1635-The Tangled Web Read online

  "They have their own problems," Clara said. "People in the border villages along the Werra who even now walk over into neighboring Lutheran territories to take communion, after all these years and in spite of the fact that they've made it illegal. Maybe they could just learn to let them do it in peace. Plus there's an occasional Calvinist imperial knight with lands well inside Fulda territory, so they could learn to make it a trade-off. The abbot stops hassling the Calvinists and Lutherans. The Calvinists stop hassling the Lutherans. Then the Lutherans could stop hassling the Calvinists, too, maybe. Or at least stop calling one another crypto-Calvinists."

  She smiled. "Are you sending an observer to the Rudolstadt Colloquy?" she asked.

  "H . . . that is, heck no!" Harlan answered.

  "Do we need a pilgrimage church up on top of a hill?" Andrea asked.

  Roy Copenhaver winced. "You know, sometimes I ask myself if this place is worth all the grief that it's causing us. There can't be more than fifty thousand people in the Stift and town of Fulda, combined. Total. If that many. Maybe forty thousand if you count out all the subjects of somebody else who are just living here."

  "We did get Fulda as sort of an appendage to Würzburg and Bamberg, I think. An afterthought. It's nowhere near as big. Nowhere near as exciting. But if Mike hadn't taken it on, it would have gone to Hesse-Kassel, like Paderborn and Corvey did. And the landgrave would have done the same sort of stuff to the folks here as he's doing to the folks there, so maybe it's worthwhile," Andrea answered.

  "What's he doing?"

  "The longer he manages to hang on to them, the tighter he's squeezing the Catholics. He started out in 1631 just swiping valuable stuff, but being pretty generous about letting the ordinary people keep their religion. But as time goes on, first one church and then another gets handed over to the Protestants; first one and then another Catholic priest gets exiled, till there's just one little church in each town where he allows Catholic services. He fires the Catholic schoolteachers. Then the Jesuits have to go; then the Franciscans and Benedictines and the other religious orders. Then he introduces a religious test for holding public office. So far, he hasn't made it illegal to be Catholic, but it's definitely creeping Calvinism, now that he sees some prospect that Gustavus Adolphus will grant them to him as permanent possessions. SOP, pretty much, for seventeenth-century Germany when a ruler who has one religion takes over a territory that has another."

  "What about this pilgrimage church Andrea was talking about?" Fred Pence asked.

  "According to Steve Salatto," Wes said, "the purpose of this exercise is to keep resources out of the hands of the CPE's opponents. So they can't use them to oppose the Confederated Principalities of Europe. Are the pilgrimages compulsory?"

  "Not by law, no," Andrea answered. "I suppose that if a priest sticks someone with a pilgrimage as a penance, it's sort of morally compulsory. But the constable or bailiff isn't going to make the guy go."

  "Does it have income?"

  "Just what the pilgrims donate. It doesn't have farms or estates or anything attached that support it with dues."

  "I don't think we need it," Wes said. "If it's going to cost him money to keep it up, pay the priests and so on, give it back to the abbot, land title and all. Make that a rule. If it's going to cost the abbot money, give it back to him. Parochial schools, the seminary for boys who are studying to be priests, and stuff like that. If it's going to generate income, keep it."

  He leaned back and yawned. "Solomon had nothing on me when it came to snap decisions."

  Ways and Means

  Fulda, April 1633

  "Your administration has abolished the tithes," the abbot said.

  "Yep." Roy Copenhaver took a drag on his clay pipe. He still missed cigarettes, but the region right around here was about the largest manufacturer of clay pipes in Europe, from cheapos to deluxe.

  "Not just the tithes that the church actually collected itself, but the ones that other investors had bought up as well."

  "So they can sue us. They probably will. It doesn't make any difference in the long run. Everybody's busy. Congress didn't get around to making a law. Mike Stearns didn't get around to issuing an executive order. Steve Salatto didn't get around to sending us any general edict. We had to do something. Whatever Wes decided to do about it, somebody would have sued us, so we just wiped the things out as far as Fulda is concerned. We're building legal fees into the budget request for the next fiscal year."

  "As the secular government, you are now collecting the taxes."

  "That's true, too."

  "And you have confiscated the abbey's estates that produce income in the form of rents and dues."

  "Ummn-hmmn. That's what you get for running off with Tilly and hanging out with Wallenstein, pardon my French."

  "So how do you expect me to support all the things that you have so generously returned to the church? How do I pay for roofs for the schools and matrons for the orphanages and priests for the churches?"

  "Pass the plate. That's how we did it up-time. If they really want the stuff, they'll cough up the money. Nobody says you can't lay a guilt trip on them, even. Try sermons. My wife Jen and I were Pentecostals, up-time. That's how our preachers did it."

  "Were?"

  "Are. But our church was outside the Ring of Fire. There's an old retired preacher, Reverend Chalker, who was caught in it. Must be eighty years old. He was visiting Lana Soper at the assisted living center when it hit, and he's been holding tent services. We should manage to get a temporary building up fairly soon, but there aren't very many of us."

  Roy looked at the abbot. "Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You're in a lot better shape here in Fulda than we are back in Grantville. You saw St. Mary's. Nice church building, right downtown. Bet you never got out into the Five Hollows to take a look at our little arrangement."

  "I suppose there's something to be said for poverty," the abbot said. "Beyond the fact that it's in the Rule of Saint Benedict. Which got more than a little stretched over the centuries, as you can tell."

  "What?"

  "Without the income attached to the prebends, the only monks who are likely to come back to the abbey are the ones who are willing to live like monks. Which is what I've been trying to get them to do for a decade."

  "I think that it might be a good idea for you to send them to Rome," Johann Bernhard Schenk von Schweinsberg said, tapping the pile of pamphlets. "That's why I brought them over."

  The rector of Fulda's Jesuit collegium ran his fingers thoughtfully through his beard.

  "I rather liked Father Mazzare, you understand. And Kircher has a lot of respect for him. But if the holy father is to come to an informed decision, then he should know that the views of the up-time Catholics were no more monolithic than ours are. I, ah, feel rather sure that Herr Agostino Nobili of Grantville would be happy to share all the rest of his piles of pamphlets with the magisterium."

  "I will send them," the rector countered, "to Father-General Vitelleschi."

  "Understood."

  "There is no sense in encouraging the more reactionary elements in the College of Cardinals."

  "I suspect," the abbot said, "that they are perfectly capable of sending researchers to Grantville to look up the Modernist controversy in the encyclopedias for themselves. The Grantvillers will make no move to stop them. The up-timers are strange that way. Most of their leaders appear to be strongly committed to the belief that ideas should flow freely, even when they disagree with them."

  "What did you make of Herr Piazza?" the rector asked. "In some ways, he may be more important for the church than Stearns himself, since he is Catholic and can be expected to understand our problems more clearly. Does he share that belief?"

  "Almost certainly, since he is a strong supporter of the priest. It is as if they drink it in with their mother's milk. Father Mazzare played a piece of music for me on his 'phonograph.' Oddly, it contained German lines. 'Die Gedanken sind frei.' He said that it was folk music. I wa
s not able to determine why they think that folk music and popular music are two different genres. After all, 'Volk' and 'populus' basically designate the same concept."

  The conversation meandered on throughout dinner, adding the mystery of "country" as a designation for music. Why would "country" differ from "folk" or "popular," since certainly the great majority of the people lived in rural areas?

  Fulda, May 1633

  "It could have been a disaster," Derek Utt said, "but it wasn't. Figure that once more we've managed to squeak through by the skin of our teeth. No religious vigilante of any existing persuasion even shot at Willard Thornton, much less hit him."

  "I must say," Wes answered, "that the last thing we needed at this juncture was an LDS missionary."

  "So you sicced him on Würzburg and Bamberg? So Steve Salatto needs him? So Vince Marcantonio needs him?" Andrea Hill asked.

  "They have more resources to deal with it. At least, Steve does. I'm not so sure about Vince. Bamberg is worse understaffed than we are."

  "Hey," Roy Copenhaver interrupted, "Willard's not a bad guy. He's worked at the Home Center for years. I thought you said that people were just interested in his bicycle."

  "I had the pewterer pour a new mold," Fred Pence said, "just in case. I'll be running out of sports pretty soon, but LDS is golf. I've still got tennis in reserve in case somebody wanders in making converts to something else."

  "I haven't heard that he caused any problems," Orville Beattie added. "I don't think that he made any converts here in town, but he left a lot of pamphlets and flyers behind, so I'll keep an eye out."

  "Here in town?"

  Orville sighed. Derek Utt was getting pretty quick on the uptake.

  "On his way out, pushing that bicycle, he stopped at Barracktown. Over there where you've planted the wives and not-exactly-wives of the down-time soldiers. Plus their kids and the usual crop of peddlers who sell them stuff that we won't issue. I haven't managed to get rid of those sutlers; throw one out and two more sprout up, it seems like. I think he made more of an impression there than he did in Fulda. Now maybe the women just wanted to wallpaper their cabins to keep out the drafts, but he must have left several pounds of printed paper behind him."

  "What on earth about the Mormons would appeal to the wives of a bunch of mercenaries?" Harlan Stull asked.

  "They seemed to find the emphasis that husbands should be sober, orderly, hard-working heads of their households and spend their free time going to church meetings . . . umm, an improvement on the status quo if they could get it."

  "I thought that Gretchen had vouched for these guys as okay," Harlan protested.

  "Okay by the standards of seventeenth-century mercenaries, which leaves quite a bit of leeway, so to speak. Once you get to know them," Derek answered.

  "It's not as if any of the existing churches spend much time trying to improve conditions for those poor women and children," Andrea said. "There's sort of a vacuum there."

  "And nature abhors one. Thanks, Orville. I guess. At least for letting me know," Derek said.

  "By the way," Andrea asked, "what have we done about getting a grade school set up out there?"

  They all looked at her.

  "Well," she pointed out, "the people in Fulda won't let those kids go to the town schools."

  "Prejudice," Derek said.

  Everybody started to talk at once.

  "Not in the district limits. There were rules about that up-time, too. We've made a little settlement where there wasn't one before."

  "Can we make the town take them?"

  "Not if we're serious about self-government."

  "We're not in the school business."

  "What about Ronnie Dreeson?"

  "Maybe the abbot could set one up."

  "Using what for money? We've swiped all his revenues. It would have to be a charity school of some kind."

  "It's a peculiar religious mix out there at Barracktown," Derek said. "People who are supposed to be Catholic and a bunch of different kinds of Protestants, all tossed in together. Plus one Turk that I know of who has a Portuguese wife. And an Armenian."

  "If we'd quartered the soldiers out in the villages, the kids could have gone to the village schools."

  "We're not quartering soldiers on civilians, remember. That's why we have the barracks. And Barracktown."

  "Anyway, the village schools around here are all Catholic and the Protestants wouldn't want to send their kids. There's no such thing as an irreligious school. Non-religious school. Nondenominational school. Whatever."

  "Maybe Clara can think of something."

  "H . . . I mean heck, Andrea. Why'd you have to bring up those kids?" Harlan stood up, gathering his papers together. "As if we didn't have enough on our plates."

  This Troublesome Monk

  Bonn, Archdiocese of Cologne, May 1633

  "You could file a complaint of witchcraft against him," the man in the gray hood suggested. "It's much more likely to attract public attention than simple collaboration with the enemy."

  "Against the abbot?"

  Johann Adolf von Hoheneck would prefer to be abbot of Fulda himself, rather than just the ex-provost of the ecclesiastical estate of Petersberg, which had been confiscated by the New United States in any case, which made him just a chapter monk of Fulda now, much to his chagrin. Still, Schweinsberg was the abbot and he found the idea of bringing him down a little distasteful. Particularly in the way of setting precedents. A person had to think long-term.

  "Isn't the abbot the only person we were talking about?" someone muttered under his breath.

  Hoheneck looked at the Capuchin, shaking his head. "We don't have anyone on the ground there to file it, even if the rest of us agreed. The only monks who stayed were the ones from Saint Gall, who surely won't. Perhaps a few of Schweinsberg's supporters have come back, but not in any numbers, as far as I have heard. They wouldn't either, in any case."

  "Maybe if we made it worth someone's while, one of them would." The archbishop's confessor was a tenacious man.

  "Not in the chapter, then," Franz von Hatzfeld said. "But, surely, there must be someone in the town of Fulda? Someone among the city councilors and guildsmen?"

  "Why not file the accusation against one of the up-timers?" Hoheneck was uneasy at the prospect of trying to bring down the abbot. The more he thought about it, the uneasier he got. The bishop of Würzburg wasn't the only high ecclesiastical official with a desire to expand his jurisdiction. He did not consider Cologne to be exempt from it—especially not when the archbishop was a Bavarian duke. How would it be to his advantage to bring down the abbot if the archbishop mediatized the abbey in the process?

  "I don't think that is prudent right now," Hatzfeld said. "But you could include the down-time woman they sent to advise him in the accusation. That always allows for all sorts of sexual innuendoes."

  "But the abbot . . . who's going to investigate the charge?" Hoheneck asked. "And how, since the up-timers have abolished witchcraft as a crime?"

  "Why, the bishop of Würzburg, I presume," the man in the gray hood said smoothly. "Fulda does fall within his ecclesiastical jurisdiction, after all. Or so he contends, at least." He looked directly at Hatzfeld, who was, after all, the bishop of Würzburg. "The Holy Father has never ruled definitively in the matter."

  "Sufficient unto the day . . ." someone muttered, just loudly enough to be heard.

  "And it remains a crime under imperial law," Hatzfeld continued, "so when the ursurping Swede is expelled . . ."

  "The bishop of Würzburg," Hoheneck bowed to Hatzfeld, "isn't there. Just his suffragan. The bishop of Würzburg is here, in Bonn."

  He frowned. Hatzfeld was here in Bonn—under the archbishop's thumb. Hatzfeld's family was supporting him, so he wasn't living on the archbishop's charity the way most of the rest of the refugee Rheinland clerics were, but he still didn't like the way it looked.

  "Why, I should think that is all to the good," the archbishop's confessor sai
d, also bowing to Hatzfeld. "No problems stemming from delayed correspondence. No interceptions by the Jew Nasi and his agents. It should be possible for us to make our wishes clear to him directly. And he should be willing. Unless he is, like Schweinsberg, falling prey to the temptation to save whatever he can save."

  "I have been quite consistent in my refusal to deal with the up-timers," the bishop of Würzburg said.

  "So you will handle it—the investigation into the witchcraft allegations—from here?" The question came from the clerk who was taking the minutes.

  "If we aren't all running away from the Swede by the time the investigation is ripe." That was the same unidentifiable under-the-breath muttering. Hoheneck wished that the men who had not been invited to the table were sitting across from him rather than behind him. He couldn't tell who it was.

  "Hatzfeld can't very well go down to Fulda and hold hearings right under the up-timers' noses, much less use judicial torture while they are occupying the Stift lands," he said. "Who's going to take the depositions and keep the protocols?"

  "Could we possibly get Hesse to file the complaint?" a Jesuit sitting next to Hatzfeld asked.

  "Hesse? He's one of Gustavus Adolphus's strongest allies," the Capuchin said.

  "Sure, but if he thought that he could bring the abbot down . . . not realizing that we have a candidate waiting in the wings to take his place." The Jesuit tapped his index finger on the table. "It wouldn't have to be Hesse himself. He's bound to have agents in Fulda."

  "He has a regular liaison with the up-timers," Hatzfeld said. "One of the Boyneburgs."

  "Too close. Too public," Hoheneck protested.

  "Could we talk Neuhoff into going back?" the Jesuit asked. "Pretending to be reconciled to Schweinsberg? Then a couple of months later, horrified at what he has seen since his return, devastated with shock, appalled . . . you know the script . . . he files the allegations."

  "It might work," Hoheneck answered. "Hermann has a pretty good reputation. And he's scholarly. He corresponds with Grotius, you know."