The Dreeson Incident(215)

Emperor Gustav Adolf would be flooded with petitions in the time that followed, demanding that he do something about the horrid state of affairs in Mecklenburg.



But . . .



The Mecklenburg nobility really had been a monumental nuisance for him. Given their preferences, which they continued to express with extraordinary tenacity at meetings of the Estates even after Gustav Adolf became duke, the nobles of Mecklenburg would have turned the duchy into a mini-Poland with its duke having no more financial or military authority than Wladyslaw IV. So he always found reasons to delay doing anything about those petitions. Figuring that, as the years went by, the disgruntled older Mecklenburg noblemen would start dying off and their younger kin start blending in elsewhere.





There was very heavy fighting in the Province of the Main, too, although it never assumed the scale of the civil-war-in-all-but-name that it did in Mecklenburg. The critical difference was that the nobility and the town elites stayed out of it, at least as organized groups.



The Rhineland had been the hotbed of anti-Semitism in the Germanies going back well into the Middle Ages. Anti-Semitism was common everywhere, but it was among the urban artisan classes that it developed the most fervor and violence, and no part of the Germanies was as urbanized as the Rhineland.



That meant the CoC columns were clashing with people from the very same classes that provided most of their strength and support—and were doing so in areas where the CoCs themselves hadn't yet sunk the very deep roots they had in provinces further to the east. To a large degree, what was happening in the Province of the Main and the neighboring areas amounted to a civil war within a civil war. The Committees of Correspondence were establishing in towns up and down the Rhine and the Main—by force, when need be—the same authority among their own supporters which they had established in the eastern and central Germanies over a longer period, using only persuasion and moral agitation.



To make the situation still more chaotic, the neat lists of "agitators" and "groups" and "organizations" that Francisco Nasi had provided the CoCs were more a reflection of the needs of efficient record-keeping than the actual reality on the ground. In the eastern and central Germanies, as a matter of self-defense if nothing else, every political movement no matter of what stripe or persuasion had begun adopting the rigorous organizational methods of the CoCs. Which had, in turn, been heavily influenced by the habits and attitudes of the Americans, accustomed as they were to the level of social and political organization common to advanced industrial societies of the late twentieth century.



But the Rhineland, for the most part, was still in the past. Anti-Semitic "organizations" were really more in the way of loose associations that formed and disintegrated in response to specific impulses. As a rule, those impulses were provided by a particularly effective or charismatic individual agitator, who would be the one to actually incite the violence.



These men were usually clerics of one sort of another. Low level clerics, at that. Itinerant mendicant friars, in Catholic areas; junior clergy looking to make a reputation and get a permanent parish assignment in Lutheran regions. Such were the names that appeared in Nasi's lists as "leaders" and "central figures" of anti-Semitic "groups."



The reality was quite a bit more fluid—which made for a very fluid sort of armed struggle. Typically, these anti-Semitic agitators would react to the approach of a CoC column by inciting a mob of locals, who would in turn form themselves into a militia—not infrequently, they were the town's official militia—to sally forth and meet the invaders in a small battle.



A small and quick battle. These hastily formed military bands, even the ones who constituted formal militias, were simply no match for the CoC columns in an open battle. The CoCs were, first, better organized and more disciplined; second, they were far better armed; third, many of their troops and the majority of their commanders were veterans of the recent wars. Almost a third of the column commanders, in fact, had been at the great battle of Ahrensbök.



Soon enough, their opponents realized they couldn't match the CoCs in straight battles, and they fell back on the standard tactic used by town and village militias for centuries when facing more powerful regular troops—which amounted to urban guerrilla warfare.



That would have been savage fighting under any circumstances. It was made still more savage by the harsh attitudes of the CoC soldiers.



By now, in the central and eastern Germanies, the political program of the CoCs had assumed the proportions of a social crusade for its members and supporters. There was more at stake than simply this or that specific issue, this or that specific grievance. What was ultimately involved was the very soul of a new nation coming into birth.