 'country.' They were directly citizens of the 'country' as well and had a vote in choosing delegates to the 'senate' and 'house of representatives' just as the members of the Bench of Imperial Knights chooses who will exercise their vote in the Reichstag. At least, if I understand it properly."

  "This means that if we agreed to be incorporated into this State of Thuringia, we would still vote directly for our representative in the USE parliament, rather than being mediatized under the president of the state?"

  "Yes, as I understand it. And, of course, we would also have a vote in choosing the president of the state of Thuringia as well."

  "How does that work?"

  "Hmm," Wes Jenkins said. "Around here, when someone says, 'A man's home is his castle,' I guess he really means it. This hall looks bigger every time I see it." He was standing with his back to the fireplace. Wearing an overcoat.

  "It wasn't that hard to design the presentation," Clara said. Her breath made little patterns of steam in the air. She was wrapped up in three shawls.

  The rest of the delegation now appreciated her insistence on bringing along three folding screens to this meeting. When they were set up in a semi-circle around the fireplace, they not only cut down significantly on the drafts but also to some extent reflected the heat from the fire back on the group. Otherwise, it would have dissipated into the cavernous hall.

  Andrea shivered. "Do you suppose that reasonable nobles like Count Ludwig Guenther deliberately build themselves modern houses? Or is it living in freezing Burgs like this one that makes the unreasonable nobles the way they are?"

  After their first three days as guests of von Buchenau, they had all come to appreciate that one of the main advances in modern architecture—seventeenth-century modern German architecture—was the ceiling. In this old fashioned great hall, what little warmth the fireplaces produced just floated up and up and up until it went out an unglazed window. When they got back to Fulda, they would have to say something nice to the abbey's one-time construction foreman, now the NUS administration's construction foreman, about the ceilings in the administration building.

  "Actually, I thought it went pretty well, this time," Wes said. "Some of them don't buy into it at all, of course. Von Schlitz is still in hiding somewhere and I'm sure that several of the others share his opinions. And some of the ones who were considering it at the meeting will relapse into their old ways of thinking before the election."

  Clara got up and moved over toward the fireplace. "Of course, I left something out."

  "Left something out?"

  "As we have presented it to the knights, it is very strong in showing that they will become direct citizens of the United States of Europe if they accept the constitution of the New United States. Well, now, the State of Thuringia. It will be the same constitution, with just a few name changes."

  "So?"

  "Ah. Haven't you noticed? I left out entirely that all of the people who are now their subjects will also become direct citizens of the United States of Europe, in all ways equal to them, and will have just as much right to vote for their representatives in congress and parliament and the president of the State of Thuringia as they do."

  Wes stared at her. Now that he thought about it . . .

  "Really, I just thought it was prudent to omit it." She looked at the rest of the delegation with an innocent expression on her face. "In some ways, it is very convenient that this is such an isolated backwater that the more extreme propaganda of the Committees of Correspondence has been slow to reach it. Possibly even von Ilten does not realize that if the election succeeds and Franconia becomes part of the State of Thuringia, all the little local legal jurisdictions will be abolished. It is in a subordinate clause, after all, in a subparagraph."

  "Clara," Fred Pence started.

  "If they aren't bright enough to figure out for themselves that although they will not be mediatized, neither will they any longer mediatize their tenants, was it our duty to stir up trouble by mentioning the matter?"

  Fulda, February 1634

  "It's a pretty complicated ballot," Fred pointed out. "It has a lot of 'if, then' items on it."

  "What do you mean?" Roy asked.

  " 'If' the person votes in favor of incorporation into the State of Thuringia-Franconia, 'then' there's a question about whether it will all be one county, Fulda and all the imperial knights together, or whether each little imperial knighthood will be its own county. Or county-equivalent, depending on what they decide to call it. Then a question for choosing the name. Of course, someone who votes against incorporation can still vote about the name, but it's hard to see why he'd want to. Or she. I've tried to make it as clear as possible. Do you think we ought to offer some kind of voter assistance, Orville?"

  "We can't very well put someone in every single precinct to answer the voters' questions. We just don't have enough people."

  "I've trained as many volunteers as I can, working from the voter registration lists. Picking a couple of people out of each precinct. It's been sort of trickle-down, but I've done it. It's not going to be perfect. Nothing is. But I've sent stuff with the directions out to the provosts and the Amtmaenner and the village mayors. They've been, or most of them have been, holding meetings to explain it to everyone. At least, I hope they have. In most cases, it's probably a bunch of guys sitting around in the village tavern and having a beer. If that. And the League of Women Voters has helped."

  "What League of Women Voters? Since when do we have a League of Women Voters?" Wes Jenkins was frowning.

  "The one in Barracktown," Derek answered. "The LDS in Grantville has kept sending them stuff, ever since Willard Thornton went through, way back when. You know Liz Carstairs, Wes—Howard's wife, works for Mike Stearns?"

  "Sure."

  "Well, she's one of them, you know. Willard's sister. She sent a lot of League of Women Voters stuff along with the LDS Ladies Relief Society stuff. So they organized one. That was, oh, months ago. I'm not sure it's real clear in their minds about which is which, but they have one."

  Andrea clapped her hands. "That's great. What about poll watchers, Fred?"

  "Derek is splitting up the soldiers from Fulda Barracks into small groups and sending a detachment to watch the polls in each of the Reichsritterschaften."

  "Intimidation?" Harlan asked. "We don't want that."

  "Anti-intimidation," Fred answered. "If they're not there, several of the knights will be standing around with their own guards 'guiding' the voters."

  "What about the Stift territories proper?"

  "We'll just have to spread ourselves pretty thin. Derek has arranged with Captain Wiegand for the members of the Fulda city militia to vote first thing in the morning and then be available to ride circuit with us, from one polling place to another."

  "That reminds me," Andrea said. "Derek, did you ever get a school started out at Barracktown this winter?"

  "Uh, yeah. Well, we don't have a building, but we have a teacher."

  "Who?"

  "Um, your lawyer's sister-in-law's nephew who needed to find a job to tide him over after the University of Tuebingen closed down because Horn and Bernhard have been marching all over the place down there in Swabia. He's only nineteen, but he works cheap, which is lucky. I wasn't authorized to hire a teacher, so I recruited him as a private, with a promise that I'd discharge him when the university opens up again. In writing. Notarized. He has a copy. His name's Biehr."

&
nbsp; "Beer?"

  "Yes, Biehr. The sister-in-law's sister married a German."

  "Andrea, isn't your lawyer German?" Roy Copenhaver asked. "If not, why not? I never can remember his name."

  "If there's no building . . ." Andrea persisted.

  "In the loft of Sergeant Hartke's house. His wife fixed it up, and we're paying them some rent."

  Harlan frowned. "I don't remember that item in the budget."

  "That's because the budget didn't have an item for renting space for a base school."

  "Where's it coming from?"

  "Umm."

  "Textbooks? Supplies?" Harlan was adding up sums on his notepad.

  "We didn't have any to start with. But Howard Carstairs shipped over a whole set of German translations of LDS Sunday School materials."

  "Err, Derek . . ." Roy frowned. "Separation of church and state, remember."

  "It was those books or no books. Which choice do you like better? They're perfectly all right for learning ah, bay, tsay, day, ay, eff, gay." Derek whistled the German alphabet to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." "Remember the budget and keep it holy. Anyway, Mary Kat says that she thinks it will get by."

  Everybody grinned. Two weeks before, last man on the military rotation he had set up after Joel Matowski arrived, Derek had sneaked back to Grantville and, after a long courtship conducted almost entirely by letter, married Mary Kathryn Riddle. Since she was the daughter of the chief justice, first of the NUS and then of the newly-born State of Thuringia, not to mention a legal eagle herself, it probably would get by. This time.

  "Any chance of more leave coming up?" Derek asked hopefully.

  "For you?" Wes put a doleful expression on his face and shook his head.

  "Well, Dave Frost married Mackenzie Ellis when he was back home in January, too. Lawson got married last November. Devoted new husbands and all that, you know." Dave and Lawson were two of Derek's four "kids," all of whom had done a lot of growing up. "Maybe if the others got back a little more often, they could get married, too."

  "Isn't Jeffie going to marry Gertrud Hartke?"

  Derek frowned. "He'd better."

  "Where is the rent coming from?" Harlan was not easily diverted.

  "The lawyer's relative is from Tuebingen?" Wes asked, thinking back to several sentences earlier. "That's Württemberg. I thought that I told you to hire a local lawyer, Andrea."

  "Maybe the boy was just going to the university there. Etienne was living in Frankfurt as a refugee when we hired him. That's pretty close. And he was low bidder."

  "Bidder?"

  "There's no authorized FTE for a lawyer in my department. I had Harlan put out a RFP for a contractor."

  "Life is so full of interesting surprises."

  "Etienne says that he needs either another lawyer or two more clerks to handle the work load. Or another lawyer and two more clerks."

  Harlan was still adding sums. "Derek, where are you getting the rent for the school loft?"

  "Ah. When we built the barracks, some dope put in an item for landscaping. It seemed sort of a pity to let it go to waste. And we've put some potted plants in the school room. Didn't spend any money on them—the moms just cobbled together some pots from scrap wood, filled them with dirt, and dug up a few bushes. I'm hoping it's enough to get us in under the wire if auditors show up."

  "Are we ready to certify the results?"

  "Yes," Fred Pence said.

  "First, in regard to the question of incorporation into the State of Thuringia."

  The statistics were tedious, but the question passed.

  Eleven of the territories of imperial knights voted to join both the State of Thuringia and the new consolidated subordinate administrative polity (aka SAP, which made Arnold Bellamy very unhappy). Seven voted to join the State of Thuringia but be subordinate administrative polities of their own and keep calling themselves Reichsritterschaften. Schlitz voted "the hell with it and a pox on you and both your political parties." Each of the seven separate Reichsritterschaften only had a few hundred residents apiece, but that was the will of the people.

  Even the dissenting vote in Schlitz was technically the will of the people, though Fred Pence suspected that Karl von Schlitz's two oldest sons had made it fairly plain to the people what their will had better be. That pair would have done well in Chicago under Capone, except that the Mafia probably didn't take Lutherans.

  The citizens of the new consolidated SAP voted to distinguish their secular government from that of the Abbey of Fulda. The name of the new polity would be Buchenland (Latin version Buchonia). This gesture on the part of the majority, residents of the former Stift, to the minority, residents of Buchen Quarter, was widely recognized as generous.

  In a subsidiary question, the citizens of the new polity voted to establish an Ausschuss or Conventus whose duty would be to design an emblem and coat of arms for the new county.

  Applause followed the formal certification.

  So did a petition from several imperial knights of the Buchen Quarter, led by Friedrich von der Tann, who alleged that the soldiers of the Fulda Barracks Regiment had, in the course of carrying out their electoral duties, committed attacks, plundering, unjustified arrests, libels and slanders upon the honor of citizens, persecutions, demeaning statements, alienation of assets, and a variety of other crimes and delicts.

  Wes told him to give it to the lawyers.

  The following day, Derek Utt broke the news that he would now be conducting military musters throughout Buchenland, to establish a county-wide militia.

  The imperial knights whose Ritterschaften had voted themselves into it discovered that they would no longer have their own private militias.

  The rest of the imperial knights said, "I told you so. Don't say that I didn't warn you. Big government. Mediatization."

  Captain Wiegand said that the Fulda city militia would be happy to provide training to the new local units.

  Von Buchenau refused to allow the muster on his estates, saying that the ballot had not contained any provisions about military musters. Derek, with Wes's backing, arrested him.

  His lawyer sent a petition to parliament and the emperor of the United States of Europe, pointing out that he had been paying a tax of thirteen Thaler per month to support the Protestant cause, contingent upon the agreement of the envoys of the king of Sweden that they would recognize the immediacy of his territory. He protested that one aspect of being independent was that a ruler could have his own army.

  The effort that the von Buchenau militia made to spring him out of jail made it pretty clear that the knightly troops really could use the training that Captain Wiegand had offered, not to mention demonstrating that their equipment was more than a little obsolete.

  Wes let the von Buchenau militia out on parole, since they were, when not being militia, the farmers who leased land from the knight and spring planting season was coming up.

  After von Buchenau agreed to sign an Urfehde, Wes let him out on parole, too.

  Schweinsberg told him that this was a really bad idea, and would be interpreted as a sign of weakness rather than as a sign of a generous spirit.

  Wes said that the guy was just a nuisance.

  Clara Bachmeierin agreed with the abbot.

  Salmuenster, Buchenland, March 1634

  Joel Matowski looked at the residents of Salmuenster. Thirty-four families. According to the duplicate records that the local administrator had kept, there had been a couple of hundred houses in the town before the war started. He was here to take their oaths of allegiance to the new constitution and run a military muster while he was about it. Salmuenster was about as far from Fulda as you could get and still be a part of the Stift—well, part of Buchenland.

  The man raising all the objections was named Hans von Hutten.

  He was, he said, an imperial knight.

  He was, he said, a Franconian imperial knight proper and was not and had never been a member of the Buchen Quarter, so owed no obl
igation to any decisions that it might have taken.

  "If you aren't," Joel asked, "then why are you here today?"

  The answer, delivered by a lawyer carrying several boxes full of paper, involved a series of transactions by which the abbey of Fulda had pawned its outlying possessions in the Kinzig river valley to the von Hutten family, redeemed them, pawned them again, split them, redeemed them, and the like, for the past two and a half centuries.

  Von Hutten's position was that he held a currently valid Pfandschaft arrangement with the Abbey of Fulda. If the New United States, and then the State of Thuringia-Franconia, had possession of the abbey's former estates, then by extension he held a currently valid Pfandschaft arrangement with it. The terms were that until such time as the governing entity, whoever it might be, paid him back the capital sum that his great-grandfather had advanced to the abbot and chapter of Fulda, these lands were damned well his and these people were damned well his and the administration in Fulda had no authority to have conducted an election here by which they illegally voted themselves into Buchenland.

  Von Hutten added that he, personally, as a resident of the former prince-diocese of Würzburg, had voted against incorporation, and that even though the majority of the people in Würzburg voted in favor of it, he did not accept that a majority vote was binding upon him. In his view, nothing to which he personally did not agree was binding upon him, because if he accepted the decisions of others it would restrict his liberty.

  "Look, man," Joel protested, as he experienced a political epiphany vaguely related to his half-forgotten memories of Ms. Mailey's explanation of how representative government worked, "that's no way to run a railroad."

  Von Hutten announced that he was appealing the election results to the emperor, to the imperial cameral court, to the other emperor, to the imperial supreme court, and to anyone else he could think of. He proposed to demand an imperial commission to investigate.