The Ram Rebellion(190)
Margrave Christian spoke with representatives of the ram. And started accepting oaths, from market towns as well as from village people. On behalf of his nephews as well. Albrecht, of course, was still very young; Friedrich was in the north with Gustavus Adolphus' army. So it was his responsibility.
The form of the oath was carefully negotiated between them. Quite carefully.
Several of the Protestant knights and lords whose lands lay primarily in Ansbach and Bayreuth, led by Freiherr Fuchs von Bimbach, came to the assistance of the branches of their families whose lands lay primarily in Bamberg and Würzburg.
April had arrived. Indeed, it was almost May.
Across Franconia, the ram banners unfurled.
Chapter 12: "I'm sick to death of these swaggering little lords"
Bamberg, May, 1634
"Looks like you have the current hot spot, Vince," Steve Salatto remarked. "Or, at least, the hottest one."
Vince Marcantonio stretched. "Spots."
"Plural? I rode up because of a report of threats to the lives of priests, nuns, and monks by ravening hordes of perverted and monstrous peasants."
"Threats," his chief of staff Georg Rodolf Weckherlin added, "which are being reported in numerous illustrated pamphlets, but which nobody around Würzburg has been able to confirm."
Vince yawned. "I've no doubt that there have been threats. Mostly made in taverns by people who are drunk and who don't have any force to back them up." He stretched again. "Sometimes I wish that I could just lie down and sleep for a week.
"Anyway, there was one threat that Stew Hawker thought was credible, but it was being made by a merchant in Nürnberg against a little convent with six old nuns in it. He has some kind of reversionary right when the last of them dies. He—the merchant, that is—bought it up about twenty years ago. It's based on an agreement that was made sixty or more years ago between the convent and some noble who was secularizing church property in his lands after he turned Protestant, that they wouldn't accept any new novices and he got the land after the last one died. The ones who were already in it have been frustrating the merchant by living on and on and on. I think all six are well over eighty now. Stew thought that he was planning to hire a batch of bullies, burn them out, and blame it on the ram rebellion."
Vince stretched again. "I've brought the little old ladies into Bamberg and parked them with the nuns who patched up Johnnie F. and Willard after the beating last fall. If the rapacious mercantile bandit tries anything, he'll find the convent occupied by several guys who are willing to shoot back."
"If that's under control," Steve asked, "what are your other hot spots?"
"Well, there's the city council election here in Bamberg. After their little revolution last fall, the new council threw out all the guys who were convicted of being in on the conspiracy to try Willard Thornton. But they didn't replace them. It's just been running short-staffed, so to speak. Now election time has rolled around. We've already been through the question of `who gets to vote' and settled on `all adult citizens of Bamberg.' That doesn't get us very far, though, because a lot of the residents aren't citizens. They're citizens of Franconia in general, but not of the city, for purposes of local elections. So we have some candidates running on a platform of broadening out citizenship and others running on keeping the current laws. We have . . ." He paused.
"The ewe?" Weckherlin asked.
Vince nodded. "Frau Else Kronacher, herself, one embattled printer's widow amid the embattled farmers of the ram rebellion, running for the Bamberg city council. If nothing else, the guilds are so focused on fighting her that, I suspect, two or three other candidates they might otherwise be opposing will get elected. Which, if I read that daughter of hers right, may actually be the reason that Frau Kronacher is running."
"How old is she? The Kronacher girl, I mean?" Steve asked.
"Not a girl, quite," Vince answered. "There were two or three kids who died between her and the older boy. In her mid-twenties, I would guess. Maybe a little more."
"Well, then," Steve said, "back to the `ravening hordes of peasants.' If they aren't threatening the defenseless clergy, what are they actually doing? From your perspective."
"Cliff Priest, the military administrator in Bamberg, has ridden up to Lauenstein to talk to Margrave Christian of Bayreuth's Amtmann there. We've got to decide what to do about a castle at Mitwitz. Big old thing, with a moat. Belongs to a Freiherr—one of the ones who has taken up arms against the SoTF."