Vince shuddered. He was Catholic, and he was glad that Johann Georg Fuchs von Dornheim, the bishop of Bamberg, had fled to Austria. Vince wouldn't have wanted to be the guy who presided over his trial. He was even gladder that Dornheim's suffragan bishop, Friedrich Foerner, had died in 1630. Same reason. The uptime encyclopedias said that the bishop wouldn't die until this upcoming March 19. Vince didn't know whether he was dead yet or not, in this world. When and if he did die, he figured, it would be in the newspapers. And he would be stuck with dealing with all of the political problems surrounding the picking of a new bishop.
So here he sat in Bamberg. Taken by the Swedes on February 11, 1632. Taken back by Tilly on March 9, 1632. Taken again by the Swedes . . . Well, the uptime encyclopedias said on February 9, 1633, by Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. But in this world, Bernhard was a traitor to Gustavus Adolphus and February 9 hadn't quite rolled around yet. In this world, the Swedes had taken Bamberg back again last fall, right after the battle at Nürnberg's Alte Veste.
But if Grantville had found the money to send special commissioners to Würzburg, why not to Bamberg? As if Cliff Priest and his guys didn't have enough on their plates already.
"Yeah, that's the way it looks." Walt Miller looked at Cliff Priest.
"You're telling me that there were a hundred seventy separate and individual fortified castles in this region? In the triangle of land between Bamberg, Nürnberg, and Bayreuth? Not counting the ones in the triangle between Bamberg, Würzburg, and the northern border?" Captain Priest's voice was disbelieving.
"More or less. That's the best that Matt and I can figure it," Walt said. "From the information that Janie Kacere has picked up so far from the down-timers who are helping her figure out the land tenures, they're thicker on the land here than anywhere else in Germany. That's the number we've come up with as a starter, keeping in mind that we've only been here for a few months. Of course, not all of them are really in our jurisdiction, I think. Some of them belong to the margrave of Bayreuth and a whole batch of them belong to local independent petty nobles, Freiherren, or to imperial knights, Reichsritter. Think `robber barons' for a lot of those. But some, like the lords of Aufsess or Egloffstein, have a fair amount of clout. Some of them—in fact, a whole batch of them—are Protestant. So Vince thinks they aren't included in what Gustavus Adolphus turned over to us."
Walt looked at the coach—at the captain, rather. He still tended to think of Cliff as his coach, if he wasn't careful.
"I sort of thought that we ought to talk to Vince again. Find out what he wants us to do about it. Or try to do about it. Plus a bunch of other castles that belong to the bishop and are local administrative headquarters. Pottenstein, for example. And Goessweinstein, though that's a sort of ex-castle as castles go. Most of it burned down way back when. The Swedes took Veldestein at Neuhaus and turned it over to us, so we have that one. But they pulled out the fifty men they had left in it as a garrison, so all by itself, now, it's a place where we have to leave more of our not-very-large batch of soldiers than we really want to.
"Maybe we should talk to the Kaceres as well as to Vince. A lot of the castles have been used for grain storage, recently—when the bishop's officials collected the rents and tithes and taxes in kind rather than in money. See whether they want us to try to sell it. If so, does the money come to the administration here in Bamberg or do we have to send it to Grantville and wait for the Congress to appropriate it back for us to use? Things like that."
"There is one bright spot," Matt Trelli interrupted. "Like Goessweinstein, a whole bunch of them aren't in usable shape for anything military. Some of them not even for anything else. There was a big feud through here about seventy-five or eighty years ago, between the margrave of Bayreuth and the bishop of Bamberg, and some of the castles have been in ruins ever since then. Their owners couldn't afford to build them back.
"More recently, there was a big castle at Ebermannstadt, but it's been burned down by the Swedes. So has the one at Waischenfeld. It seems to be the preferred method of getting rid of them. The people of Waischenfeld were so pissed by having the local castle fired by the Swedes that after the captain general pulled his troops back, they went out and burned down Rabenstein, which belongs to one of Gustavus Adolphus' Protestant allies. Some imperials and some troops from Forchheim burned down the Streitberg last June. The Croats burned the castle at Muggendorf four weeks after that. So some of the ground has been cleared for us, so to speak. But there are plenty more. The Herren von Streitberg, the one who held that castle from the bishop, have another big one, called Greifenstein, that's still standing. There's no way to predict right now if they'll play nice and decide that Vince is the bishop's legal successor."