Meyfarth spent more of his time, though, talking about the ways that things interconnected. How the workers in the towns often supported the peasants—that, in fact, a lot of the "peasant" leaders were often townspeople from guilds like the fishers or coopers who had a lot to do with the farmers. Or village school teachers. How villagers who worked in the towns—and a lot of them did, when they were young, as maids and seasonal laborers, for years before they went home to settle down—contributed to dissatisfaction in the towns themselves. After two hours, revolts in Naples spun dizzyingly in Steve's mind around revolts in Croatia and France, Lithuania and the Ukraine, but above all in Austria. Everywhere in Austria, it appeared, there were or recently had been, masses of unhappy farmers—Upper Austria, Lower Austria, the Steiermark, Carinthia. The last big one had been five years before Grantville was dumped down into the middle of the Thirty Years War.
Meyfarth remembered that one clearly, since the news-sheets and pamphlets had covered it extensively. Ferdinand II had pawned Lower Austria to Duke Maximilian of Bavaria. He'd had to, to pay him back for military aid against the Bohemian Protestants. Maximilian had come down with a hard hand. The revolt had involved a mix of anticlericalism, protests against death duties, objections to foreigners who had been brought in to occupy lands vacated by expelled Protestants, and protests against the excesses of Bavarian soldiers quartered upon the people. It wasn't a few farmers shaking pitchforks; there had been about thirty thousand men under arms. Meyfarth started quoting poetry from the Austrian revolt. It wasn't any better poetry than the Brillo rhymes, but it sure did skewer tyranny, graft, corruption, and oppression of the individual conscience. The message was pretty clear: the lords would flee and the peasants would rule in their place.
Meyfarth gestured for emphasis. "We call each of these a Bauernkrieg—a peasant `war' and not a `protest.' They besieged several towns, including the provincial capital of Linz, and waged campaigns against the Bavarian occupying army. It involved sailors on the Danube barges; several local nobles allied themselves with the peasants; so did some Lutheran clergy. Its leader, Stefan Fadinger, was killed, but he is well on his way to becoming a `folk hero' just as you say of the Brillo ram. The last time I heard someone sing the whole `Fadingerlied,' it had fifty-seven verses. By the end, when Duke Maximilian and Ferdinand II managed to put it down, more than twelve thousand farmers had been killed."
Meyfarth paused. Then he suggested cautiously. "Perhaps, if the uptimers are not familiar with this . . . Just in case it has not occurred to Don Francisco Nasi to bring it to the attention of the prime minister . . ."
Meyfarth's hesitancy was a constant irritant to Saunders Wendell. He spit out, "Get to the point, man."
"Ah. Well." Meyfarth continued. "This is one of the reasons that Ferdinand II may not be able to throw his full forces against Wallenstein. You do realize that? If he strips Austria of troops, there will be another uprising among the farmers, as large as that of 1626. That is not a hypothesis. That is just the truth. If the Austrian farmers think that they have even a hope of support from the king of Sweden and the USE, they will revolt again." He looked up at the ceiling of Würzburg's episcopal palace, with its elaborate, gilded, plaster moldings. "Franconia could put as many peasants into the field as Lower Austria, you know."
Somewhere, maybe in a Monty Python movie, Steve had once heard the line, "The peasants are revolting." It was supposed to be a funny pun, in the movie. According to Meyfarth, it was the literal truth, a lot of the time. Mama Salatto's little boy Stevie had not signed up for a major in public administration expecting to deal with enough revolting peasants to constitute a major army by the standards of the seventeenth century. Dissatisfied civic associations were about his speed. He had spent his pre-Ring of Fire days helping people establish Neighborhood Watch associations in the Baltimore suburbs. If he hadn't given in to Anita's plea to attend her folks' fortieth wedding anniversary party in Grantville, he would still be establishing Neighborhood Watch associations in the suburbs of Baltimore. And he would be a happy man.
He sipped at his wine. Then he asked, "Do you know what the epitaph of a successful civil servant is?"
Meyfarth made his face carefully noncommittal. "No."
"He never did anything that got his name in the paper."
Saunders Wendell guffawed.
Steve said, "Don't laugh. If we manage things right, maybe the damned sheep banners won't make the news at all, except locally. If they make a really big splash in the national news, that means that we failed to manage things right. If your name gets in the paper, you've screwed up. The bigger the headlines, the bigger the screw-up."