"Give me a rundown on Meyfarth."
"Johann Matthaeus Meyfarth. Matz to his friends. Middle-aged, more or less; in his early forties. He's a Lutheran pastor. That's a priest, if you're Catholic; a minister, if you're a run-of-the-mill American Protestant. And he's a musician, as if seventeenth-century Germany isn't overrun with them. I expect any day now to find out that the garbage collector on our route plays the flute between pickups."
Bellamy shook his head. He didn't like thinking about witchcraft persecutions, and found that his mind would take any side direction to avoid focusing on them. Pushing himself back to the topic, he continued. "But Meyfarth also, for years, has been Duke Johann Casimir's point man for squelching witchcraft persecutions. As you've probably noticed, you pretty much have to get south of the ridge of the Thuringian Forest, down toward Suhl and beyond, to find a lot of witchcraft hysteria. Or more precisely, before you find anybody taking a lot of action about witchcraft hysteria. Around here there's been some, sure. People believe that witchcraft exists. Villagers accuse old ladies of souring the milk of nursing mothers; or the herdsman's assistant of maliciously drying up someone's cow. But it hasn't escalated into major investigations, examinations under torture, court cases by the dozen, and smoke going up from the stakes. On the map of Dead German Witches, this area right around Grantville is a fairly nice, white, hole among the black dots. Barely speckled, so to speak."
"So Meyfarth is off to Franconia with the commission to work his magic on the second point." Mike raised his eyebrows. "Do I even dare to ask how they managed this?"
"I believe that they bribed him with the offer of a tenured professorship at the University of Erfurt. If he survives the experience."
"What I meant was how they managed to create a `barely speckled' spot on the map amid the polka dots and the black splotches."
"Oh," Bellamy answered, "it's simple enough. Johann Casimir is an old man, close to seventy, and not at all well. He's been childless in two marriages, so he has focused on projects rather than accumulating bits and pieces of the Wettin family's properties for his heirs. He has been at this for decades. A long time ago, it occurred to him that these organized antiwitch campaigns don't happen without money: money to pay the investigators, money to hold the hearings, money to pay the torturers, money to pay the executioner. They are not lynchings, by and large. They are perfectly legal judicial proceedings. Exercising their right to administer high justice, to have jurisdiction in capital cases, is one of those perks that the various rulers protect very zealously. That means that persecutions will not happen if there's no money forthcoming to pay all that staff. Therefore, if the ruler refuses to allocate money to pay for witchcraft persecutions—"
"—We won't have witchcraft persecutions," Mike finished for him. "Or, at least, no more than an occasional random case. Not these systematic witch hunts that lead to chains of accusations and hundreds of burnings. Charming. Beautiful. Elegant, even. I think that I have to admire this technique."
"Just keep in mind," Bellamy warned, "that we have a democracy now. One duke can take a notion that he doesn't want to spend money on this, lobby his fellow-rulers, who are also his cousins, and make some progress toward stamping it out, at least in his own region. But if we end up with a majority in Congress who believe that witches should be burned, they may well vote to throw money at the problem. We've been moving awfully fast. If we ever forget that not all our citizens share uptime values, it could turn into something like letting the inmates run the asylum to suit themselves."
Mike grunted. "That's always the problem with top-down solutions to social and political problems. The ideal way to handle a problem like this is for some mass movement to do it. From the bottom up. That's why I usually try to have the Committees of Correspondence tackle something like this, whenever it's possible."
Bellamy didn't entirely share Mike Stearns' enthusiasm for the revolutionary Committees of Correspondence which had, by now, sprouted up like mushrooms all over Thuringia and were beginning to do the same in and around Magdeburg. But it was all a moot point here, anyway.
"The CoCs don't amount to much, in Franconia," he pointed out.
"I know," Mike sighed. "So we'll have to try a top-down approach. Dammit."
Common Sense
Virginia DeMarce
December, 1632: Frankenwinheim, Franconia
"Of course no one is happy. Why would anyone be happy?"