Designed to Fail Read online

  The Alte Neustadt, the Neestedt in the local Plattdeutsch vernacular, as large as the medieval city on the other side of the river, had been established as a planned expansion for the defense of Bremen a decade earlier, furnished with modern fortifications, walls with eight bastions, according to the plans of the Dutch engineer Johan van Valckenburgh. Its resentful residents by and large considered themselves to be the shortchanged stepchildren of the privileged city on the east bank.

  The Neue Neustadt didn’t have fortifications. Or any other normal amenities. It was noisy and muddy. Not to mention smelly; the swine market was flourishing. From Frederik’s perspective, it had one major advantage as a place to stay. However much the city fathers on the east bank aspired to acquire a large hinterland and place it under their jurisdiction, thus far they had not managed to do so. His overnight headquarters were in the Stift lands.

  He set out to take stock of his new responsibilities—being completely sober and still awake, while his officers and staff had mostly succumbed to the effect of too much beer and wine at the banquet.

  Frederik opened his field kit, rooted around for a bit, and hung a blank sheet of paper, one of the big ones that ordinarily got folded eight times to make books, on his easel. He had set the easel up the day before. It traveled with him.

  He drew a stylized crown. At least his appointment as governor had somewhat mollified his father in regard to Holstein. Or lubricated him. Along with a goodly quantity of wine, of course. Christian IV’s personal habits were one of the reasons that his second son was so abstemious.

  Another dot. His older brother Christian had been married to Magdalene Sybille of Saxony for six months now. The up-time encyclopedias said that he did not have children; nothing had happened to challenge that assumption, no matter how many other things were not working out according to the patterns in those books from another world. The happy couple had retired to their own palace and were busy being patrons of the arts. Or possibly, he thought sardonically, being patronizing to artists. Based on the observations he had made of his father’s endeavors as a builder and collector, the two frequently went hand in hand, and nothing he knew about John George of Saxony would lead him to believe that the man’s daughter might take a different approach to the people who had designed and decorated the buildings of Dresden or composed and performed the music that was played for the elector, whether at public events or private social gatherings.

  A third dot. He considered once more his position vis-a-vis his brother Ulrik and reflected that it was no fun being second-string. And after his first superficial survey of his new province, likely to remain so.

  He drew a line. Then, beneath it, a little sword.

  The governor of the Province of Westphalia did not, per se, coming out of the Congress of Copenhagen, have any military forces assigned to him in his administrative capacity other than the one company that was with him today.

  That wasn’t "any significant military forces." It was "any" military forces as far his role as governor went. He didn’t have a militia. He didn’t even have a regiment. His situation was unlike that of the president of the State of Thuringia-Franconia, which had created a "national guard" when it was the independent New United States and kept it when it joined the USE; unlike Brunswick or Hesse, each of which had at least a nucleus from the central hereditary principality around which the new province had been formed; unlike the Main or Swabia, which had some remnants of the Swedish army of conquest available to the imperial appointee and General Horn with several regiments in the background.

  How large would the military force that he didn’t have need to be? To cover the extent of the province, nearly three hundred miles from far northeast to far southwest? Looking rather like a large-headed serpent, the head in Holstein, that had swallowed a goose egg before its short tail petered out in the southwest at Bochold squeezed between the borders of the Low Countries and Essen. He would be surprised if the neck, the land bridge they had given him, was as much as forty miles wide.

  The new Brunswick, from Harburg opposite Hamburg in the north to Göttingen in the south would be more like a hundred seventy-five miles. Only Thuringia-Franconia, from north to south, came close, and that jurisdiction would soon have a railroad through much of the distance; some had already been completed.

  He pulled the paper off the easel and attached a fresh sheet.

  At the top, he placed a random list of numbers.

  Nobody knew how many people lived in the Province of Westphalia. Almost certainly fewer than resided in the State of Thuringia-Franconia.

  He had the best idea in regard to Holstein, of course—Holstein as a whole, regardless of its various internal divisions among the branches of the House of Oldenburg. His father’s agents had tax registers; the pastors kept church registers. The war of the past fifteen years had not caused too much devastation. There might be 230,000 people there.

  On the left margin, the drew a round dot; the name of the region; the possible number of people. On the right margin, he drew a Luther rose as a symbol for Lutherans.

  The Stifte of Bremen and Verden, together, he thought, would have less than half that, but not much less than half that. Here again, he had access to tax and church registers. Two more dots. More Lutherans.

  Another dot. By contrast with those numbers, the city of Bremen’s population should be comparatively insignificant. Before the war, it had counted just under 23,000 residents; even though its numbers had swelled, crowding the residences and spilling outside the walls, the Altstadt still could not have much over 35,000. And growing fast, of course. But in their ability to wield political and economic influence, the cities were always far stronger than their sheer number of people would lead an observer to believe.

  He snorted. Consider the case of Hamburg, that inconveniently independent imperial city forming an enclave in the middle of Westphalia. A prosperous city which, by the logic of the up-timers who wanted to "simplify the borders," should have been, along with its substantial revenues, allotted to Westphalia, but had managed to claw the status of an imperial city with a vote for its mayor in the USE House of Lords. Still, the city of Hamburg could not have over fifty thousand people within its walls, though it had managed to pirate from Gustav Adolf a significant hinterland that, by rights, should also have been allotted to Westphalia. And as people kept coming, as Hamburg kept growing, it would represent a constantly increasing threat to the success of Westphalia.

  Ignoring the nuisance that Hamburg would undoubtedly become to all his endeavors, he drew a new symbol in the right margin next to the city of Bremen. Calvinists. A book, symbolizing the Institutes of the Christian Religion.

  There weren’t many people in the little land bridge territories that Oxenstierna’s minions had thrown into the province to connect Bremen to Osnabrück and Münster. All of the Lippe counties combined, with the addition of Hoya and Diepholz (whose records were jealously guarded by the Brunswick-appointed officials who had been administering them for a half-century), would not amount to fifty thousand.

  Probably.

  That amounted to no more than "my best guess." He drew a circle around them. And gave them both the Lutheran and Calvinist symbols. A mix.

  In the southwest? Most of the church registers were kept by Catholics; he had no access to them. It was astonishing how many of the tax records seemed to have mysteriously disappeared.

  Osnabrück—the Stift as a whole, not the town, which at present was down to about 6,000 inhabitants—had … probably more people than Holstein. Before the war, both Stift and town would have had quite a lot more, but the campaigns of the past 15 years had not been kind. A new symbol, a papal tiara. Catholics, but mixed with Lutherans.

  As for Minden, the city was perhaps the same size as Osnabrück, but the Stift, tucked as it was between Hoya and Lippe, was considerably smaller. And should logically have been put in Brunswick, given that the Lutheran bishop was the older brother of Georg, Duke of Brunswick at Calenberg and ally of Gustav Adolf. He drew an auxiliary circle linking Minden to Hoya and Diepholz.

  Tecklenburg—the Province of Westphalia had this little island of Calvinists by default, because it was tucked in between Lingen and Münster and had to be somewhere. Oxenstierna hadn’t even bothered to mention it, any more than he had mentioned Minden. Or Steinfurt, another little Calvinist island, with its non-university-degree-granting Hohe Schule full of Dutch students. A Calvinist island with Mennonites.

  Everybody deserved a few Mennonites. If they were in Altona and Wandbek in the north, next door to Hamburg, then why not in Steinfurt in the south? The city fathers of Bochold had never been zealous about expelling them, no matter how often Archbishop Ferdinand of Cologne ordered it. Moreover, when they were expelled, they usually walked across the border into the Low Countries, a matter of a couple of miles, and stayed there until things calmed down. He added a symbol for Mennonites: a fully grown adult trying to cram himself into a baptismal font.

  And Altona had a Jewish settlement.

  He could use a better map than the one he had. For which he could use a survey team. Which he did not have and could not afford to pay if he could find one.

  Münster itself? Before the war, the town had some ten thousand people, not counting at least another fifteen hundred non-citizen residents, including clerics and students. The town had been down to eight thousand at the time of the Ring of Fire, but was filling up again, according to reports. He thought that there were probably ten to twelve thousand by now, with more coming.

  The Hochstift, the prince-bishopric as a whole, Oberstift and Niederstift combined, had to be the single most populous subdivision of the province, even after invasions and epidemics. Well, the Niederstift not so much; the three Ämter of Meppen, Vec
hta, and Cloppenburg were large in extent, but thinly settled. Perhaps another fifty thousand people, quasi-Lutheran in the previous century; only half-heartedly re-Catholicized over the past twenty-five years in spite of the strenuous efforts of the Jesuits. The Oberstift might be more populous than Holstein and was officially Catholic; in practice, a mix of Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists. A minimum of two hundred fifty thousand inhabitants. Maximum? He had no idea; it could be a third more. Or twice that many, if you included those working as migrant laborers across the border in the Low Countries. He would count it as at least nominally Catholic. Another tiara.

  Overall? As a total? The new province contained fewer than a million people, he thought. Around nine hundred thousand. Fewer than Thuringia-Franconia, but it might well be the second-largest. Of those, perhaps a hundred thousand at most, probably fewer, lived in cities and chartered towns—granting that Lemgo, Rinteln, and their like, each with five thousand or so, should be classed as cities and settlements of a thousand as towns as long as they had a charter. Which they should. They functioned as cities and towns, trade centers. Nienburg would fit with those smaller ones, except that it was in Hoya, which in spite of anything that the Congress of Copenhagen might have said, would effectively have to remain in Brunswick in the interest of brotherly harmony with Duke Georg.

  Kiel in Holstein and Stade in Erzstift Bremen each had about eight thousand. Those numbers were firm, which was more than he could say about most of the ones he had been doodling on the pad in front of him.

  Before he could establish a provincial militia, he needed a census, to figure out what the real personnel resources were and how they were distributed.

  Before he could take a census, he needed some kind of central administration to conduct a census and execute other necessary measures.

  Before he could staff and pay a central administration, he needed some kind of Estates or other legislative authority to grant taxes over this disparate body of hitherto unrelated entities so the province would have revenue coming in.

  But, other than saying "elect one," the USE constitution provided no guidance whatsoever on the subject of how one constituted a body of provincial Estates ex nihilo or even ex two dozen or more tattered remnants of medieval institutions whose existing members had no desire to cooperate with him or one another.

  One had only to look at the cathedral Osnabrück. Of the 24 canons, the Domstift featured a small Catholic majority; the remainder were Lutheran—a division which reflected the confessional divisions in the region. Harmony was scarcely an expectable or expected achievement.

  Before he could conduct an election … he needed a census and some kind of central administration.

  He concluded his doodle with a flourishing circle and tacked the sheet of paper to the wall. Sat down and glared at it, harboring suspicious thoughts about Oxenstierna and Swedish intentions within the Union of Kalmar. Was Westphalia a province designed to fail? Designed to fail on his watch? Designed to humiliate Denmark—more specifically designed to humiliate his father—with his failure?

  As he prepared for bed, one minor consolation occurred to him. At least most of the area spoke Plattdeutsch, close to Dutch and Frisian, rather than the Hochdeutsch of Thuringia, which might be an obstacle to any of the interfering up-timers who took an interest in what he might do in and for his new area of responsibility. The up-timers. Those. Diejenigen.

  Unless, of course, they were shrewd enough to send a properly educated, Latin-speaking, down-timer as an observer.

  As to who the Swedes might send … for they would send someone …

  He picked up his evening devotional reading, by means of which he was managing to combine the proper pursuit of piety with the prudent project of improving his English, given that God according to His gracious will had caused the arrival of Stearns, Cantrell, and their ilk into his own world, by each day completing a chapter of the recent translation that his Aunt Anne’s late husband had commissioned and the appointed committee had so successfully carried out.

  Deliver me from mine enemies, O my God; defend me from them that rise up against me. Deliver me from the workers of iniquity, and save me from the bloody men.

  Psalm 59. An imprecatory psalm, as his professors had called it.

  Thou therefore O Lord God of hosts, the God of Israel, awake to visit all the heathen: be not merciful to any wicked transgressors. Selah.

  Selah indeed. The proper translation of the word was unclear, according to scholars of the Hebrew language. The Septuagint put it into Greek as an interlude or intermission. A pause to think about what one has prayed, perhaps? Or possibly, he thought quizzically, God had simply included a message to the choir director about how the passage was to be sung.

  Even if they return at evening; even if they make noise like dogs; scatter them; consume them in wrath … Consume them, that they may not be: and let them know that God ruleth in Jacob unto the ends of the earth. Selah.

  And at evening let them return; and let them make noise like a dog, and go round about the city. Let them wander up and down for meat, and grudge if they be not satisfied.

  Yes, David had an outstanding grasp of how things worked. Frederik looked back, a few lines above where his finger marked his place. "Slay them not, lest my people forget: scatter them by thy power; and bring them down, O Lord our shield." A slain enemy could be turned into a martyr by his followers. An embarrassingly humiliated enemy, on the other hand … might be angry but frequently saw his support dwindling. May justice be done!

  He recited Luther’s evening prayer from memory and went to sleep.

  Chapter 2

  Quedlinburg

  July 1634

  The abbess of Quedlinburg, bones groaning, descended from her carriage. The roads from Copenhagen to southern Brunswick had not been in good condition. The roads from Lübeck to Quedlinburg, to be more precise; she had naturally covered the first half of the trip by taking a ship, as anyone with common sense would do. And broken the land journey twice, once in Hamburg to see what the city, physically and politically, was looking like since the end of the war. Then again in Calenberg for a week to see darling Anna Eleanora and play with her children. Still, nearly 225 miles of sitting on a carriage bench left a person stiff and sore.

  She moved her shoulders to loosen them up. A person who, if not yet old, was no longer as young as she used to be.

  If she was stiff, the Stift’s prioress, her second-in-command, was standing even more stiffly. Radiating stiffness.

  "Yes?"

  "While you were gone, the foreign woman arrived."

  "Which foreign woman?" That was not an unreasonable question. Quedlinburg received international guests with some frequency.

  "The one you have brought here as a teacher. The one who is one of those up-timers. Who are not noble, whatever their flatterers and fawners may say about them."

  The abbess looked down her prominent, pointed, nose and nodded. "I will see her."

  Then she considered her groaning bones. "After I have had a hot bath."

  That turned into, after the bath, a bowl of soup and a nap as well. And fresh clothing. The sedate dark colors she considered appropriate to her quasi-religious status as a canoness of the Stift accumulated road dust visibly.

  "Oh, I didn’t mind waiting," Iona Nelson said cheerfully. "I’ve been busy unpacking crates and getting my classroom organized ever since I got here. I brought a whole wagon load of stuff. I have so many ideas about what I can do with the girls."

  The abbess thought that breezy up-time good cheer was probably part of what so irritated the prioress. The idea that someone of lower status might possibly have a right to mind waiting to be received by someone of higher status would be hard for her to grasp. Mind waiting to be received by a born duchess of Saxe-Altenburg? Mind waiting to be received by a half-sister of the current duke, a cousin of the dukes of Saxe-Weimar, the holder (until the recent series of unfortunate events, as the prioress undoubtedly thought of them) of a voting seat in the Imperial Diet?