by Eric Flint
Arnold Bellamy, looking at the congressional resolution, cleared his throat and commented, “’Civil?’ Congress does understand that these were ecclesiastical principalities, don’t they? That the rulers of the three biggest ones were two Catholic bishops and a Catholic abbot? That the best one can say about the distinction between ‘civil’ administrations and ‘ecclesiastical’ administration over there is that it’s pretty vague?”
“Well,” Mike Stearns answered, “the down-timer delegates do, at least. On the other hand . . .”
“I know. The congress has a couple of Catholics among the down-timers. And for Grantville’s senator we have Becky, who’s Jewish. And if Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel ever showed up to take his seat in the House of Lords, otherwise known as the Senate, we would have a Calvinist. He, however, is chasing around northern Germany in command of an army unit. For all the rest, we’ve got Lutherans in the NUS Congress. For the simple reason that Lutherans are what we landed in the middle of the state church of almost every place that’s joined the NUS confederation: Badenburg, Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Sommersburg, Sondershausen, Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Altenburg, Saxe-Coburg, Saxe-Eisenach, Saxe-Everyplace Else, you name it. Except for the transients, the refugees who’ve come in from outside because of the war, they’ve all been Lutheran for a century, give or take a couple of decades here and there.”
Mike Stearns sighed. “You know perfectly well what they thought they were voting for. They thought, no matter that it’s officially titled a Commission for the Establishment of Religious Freedom, that it’s really a Commission to Make Catholic Franconia Safe for Lutherans.”
“So does Gustavus Adolphus, for that matter, according to the letter he sent down. Our Captain-General thinks that it’s a grand idea. So does his chancellor, Oxenstierna.”
“What other frame of reference do they have?” Mike was directing the question more to the air than to Bellamy, but Arnold answered.
“At least, since they think they know what we’re doing, Duke Johann Casimir of Saxe-Coburg has loaned us this Meyfarth guy to help. He wrote the original set of German words to that awful tune that won the NUS national anthem contest. And we’re going to need all the help we can get. Trust me on that. Here’s a summary of the reports I wrote last fall when I went down to scope out the situation.”
“Give me a rundown on Meyfarth.”
“Johann Matthaeus Meyfarth. Matz to his friends. Middle aged, more or less; in his early forties. He’s a Lutheran pastor. That’s a priest, if you’re Catholic; a minister, if you’re a run-of-the-mill American Protestant. And he’s a musician, as if seventeenth-century Germany isn’t overrun with them. I expect any day now to find out that the garbage collector on our route plays the flute between pickups.”
Bellamy shook his head. He didn’t like thinking about witchcraft persecutions, and found that his mind would take any side direction to avoid focusing on them. Pushing himself back to the topic, he continued. “But Meyfarth also, for years, has been Duke Johann Casimir’s point man for squelching witchcraft persecutions. As you’ve probably noticed, you pretty much have to get south of the ridge of the Thuringian Forest, down toward Suhl and beyond, to find a lot of witchcraft hysteria. Or more precisely, before you find anybody taking a lot of action about witchcraft hysteria. Around here there’s been some, sure. People believe that witchcraft exists. Villagers accuse old ladies of souring the milk of nursing mothers; or the herdsman’s assistant of maliciously drying up someone’s cow. But it hasn’t escalated into major investigations, examinations under torture, court cases by the dozen, and smoke going up from the stakes. On the map of Dead German Witches, this area right around Grantville is a fairly nice, white, hole among the black dots. Barely speckled, so to speak.”
“So Meyfarth is off to Franconia with the commission to work his magic on the second point.” Mike raised his eyebrows. “Do I even dare to ask how they managed this?”
“I believe that they bribed him with the offer of a tenured professorship at the University of Erfurt. If he survives the experience.”
“What I meant was how they managed to create a ‘barely speckled’ spot on the map amid the polka dots and the black splotches.”
“Oh,” Bellamy answered, “it’s simple enough. Johann Casimir is an old man, close to seventy, and not at all well. He’s been childless in two marriages, so he has focused on projects rather than accumulating bits and pieces of the Wettin family’s properties for his heirs. He has been at this for decades. A long time ago, it occurred to him that these organized anti-witch campaigns don’t happen without money: money to pay the investigators, money to hold the hearings, money to pay the torturers, money to pay the executioner. They are not lynchings, by and large. They are perfectly legal judicial proceedings. Exercising their right to administer high justice, to have jurisdiction in capital cases, is one of those perks that the various rulers protect very zealously. That means that persecutions will not happen if there’s no money forthcoming to pay all that staff. Therefore, if the ruler refuses to allocate money to pay for witchcraft persecutions . . .”
“ . . .he won’t have witchcraft persecutions,” Mike finished for him. “Or, at least, no more than an occasional random case. Not these systematic witch hunts that lead to chains of accusations and hundreds of burnings. Charming. Beautiful. Elegant, even. I think that I have to admire this technique.”
“Just keep in mind,” Bellamy warned, “that we have a democracy now. One duke can take a notion that he doesn’t want to spend money on this, lobby his fellow-rulers, who are also his cousins, and make some progress toward stamping it out, at least in his own region. But if we end up with a majority in congress who believe that witches should be burned, they may well vote to throw money at the problem. We’ve been moving awfully fast. If we ever forget that not all our citizens share up-time values, it could turn into something like letting the inmates run the asylum to suit themselves.”
Mike grunted. “That’s always the problem with top-down solutions to social and political problems. The ideal way to handle a problem like this is for some mass movement to do it. From the bottom up. That’s why I usually try to have the Committees of Correspondence tackle something like this, whenever it’s possible.”
Bellamy didn’t entirely share Mike Stearns’ enthusiasm for the revolutionary Committees of Correspondence which had, by now, sprouted up like mushrooms all over Thuringia and were beginning to do the same in and around Magdeburg. But it was all a moot point here, anyway.
“The CoCs don’t amount to much, in Franconia,” he pointed out.
“I know,” Mike sighed. “So we’ll have to try a top-down approach. Dammit.”
Common Sense
Virginia DeMarce
December 1632: Frankenwinheim, Franconia
“Of course no one is happy. Why would anyone be happy?”
Old Kaethe sniffed as she poured some very thin beer for her husband, Rudolph Vulpius. The wife of the head of Frankenwinheim’s village council doubling in her role as the wife of Frankenwinheim’s tavern keeper.
Kaethe gave her husband a toothless smile. He had been a good catch forty years before, when they married. Even the fact that his family had at some point Latinized the name from Fuchs to Vulpius indicated that Rudolph had some pretensions to social standing in the village. All things considered, he’d stayed a good catch throughout the four decades that followed the wedding.
“It will be hard for these ‘up-timers’ to be worse than the Swedes were last winter.” He smacked his stein down on the table with a thump.
That seemed to be the only consensus the village had reached so far.
Constantin Ableidinger, the school teacher, tipped back precariously on his three-legged stool. He was a stocky man, bull-necked, broad shouldered, with straight black hair, brown eyes, and a dark olive complexion. “When do you expect Tobias to get back from Bamberg?”
“Today, perhaps. He’s a reliable boy.” The mayor was justifiably proud of his oldest grandso
n.
“If we’re lucky, he’ll bring more information. I sent some money with him, to buy pamphlets and newspapers for sale. We shouldn’t just read the free things that the up-timers are handing out.”
The mayor frowned. “Das Erfolgreiche Dorf,” he snorted. “Why do we need foreigners to tell us how to make a village successful? We could make our village successful without their advice. Which, I would like to point out, we never asked for. We know what we need. In fact, before the damned war, we had most of it. A bell in our church tower. Now melted down by the soldiers. A bridge across the creek. Now with its timbers taken for firewood by the soldiers. A stone-lined ditch from the spring on the hill, so we had water here and the boys and girls didn’t have to spend half the day going up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Which we can probably have again, once we get the ditch cleared out. They ruined that just for the meanness of it.”
“At least we have the free pamphlets,” Ableidinger pointed out. “When the Swedes burned the school house last winter, they burned most of the books we had with it. The ones that weren’t in my cottage, anyway. So I’m using these ‘hand-outs’ for the children to read. Some of them are pretty good. The one they call Die Wochentliche Bauernzeitung is the best, I think. Apparently these up-timers have an organization called a ‘grange’ that’s been publishing this weekly newspaper for farmers for almost a year up in Thuringia. We’ve only gotten a few issues, so far. Mostly old ones. It has articles on farming, of course, but also woodcuts and jokes. Stories for fathers to read to their families in the evenings.”
The village pastor frowned. “Very few of them are edifying.” Otto Schaeffer didn’t find many things to be edifying, once the members of his flock had completed their perusal of Luther’s Shorter Catechism. Which, he thought, they should peruse much more regularly than most of them did.
Ableidinger shook his head. “They aren’t biblical or classical. But some of them are really funny. Especially the woodcuts, the ‘cartoons.’ One of the issues introduced ‘Peter Baufaellig.’ He makes me think that maybe we’ll be able to understand these up-timers after all. The introduction said that there were woodcuts about him in a newspaper about farming up-time. The head of this ‘grange’ read about this ‘Peter Tumbledown’ when he was a child. Every village has a man like that now. I guess every village still had one then. The one who doesn’t oil his harness, who lets his hinges rust, who doesn’t fix the leak before something inside is ruined.”
“Materialistic,” the pastor proclaimed.
“Fixing things that need fixing fits into ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,’ Ableidinger said stubbornly.
Kaethe frowned. She, along with most of the women, thought the village was lucky to have Ableidinger as its teacher, even if he wasn’t local. His family had been Lutheran refugees out of Austria who had settled up around Coburg. He wasn’t an easy man, but he kept the children disciplined and, most of the time, interested. That wasn’t easy. Energetic and vigorous, at least when the melancholy didn’t seize him. Moody, when it did. In that case, there wasn’t much to be done except wait it out. And feed the boy, of course, if his father forgot to. Matthias was a good boy, well worth a few bowls of soup or porridge.
Kaethe knew that Pastor Schaeffer wasn’t as pleased as Frankenwinheim’s mothers and grandmothers were. She also knew one main reason why. It wasn’t just that the teacher-who was, of course, also the organist back before the soldiers had smashed the organ, as well as the sexton and the clerk for the village council, since no one could reasonably expect a man to survive on what a village schoolteacher earned, much less feed a family-had lived in the village for years before the new pastor came and knew the people better. It was that he had been to the university at Jena, just like the pastor. He had finished the arts curriculum and started to study theology before he was thrown out for getting a baker’s daughter pregnant and marrying her.
She shook her head. Rudolph kept saying mildly that this was the young pastor’s first job and he was still full of himself and all of his book-learning. Rudolph argued that Pastor Schaeffer would season all right if they just put up with him for a while.
She sort of doubted it. Ableidinger, who was fifteen years older than his new supervisor, was sure that he knew just as much and probably more. He didn’t hesitate to say so in public, either. She moved over to the window, pulling back one of the wooden shutters that kept out the winter air, hoping to find a distraction in what was left of the winter daylight that would head off another dispute between God’s representatives on earth-or, at least, between God’s representatives in Frankenwinheim.
It didn’t help that Pastor Schaeffer so strongly disapproved of Ableidinger’s marriage. The pastor was still unmarried. He had heard all about the scandal when he was studying in Jena-a Professor Lenz had told him all about it. He still disapproved strongly, even though the poor woman had been dead for five years now.
Kaethe shook her head. Maybe the pastor had skipped over, “Let the dead bury their dead.”
Today, she was lucky. “Tobias is coming,” she said. “And it looks like his rucksack is full.”
* * *
“It’s a new one.” Vulpius picked up Die Moderne Landwirtschaft, which Tobias had shaken out onto the table in front of his grandfather. “Modern Agriculture, no less. Our new governors must be setting out to make every printing press in Bamberg profitable.”
Ableidinger moved over to stand at the shutter Kaethe had opened, sorting through a package of pamphlets that he had ordered from Wuerzburg. That was where the new governors of Franconia had set up the center of their administration, so he thought that the most important publications were likely to be printed there-not in Bamberg, which was just a regional center, if he understood the newspaper right.
The stack wasn’t as big as he would have liked it to be. It was going to be another grim winter. If food was scarce and prices went up, he had to keep some kind of a reserve if he was going to feed his son and himself. He could afford a few short items and broadsides, but he could not risk buying expensive books. Not this year, no matter how glum it made him. Winter was a glum time in the best of years, with the days so short. Glum. Grim. The only comfort was having something to read.
So the small size of the package that Tobias had been able to buy was discouraging. He picked up the first. Der Gesunde Menschenverstand. Below, the subtitle read, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” Translated into German, with an Explanation of Unfamiliar Terms.
He frowned. The first unfamiliar term was “common sense.” He had never heard of something called gesunder Menschenverstand. “Healthy human understanding?” He thumbed through the foreword. The translator had considered using schlichte Vernunft as an alternative translation before settling on the one he chose.
“Simple reason?”
He had just begun to lose himself in reading the pamphlet when Rudolph Vulpius started to laugh. “Here, Pastor Schaeffer. You being named a shepherd, here’s one for you.” Vulpius tossed an issue of Die Wochentliche Bauernzeitung, one that hadn’t previously reached Frankenwinheim, across the rough boards of the table.
Schaeffer read the page, the expression on his face becoming grimmer with each line.
Stuffing Common Sense into his belt, Ableidinger came back to the table, looking over the pastor’s shoulder. It was the entertainment page. At the top, large type proclaimed, The latest from Grantville. Just below, on the left, was a woodcut of a scruffy but very well-endowed ram. The title was Schade, Brillo! Schade! “Shame on you, Brillo! Shame!”
“What’s a Brillo?” Old Kaethe asked. She was looking over the pastor’s other shoulder with no more deference to his status than Ableidinger showed.
“Maybe it explains it somewhere in the story,” Vulpius said.
Pastor Schaeffer was turning red and starting to sputter.
“For the sake of your health,” Ableidinger said, reaching over and taking the newspaper. “It’s a fable, like Aesop. That�
��s classical enough.” He started to read it out loud for everyone in the tavern. His booming voice, trained in rhetoric and debate, caught the attention of even the people who didn’t pay much attention to the politics of the village or the region. “The English title of the story was Bad, Ba-a-a-ad, Brillo!”
Everyone knew animal fables. Nobody had trouble figuring out that Brillo, whatever a Brillo might be, stood for the sturdy German farmer. Nor that the merino ram stood for the rulers who made their lives difficult.
Ableidinger was no more than half way through when Pastor Schaeffer got up and left the tavern.
None of the rest of the audience paid any attention to his disapproval. Frankenwinheim provided him with an unruly flock.
Kaethe pulled the shutter closed and brought in an oil lamp. “Read it again,” she ordered. “Maybe there’s something to be happy about, after all.”
Rudolph blinked up at her. “What?”
“The up-timers printed it, didn’t they? The plain old ordinary ram was clever enough to outwit the highly-bred one. This wasn’t smuggled in. Our new rulers-they printed a fable in which this Brillo triumphed.”
Ableidinger grinned. “Not edifying, of course. To be properly edifying, I’m sure Pastor Schaeffer would insist that Brillo should have come to a proper insight that God the Father had established the merino ram as the representative of His secular sword on earth and deferred to the gentleram, giving him proper precedence.”
“Teacher.” Old Kaethe rapped him on the top of the head. “That’s not respectful.”
Ableidinger nodded. “I know.” His voice rumbled as he started reading through the fable again.
* * *
He had to read Schade, Brillo! Schade! a half-dozen times. Not that the rest of the villagers couldn’t read, but they only had one copy of the story. In any case, most people would rather hear something read out loud, with feeling and emphasis in the reader’s voice. By the time they got out of the tavern, it was full dark. Old Kaethe had given them a crock of hot broth to dunk their bread. Matthias was sleeping on his cot. The comfort in his stomach had put him right to sleep.