The Extra Girl: For the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Thank you for clarifying that point. I agree that the name Alexander was perfectly in fashion, I had just wondered if he was named for anyone closely related much like his predecessor and successor were. I look forward to your excellent narration of the First General War. One interesting thing I suppose is where Bohemia will end up at the end of all of this since I’m assuming it will not be part of the second realm (which has the borders of Weimar Germany in the modern day I think).

No, thank you for your helpful comments that are helping me to stay consistent, especially as this whole mythology becomes more involved and complex.

As to Bohemia, I have some ideas for some posts delving into the country's future and what it's like today. We may even get to that fairly shortly.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Military Scene, by Hans Ulrich Franck, 1656

These Noble Affairs of War, from the Killinger Lectures

Adam Klein

In David Haller's memorable words, "if Saxony had a state religion at the death of the Elector Alexander, it was double-entry accounting." Perhaps that's an overstatement, but not by much. Much of this obsession with bookkeeping, and especially in its reliability and regularity originates simply in the basic "ad fontes" attitude typified in, and advanced by, the Reformation: "You are making this claim! How do I know this claim to be true? Do you have a text? Is the text genuine?"

If people argued this way when the claim is over the proper way to take the Lord's Supper, then you can imagine when instead, the claim is for a debt owed, and the matter not an abstract concern for the next world but a practical need for payment in this one. Thus, in place of a deference to an individual's authority or character, more and more there was a demand for proof. And more and more, that proof was a written record. In place of a reliance based on a faith in the individual, is a certainty arising from knowing with certainty for oneself from recorded information. Now, it's rather easy to oversimplify the confessional significance of this relationship. Remember, it was the Catholic Fuggers who were issuing bonds on the promise of repayment with interest from the revenue streams of states' in-coming tax revenue, and it was Martin Luther who railed against charging interest at all, and who was aghast by the development of the Saxon finance culture even within his lifetime. So by all means, it is imperative we not reduce matters to an alignment between Protestantism and an emergent modern way of doing business on one side, and Catholicism and a time-honored feudal manorialism on the other.

But nonetheless, claims of personal authority, whether originating in birth, in class, in institution, or in character, were not the same in the Post-Reformation world. And we must add to this originating and sweeping transformation the aftershocks that followed: the long standoff between Saxony and imperial institutions culminating in the Spanish War, the founding of schools in many of the former religious houses and the introduction of new educational responsibilities to the Lutheran parishes, triggering an explosive growth in literacy; mass migration of Protestant populations from elsewhere in Europe and the social upheaval they created; the emergence and evolution of commercial lending to include sophisticated systems of collateral; the development of the Saxon franchise with its elected legislature and limitations on the power of the elector; and the active press culture the new political life fed and nurtured.

What all these are, are structures of accountability for a society in which no man's word, not even the one who is its sovereign prince, is by itself good enough.

By 1600, this change has created a profound gulf between between the public life, especially the business practices, of Saxony and its neighbors. Reading accounts of foreign merchants, even other Germans, writing to their business partners from Magdeburg or Halle or Lieipzig, you see endless complaints about the Saxons' lack of trust, inflexibility, and aversion to risk. Conversely, when Saxon merchants go abroad, and report home by letter from Bayreuth, or Passau, or Muenster, they gripe about the counterparties' irregularity, unreliability, and the flimsy nature of promises and contracts. What both sides observe, but ascribe different values to, is a growing impersonality in Saxon economic practices, less of a faith in people, and more reliance on the mediating value of the page.

But what it also is, is the work of a society that has experienced in the more than fifty years since the Spanish War, a long era of peace. And in 1610, this rapidly modernizing society with its robust new institutions, many of them based in vigorous record-keeping, has to go to war. In doing so it experiences a bit of a shock. Because, beneath questions about the storied English subsidy, or about Saxony's unwillingness to involve itself directly in military conflict that led to the atrophy of its military preparedness relative to its neighbors, or about the skills or ability of any one elector, there is the simple matter that the institutions of war-making in this society had not kept pace with the changes elsewhere.

The famous, or infamous, long bows were emblematic of the deeper issue: Saxony was an early modern state with a late medieval way of making war, with colonels and majors and captains each of whom were charged with rounding up and paying the men who would be their subordinates on the battlefield. Were these men Saxon, or Swiss, or Swedes? Were they Lutherans, or Calvinists? Had they been properly drilled? Did they have boots? As per usual in the world of the seventeenth century, these were questions few people had answers to, much less asked. And too often, the system of recruitment, provisioning and pay was not even that, it was lords showing up with tenants they had pulled from work in the fields, with the last innovation in the underlying relationship that the tenants were no longer serfs. And of course, because though Saxony had a free peasantry, but some of the territories it had annexed over the sixteenth century did not, a few actual serfs were still involved.

In a sense, this fact better than anything states the jaw-dropping weirdness of Saxony in the moment before all hell broke loose in the First General War. Here was a country in some newly acquired corners of which you could buy real estate which came attached with human beings, but you could pay for it taking out a mortgage, or by selling bonds in the Wittenberg markt.

So the first part of this two-part lecture will focus on, if you will, the attempts of these new institutions, and the newly emergent elites that are at their helms, to modernize the Saxon army, its resistance, and the resulting confrontation. It will be centered on the new vertreter brought to power by the merciless wheel in 1617, Hans-Albrecht Koerbelitz. The second part will focus on what happens when these Saxon institutions and the habits and behaviors they generate come into contact with the very different norms that obtain in revolutionary Bohemia at the start of the First General War. And this will be described through the experiences of Christian, at the moment he goes from being an elector to being a king.

Koerbelitz was given the boots by the Estates-General at a perilous time in the Saxon constitutional experiment. Now, Jakob von Ummerstadt had been vertreter at the death of Alexander and the accession of Christian. Despite almost supine loyalty to the young elector during the travails of the regency dispute and the Juelich War, he found himself waiting in the anterooms at Alexanderburg and Torgau for personal audiences with the prince that never came, as the task of dealing with the grubby commoner trudging in from the Estates-General kept getting handed off to Chancellor Kellensdorf.

Though there was no ideological gulf at all at this point between the zealous, impatient Lutheran young elector and the zealous, impatient Lutheran Estates General, as a constitutional matter this treatment was enraging to an institution that was more and more thinking of itself as a sovereign parliament. But Ummerstadt, patient to an actual fault, refused to insist, to raise his voice, to agitate, finding it impossible to engage with the great-grandson of the Holy Prince in any kind of adversarial way. There had been bared knuckles in several of the confrontations between Alexander and the new Estates, and before that of course with the old estates pre-1579. But Alexander, as much with his vertreters as with his Habsburg cousins, had managed conflict with finesse and finding shared interests. If threats had been necessary, they had been implied. Now, Christian was not even making threats. He was simply behaving as if the Estates General did not exist at all, 1579 had never happened, and the office-holder tasked with at a minimum, reminding him otherwise, found himself frozen and unable to square shoulders with the sovereign prince. Thus, Ummerstadt was replaced immediately following the 1614 elections, even though there was no discernable movement in terms of public support on matters of actual policy one way or the other.

This, the Estates General hoped, would be the end of its humiliation. But instead it was only the beginning. Between the 1614 and 1617 elections, there were four vertreters, each of them denied personal audiences with the elector, each of them forced to conduct business with Kellensdorf instead. There was the physician, the retired fencing instructor, and in a note of particular desperation, a former mercenary who, having visited Turkey, Egypt and Persia in his youth, would it was hoped would attract the curiosity of a young man obsessed by war and adventure. But none of them could make it into the throne room and the presence of the stubborn young elector.

That is, until Hans-Albrecht Koerbelitz. He was an estates attorney from Magdeburg whose successful practice had specialized in drafting wills and other instruments to prevent spendthrift heirs from squandering their inheritance. Later, Christian, who was actually not as intellectually inert as some of his detractors claim, would say in all seriousness he had no idea why anyone would think such a career would prepare a man to serve at his court.

Koerbelitz began by simply milling about the elector's court every day, wheresoever it was in residence. And rather than presenting himself with the officiousness of the emissary of a partner in government, Koerbelitz slyly folded in with the functionaries, the petitioners, and the burgomasters from the Erzgebirge looking for a place at court for their comely daughters. Eventually, he slipped through, as if he were trying to notify a hostile adverse party of a pending lawsuit, and when he happened upon the elector it was not in the rooms of state, but at the tennis house at Schloss Hartenfels in Torgau that Elizabeth of England had had built for her son the Holy Prince, out of concern he might get as fat as his father.

That Christian first mistook Koerbelitz for the new huntsman for the Torgau park, and tried questioning him as to whether the deer had been restocked for the upcoming season, is pure invention. But that the initial conversation left the young elector flummoxed was absolutely true. No commoner had ever spoken to Christian that way, and so there were simply no intellectual tools at hand for him to respond to what was happening. His Most Serene Highness was informed, curtly, that it was general knowledge he had great plans, and that if they came to fruition would benefit all the state and everyone in it. He must understand the Estates General was, no less than he, committed to the fulfillment of these plans, and the preservation of the authority that was his due. But that, provoking the Estates General to no purpose now could make for complication later. Wars require money: he could make arrangements to fund them beforehand on a secure constitutional and legal foundation, or try to wrestle new taxes out of the Estates from his saddle while on campaign against the Habsburgs. Let him help, Koerbelitz said, simultaneously plaintive and insistent in the most lawyerly of ways.

No doubt, that initial conversation on the old Tudor-style tennis court, between a panting, freshly exercised young elector and a wealthy attorney who had perhaps never sweated other than from proximity to a roaring fire, broke many rules. As Elizabeth I of England said, the word must must not be used to princes, but in the course of about ten minutes it was probably wielded like a cudgel against this prince some twenty times. But it bore Koerbelitz the desired fruit, and Christian assented to an audience, though he made a great show of handing Koerbelitz his towels like a servant, not inviting him to sit, or offering him refreshment while he ate at table, The young elector made it perfectly obvious the vertreter was an inferior, a servant and a subject, but he nonetheless listened, and answered, and by the end of the whole awkward encounter something like a working relationship existed. Chancellor Kellensdorf, who had been something of the author of the strategy to delegitimize the post of vertreter, was appalled, but it was too late.

Koerbelitz wanted to defer as long as possible using tax proceeds from the Saxon general treasury to fund the new standing armies at all. He understood that for a state the size of Saxony, going after the Habsburgs in a serious way would require immense sums that would have to be kept in reserve as long as possible. Instead, he proposed going to specific communities to extract voluntary contributions, not using the veiled threats or coercion of previous princes, but promises and enticements. The merchants of Magdeburg, for instance, who had grown so wealthy from the abolition of internal tolls and duties within Saxony, and between Saxony and the appended lands, were freshly promised the abolition of such tolls and duties with any new lands that might come into Christian's possession. The Calvinists, who faced more severe repression elsewhere in the empire and who had made it their mission to be perceived as the Wettin electors' most loving and faithful subjects, barely needed any inducement at all to make significant contributions to make war against the Habsburgs.

The relatively small sizes of the new standing armies were determined by the ability of the benefactors to continue funding it without disruption, rather than any great commitment to the romance of ancient Rome and its legions. Giving the armies names would bestow honor on the benefactors and the home city from which the army had been raised. And so the initial plan was for four armies, two armies funded from the elector's household budget, one from Magdeburg, and one from the Calvinists of Wittenberg. If more were needed, Koerbelitz would shake the tree for more benefactors. In doing so, he could make use of the prestige of the elector as needed, offering audiences, placements at court, or other perquisites if it would get Christian the resources he needed. There was no firm agreement to the effect, but the informal understanding was that beyond the initial four armies, every second army would be funded by the Estates General through tax collection. Finally, it was understood this arrangement would last through the end of the campaign season of 1620, at which point it would be revisited by Christian and whoever was vertreter at that time.

The rest of the mechanics of recruitment and training was worked out with Alexander Leslie, the colonel in the Saxon army who was given the brief of training all the new soldiers in the Dutch manner. (Explaining to the city fathers of Magdeburg and the Calvinist deacons of Wittenberg that they would also have to pay their soldiers while they were receiving said training made for a delicate matter.) For these purposes, Leslie received exclusive use of the old electoral castle in Weimar. That a whole princely residence was being turned into barracks, armories, storehouses and training grounds displayed Christian's seriousness better than anything, as records, furniture, and princely bric-a-brac was either folded into the collections at Wittenberg, Altenburg, Coburg and the Schloss Alexanderburg, or simply thrown away.

It was only in summer1619 though, when the Estates of Bohemia were meeting and Christian was waiting to finally be offered the crown of Bohemia, that the true complication of the matter revealed itself to Koerbelitz. Until this point, it had all been basic mathematics: the funding of a certain number of soldiers in the field for a certain amount of time at a certain rate per month. Koerbelitz had waited, and waited, for Christian or his new, and somewhat more sensible, chancellor, to share the procedures by which the numbers of soldiers, their presence in the army, and their participation in the battles and otherwise in good discipline would be ascertained, verified, and transmitted to his office so that precise sums would be tabulated and requests sent to the necessary parties.

Instead, it became all too obvious that Christian intended for Koerbelitz to simply load wagons with however many chests of silver coins were deemed necessary and send them on to Prague, no questions asked. When he broached the question, at first very delicately, Koerbelitz was informed this was how the Imperial army did it. And, Koerbelitz wasted no time replying, it might have something to do with why the Habsburgs were perpetually millions of florins in debt.

Thus, very discreetly, Koerbelitz drew up a bill of 38 statutes detailing pay procedures for the Saxon army, including a guaranteed pay schedule, procedures for extraordinary expenses, the provisioning of beer, food, equipment and medicines, along with minimum requirements for service and discipline to qualify for payment, and a set of practices and oversight to make sure all soldiers being paid were present and accounted for. Rather than introduce it first to the Estates General as official legislation, Koerbelitz instead gave it to Christian to review so that the high-strung young elector would not feel blindsided.

Reading it, Christian fired Koerbelitz on the spot. He ordered Koerbelitz out of the castle and to never appear in his sight again. He declared the document he had been given was nothing more than a scurrilous attack on his own honor, those of his officers, and of the Saxon soldiery who were preparing to risk their very lives in Bohemia. Moreover, whereas Koerbelitz had considered it merely the elaboration of the terms of the previously reached deal, Christian considered it a repudiation of everything Koerbelitz and the Estates General had agreed to. In the young elector's eyes, it was an act of revolutionary insubordination that came at the most sensitive moment, and an effort to wring more concessions out of him when he had already been far too indulgent. He became still more hystrionic when the dismissed Koerbelitz did not budge from the spot.

Of course, any of you who have visited the Palace of the Estates General in Wittenberg, whether as tourists, or for those of you who are actual Germans, on the necessary school trip in tenth year, will have seen the enormous painted historical scene by Leutze, hanging in the entrance hall. The furious young prince, with his arm pointing like a weathervane, demanding Koerbelitz go. Koerbelitz passively standing there, almost bored, as if waiting for his dinner to digest, and behind him, the courtiers and functionaries glowering as if they are waiting for the order to spit Koerbelitz and roast him on an open fire.

Of course now, it is German political idiom: "firing the vertreter" is the phrase for when you panic so much you try everything, but accomplish nothing at all. And there would be, over the course of Saxon, and then Second Realm, history, seven attempts to fire vertreters by the sovereign prince, five of them in the 17th century alone. But none of them were successful, for the simple constitutional truth which Koerbelitz now recited to Christian: "Most Serene Highness, as your subject I must do as you wish, but as the servant of the Estates of Saxony I am not yours to dispense with, nor are the Estates of our people."

The next day, the Estates General voted to reaffirm the choice of Koerbelitz as vertreter. Six days later, it passed an expanded 43 articles governing the pay and provisioning of the army, responding to Christian's intransigence by adding further requirements to make sure of how appropriated funds would be spent. Christian, they made plain, could in fact go claim the Bohemian throne if the Bohemian Estates actually offered it, but he would have to save his receipts. During this time, Christian sulked but made no official statement beyond his initial termination of Koerbelitz as vertreter, as if even to concede that there was a question of his action's legitimacy would be too offensive for him to bear. In the end, the constitutional stand-off ended not with mother, wife or aunt taking Christian aside and explaining matters to him, or Christian reflecting on the affair and coming to an epiphany. No, instead the heralds from Bohemia arrived with word that he had his kingdom, and Christian could either take the deal such as the Estates General had offered him through Koerbelitz and go, or he could defer the matter of Bohemia to pursue a dreary civil war with his own mercantile aristocracy.

So Christian left for Prague, the Estates General got its procedures to ensure the vast sums it was being asked to produce through taxes were not misspent or wasted, and Koerbelitz was addressed as vertreter in the prince's correspondence as if the scene of the firing hadn't happened. Of course there was no confirmation by the elector he could not dismiss the vertreter chosen by the Estates General to do business with him, there would never be any such confirmation, by any elector, king or emperor that this is the case. But nonetheless, it was understood to be true, and Saxony at that moment took another long stride in the evolution of German constitutional democracy.

But that does not mean the 43 Articles of 1619 was his only accomplishment, even just with respect to the funding and organization of the great armies Saxony was relying on. In 1620, with the fiscal burdens of fielding the respective armies too much for the Magdeburg city fathers and other groups, he negotiated for the Estates General to assume the whole role of funding the Saxon land armies. Then in 1622, in response to the worsening problems of desertion and retention, he instituted the decimary bonus. Essentially, in every battle involving an entire army, one-tenth of the soldiers, of whatever rank, would receive a bonus of one-tenth of the standard pay for the month, in a vote determined by the ordinary soldiers. Thus it would become possible to rank effective warriors, spur competition, and incentivize success free of social allegiances, toadyism, or corruption. Neither the Elector nor his Regent had any objection at this time because it represented additional money to the armies.

Likewise, in 1623 as a further effort to prevent the attrition of the armies due to desertion, the Estates General passed the law, at Koerbelitz's instigation, that imposed on the Lutheran parishes the requirement of support of the wives and children of soldiers serving in the armies. This may sound to modern observers like the policies of a kindly social-welfare state. But let us consider what it meant in the context of the Saxon zeal for record-keeping, inspection, and verification. The women who were thus supported were affirmatively required to maintain good moral conduct in the absence of their husbands. Likewise, the weddings and the births of the children had to be verified in those churches' records. So it coupled, even on a basic level, support with social control.

Simultaneously, this support continued only so long as the men whose families these were continued to serve, with honor and good discipline. In short, sitting out a battle, disobeying an order, fleeing, all these things would render one's family permanently outside the means of support and thus perhaps, especially given the privations of the war by this point, destitute. But even that does not express all of it: for the knowledge of which families were supported, and how much they received, were public knowledge. And as the families of the verified and "just" dead stayed on the parish books and were supported as if the husbands were still alive, the only reason for a family to be stricken from the books would be for some bad conduct on the part of the soldier whose service justified the payments in the first place.

In short, for support to be terminated to one of these families was a public announcement of that soldier's treason, desertion, or some similar dishonor. And there was nothing preventing the formidable machinery of early modern German social exclusion from operating to punish these families, sometimes quite brutally. We have records of nine retributive killings of members of families expunged from the Wittenberg roles by 1630, in one case a boy of nine years old, murderer never found, no attempt by the city watch made. So while the textbooks of the German gymnasia have for centuries portrayed the reforms of 1622 and 1623 as generous, liberal and public-spirited, it's important to understand that this new bureaucratization of military service resulted in the creation of a new system of disciplining both soldiers serving in the army, and the wider society.

In those same Wittenberg records, for instance 12 wives lost the parish support on accusations of prostitution while their husbands were away. But of course the most consequential accusation was that of fraud. The 1623 law provided the death penalty to anyone who claimed a wife or child not their own, or tried to claim support for a soldier already dead, or who falsified a document in furtherance of such a plan. Vigorous investigations and prosecutions of these crimes did not abate in even the worst years of the war, as in 1626 a widow was executed in Coburg trying to claim that a husband who had died of typhoid was in service, and in 1628 a leather-worker and his wife in Leipzig were hung for dishonestly trying to get support for the five nieces and nephews they had taken in whose parents had died in a fire.

Like many of the vertreters in these early days, Koerbelitz himself did not last extraordinarily long in office. The rigors of wartime service wore on him, of course. But there was something else. It might help if we consider briefly that the recruiting, paying and provisioning of late medieval and early modern armies, with all its awful informality and the opportunity for corruption, especially considering the characters of the men involved, would look to modern observers much like what we would call organized crime. And it was to these figures Koerbelitz had effectively staunched generous and unsupervised flows of coin. So in 1623 Koerbelitz decided ending his political career and enjoying a long retirement in Copenhagen with his family was preferable to staying in Saxony, with its uncertain military situation. At the time, Christian was still in little mood to award Koerbelitz any extraordinary honors beyond continued breath. But years later, in the ceremonies accompanying the founding of the Saxon monarchy, Christian found himself face to face with his hated ex-vertreter, as Koerbelitz's name was included by the Estates General in the list of pater patriae, along with the storied likes of Friedrich the Wise, and Martin Luther. Ultimately, it would be for Erste to actually ennoble Koerbelitz in 1641, or as they say in modern German idiom, "give him the von."

Included in the award of course was land, specifically some vineyards near Prague. The family's manor house and winery is still there, and I heartily recommend you go there and take the tour. On account of the sandy soil, which is of course beneficial to wine-grape cultivation, it's called White Mountain.

 

[Kitiem3000]

I was rooting for Koerbelitz. Glad it worked out for him.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Hans Ulrich Franck, The Armored Rider (1643)
These Noble Affairs of War, from the Killinger Lectures

Adam Klein

We need to begin by way of the narrative history of Christian's accession to the Bohemian throne. In the process, I will try to keep us from getting too many rose petals in our hair.

Months, perhaps years before the invitation of the Bohemian Estates in autumn 1619, Christian had planned that in his absence, Electress Elizabeth would be regent of Saxony. Virtually no one else supported the notion that a 22 year-old woman, who neither understood the political system nor spoke the language, could effectively manage the state, least of all Elizabeth herself. But Christian insisted that, in light of prior betrayals and disorders, she was the only person he could trust. This plan was undone when Count Thurn informed Christian by letter that leaving his wife in Saxony would be seen as a slight by the Bohemian Estates and the burghers of Prague. Essentially, after almost a century of Habsburg rule, Bohemia had no more use for absentee kings, or to be one of a portfolio of realms. If Christian expected to be popular in Bohemia, he had to bring with him a resident royal family. And that Christian's royal family in particular would include a wife and mother who were themselves the daughters of kings was not an asset to be disregarded.

Thus, to Elizabeth of Scotland's relief, the idea of her regency was scrapped. And so in place of her, Christian resolved upon the other woman he felt he could trust, his mother, Elisabeth of Denmark. Whereas the question of one woman's competence created concern, the certainty of the other's caused panic. Elisabeth, while personally loyal to Christian without a doubt, was certain to waste no time strengthening the privileges of the Lutheran Church and provoking the Calvinists in every possible way. In this she could count on help from her most significant ally, Christian's influential court preacher, Hoe. It was entirely possible whether or not a shot was over the matter of Bohemia, and Christian still face a confessional civil war at home, if his mother and Hoe had their way.

Thus, when someone put it to the Elector's mother that Elizabeth of Scotland would need guidance as to etiquette and proper deportment at the more conservative Prague court. where Habsburg gravity had been the norm for a century, and Elizabeth of Denmark leapt at the chance to accompany her son and daughter-in-law south, once again most of the court was relieved. Nevertheless, there were now fewer still credible candidates for regent, and in the end Christian chose the one he disliked but did not despise, and distrusted but did not fear, his Uncle Friedrich. Friedrich's brief was simple enough: keep collecting taxes to finance the war, keep men flowing into Bohemia until the war was won, and personally lead the military response to any invasion of Saxon territory. Christian believed this would most likely come in the west from the Spanish Netherlands. Though he did not discount the possibility of an attack from the Catholic League, he thought that would be most likely be over the Bavarian border into Bohemia directly.

In one surprise, Christian recalled his former chancellor Gerhardt Kellensdorf to accompany him to Prague. To some extent, the whole notion of winning Christian the Bohemian throne had originated with Kellensdorf, and it was only natural that now he be present for his long project to come to fruition, though he also served a more practical purpose in that his long and voluminous correspondence with Thurn, Tschernembl, Gabor and others could be an asset in Prague given that these were the men on whom the conduct of the present war and the security of the new reign depended. In fact, it was a surprise to many that Kellensdorf had never been as far out of power as had been supposed after his fall in the scandal of two years before: Christian had merely given him a quiet retirement at his expense in the Coburg Veste in Thuringia, where he had enjoyed Martin Luther's former lodgings, and the two had maintained a continuous correspondence themselves. There was even talk Kellensdorf might be appointed chancellor of the Prague court, or be given a hereditary title, thus erasing the offense of his prior fraudulent claim to be nobility.

But it was not to be: Kellensdorf, who had been a scholar at the Leucorea for some years before he entered court service, was now almost 70. Exhausted by travel and in declining health, his heart failed in the town of Tichiowitz (Techlovice) just over the border in Bohemia. Christian wept bitterly over the man who had been not just his chancellor, mentor, and friend, but his childhood tutor, and perhaps the one person other than his mother who had demonstrated unfailing faith in his ability and judgment throughout his life.

Further up river, in the town of Aussig (Usti Nad Labem), ironically the sight of bloody fighting between Saxon and Bohemian armies during the Hussite wars, Christian was received on Bohemian soil for the first time as King Krestan I. Christian always excelled at the public performance of rule, and with his equestrian skills and athletic physique, never failed to cut an impressive figure on horseback. On display before his Bohemian subjects for the first time, he did not disappoint.

He had managed to learn relatively few words of Czech in the many years he had contemplated becoming the land's king, but did exclaim to the people of Aussig that he would "force no man to an observance against his conscience" and swore to "respect this land's fine and ancient church." Printed broadsheets distributed at the event were also in Czech, declaring with wordplay all the more pointed given that Christian was not at all a common given name in Czech, "A Christian king is better than a Habsburg!" All this was well-received, and after extensive banqueting Christian, Elizabeth and their enormous guard and entourage were boarded at Burg Strekov, the local castle that had long been held by the Catholic Lobkowitz family, Count Lobkowitz having most recently been Ferdinand;s chancellor before having fled with the Habsburg court to Vienna. Casually, and disregarding several constitutional provisions and other statutes, Christian appropriated Burg Strekov and strongly garrisoned it.

The next evening, virtually the same script was followed at Melnik, up to and including the seizure of Melnik Castle, also a possession of the Lobkowitzes. There, insult was added to injury with the Saxon looting of the castle's extensive wine cellar, with everything that was not consumed on the spot given as gifts to the local burghers or loaded onto wagons bound with the new court to Prague. Melnik too was strongly garrisoned with Saxon forces, and Christian directed in his correspondence with his uncle in Wittenberg that more garrisons be sent to man other crucial pinch-points on the Moldau (Vltava) and Elbe rivers. Christian wanted to no question of his lines of communication, reinforcement and if necessary, retreat, remaining clear.

Reaching Prague, the enthusiastic reception of the new king, queen, their family, and the new court, and their acclaim as liberators, could not hide the increasing awkwardness of the situation. Before plunging into matters of the coronation or settling into his new quarters on Castle Hill, previously occupied by Rudolf, Christian asked for a detailed review of the status of the kingdom from the Directorate, a kind of ruling council selected from the Estates. The most critical problems were not even, narrowly speaking, military, as the armies supporting Ferdinand's cause were still mostly held to the extreme south of the country and the Duke of Teschen, with extensive lands in Upper Silesia, having just belatedly declared for the revolution once he heard Christian had accepted the throne.

Instead, what Christian heard that so unsettled him was that the armies had not been paid for six months; the mercenaries, including Bethlen Gabor, had yet to receive the first installment of vast sums that had been promised them, and some were now refusing to fight until they saw money; and yet somehow the state treasury was also empty even though Ferdinand's court had been forced to leave most of it behind. Christian asked specifically after the year's tax proceeds, and found they had been irregularly collected, with scant records of who had and had not paid. Essentially, the Bohemian Estates had planned their entire war effort around Christian, and the Saxons, just paying for everything, with precious little effort being taken towards any other practical alternative. If anything, the arrival of Christian with Saxon armies instead of Christian with just money was declared by the Directors to be disadvantageous: unhappy memories of the Hussite Wars aside, Christian was told it would be more efficacious to pay the mercenaries and soldiers the Estates had already retained, so as not to run the risk they would then defect and find employment with Ferdinand.

As to the Saxon armies, the Defensors ventured, better to just send them and trust to those forces retained by, and loyal to, the Estates.

If that was not enough, Christian was sternly informed that his seizures of the castles at Aussig and Melnik were in violation of the 100 Articles' prohibitions on seizures of property. Hearing all this, the young king boiled over. Withdrawing from the meeting and kicking over his chair, Christian declared he was contemplating refusing the crown after all, begging Ferdinand's forgiveness, and going back to Saxony. And, worse still, he threatened to, as a display of his contrition to the emperor, hang all his Bohemian traitors for him on his way out.

At the moment Christian stormed out of his meeting with the Directorate, there were some 11,000 Saxon infantry in Prague itself. Elisabeth of Denmark's advice when Christian had expressed reluctance about accepting the crown upon receiving the offer in Dresden, that some negotiations are best held when one's army is already within the walls, was now in every sense the Saxon policy. And so the next morning the Defensors, led by Count Thurn, who had both led the revolution and the effort to recruit Christian to be the Bohemian king, fell on their knees before the doors to Christian's chambers in Prague Castle and begged his forgiveness. He accepted their profuse apology, and displayed every sign of a return to a more sanguine attitude towards his government, but this only began a period of protracted negotiation that was occurring simultaneously with intense warfare in the southern half of the country. Not for nothing was Christian holding back committing his forces, or his coin, before final arrangements were made. He had been around long enough to now understand how leverage worked, too.

In the end, it was the corpse-lawyer from Magdeburg, the Vertreter Hans-Albrecht Koerbelitz, who offered some helpful ideas in correspondence to the new king. Thus Christian issued as edicts his declaration that a new supplementary tax would be levied for the present year that must be paid within forty days at the previously assessed rates, that nonpayment would trigger the forfeiture of all lands held by the nobles in question, which would be auctioned off first to a class of potential buyers who would include the owners of contiguous plots, second, other neighbors, and third other Bohemians. Bidders in the auctions would have to have paid the tax themselves, and could earn themselves a discount by taking possession of the lands themselves without making use of the new king's soldiery, given that the miltiary situation was so difficult. At the same time, Christian would not just enjoy the properties that were his as king, but be able to seize at his leisure the lands of the Catholic Church and any of the nobility who had already sworn fealty to Ferdinand or taken up arms against his rule.

Implementation of this regime would fall to his freshly appointed Chancellor of Bohemia, Jindrich von Thurn, with the assistance of a small corps of Saxon bureaucrats who were being unleashed on the country in a project of tax collection as thorough and rapacious as anything the Cossacks sent by the King of Poland were doing in eastern Moravia at that moment. That Thurn, the leading domestic political force, was being coopted to become the face of the ferociously unpopular project of tax collection, was an intentional effort to prevent him from articulating the resistance to it. And Christian made no secret of the fact that Thurn was to personally receive one per cent of the tax revenues collected before the end of the year, making certain he had an incentive to perform as well.

Again Informed this would violate the 100 Articles, which was the new constitution he had sworn to uphold, Christian laughed. Politely told by the Directors these measures would be submitted to the Estates and so might be amended, Christian replied that as they were edicts issued by himself, no action by the Estates was needed, in that as king he made the law. Moreover, understanding the game that was being played, the new king named Saxons to the key posts controlling Prague Castle, the treasury, and most importantly, the mint at Kattenberg (Kutna Hora). The Directors then reminded Christian that it had been a term of the offer of kingship that Bohemians would not be marginalized in their own country but continue to enjoy all offices of importance. They received for their trouble from the simple answer that if they found themselves unhappy, they were always free to retract their kind offer to him of the throne of their country, but that if he was king, this was his judgment.

With these matters supposedly settled, Christian and Elizabeth were crowned in St. Vitus's Cathedral the King and Queen of Bohemia. For a moment, the storm clouds parted and Prague celebrated the new reign, and Christian his new realm. However, the very next day word arrived from Kattenberg that the Bohemian soldiers garrisoning the mint had refused to turn over control to the Saxons, even when told they were ordered to by the new king. Rather than delegating, Christian rode to Kattenberg at once. Arriving with the bulk of the I Saxon-Weimar three days later, he found the Bohemians unwilling to surrender to him personally, and loyal only to the Directorate. After offering them a final chance to back down from their insubordination, Christian ordered force be used to secure the mint. Six Bohemian soldiers were killed in the fighting, and 13 were executed for their disobedience.

In the time he was gone from Prague, Christian's bluff talk of vacating the newly-acquired Bohemian throne and abandoning the revolution led to surprisingly earnest discussions among the Defensors and the Bohemian Estates about how to proceed with just that option. Perhaps because of the Habsburg sensitivities to the complex confessional situation in Bohemia and their understanding of the tenuousness of their grip on the country, there had never been in the previous hundred years the displays of naked coercion Christian was now engaged in. For all the welcome assurances of his disinterest in enforcing any kind of religious uniformity on the polyglot Bohemian nation, in every other respect he was proving himself to be a tyrant far more assertive and absolute than Ferdinand of Styria or any of his predecessors had ever dreamed.

Once word arrived of the executions in Kattenberg, several of the Directors lost their last shreds of patience with the new regime. Discreet approaches were made to Thurn about the possibility of a second Revolution to evict the prince invited to vindicate the first. Once again, the name Bethlen Gabor was mentioned as an alternative to the Saxons. Thurn also received inquiries ascertaining whether he himself would be interested in taking the throne. Finally, the possibility of an earnest reconciliation with the Habsburgs was broached, and the mechanics of how to begin secret negotiations without the new king knowing it were considered.

Thurn poured scorn on all these options. The military situation in Prague was such that Christian could dispatch any rebellion with ease, and then use the crushing of that treason to justify the outright abolition of the 100 Articles and the imposition of the absolutism he so clearly wanted. Likewise, the military situation as against the Habsburgs required substantial foreign assistance, as the costs were far beyond the ability of Bohemia to pay. But finally, Christian's eviction from the country, or worse, his abandonment of the Bohemian cause after the long courtship, would render the Bohemians a laughingstock. Christian could simply declare the Bohemians unwilling to fund their own war of liberation, at which point no prince of sufficient resources or reputation would be willing to rush in after him. Even the option of a contrite return to the Habsburg fold had serious problems: not only would the same confessional questions always inevitably bubble to the surface, but there was still the matter of how Christian, or his army, would respond to that betrayal.

So Thurn, who would have to be the lynchpin for any genuine effort to displace Christian as king, rejected making any effort against him. Of course, these same nobles who were making their approaches to him wasted no time noting that Thurn's new grants of land, his new post as chancellor, and his share of the receipts of the extraordinary tax, would shortly make him extremely wealthy. Plainly, wherever his loyalties actually lay, the Saxon strategy of coopting Thurn had succeeded in sowing sufficient doubts about him that the Bohemians were unable to unify behind a resistance to their new trouble-making king. Whatever the reason, by the time Christian returned to Prague from Kattenberg the consensus of the Bohemian nobles was that for the time being they had to stay the course, regardless of their fears.

Christian, for his part, perhaps informed by his new Bohemian chancellor that some moderation of his course might be in order, issued edicts promising that the provisioning of the Saxon forces in Bohemia would be paid for in silver, obtained at the choice of the vendors, and priced at market rates; that the nobility presently fielding significant forces against the Habsburgs at their own expense would be exempt from the extraordinary tax; and that under no circumstances were any proceeds of the extraordinary tax, or the Bohemian treasury otherwise, were to leave the country for any purpose.

By this point, the campaign season of 1619 was reaching its end. In a remarkable burst of early and unseasonable cold, winter had already come to Bohemia in the autumn months. Such conditions were the case throughout Eastern Europe: at Istanbul, the Bosphorus froze, and men could walk from Europe to Asia. The best thing to be done militarily then, Christian offered, was to wait for winter to end before taking the field and allow the cold, privation and disease to thin out the Habsburg armies stuck out in the field. Of course, the dissatisfied members of the Bohemian Estates were quick to note, the cold would thin out their armies and mercenaries too, leaving Christian's soldiers, warm and well-fed in one of Europe's greatest and best-secured cities, better situated than ever to crush dissent from any quarter once spring came.

Christian's carrot-and-stick approach to the crown's financial problems resulted in a spectacular influx of tax money as the nobility raced to prevent the loss of their lands. At the same time, non-payers conveniently announced themselves as pro-Habsburg, or at least enthusiasts for the old order, and in their flight opened up tenancies for loyalists to the new Bohemian state. Grants of land to Saxons or any German members of the court though was taboo, as clearly that was felt to be too much a provocation given the sensitivities. But the resolution of the state financial crisis had, in and of itself. improved the military situation, as the Bohemian army in the field and the supporting mercenary forces began to be paid regularly.

With the financial pressure relieved, and land getting reallocated to the nobles willing to fund his new regime, Christian relaxed somewhat. During his previous seven years as the Elector of Saxony, he had happily promoted the legacy of Martin Luther in various formal and informal ways. One of these was the anniversary of posting of the 95 Theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg on October 31 had become a public holiday. Efforts by the Duchess Elisabeth to keep the observance spiritual and restrained had failed utterly, and so Theses Day as it had come to be known was marked by beer-fueled revelry, patriotic displays, and lewd singing in the streets. It was a good thing people could only be saved by faith alone, the saying went, "because nothing that happened on Luther's Day would get a man any closer to heaven."

As a display of magnanimity, Christian kept Theses Day in grand style in Prague, and the city was lit with bonfires. No doubt, Christian's gesture had greater strategic significance. Apart from the native Hussite Churches, the balance of the Bohemian population was Lutheran. Inviting them to a celebration of the shared faith built much-needed solidarity between the new court and an important segment of society, and it also demonstrated to anyone hedging their bets against the new monarchy that Christian had more support than just his Saxon armies he could call upon in the event of crisis. As it was, Theses Day, Door Day, or Luther's Day, as it was variously called, was enthusiastically celebrated as long as the House of Wettin ruled Bohemia.

Addressing the court at the peak of the celebrations, Christian announced that his wife Elizabeth was once again pregnant. Moreover, Christian announced, the Lutheran Church of Saxony, perhaps shamed by being beaten out the gate by the Wittenberg Calvinists in funding one of the armies, was raising a force of its own, also numbering 6,000 infantry, that would arrive to reinforce the present numbers before the beginning of the coming year's campaign season. One can only imagine what those members of the Bohemian nobility already distressed by the turn their strike for freedom had taken, and surrounded by boisterously drunk Saxon soldiers, thought at hearing this. More Germans were on their way, who would sit in Prague and reinforce Christian's grip on the country while the actual fighting, and more to the point, the actual freezing to death in the inconceivably cold weather, was being done by Bohemians and Transylvanians.

Now, it is incredibly seductive to read these events through the lens of Christian's personality. There is no end to the histories that see him as having been a budding tyrant all along, hemmed in by Saxony's strong institutions and the other members of his family, until upon reaching Bohemia Christian threw off all pretense of being anything but an absolutist who believed he had to but say a thing for it to be law. Clearly, Christian did not consider the Alexandrine settlement of a ruler bound by law and a legislature that existed outside the ruler's control to be some proud new condition of humanity worth defending. To Christian, it was an affront. It was an affront when he was accosted by Koerbelitz in the tennis house at Torgau, it was an affront when he was presented by the Directorate of the new Bohemian Confederation with an empty treasury that he was expected to fill, and we have every reason to believe Christian still thought it was an affront when he was cut down on the battlefield. But there is something else going on.

The Bohemian Revolution was at its core, a conservative uprising by the nobility against the centralizing erasure of their traditional rights, including the elective monarchy, including the grants of religious freedom in the Letter of Majesty, and including the new forms of government the Letter had established in Bohemia. But more broadly, it is also in defense of a whole idealized medieval culture that we recognize in the rhetoric of put-upon noble elites and their conservative propagandists across Europe: a king who rules by the advice of his nobles, who exists not over them but as the first among them; a nobility that exists within a self-imposed and self-regulated code of honor and receives for its service and loyalty the deference of the king.

In the anti-tyrannical rhetoric of the Bohemian Revolution, the problem was specific to the Austrian Habsburgs' overreach. Surely, they thought, once a proper non-Habsburg king was elected and arrived to take up the cause of Bohemian freedom, he would accept their terms (if for no other reason, because a kingdom on limited terms was better than no kingdom at all), that he would recognize would recognize the legitimacy of the religious settlement because he would be a co-religionist, and that he would reject all the other Habsburg excesses. This was because, they felt, the Habsburgs had been so uniquely terrible.

But it never occurred to this nobility that, outside Bohemia and its peculiar experience in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, other states had experienced their own vigorous, and sometimes violent, centralizations of authority. So if they were unsatisfied with the centralized traditions of rule that were normal and reasonable to the heirs of Maximilian I, they would get in turn the habits of rule normal to, say, Henry VII and his grasping descendants. Now, perhaps it would be otherwise if, instead of Christian, they had chosen a weaker elective sovereign, perhaps someone on the order of the Elector Friedrich of the Palatinate.

To some extent, all this can be confusing: if Christian had just been in a stand-off over state finance just before being offered the Bohemian throne, how could he have come to expect the Bohemians to unquestioningly accept his authority? Of course, to some extent much of this is attributable to the peculiarities of Christian's character. But it is helpful to remember that the Saxons' still-young constitutional system had originated in a state financial crisis that left it need of extraordinary funds. That system had functioned, almost despite Christian's best efforts, in arranging almost lavish funds for the anticipated war. Whereas clearly whatever merits the Bohemian Confederacy had otherwise, adequate tax-collecting, administration and oversight were not among them.

And I trust this is a point we do not have to belabor, but of course soldiers who are paid, fight, train, and yes, just show up more reliably than soldiers who are not.

Moreover, if we turn our attention more specifically to the measures he enacted in those highly fraught weeks of September 1619, we see their underlying impersonality, the nascent modernity in their single-mindedness. Many in the Prague court thought that Christian, in his rage, would execute the holdouts who resisted paying his extraordinary tax, or perhaps imprison them, or seize them and hold them until family members paid their bonds, which is to say, ransoms. Not a few late medieval kings would have likely done precisely this. By the end of his reign, Henry VII usually needed a good reason to let a wealthy nobleman walk free, rather than the other way around.

But to Christian in 1619, all this seemed inefficient. What did he want with the job of killing these people, or the violence that would unleash? Why would he assume the responsibility for feeding and housing them, when he had armies to quarter and provision? Instead, Christian announced to the Bohemian nobility that he needed money, and if he did not get the money he would take land which he would sell to get the money. The persons involved are irrelevant. After all, they're not the ones growing the cereals and other crops on the land that make it valuable. Christian, anxious about his costs, even sublet the task of collection, in a novel experiment in tax farming, to Count Thurn.

And all these payments and transactions would be recorded with the meticulous Saxon record-keeping, so that no one would later have reason to object and say, as many had when Christian first arrived, that they had but the dog had eaten their homework. Thus, for all the emphasis many historians, especially many Czech-language historians, place upon the Bohemian Revolution as a modernizing force, government by the consent of the governed and all that, it is also in a sense the arrival of the early modern state to Bohemia, albeit in the form of a jackass who had the largest collection of parade armor of any European prince living at the time.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Just as an aside outside the fourth wall of the timeline, one of the inspirations and guiding concerns for the previous installment was my reading about how in many of the crucial early battles of the Bohemian revolt Frederick of the Palatinate's armies would simply melt away, often on account with issues having to do with pay and provisioning, and how when Ferdinand's armies subsequently went through and sacked the castles of high-ranking members of the Bohemian revolt, they found their treasuries stuffed with coin. I don't necessarily attribute this to greed. If one is entering into a period of protracted lawlessness, disorder and uncertainty, what's the first impulse, but to accumulate as much physical, portable wealth for oneself as possible, as it may make all the difference in the way of survival? But obviously this does harm to the public finance of a nascent state, too. So.

And as to the political consequence to all this imperious behavior on Christian's part, we'll see.

 

[not livius]

This update is full of what I love most about this timeline, which is the way you mix together larger historical shifts and patterns (hello, early modern period, with its interest in accounting and rejection of feudalism! hello, Saxon cultural habits! Sorry you weren't expecting either of those things, Bohemia!) with the personalities of major actors, in particular here Christian and, as you put it, the peculiarities of his character. There's a great sense here of the inevitable conflagration as the early modern ideas of constitutional monarchy crash right into early modern ideas of absolute monarchy. And by conflagration I really do mean conflagration. There is going to be a lot of gunpowder involved, isn't there?

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

This update is full of what I love most about this timeline, which is the way you mix together larger historical shifts and patterns (hello, early modern period, with its interest in accounting and rejection of feudalism! hello, Saxon cultural habits! Sorry you weren't expecting either of those things, Bohemia!) with the personalities of major actors, in particular here Christian and, as you put it, the peculiarities of his character. There's a great sense here of the inevitable conflagration as the early modern ideas of constitutional monarchy crash right into early modern ideas of absolute monarchy. And by conflagration I really do mean conflagration. There is going to be a lot of gunpowder involved, isn't there?

Thank you so much! I think the first time I was developing the bare bones of the alternate history was 2008. And while there are still some very basic questions I still don't have a good answer for (like, if you're going to do a story about an early German unification under the 17th century Protestants, why not just have Gustavus Adolphus live and beget a son, and be done with it?), I like to think the amount of time I have lived with these characters gives them a depth and piquancy that they wouldn't have even if I was researching them at the same level fifteen years ago. Are we ever going to finish, in the sense of arriving at the alternate contemporary present, having built a fully realized narrative covering the entire period from 1509, with this level of detail? Oh hell no. But we're going to have fun anyway.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Portrait of Louis XIV, by Lorenzo Bernini, at Versailles. This would be the model for Schauberger's Amazon.

Wrestling Titans by Ignac Platzer, in the First Courtyard of Prague Castle. While the gate and background structures would be different, the Amazon would be placed at the center, facing outward, as if to make a sally against a besieging army.

Julius Caesar, by Jan Jiri Schauberger, Olomouc, Czech Republic.

Prague: A Heritage of Freedom
In order to make the history of the city more accessible to casual visitors, the Commonwealth Tourism Ministry has produced this guide in which sites particularly important to a specific era are listed and described in brief.

CZECH
GERMAN
ENGLISH
FRENCH
SPANISH
ITALIAN

The Early and Medieval City - Luxembourg Prague - The First Revolution - Habsburg Prague - Second Revolution - Wettin Prague - Third Revolution - Early Commonwealth Bohemia - Mitte-Mitte - Fourth Revolution - The Contemporary Commonwealth

Castle Hill

16. The Amazonka is the world-famous equestrian statue by Jan Jiri Schauberger of the Empress Sofie that dominates the first square of Prague Castle, facing the main gate, and posed as if about to exit. Completed in 1740, it is the first equestrian statue with a female rider in the west. Some eighteen feet high, it is taller than the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius at the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Yet the statue's popularity derives not from the fact it has a female subject, from its singular placement or its almost-unique size.

The Amazonka shows Sofie (In Bohemia, Queen Sofia I) in the garb of a Roman Emperor, complete with (feminine) breastplate and a crown of laurels, wielding a spear with one arm and holding the infant Friedrich, Margrave of Meissen in the other. The imperial symbolism is not mere fancy: with the female rulers of Germany only possible since the start of the New Realm, and with Sofie having succeeded to the throne of Saxony and won election to the Bohemian and imperial thrones with great difficulty, she was anxious to depict herself as a literal Caesar, and a victorious war-making monarch.

The response of Sofie's court artists to her demand for a monumental equestrian statue of herself strained to make the image more conventional and feminine. Hence, the inclusion of her infant son, softening the martial imagery of the rest of the sculpture into a mother's effort to protect her vulnerable offspring. The court artists wanted to go further, and create something close to an approximation of the actual equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius at the Capitoline: sober, dispassionate and majestic. Sofie emphatically rejected that notion, preferring instead the dynamism of the rampant pose. So she instead required that her artists base her portrait on Bernini's equestrian statue of Louis XIV.

The result of all her insistence, in the face of years of obstruction, is the Amazonka. It both depicts the First Empress's force of personality, and is the result of it. It differs from the work of Bernini that it took as its model, first and foremost in the inclusion of the the young Margrave, and the replacement of the general's rod with the spear. But also instead of the stylized flames Bernini used to help support and stabilize the rampant horse and rider, it has the chopped and segmented body of a serpent performing the same function.

Ironically, considering the role of Bernini's portrait of Louis XIV in the genesis of the Amazonka, one theory is that the vanquished serpent represents the House of Bourbon. Another is that it represents Sofie I's husband.

The inscription on the statue's immense pedestal, as if it could be made any more obvious: MEINE VOELKER SIND MEINE KINDER.

 

[Cate13]

Very cool!

 

[Hohensaufen]

My peoples are my children is the translation of MEINE VOELKER SIND MEINE KINDER for any non German speakers.

Great info on Bohemia as well... it seems as if in the modern era it is a multinational commonwealth separate from Germany.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

My peoples are my children is the translation of MEINE VOELKER SIND MEINE KINDER for any non German speakers.

Great info on Bohemia as well... it seems as if in the modern era it is a multinational commonwealth separate from Germany.

So originally that post was going to be a wider survey of sites in Prague, similar to the one we had about the English immigrants in Wittenberg forever ago. But then I went off on that one statue and realized that as one post this could literally go on forever, and take forever to do. So the plan instead is to alternate between the heavy-duty historical updates focused on the war and items from the online travel guide. And as we do we'll fill in some of what happens to the Czechs later. Because, as is apparent from the menu the post begins with, the House of Wettin is not the Bohemian happily-ever-after, but one of a series of stops on the way to republican self-rule. In many ways, the Commonwealth is not too different from our Czechia, but there are some exceptions, and that will be fun to explore.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

GILLESPIE'S STUDY GUIDES FOR INTRODUCTORY UNIVERSITY COURSES

THE FIRST GENERAL WAR:
THE MAJOR AND MINOR POWERS CHOOSE SIDES

Lucky McGee

A complete diplomatic history of the beginning of the First General War in any kind of abbreviated overview is just about impossible. Virtually every power in Europe, whether a sovereign kingdom like France (which was entreated to participate by both sides), or a territorial prince beholden to a sovereign, like Prussia to its Polish overlord or the Palatinate to the Emperor, was confronted over which side it would choose. For some, the matter was so easy there was little discussion. For example, Saxony's closest allies in the Protestant Union--Hesse-Kessel, Hesse-Darmstadt, the Elector Palatine, and the Count Palatine of Neuberg--wasted little time plunging along with it into the conflict with the Austrian Habsburgs, as if tied by the same rope. Many others calculated matters of payment, advantage, the most likely outcome, and what other powers would become involved. Some joined, some did nothing, and many countries found themselves on a continuum between the two extremes.

What this review presents is the initial moves and deliberations of the various powers whose involvement would prove most consequential in the war's initial stages.

Bavaria and the Catholic League

Throughout 1619, the diplomacy of Philipp von Sontra, Koellendorf's replacement as the Chancellor of Saxony, had been an abject failure in its effort to find allies from among the great Protestant princes of Europe in the effort to remove the Habsburgs. from the Bohemian throne. However, Sontra fared somewhat better in preventing the Habsburgs from mobilizing their own potential allies. Not long after the Bohemian revolt first began, Sontra had written the Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, essentially saying that as a newcomer to political service he had had no part in any of Christian's previous provocations, and declaring that he desired nothing more than preserving the peace of the empire. To this purpose, Sontra suggested, he would use all his influence to prevent Christian and the Protestant Union from intervening directly in support of the Bohemian rebels against the Habsburgs. But it would help him to make his peace arguments to Christian if Maximilian and the Catholic League had promised, conditionally, to do the same.

Thus, Sontra asserted to Maximilian, he could say to Christian that if he stayed out of the Bohemian matter he was in fact securing the continuing neutrality of the Catholic League as well. Of course at the same time Sontra, no less than Koellendorf or Thurn, was obsessed with winning Christian the very throne offered by the rebels he had sworn to do nothing to help. To a great extent, Sontra's deception succeeded with Maximilian so well because it played to the duke's own desire to see the Habsburgs humbled so as to facilitate his own ambition to become the preeminent Catholic prince in the empire. The greater the magnitude of the disruption in Bohemia, the more resources the Habsburgs would be forced to channel into squelching the uprising, and hence the more necessary Bavaria would be, and the more the likely for the Habsburgs to be displaced eventually. This Maximilian did not mind at all, so long as it did not permanently prejudice the Catholic religion in the Empire.

But once word arrived of the offer of the Bohemian throne to Christian (his likely acceptance could be inferred from the offer itself), Maximilian's anger knew no bounds. Ferdinand visited Maximilian in October 1619 on his way back from his coronation, and the two men wasted little time reaching an agreement. Despite misgivings about the legality of the Catholic League, it had been permitted to continue before the Bohemian Revolt because of lingering fears over Christian's hegemonic ambitions within the Empire. Now, Ferdinand explicitly called for the Catholic League's help under Maximilian's leadership. In the resulting treaty signed by the Emperor and the Duke of Bavaria, Maximilian was legally entitled to act on the Emperor's behalf, and thus to receive compensation from the Emperor for his expenses. Until these were paid, Maximilian would effectively occupy Upper Austria. This was far from an onerous burden on Ferdinand, as the Lutheran peasants of Upper Austria were also in revolt, and he had precious little resources available to suppress the disorders and extract tax money from the province anyway.

In December 1619 the Catholic League met at Wurzburg, where its members agreed to field an army of 25,000 in the coming campaign season. Also at Wurzburg the prince-bishop of Salzburg, having previously abstained from membership but now fully comprehending the scale of the crisis, joined the League. Finally at Wurzburg the League's forces were officially put under the control of Count Jean Tserclaes Tilly, a commander with significant experience in the East against the Turks.

On January 26. 1620 Ferdinand officially declared Christian's election as king of Bohemia legally void and gave him six months to vacate the throne and defuse the crisis or else face the imperial ban. These terms were ridiculed in Prague, as Christian declared that by June he hoped to be able to confer with Ferdinand on the matter in Vienna, in person, at the head of his army.

Brandenburg

Ostensibly a member of the Protestant Union, Brandenburg has shown little inclination towards using the league of evangelical princes to win new titles and offices for Christian. Originally, the breach between Saxony and Brandenburg had opened up over the conversion of the electorate's heir, Johann Sigismund, to Calvinism. More specifically, when his wife, Eleonora, a devout Lutheran, attempted to notify Johann Sigismund's grandfather of his conversion so that the succession could be changed on that account. One theory is that Eleonora's objective in this had less to do with faith than with the possibility of ridding herself of a husband for whom she had no affection and becoming the regent for her, at that time, very young son. In the end, Eleonora was forced to flee Brandenburg on her husband's accession to the electoral dignity and return to Saxony, where her presence and influence has remained an irritant ever since. Johann Sigismund having suffered a debilitating stroke in late 1617, the regency officially passed to his son, Georg.

However, true power in Brandenburg has passed to Adam, Graf von Schwarzenberg. In an odd turn of events given Brandenburg's new commitment to Calvinism, Schwarzenberg was a Catholic. A native of the County of Mark, Schwarzenberg had hoped for high office following the accession of Christian to his matrilineal inheritance of the lands of Juelich-Cleve-Berg-Mark-Ravensberg. At the time, Christian was in the full froth of his Protestant bigotry though, and rejected out of hand the possibility of appointing Schwarzenberg to any position of hgh office. Eventually finding a place at the court of Brandenburg, Schwarzenberg has steered its policy in the ways most advantageous to the Empire and lead advantageous to Saxony.

Thus Brandenburg offered precious little assistance to Saxony first in assembling the Protestant Union, and then in 1619 when the Bohemian crown was offered, securing it for Christian. In fact, it is the Brandenburg court, most likely Schwarzenberg himself, who revealed in early November 1619 deeply damaging diplomatic correspondence. In attempting to secure alliances to support Christian's claim to Bohemia against the Habsburgs, the Saxon Chancellor Sontra had proposed a secret partition of much of the remaining ecclesiastical territories of the Holy Roman Empire, by which Braunschweig would get the Bishopric of Bremen, the Palatinate would get the Bishopric of Speyer, Hesse-Kassel would get the Bishopric of Muenster, Hesse-Darmstadt would get the Bishopric of Wuerzburg, and Brandenburg would get Cammin, Minden and Osnabrueck.

This destroyed any credibility Christian had as a law-abiding prince of the empire, and greatly contributed to the perception that the empire was heading into a final confrontation between Protestant and Catholic princes.

Braunschweig-Lueneburg

The death of Duke Heinrich in 1613 left the Duchy of Braunschweig-Lueneburg in the hands of his fifteen year-old son Rudolf, with Rudolf's mother Johanna the regent. Originally committed to the Saxon cause, Duke Heinrich in his final years developed views that prioritized the constitutional stability of the empire over confessional and familial loyalties. Johanna however during her regency brought Braunschweig back into the fold of the German Protestant territorial princes loyal to Saxony. First the Bohemian revolt itself, and next Christian's acceptance of the offer of the throne of Bohemia, threw Braunschweig into crisis. The young Rudolf, though technically of age to rule on his own, had like his father developed a very serious drinking problem that led the estates of Braunschweig to continue the regency of his mother. In September 1619, on learning of his mother's intent to support Christian's war for Bohemia by all possible means, an enraged Rudolf asked the Estates of Braunschweig to end the regency, invest personal rule in him, and exile his mother so that he would stop Braunschweig's role in a war for Saxony's aggrandizement. In December 1619, the Braunschweig estates obliged, and thus Brandenburg has removed itself from the Protestant Union and declared its neutrality.

Poland and the Cossacks

Sigismund III Vasa, King of Poland, was married to Constance of Austria, Ferdinand's sister, in 1605 and in 1613 had signed an alliance with Austria by which each ruler agreed to assist the other against rebels to his rule. Sigismund had invoked this alliance in 1617 when the heir to the usurper of his rule in Sweden, one Gustaf II Adolf, invaded Livonia. For his trouble he received no assistance from the Emperor, and so was unsympathetic when Ferdinand began entreating his help against the Bohemians, even before Saxony involved itself in the question. Even with Ferdinand offering Sigismund the duchy of Silesia from out of his Bohemian territories, Sigismund refused to involve himself directly. Instead, he permitted the Habsburg ambassador to recruit among the rebellious Cossack cavalry in the south, as yet unpaid after a recent war in Lithuania. These 3,000 Cossacks under Aleksander Lisowski in Podolia were now joined to 4,000 Cossacks under Gyorgy Homonnai in Upper Hungary.

The combined Cossack force then attacked the rump force of Transylvanian cavalry left behind when Bethlen Gabor led his force west to assist the Bohemian rebels. On November 22 the Cossacks delivered a severe defeat to the Transylvanians, led by Rakoczi, in Upper Hungary. This destabilized matters in Transylvania so much that Bethlen was forced to conclude his own eight-month truce with Ferdinand in January 1620.

Prussia

Not part of the empire, nor a member of the Protestant Union, Prussia was governed by Hector, a Saxon noble of the Johannine Wettin line who had spent much of his life in the Netherlands. Hector had been given the regency of Prussia through the good offices of the Elector Alexander, and ruled in place of the mentally ill Albrecht Friedrich with the blessing of the Polish-Lithuanian king, Sigismund III Vasa. Hector had even received from Sigismund approval to wed his son Joachim to Albrecht Friedrich's daughter and heir, making the Johannine Wettins the hereditary dukes of Prussia. Sigismund's assent was largely due to Hector's loyal service during the Polish-Swedish wars, despite the shared Lutheran faith of the Johannine Wettins and the self-declared Vasa kings of Sweden. On August 12, 1618, Albrecht Friedrich died, his daughter Maria became duchess, and through her, Joachim became duke of Prussia, jure uxoris.

Though neither wealthy nor well-populated, Prussia was significant enough that Christian sought its contribution to the Saxon effort to win the Bohemian throne. Joachim declined, explaining that he feared displeasing Sigismund. However, beginning in Christmas 1618 Habsburg ambassadors arrived at the Prussian court in Konigsberg to offer Hector the electorate of Saxony.

Spain

Though Spain for its part refused direct involvement in the war as yet, it agreed to permit imperial commanders to recruit from Spanish-controlled territory and to allow the nobility of the Spanish Habsburg lands to contribute money and other means to the war effort. With the Spanish Netherlands officially within the Empire as part of the Burgundian Circle, the governors of the Netherlands allowed 6,000 infantry and 1,000 horse, led by Johann VIII, Count of Nassau. Marching on a route that carefully avoided the territories of the Protestant Union, they reached Austria by July 1619. By November 1619 a second contribution of 7,000 soldiers from Italy had crossed the St. Gotthard's Pass from Italy and reached Innsbruck., but half of these were dispatched down the Rhine, ostensibly to join the Army of Flanders in preparation for the 1621 expiration of the Twelve Years Truce, but also potentially to assist in the imposition of the Imperial Ban in Christian's Juelich lands. 9,000 more Spanish-Italian infantry crossed the pass in the winter of 1619-20, and were also sent down the Rhine to either, as circumstances required, make war on the Dutch or the Saxons.

By June 1620 the Army of Flanders numbered some 44,000 infantry and 7,000 cavalry, far out-numbering the Saxon defenders garrisoning the great Rhineland fortresses.-

Transylvania, Upper Hungary and the Ottoman Empire

From 1613, the Calvinist Bethlen Gabor was prince of Transylvania. Almost immediately, he fell into the network of potential allies being cultivated by the Saxon chancellery, believing that helping Christian to the Bohemian throne would win in turn the Saxon financial assistance that would make him the Protestant king of Hungary. Almost immediately, he moved to support the Bohemian Revolution, even before Christian had been invited to take the throne. Bethlen on his own initiative sent an envoy to Istanbul, where he had won from the Ottoman Grand Vizier Mehmet Pasha not just permission for Bethlen, an Ottoman vassal, to wage war, but the promise of Turkish infantry to use as auxiliaries in the Bohemian war.

In August 1619, Bethlen left Cluj with 35,000 soldiers, while Rakoczi, with 5,000 soldiers, entered Kassa, and Gyorgy Szechy, with 5,000 more, advanced on Pressburg in order to disrupt the efforts of the Hungarians loyal to the Habsburgs from mounting a separate resistance. Ferenc Rhedey crossed the Little Carpathians into Moravia with 12,000 light cavalry. Bethlen entered into a pitched battle with a Habsburg force sent to relieve the loyalists in Pressburg, and defeated them. Most of the fortresses on the Military Frontier declared for Bethlen, leaving only Komorn, Raab and Neutra loyal to the Habsburgs. The loyalist Forgach could muster only 2,500 infantry in Upper Hungary. Even Vienna itself was held against Bethlen with just 2,650 men by Archduke Leopold.

With Ferdinand still returning from his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor, and Christian likewise journeying up the Moldau towards Prague, General Bucquoy was forced to break off an advance against Tabor with 17,000 infantry by Bethlen's march against Vienna, leaving 5,000 men behind to prevent the position that he held from being lost. In late October Bethlen crossed the Danube at Pressburg, as thousands of refugees pressed into Vienna and once again, it seemed as if the city might be lost, before Ferdinand managed to return despite the presence of the Transylvanian forces. Vienna having been provisioned and the surrounded countryside scoured of resources that could support an attacking army, Bethlen was forced to withdraw towards the end of 1619 in the face of the Cossack counterattack against Upper Hungary and Moravia.

In December 1619, in the depth of winter, Bethlen finally met the new king of Bohemia in person, at Brunn, in Moravia. Christian brought with him silver sufficient to pay Bethlen's army for the previous year's service, and keep him in the field another year. However, Christian demanded that in advance of the next year's marching season there would have to be better coordination between his forces and the Saxon infantry. The goal as Christian envisioned it would be to first reduce the remaining Habsburg-controlled cities in Bohemia, then to press south towards Vienna a final time, but with siege artillery and the advantage of the Saxon, Bohemian, and Transylvanian forces, prepared and working in concert.

However, very quickly Bethlen Gabor realized he and Christian were operating from fundamentally different assumptions, not the least of which Bethlen's belief that they were coequal allies working against a common foe, the Habsburgs, towards a desired end in which they would each be kings, Christian of Bohemia, and Bethlen, of Hungary. Bethlen quickly understood that in Christian's view, he was little more than a paid mercenary whose ambitions would be humored, but who would not be treated as a partner. Moreover, Bethlen was a vassal of the Ottoman Empire, who had mounted his offensive with the permission of the grand vizier. Koellendorf had enthusiastically embraced the possibility of Ottoman involvement, even if that meant accepting terms of Ottoman vassalage for Bohemia. Christian laughed off that notion as absurd. The joint request for Ottoman aid in the face of the Habsburg war that Bethlen had assumed they would make together was rejected out of hand.

Christian was willing to coordinate and time his attacks with the Ottomans, but not to accept any hierarchical relationship with them. He even refused the notion of paying the conventional bribes at the Ottoman court that would allow a diplomatic petition to be heard. Bethlen could do such if he wanted, with the money Christian was paying him, but Christian would not lower himself that way. Bethlen feared the consequences of that sort of disrespect to the Ottomans for any realistic chance of assistance. Discouraged by his encounter with the new king of Bohemia, Bethlen decided to make an eight month truce with Ferdinand in January.

As for Christian, in Prague on Christmas Day he had made it public knowledge as a matter of pride that he had refused to seek help from the Ottoman Sultan, and that he would never submit as a vassal or liegeman to any non-Christian, no matter the consequences, triggering celebrations in the streets.

Venice

In 1615 Venice had gone to war with Ferdinand of Styria over tensions pertaining to the Uskoks, landless raiders displaced by the Ottoman wars who ranged across the lands of the Miliitary Frontier close to the Adriatic and occasionally ventured across the western border into Venetian territory. The problem of the Uskoks had presented Venice with the opportunity to strike against a larger Austrian problem in the Adriatic, as the development of the port of Trieste represented unwelcome competition, and the Austrian domination of Istria, Styria and Carinthia and Carniola all represented hard limits on the ability of the Republic to expand inland. In this war Venice had the assistance of the Ottomans, who likewise sought to end the Uskok raids. Venice also had loose alliances with the English and Dutch, which allowed it to hire mercenaries from those nations for the purposes of its land campaigns against the Uskoks, which had ended without much success in 1617. Venice's willingness to provoke Austria however had the hard limit of its unwillingness to confront Spain, or to risk Spanish participation in a major Italian war.

Saxon diplomats still hoped to leverage the long trade relationship that had existed between the republic and the electorate, which had become only more significant in recent decades. They were now dangling the prospects of a Venetian Istria in much the same way they were making use of the northern ecclesiastical territories in trying to win the support of the Protestant German princes of northern Germany. However, as 1619 ended and 1620 began, Venice was as yet unwilling to take the risk of going to war against Spain.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

St. Barbara's Church, Kutna Hora, Czech Republic. Designed partly by Peter Parler, like St. Vitus in Prague, the square peaked roofs here represents a traditional Bohemian derivation of gothic design which was present in the structures in Prague Castle before the 1541 fire. In the work on St. Vitus completed in the seventeenth-century, Fridrich incorporates peaked roofs similar to St. Barbara's, which were completed by 1588, into St. Vitus.

The Golden Gate, ceremonial entrance for the Kings and Queens of Bohemia, would have been completed by the time of Fridrich.

Michelangelo, Second Plan for a Wall Tomb for Julius II

Prague: A Heritage of Freedom

In order to make the history of the city more accessible to casual visitors, the Commonwealth Tourism Ministry has produced this guide in which sites particularly important to a specific era are listed and described in brief.

CZECH
GERMAN
ENGLISH
FRENCH
SPANISH
ITALIAN

The Early and Medieval City - Luxembourg Prague - The First Revolution - Habsburg Prague - Second Revolution - Wettin Prague - Third Revolution - Early Commonwealth Bohemia - Mitte-Mitte - Fourth Revolution - The Contemporary Commonwealth

Castle Hill

35. The Cathedral of St. Vitus is the most historically important church in Bohemia. Begun in 930, serving a city that became a bishopric in 1060, with the present gothic structure begun in 1344, it may be odd that the church is so closely associated with a family, and one one ruler in particular, who only arrived in Prague in 1619, and how an edifice Catholic in its origins became a focus of Protestant faith. Though the present structure was begun by Jan I, it was for a long while most closely associated with Karl IV, who was also a Holy Roman Emperor. Karl envisioned the cathedral, at the very center of the Prague Castle complex, as serving as a coronation church, crypt, treasury and seat of the archbishopric of Prague. The original structure was designed by the French master builder Matthias of Arras. He was succeeded on his death in 1352 by the Bohemian Peter Parler. On Parler's death the work was continued by his sons, Wenzel and Johannes Parler.

The Hussite Wars did not just lead to the end of active construction on St. Vitus: they began an active process of iconoclastic destruction, including the spoliation of many figurative artworks completed and installed during the previous centuries. With the reestablishment of the monarchy under the House of Luxembourg, work on the church resumed, with features like the chapel of St. Wenzel completed. Vladislav II commissioned the architect Benedict Ried to finish St. Vitus at the end of the 15th century, but the project almost immediately ran out of funds. Then the Cathedral of St. Vitus suffered extensive further damage due to the great fire that swept through the Castle in 1541.

At the time the First General War began, the church was built only to the transept. It was enclosed by a provisional wall, with no nave. The planned three-aisle nave had at that point not been built. The Second Bohemian Revolution that began in 1618 brought with it a second cycle of iconoclasm, many of the perpetrators this time being Calvinists. Christian I (in Czech, King Krestan I), to a great extent, represented the historical pivot. Brought up in a Protestant faith that had made its own extensive use of architecture and representational art since the time of Lucas Cranach the Elder, Krestan forbade iconoclasm on pain of death and began protecting the cathedral against further predations, even though he made no effort to reverse the damage already done, or to resume work on the structure.

On Krestan's death, his son, Fridrich I, decreed his father be buried in St. Vitus, rather than in the Wettin family's crypts in Wittenberg. This began the powerful emotional connection Fridrich I had to the Cathedral. Fridrich, called Erste by Germans as the first ruler of their New Realm, had little more than laid his father in the ground, and was still subject to the terms of the regency, when he began agitating for the completion of St. Vitus. It was unseemly, he thought, that the coronation church of his kingdom would still be half in timbers. But of course his connection to the place went far beyond that. Though at first only resident in the Bohemian capital for six months of the year, Fridrich always considered Prague his home. He liked to wander through the workshops of Castle Hill, keeping little ceremony and with few guards, chatting with craftsmen and customers, admitting only with mild embarrassment that yes, it was his face on the bohmenthalers, occasionally making a haphazard try at glassblowing. As such, he would have seen and walked by the half-completed church almost every day.

Fridrich's own religious beliefs, allocated in a way not unlike many ordinary Bohemians of his day among different aspects of Lutheranism and the Unity of the Brethren, made room for an appreciation of the aesthetic and even the monumental in his houses of worship. When, in 1647, he first seriously undertook the task of finishing St. Vitus, he took the odd step of announcing an open call for plans with a generous prize for the design chosen. He so hated the results that he dropped one model from a certain very famous window in Prague Castle, shot another to pieces, and blew up others with gun powder. When his chief builder recommended leveling the existing structure and starting fresh, Fridrich literally chased him out of the Strahov Palace and never permitted him back in.

By 1655, Fridrich was insisting on the completion, in so far as possible, of the original medieval plan of Matthias of Arras and the Parlers, a notion greatly complicated by the destruction of journals, records and notes over the intervening centuries, and scoffed at by architects of the baroque era who believed their notions of beauty superseded the medieval. Christopher Wren, by now several decades after the original competition, submitted his own plans for a monumental domed church occupying a greater footprint than the existing structure, which would from its perch on Castle Hill more completely dominate the city than even the Cathedral with its gothic spire does now. The hand-written note, scrawled in English at the bottom of the plans that were returned to Wren, reads simply "Sir, my family did not shed its blood so profusely in this place to build new Vaticans." It is on display at Dowager's College, Oxford.

Fitfully, construction began in 1660. Even though Fridrich was always more popular with his Bohemian subjects, winning funding for the project from the Diet in these years was a struggle. At one point, apparently Fridrich broke into the Queen's apartments in the Strahov, seized a significant portion of her jewelry, and pawned it all to keep the craftsmen working. And even in his later years, he visited the site, less with the air of a prince supervising the work he was funding than a man curious as to how it was all done. In order to assuage the complaints from the Hussite and Brethren communities that the ostentatious expense could be better spent on new schools and hospitals, Fridrich, whether missing the point entirely or conveniently ignoring it, announced plans to build the single biggest deviation from the plan of the original church, the Martyr's Chapel. Intended, originally, to be a memorial specifically to Huss and the Bohemian martyrs, Fridrich eventually adapted it to serve as a place of prayer for the souls of all Christians who died by violence at the hands of others for the observance of their faith.

The Martyr's Chapel is dominated by stained glass windows depicting the burnings of Wycliff, Huss, Tyndall, and Anne Askew. The statue of Thomas More represents a later, and somewhat controversial, addition, provoking the bitter joke that it has the air not of a fellow martyr to freedom of conscience but of a man supervising work being done. On the south side of the cathedral, which in their use of stained glass in the load-bearing structure like at Saint-Chapelle in Paris, the walls of the Martyr's Chapel are almost entirely glass. Given the intensity of the subject matter and the use of various shades of red and yellow in the colors of the depicted flames, as well as the south-facing windows, in the afternoon the Martyr's Chapel is flooded with red light, creating the impression the people inside are themselves burning. The effect is so overwhelming that when the aged Fridrich was brought in to see the completed chapel in 1673, he was overcome and fainted. To this day, people can find the experience of the Martyr's Chapel profoundly unsettling, and over the years it has given rise to more than its share of claims of religious visions, miracles and portents.

In 1678, work on St. Vitus's Cathedral was stopped again as war and crisis once again made the work too costly to continue. The final push to completion only came with the Empress, partly out of her admiration for her predecessor Fridrich. She kept to his commitment to the completion of the medieval plan, but with one significant modification. She, being the personification of the Baroque Era in Prague, commissioned a new family tomb for the Wettins inside the Cathedral, based on the monumental plan for the tomb of Pope Julius II inside St. Peter's in Rome as envisioned by Michelangelo, but never built because of the expense. (Michelangelo's famous statue of Moses was originally planned as one component of the enormous structure). So today, the final resting place of Krestan, of Fridrich, and Sofia herself, is in a display of supreme irony something that was too grand for St. Peter's. "My family did not shed it's blood so profusely in this place to build new Vaticans," indeed.

Today, St. Vitus's is the largest church in the National Bohemian Church, which embraces in its theology a mixture of Huss and Luther, and is the official seat of church government for the country. It is however only the second largest church in Prague. That distinction goes to the rococo Metropolitan Cathedral of St. Jan Nepomuk, which was built east of the Old Town of Prague as the new Cathedral for the city's Roman Catholics in the eighteenth century and the seat of the new archbishopric of Prague. As the early Wettin kings of Bohemia gave way to their less popular, and more physically and culturally distant, heirs, Catholicism became more popular, and efforts to disfavor it transformed it into a mode of popular resistance to German rule. While it never displaced the National Bohemian Church as a matter of law, it became more popular in the era of the Third Bohemian Revolution. Thus, whereas Bohemia at the time Fridrich I may have had as few Catholics as one person in ten, Catholicism by the mid-nineteenth century was once again the majority religion in Bohemia, although the question of anything more than polite competition between the Protestant, officially National, Church, and the Catholic, majority, one, has been out of the question since virtually Fridrich's time.

And of course it was in the Fourth Revolution that the Catholics of Bohemia, and the Hussite National Church, truly made common cause against a shared enemy.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Pictured: Saxony, including the appended realms and the remaining possessions of the Juelich-Mark-Kleve inheritance at the end of 1620, is forest-green. The Bohemian Confederacy is light-green. Austrian Habsburg lands are yellow. Ecclestiastical lands of the Holy Roman Empire, most of which are members of the Catholic League, but some of which have Lutheran administrators, are red. Bavaria, the only territorial prince of consequence who is an ally of the Austrian Habsburgs, is light orange. The Spanish Habsburgs, including their conquests in the west during 1620, is deep orange. Light-blue denote those states of the Protestant Union which are actively allied with Saxony, including the Palatinate Wittelsbachs, Anhalt, Ansbach, Hesse-Kassell, and Hesse-Darmstadt.

The First General War and the Invention of Global Warfare

Marguerite Tromarey

Bohemia and the East, 1620

In February 1620, the V Saxon Army-Eisleben, supported and funded by the Lutheran Church of Saxony, arrived in Prague bringing the number of Saxon forces in Bohemia to 18,000 infantry. The various Saxon armies had varying cavalry components, usually less than 500 horse for each army. It is believed there would have been around 1,000 horse total for the three Saxon forces in Prague at that time. Like the infantry, the cavalry relied disproportionately on firearms. Traditional shock cavalry armed with lances was disfavored by the Saxons, with the great uncertainty being whether they would be able to fire and reload on the battlefield in a timely way. This was very much like the great question facing the Saxon infantry, but with the added complication of firing from horseback.

The Duke of Teschen, in far-eastern Silensia, had mustered 10,000 infantry and perhaps 2,000 cavalry, but was unable to march them west at the start of the year because the Cossacks the Habsburgs had obtained from Poland began brutal raids into Moravia. Unable to force the Cossacks into open battle, the duke's army was instead dispersed so as to garrison the fortified towns that would be the Cossacks' targets. While this provided welcome protection to eastern Moravia and won support for the new regime, it deprived Christian of vital assistance in the coming campaign season. It was believed one reason for the duke's decision was his reticence to send his army against the Habsburgs directly, rather than against Polish invaders who were behaving lawlessly in the Bohemian realms.

Thus, lacking the contributions promised by the Duke of Teschen, but joined by Christian of Anhalt with a contingent of forces from the Palatinate, as well as several thousand troops sent by the Silesian Margrave of Jaegendorf, the full Bohemian and Saxon army began the year with 32,000 infantry, along with 6,000 cavalry, Despite Christian's original misgivings, the discipline enforced on the army's recruitment and payroll by his vertreter had paid off, in that morale was high, desertions were few and the army was in good discipline. 7,000 additional Hungarian and Transylvanian hussars hired as mercenaries created their own problems, but Christian feared dispensing with their services would just lead them to switch allegiances take employment with Ferdinand.

Over the winter, Christian's preoccupations had been the sieges of the remaining Habsburg strongholds in the south of Bukovice and Krumlov, Pilsen having surrendered in late November 1619. With the siege lines closely supervised and a steady flow of Saxon reinforcements to the siege lines, Bukovice surrendered in January, allowing Christian to start the season with a claim of victory. In February, the new Bohemian king ordered his army to march south to engage the Imperial and Austrian forces. Addressing the army he announced he would first take Krumlov, With it, completely in his possession he would finally have all of Bohemia. From Krumlov he would march to Vienna. There, he would not flinch from its walls, rely on help from inside, or merely menace it, as army after army had the past few years. Instead, he promised he would besiege the city until it had fallen, force Ferdinand to recognize his reign in Bohemia, and confer Upper and Lower Austria on a new, Protestant prince.

The announcement of these war aims was taken by the rest of Europe when it reached the respective capitals of the great powers as delusional, and as such, completely in character. However, they represented a great problem. For with the addition of the Saxon armies to the Bohemians and his mercenaries, Christian had a clear numerical advantage. The strategy of the Imperial forces, as developed by Tilly and Bucquoy, was going to be to refuse to give battle and exhaust Christian by having him pursue them fruitlessly. Instead, with Christian declaring he would make a straight line towards Vienna, a target they dared not allow him to win, he was now determining the path of the war. This presented an end to the frenetic dashing about of the Protestant armies the previous year. Instead, Christian's march would be slow, methodical, with in his train, not just the siege artillery that would be sufficient to bring down the walls of Vienna, but pre-fabricated bridge segments that had been built over the winter that could be thrown up to enable passage over significant rivers, possibly including the Danube.

Thus March passed with Imperial armies attempting to lure Christian away from his objective, with at one point the camp fires of Tilly's forces clearly visible from Castle Hill in Prague. But Christian, never a man easily dissuaded, plodded south. The great towns of Bohemia had been fortified, provisioned, and garrisoned, and he was making the wager that any of them, including Prague, could hold out against even a determined siege in the time it took him to take Vienna. If worst came to worst, his uncle Friedrich could lead a relief army behind him. In the end, it was the Imperial armies rather than Christian that flinched. In Christian's columns headed south were only around 19,000 infantry. The rest of the Bohemian forces, under Thurn, waited for him at Bukovice. Tilly and Bucquoy could not allow Christian to reach Krumlov and join with Thurn, either to pierce the walls of Krumlov or to proceed south against Vienna and Ferdinand.

Bucquoy managed to run ahead of the Saxon column, slowed by the enormous train behind it, to Sobeslav, where he seized the road headed south and turned to confront the Saxon force. Tilly, marching from near Pilsen, was still perhaps a few days behind them both. Christian sent scouts east, around Bucquoy's army, to get word to Thurn that he would have to offer battle, and for Thurn to send immediate assistance. Unbeknownst to him, the message was intercepted and would never reach the Bohemian army. Nonetheless, Christian waited, and initially refused to offer battle in the hopes of giving Thurn the opportunity to reach him.

At this point Christian put the Saxon army to work digging trenches to create barriers to protect his infantry from the opposing cavalry. In a story which would immediately become famous, he ordered the Hungarian hussars, who were sitting in their saddles watching the work, to help, and reminded them he was paying them. When told that only peasants dig, Christian furiously dismounted, grabbed a shovel, and began throwing earth over his shoulder along with the rest of the ordinary infantry. Whether this shamed the Hungarians or won from them some sharp words depends on which version of the story one hears. But without a doubt, it lent credence to the notion that, whatever his ambitions, whatever his passions, Christian was willing to share the burdens of his men.

Eventually, unwilling to give Christian the chance to further improve his position where he was, or give Thurn's forces the opportunity to reach him, Bucquoy gave battle, with 23,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. In fact, the early battle showed that the Saxon rate of fire was not sufficient to hold back the offensive push of enemy infantry bearing pikes, Literally, the trenches in the front of the Saxon forces was all that prevented a massacre, as they channeled Bucquoy's attacks into the flanks, where they faced their own charges from the Hungarian and Transylvanian light cavalry. Casualties were heavy on both sides.

In the end, it was a simple matter of who had assistance closer at hand. Around the same time the fighting began at Sobeslav, Thurn's scouts reported back to him the situation there, and he began marching as quickly as possible to rescue his young and troublesome new king. Tilly, advancing from the northwest, was perhaps a further day behind. It was as the still-indecisive battle was reaching the end of the day that Bucquoy's rear glimpsed Thurn's soldiers approaching up the road from the direction of Bukovice. Suddenly, Bucquoy's army's resolve broke, and it became a rout. Bucquoy himself, fearing being caught within the jaws of the two armies, commanded a retreat east towards Preborov. Suddenly, with the pressure of the attack broken, Christian's infantry had the luxury of firing into the backs of the retreating army.

Half Bucquoy's army was killed, with perhaps only 10,000 of the initial number able to bear arms. Tilly, realizing he was a day away from the now conjoined armies of Christian and Thurn, rounded and fled west as fast possible. Of Christian's army, perhaps 15,000 infantry was still ready to fight, with 4,000 horse and 3,000 Hungarian hussars. To this could be added Thurn's 12,000 men, who had seen virtually no significant fighting. Of course the shock of Sobeslav (in German, the Battle of Sobieslau) was greater even than that: Christian's shabby reputation from the War of the Juelich Succession had led many great powers, including Denmark and England, to discount the possibility of victory in Bohemia. Instead, with so much of the Imperial army dead, it now remained more to see how he could be stopped short of making good on his promise of taking Vienna.

Tilly for his part sent word to Maximilian that the army of the Catholic League now represented the last hope against the Saxons and Bohemians, but that to be effective in the field against the combined force of Christian and Thurn, Maximilian would have to send the 9,000 infantry left behind to defend Bavaria. Thurn for his part argued they should pursue Tilly and press the moment to destroy the power of the Catholic League while they had superiority of numbers. But Christian once again counseled that Tilly would have to come to them in order to prevent the siege artillery in the train from being brought to bear against the walls of Vienna. Once again, the Saxon and Bohemian armies resumed its march south.

On June 25, Krumlov surrendered to Christian and acclaimed him as king rather than suffer the bombardment of that same artillery. Hungarian and Transylvanian discipline became more of an issue as the hussars were angry to be denied a sack. Like Pilsen, Bukovice and other fortified places, Christian garrisoned Krumlov strongly. At the same time, he understood a continued lack of fresh supplies from Prague meant most likely that Tilly and other forces on the side of the Habsburgs were intercepting communications and provisions. Christian badly wanted to avoid incurring the wrath of his new subjects by plundering their crops and livestock to support his forces, but by this point, especially given the size of the army he had to support, there was no choice but to resort to confiscations.

The army resumed its march south in early July, but by now Tilly had reinforcements. The 30,000 infantry of the Catholic League was now bearing down on the army of Christian and Thurn from the west, while the rump force of Bucquoy's survivors, careful to avoid coming into range of battle, had been shadowing the column from the east. Now it was Christian's turn to not want to be caught in the enemy's pincers. Thurn again wanted to divide their army, but Christian decided he would risk battle against Bucquoy first, and take the chance they could finish off his army before Tilly could close on them. The key would be to surprise Bucquoy.

On the day his army crossed into Upper Austria at Bad Leonfelden, Christian received in a ceremony before a large assembled audience the fealty of 14 Lutheran Austrian nobles, including Tschernembl, reaffirmed his intent to liberate all Austria from Habsburg oppression, and gave no doubt in a few days' time he would be at the walls of Vienna, as promised. No one anticipated that, after sundown he ordered his armies to strike their camps and march overnight back into Bohemia towards Malonty, where Bucquoy was camped. When dawn came, Christian's army was too close, and Bucquoy was forced to give battle.

This time, 4,000 of the Habsburg forces were killed by the superior combined army of Christian and Thurn. Bucquoy was captured, and gently treated. This time perhaps only a thousand of the large Saxon and Bohemian force was lost. The problem was that after two victories Christian's signature overconfidence had returned, in full force. Informed that the even larger army of the Catholic League under Tilly was only miles away, Christian decided to charge headlong into it. Thurn counseled the better choice now would be to send for further reinforcements, and perhaps even the presence of the Magdeburg army under Friedrich of Saxony, neither Christian nor Thurn knowing the parlous situation in the west by that point. Christian, for his part, believed that with no supplies or communications reaching the army, they needed to offer battle while they were in their strength.

Thus at Gruenbach, a few days after passing back into Upper Austria, Christian and Thurn met Tilly. By this point Tilly had been further reinforced, by Imperial troops and ragtag elements of Bucquoy's former army to some 40,000 infantry. The 15,000 surviving infantry Christian had after Sobeslav, combined with Thurn's 12,000, had been reinforced by 4,000 fresh recruits from the Lutheran population of rural Upper Austria. There were still some 6,000 total cavalry on the Austrian side. Christian believed if he could force this victory against Tilly, the way would be open to a decisive siege against Vienna and a quick victory. However, Tilly now understood the critical error at Sobeslav had been to give the Saxons the opportunity to entrench their position, protecting their gun-dependent infantry from cavalry and pike advance. Christian, for his part, believed that if he attacked first, Tilly would entrench his position to defend, and thus in a sense do him the favor.

Instead, Tilly sent his forces into the teeth of the oncoming Saxons, with the result that the Saxon army was quickly broken. Christian's infantry was simply mowed down by the pikes. The countervailing benefits of the cavalry, whether Saxon, Bohemian, Hungarian or Transylvanian, that Christian had previously been able to rely on, had been worn away with their dwindling numbers, and now provided precious little assistance. At Gruenbach, Christian lost 8,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry before being forced into a humiliating retreat that just barely managed to salvage his precious siege artillery and the mobile bridgeworks. Tilly, from his superior force lost just 3,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry. Urged on to pursue Christian and end the war quickly for the Habsburgs, Tilly did so.

Now, the slowness of the Saxon army truly began to work against it. In a ferocious confrontation in the village of Kvetonov, just over the border back in the kingdom of Bohemia, Thurn demanded Christian discard the bridgeworks of which he had been so proud so that the army could stay ahead of Tilly. Frustrations over the course of the whole campaign and Christian's reign beforehand, which had been ignored in the glory of the previous successes, boiled over. They rowed furiously, with serious threats made on both sides. In the end, accepting at length the most likely alternative was defeat and capture, Christian made the decision to abandon the bridgeworks, save the siege artillery, and make like hell for Krumlov, the only town of sufficient size to support the army for any length of time. At Kaplice Tilly almost caught Christian and Thurn, but Christian ordered another night march, which, while demoralizing, brought the army to the gates of Krumlov just ahead of Tilly.

Efforts to invest the town for the purposes of a proper siege, this time by the Catholic League and Imperial forces, were fiercely resisted, as Christian personally led sallies to hold vital positions in the highlands around the town. Simultaneously, he ordered sorties north to clear the lines of provision and communication, though if he knew then the information those routes would bring to him of events in the west of the empire, he perhaps would not have bothered. Understanding his campaign season was done for the year in the absence of substantial fresh numbers of troops from Saxony and Prague, he resolved to winter at Krumlov. Tilly, for his part understanding that his army likely would not be able to take Krumlov in the face of Christian's determined resistance, decided instead to turn north. He would interpose himself between Krumlov and Prague, picking off efforts to replenish Christian's forces over the winter months and, if not locking the putative king of Bohemia off inside the walls of Krumlov, isolating him from assistance. If further help from Ferdinand, ever more short of money and weighed down by debt, happened along, then Tilly considered, he might try to take Prague, the capital whose fate until now about which Christian had been curiously indifferent, Otherwise, Tilly would simply wait.

The Empire and the West, 1620

In the Empire itself, the Protestant League had raised 13,000 infantry at Ulm, not for the purpose of directly assisting the Saxons in Bohemia but to defend the homelands of the Protestant territorial princes from attack. Just across the Danube, the Catholic League however had raised 30,000. The government of Louis XIII of France attempted to negotiate a truce between the Protestant Union and the Catholic League with respect to the Empire outside of Bohemia. At first Christian resisted the notion, but then realized the vulnerability of the outmatched Union forces threatened to dispossess his allies of their realms, so he reversed course and accepted the truce, which would limit the theaters to Bohemia, where he would face the League as well as the forces massed by Ferdinand, and the Rhineland, where Spain would most likely shortly use the opportunity presented by helping the Habsburg cousins to try to dispossess him once and for all of the western inheritance.

Thus Maximilian, of the 30,000 soldiers raised by the Catholic League, left behind 9,000 to guard Bavaria from his Wittelsbach cousins in the Upper Palatinate and the County Palatine of Neuberg, and proceeded into Upper Austria with 21,000, led by Tilly.. At this point, the Austrians who had revolted in the hope of receiving outside Protestant aid were despairing of receiving it in a timely way, as the bulk of the powerful combined Saxon army was just rousing itself out of Prague. The Austrian Protestant nobles led by Tschernembl fled into Moravia.

At this point, passing over the frontier into Bohemia, General Tilly and the army of the Catholic League became the problem of the Saxon army there, and ceases to be a factor in the military events in the empire proper.

In the west, the Saxon forces included the garrisons of the great Juelich fortresses, plus the 6,000 men massed at Dueren. With the limited truce negotiated by the French apparently holding as Maximilian marched the League Army east, this left Joachim Ernst, Margrave of Ansbach, to march the Protestant Union forces west from Ulm to defend Juelich.

The Saxons were joined by 2,000 English volunteers under Horace de Vere who were flouting their king's proclaimed neutrality and refusal to permit his subjects to participate. Most of these English were cavalry. In a mocking reference to Frederick I, the Saxons referred to these English volunteers as the Vetters, or Cousins, since each of them were worth more to the cause than the Elector's real cousin, the king. These were joined by a further 2,000 Dutch volunteers under Friderik, younger brother of the Stadtholder Moritz. Thus in the west the Wettins were able to muster in the late spring of 1620 a total force of some 25,000 infantry.

These faced, massed in the Spanish Netherlands, an army of 18,000 under Luis de Velasco that served primarily as a backstop to a surprise attack by the Netherlands in violation of the still in-effect Twelve Years Truce. The offensive force fielded by the Spanish was led by none other than Spinola, and left Brussels on August 18, legally empowered by the imperial ban against Christian to dispossess him of his territories. Spinola, ever careful, moved first against Juelich itself, at the western edge of the Saxon territories and at the intersection of the Wettin lands with the Dutch rebels. Winning Juelich, Spain would be able to pry apart the Dutch and Saxon lands and seize territory from which it could launch future efforts to recover the rebelling provinces.

Submitting to Spanish firepower, Juelich fell unexpectedly quickly, and the army under Joachim Ernst of Anhalt that was rushing to relieve it instead found the fortress and town under Spanish occupation when they were still on the other side of the Rhine. They now faced the same essential problem that Christian faced in the War of the Juelich Succession ten years before: with Juelich largely inscribed within Catholic territories, like Koln and Trier, they would have to seize a path to it first just to fight for Juelich. Meanwhile, Spinola moved quickly into the friendly territory of the Archbishop of Koln, younger brother to Maximilian of Bavaria. There, he augmented his force to some 23,000 infantry.

Joachim Ernst decided to offer battle near Bernsberg, in the County of Mark. The difference in discipline and experience between his forces and that of Spinola's was catastrophic to the Protestant cause. The Union forces lost some 4,000 men in battle and scattered in poor order. The Saxon Army, trained by Alexander Leslie but insufficient to turn the tide, lost 1,000, and retreated in good order to Dortmund, which it occupied. Though an imperial city, Dortmund was almost entirely Lutheran, and offered its support to the Saxon cause. The English and Dutch volunteer forces both suffered extensive losses, as Friderik of Orange, Moritz's heir in the absence of any legitimate offspring, was dead.

The report that reached the Saxon regent Duke Friedrich, then in Gotha, was eye-watering: despite the immense outlays on the defense of the Rhinelands, Saxony had lost all of Juelich, all of Berg, and the western half of Mark to Spinola. Only Kleve, Ravensberg, and Herford were still in Saxon hands, and the remaining Saxon army there was incapable of resisting the Spanish in the field. Thus Friedrich took the final Saxon army, the backstop left behind at Magdeburg against unexpected invasions, and marched west, demanding Hesse-Kassel and Hesse-Darmstadt honor their treaty commitments. To his 6,000 force they committed 8,000 and 5,000, respectively.

Spinola now moved to intercept this combined force before it had a chance to relieve the army at Dortmund. Spinola's convincing victory at Bernsberg had not been without cost: he had lost some 6,000 men, and felt he would not be able to face II Saxon-Dueren, IV Saxon-Magdeburg, and their Hessian allies successfully. So he intercepted Friedrich's army as it was crossing the Bishopric of Westphalia, at Bruchhausen. There, his reduced fighting force of some 15,000 infantry defeated Friedrich's 19,000, although Friedrich's better-drilled army was able to retreat before suffering the same rout as the Saxons had at Bernsberg. Friedrich with his combined force of now 15,000 soldiers fled east, as the tone of his letters to the Duke of Braunschweig, Duke of Prussia and the Elector of Brandenburg became dramatically more stern.

Meanwhile, Ambrogio Spinola, with every reason to be pleased, retired to Dortmund, where he began the process of properly investing the city for a long siege. He declined to pursue Friedrich, which would make the same mistake his predecessors had in the Spanish War seventy years before, overextending his supply lines and exposing his army to hostile partisan warfare only for the privilege of fighting the Saxons on their home territory. Instead he would consolidate his gains, neutralize the Saxon force at Dortmund, and prepare for 1621, when the Twelve Years Truce would be at an end and the Dutch would, no doubt, enter the war. The last shred of uncertainty over whether the Dutch would renew the truce had died with Friderik of Orange at Bernsberg.

At year's end, Frederick of England proposed a peace plan: Christian of Saxony would be recognized as the king of Bohemia in every legal respect, and Saxony would cede its Juelich lands, which Spain had mostly conquered during the campaign season anyway, to the Austrian Habsburgs as recompense. It was lost on no one that this would leave the Protestants with a majority of the electors in future imperial elections, though with the growing discord between Brandenburg and the rest no one was quite sure whether a Protestant emperor would be the result. Saxony rejected Frederick's notion out of hand, and France, appalled at the idea of an even greater concentration of Habsburg power in the Netherlands and the Rhineland, poured scorn on the idea. It was a measure of just how awful the military situation was for the Austrian Habsburgs that they were the power most congenial to the terms of Frederick's proposal, and Spain was close enough to supporting it outright it was preparing a mark-up of a response by which it would accept Juelich and Kleve into the lands of the Spanish Netherlands for its expense, and let the Austrian cousins take just Mark and Berg.

Saxony's winter diplomacy was directed for the most part at Brandenburg: Eleonora made an unscheduled trip north to her old home of Berlin, essentially pleading with her son to enter the war on the side of the Protestant Union, and fully empowered by Christian and Friedrich to offer Elector Georg anything he wanted, within reason. Meeting Schwartzenberg directly for the first time, Eleonora found her strategems, offers and maternal pleas falling on deaf ears. For the first time she understood the magnitude of what was happening in Brandenburg. She had even dangled before Georg's chief minister the possibility of Saxony ceding the rich city of Magdeburg in exchange for assistance, but to no luck. If this failed to move Brandenburg, she considered, someone had to be offering Georg something far in excess of even that. And the only ones who could conceivably be doing the offering were the Habsburgs, and the only thing imaginable they could possibly be offering that would be that significant were chunks that would be seized from the slaughtered carcass of Saxony itself.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Christian IV of Denmark, by Peter Isaacsz

King Christian's Reach, by Maurice Starling

from Chapter V: The Land of Every Man for Himself

Communications among the major European houses in the winter of 1620-1 was frantic, as dispatches updating the locations, possessions and conditions of various combatants were exchanged for revised statements of policy, suggested alliances, and proposed outcomes. Europe was changing beneath its rulers' feet, but no one was completely certain in what direction.

The ministers for Louis XIII started the year proving the English king was not the only one who could just pour his favored outcomes for the war into a document and call it a peace plan: France proposed that Saxony be restored its Juelich lands, Maximilian of Bavaria become the new compromise king of Bohemia, sworn to uphold the Letter of Majesty, and that to compensate Austria for the loss of Bohemia Bavaria would assume its crippling, and increasing, war debt. For its part, Saxony would pay Spain's, as a kind of penalty for plunging Europe into the whole mess. Once again, Austria was the only power who showed interest, as Ferdinand's government was becoming increasingly desperate for some way out of looming insolvency.

Christian, for his part, was learning the hard way to look on his professional relationships in a new light. Letters to Bethlen Gabor, who in August 1620 crowned himself king of Hungary in Pressburg, and whose truce with Ferdinand had run out, addressed him as brother and majesty, and pleaded for assistance. A great many of these letters, intercepted on their way out of Krumau, were, like his letters to Elizabeth, finding their way to the tent of General Tilly, where they were subject to dramatic readings with great verve.

That said, Christian had acquitted himself well enough in the campaign season of 1620 that Bethlen now reevaluated what had been a frayed Saxon alliance, realizing in part that he would need the prisoner of Krumau for any final victory over the Habsburgs recognizing his rights to Hungary. No one was mentioning their moral objections to Ottoman involvement now, or suggesting he would refuse help if it meant an Ottoman role in the great shared anti-Habsburg enterprise. Likewise, Friedrich, duke of Teschen, the Lisowski Cossacks all having been killed, repulsed or bought off, signaled he was ready to move his army west, probably likewise more convinced now that Christian could hold Bohemia against the Habsburgs.

In Saxony itself, there was an odd bifurcation. Apart from the territorially isolated western duchies, Saxony itself was untouched. Trade was brisk, if anything the sudden burst of spending on paying and provisioning the armies was putting money into pockets, tax receipts were increasing, the playhouses were open. Only in the schlosses of the rulers was everything chaos. Friedrich, overwhelmed by the responsibilities of the horrific military situation in the west and the task of somehow recovering the Juelich lands, resigned the "ordinary" functions of the regency, the meaning of which no one was quite sure. Moreover, though everyone understood this was the last thing the actual ruler of Saxony wanted, he did so in favor of Eleonora. If Christian had a problem with it, he would have to come back from Austria or wherever it was he was hiding from the Bavarians and right things himself, essentially.

Eleonora for her part, terrified after her visit to Berlin that the Habsburgs were going to make use of Brandenburg, and finding Saxon's financial advantages were rapidly vanishing, began a crash attempt to restore the city defenses of Wittenberg, the walls having been opened on the town's eastern end when the Church by the Oak was built. Her other brief was to expand Saxony's roster of allies. Stadtholder Moritz was massing armies for the new campaign season, and she believed his involvement would be sufficient to eject Spinola from the western duchies.

Her resounding failure though, was Denmark. King Christian IV had not only been resistant to come to the aid of his nephew and namesake, even with the physical safety of his beloved elder sister and the niece by his other sister, involved. His scorn had been withering, as his sense of outrage at the Saxon Elector seizing the throne of Bohemia had only been compounded when the younger Christian actually started winning battles, rather than getting spanked and being promptly sent back to Wittenberg. Thus the Danish king at the start of 1621 had issued his own parody of the French and English peace proposals: by the terms of the Danish peace proposal, Christian would abandon the throne of Bohemia, go home, accept his losses, pay his debts, forget Juelich to the Spanish, and look to God to mend his ways.

No Danish armies coming to bail them all out, then.

The Saxon chancellery at this point was being run by Sontra as a central information exchange, making sure communications from Christian in Bohemia, Friedrich in the west, Eleonora in Wittenberg, the various allies and the Vertreter were all routed appropriately at that something like an actual command hierarchy was maintained. Though no great enthusiast for parliaments or republicanism, Sontra had established a fairly deferential relationship to the Vertreter Koerbelitz, who had given Christian such trouble but who still did not seem to be going anywhere.

It was to the Vertreter and the Estates General that was left the deadly serious mathematics of money and men. For decades the Estates General had trafficked in the jingoistic patriotism that saw war as the solution to every nuisance, and now it had it. Koerbelitz had promised Christian that if he went to war maintaining the Alexandrine constitutional settlement, he would make sure the armies would have everything they needed, and now Christian had. So there was nothing for the Estates General and the Vertreter to do but pass the necessary taxes, and raise the armies, and lodge no complaints. By the end of 1620 there were five extant Saxon field armies totaling some 30,000 soldiers, three in Bohemia and two in the west, with precious little but garrison troops left in Saxony proper. In total, Saxony might have 40,000 men in arms, an incredible number for an electorate its size.

Eleonora, now more or less the regent, sometimes through the intermediary of the pet Dutchman who was beginning to assume an outsized role in affairs of state, Grotius, was demanding a new home army be raised somewhere in the vicinity of Torgau and kept there lest an attack come from the north. Christian however was roaring about the dire conditions at Krumau and demanding fresh reinforcements, and Koerbelitz was not about to second-guess Christian's claims that his personal survival was at stake. Likewise, Friedrich was maintaining that his army, the remainder of the force holed up at Dortmund, and the Dutch would not be enough against the full might of Spain in the west, and that it was only a few weeks' march across pleasant country from the County of Mark, where Spinola's forces were wintering, to the frontiers of Saxony itself.

Against all these competing demands, the best the Estates General could do would be to top off the existing armies in the field, and raise two more for the coming campaign year of 1621. In the end, Eleonora, whatever authority she was cobbling together, would not take precedence over the requirements of the actual sovereign. VI Saxon-Pirna was being raised near Dresden, where soldiers were being obtained at a discount on account of the depression in the local mining industry. VII-Saxon-Meiningen was being raised in the west, and had been earmarked for Friedrich on the understanding that in the event of some calamity on the order of what Eleonora feared, he would run home as fast as possible and leave the Juelichers to fend for themselves.

As far as Koerbelitz was concerned, enough treasure and men had been expended on the Juelich-Mark-Kleve inheritance. He was quite willing to let them pray the rosary forever, so long as Saxony itself remained intact.

The only member of the Ernestine House of Wettin who was at all having a pleasant time was Julius. Throughout the winter of 1620-1 his letters to his nephew, brother and favorite sister were replete with hunting stories and amusing anecdotes related to him by his mistresses. In the summer of 1620 he sent a large boar he had killed to Christian in Prague, saying he was doing his part to provision the army. But of course, as he had no idea how far it was to Prague, and had not salted or cured the meat, it was rancid by the time it reached Prague Castle, which Christian had not so much as laid eyes on for six months.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

From A Guide to the German Political Process for Prospective Investors, Managers and Immigrants, 2022 Edition.

As the following maps demonstrate, the New Realm brought with it a radical simplification and rationalization of Germany's internal borders. While it would be a mistake to think that Germany's present constitutional system emerged intact and unchanging at the end of the First General War, the founding of the new realm brought with it a great many changes. First, the war itself led not just to the liquidation of several major princely states, and the extinction of some noble houses, but the end of several kinds of political organization within the empire, including but not limited to the ecclesiastical states and the imperial cities. Second, while an exception was made for the King of Denmark in Holstein, lands within the empire were now held by the empire's princes. All these changes allowed for a great reshuffling of the internal frontiers, which allowed for the elimination of enclaves and exclaves, the greater use of natural barriers to mark frontiers, and the consolidation of small territories into larger units.

Politically, these changes reflected the dramatically transformed situation. The Second Realm was at its foundation a contract among the princes, the acceptance of a new political order on the condition that the foremost state within that order, Saxony, accept constitutional limitations on its power that had been rejected both by the Habsburgs it replaced and by its own rulers in the heat of the First General War. Thus, specific permanent limits on the ability of Saxony or its rulers to acquire new territories were made core provisions of the new arrangement. But, the German princes went further. The elected office of emperor was also limited. He could not create new titles of nobility, nor could he award or alienate the lands of any other prince. The concept of the imperial ban, which had so bedeviled the princes of the earlier Holy Roman Empire by extending the possibility that princes might be completely dispossessed, was disallowed. Even territorial changes could not be instituted by the emperor alone or the imperial diets, but by the actual princes meeting in concert, and even then by a three-fourths majority, including a majority of both Protestant and Catholic princes.

Gradually, it was the work of generations, including great undertakings of political reform and one notable shooting war, for the Second Realm to make the leap from being essentially a collection of sovereign rulers to a truly unified political entity, with law-making power in all its corners invested in public institutions rather than the persons of the territorial princes. One early consequential reform came when princely states could no longer be partitioned among their rulers' heirs. This helped drive a controversial change, as princes were forced increasingly into the situation of being private landowners rather than public rulers, invested with the powers of their forebears. Ownership of land and political authority became more and more separate. Boundaries between the states demarcated the limits of the princely territories' lawmaking authority, not the rule of a family or a given prince. Landholdings of the great houses likewise became more scattered, and less concentrated within the princely states in which they had been historically situated. By the nineteenth century the Wittelsbachs held more land in the former Brandenburg than in their traditional Palatine homeland on the Rhine.

Saxony's own reforms of its feudal estates into a true legislature led the way in the next phase of these historical changes. In Saxony it had from almost the very beginning of the Merciless Wheel a proverb that "voters choose their politicians, politicians do not choose their voters." The idea of allowing the Estates General to draw up its own representational maps had been so repugnant to the Elector Alexander a prohibition against it was written into the Founding Letters of the Saxon Estates General when it was reconstituted in 1579. Thus when the time came for the old imperial diet to share the stage with an enlarged Estates General that would hold representatives from across the empire, it was obvious to just use the pre-existing princely states as the districts which would send representatives to the new German parliament. This required what the Saxons called the Terrible Sacrifice, as their beloved homeland was partitioned into new entities so as to not suffer a critical diminution of representative power in the new body.

Saxony became Germany, the Estates General of Saxony became the German, but at that moment Saxony as such ceased to exist on the map of Europe.

The great problem of the new German Estates General was how to apportion representation within a map of unchanging boundaries without resulting in ridiculous disparities of political power. For in Saxony the districts had been of equal size, measured in censuses, verified in Lutheran Church records, and allocated for a long time by parish. Instead, in the new German Estates General each new district would have at least one member of the Estates General, but additional members would be awarded propotionately based on population as of the last census, still verified, but now by available public records.

Very quickly this gave rise to a system of proportional representation. Parties would nominate a slate of candidates equal to the number of seats the district possesses, with each candidate ranked by the party's preference. The number of seats the party would take in the ensuing election would be whatever most closely approximates the percentage of the vote the party won in the election. The strong selective role of the parties in this system has been counterbalanced by several measures, including strong residency requirements. Early on, German voters demonstrated a deep hatred for the idea that political parties might try to insert "alien" candidates into the slate of a given district, who were from outside the community with little understanding of its concerns or culture. For this reason, the German system has unusually strict and unyielding residency requirements: five years, against which second homes, non-resident family homes, businesses or employment counts for nothing.

The final piece of the German system clicked into place when the former princely states were finally swept away, and replaced within the same borders they had maintained more or less since the birth of the Second Realm new regional governments. These were now simply the districts, absolutely coterminous with the districts that sent representatives to the Estates General. This strengthened the role of locality in the German constitutional system. If a given district is in crisis, then the same people electing its district governor and estates will be electing the representatives sent to the Estates General in Wittenberg. And they will elect them in the same vote on the same day: by intent, local government in Germany is also, as the saying goes, "prisoner to the Merciless Wheel" of elections every three years on St. Boniface Day. Only on account of death or resignation are elections held any time else, in order to prevent voter confusion or exhaustion.

Inevitably, the presence of so many extremely small districts relative to the large urban centers (Magdeburg and the Wittenberg Capital District are the largest districts) creates, no matter how many additional members are awarded, disproportionate concentrations of power in rural areas. In 1994, a documentary on the longstanding dispute claimed Magdeburg had perhaps a thousand buildings with a thousand people each, when the smallest district in the country had only 903 voters, though Magdeburg sent only 35 members to the Imperial Estates General. As expected, among the German political parties German Republic has led the way in championing reform of the districts, and Imperial Democracy has resolutely opposed it. On this matter Audacity sides with German Republic, as its voter constituents among immigrants and ethnic minorities are concentrated in the cities and would benefit, and it sees the old districts as locking in political power that would prevent greater market-based reforms of economic life. For perhaps the same reason, Heimat, seeking to protect its constituencies in favor of ecological and agricultural subsidies, ferociously opposes change. Thus, in the bizarre Aesop's Fables-shorthand Germans use to describe such things, on this matter the Stag is in league with the Hawk, and the Man rides the Dog.

At one point a strong Audacity-led coalition did attempt the rewriting of the district boundaries and the dismantling of the residency requirements. The result was the Trachtenwehr, a rural uprising that led to vociferous protests in Wittenberg and elsewhere led by people in traditional dress. The reforms were blocked, and nine months later on St. Boniface day the Dog was, as the Germans say, sent to the pound.

Germany has 127 districts. 125 of these are ordinary, fully independent entities. Two, the capital district of Wittenberg and the Special Recovery District, maintain a full regional government and send representatives to the Estates, but are not required to maintain independent budgets as they need extensive additional funds from the common imperial treasury.

These are not the official names of the districts, but rather the convenient shorthand that has grown up around polysyllabic placenames that sometimes try to encapsulate the full history of the district from the time of Charlemagne.

Bavaria maintains a unique arrangement within the German constitutional system: upon a majority vote of its district estates, it may secede from the empire at any time of its choosing. There is not even a specified procedure for the acceptance of its secession or a duration of time before it would become effective.

The 127 Districts of the German Empire

1. Ostfriesland
2. Oldenburg
3. Bremen
4. Verden
5. Braunschweig Nord
6. Lauenberg
7. Luebeck
8. Holstein
9. Special Recovery District
10. Mecklenburg
11. Pommern Westen
12. Altmark
13. Mittelmark
14. Magdeburg
15. Anhalt
16. Halberstadt
17. Braunschweig Sud
18. Hildesheim
19. Braunschweig Westen
20. Hoya
21. Bentheim
22. Muenster Nord
23. Osnabrueck
24. Lingen
25. Muenster Sud
26. Kleve
27. Mark
28. Dortmund
29. Westfalen
30. Herford
31. Minden
32. Lippe
33. Paderborn
34. Hesse Nord
35. Goettingen
36. Duederstadt
37. Nordhausen
38. Halle
39. Jueterbog
40. Cottbus
41. Hauptstadt Wittenberg
42. Eisenach
43. Hersfeld
44. Fulda
45. Hesse Sud
46. Nassau
47. Berg
48. Koln
49. Juelich
50. Aachen
51. Trier
52. Pruem
53. Wurzburg
54. Bamberg
55. Nuernberg
56. Bayreuth
57. Coburg
58. Meiningen
59. Gotha
60. Weimar
61. Saale
62. Gera
63. Reuss
64. Ansbach
65. Eichstatt
66. Nordlingen
67. Ellwangen
68. Oberpfalz Nord
69. Oberfalz Sud
70. Passau
71. Bayern
72. Neuberg
73. Augsburg
74. Kempten
75. Ulm
76. Kaufbeuren
77. Landau und Ravensberg
78. Leufkirch
79. Memmingen
80. Bilberach
81. Wuerttemberg
82. Durlach
83. Baden
84. Speyer
85. Offenberg
86. Breisach
87. Konstanz
88. Sigmaringen
89. Rottweil
90. Sundgau
91. Simmern
92. Mainz
93. Darmstadt
94. Frankfurt
95. Aschaffenburg
96. Pfalz-Rhein
97. Zweibruecken
98. Saarbruecken
99. Worms
100. Nordgau
101. Wimpfern
102. Heilbronn
103. Schwabish Hall
104. Rothenburg
105. Prussia
106. Bulow
107. Lauenberg Ost
108. Stolp
109. Cammin
110. Stettin
111. Ostmark
112. Schwiebus
113. Ermland
114. Nieder Lausitz
115. Ober Lausitz
116. Schliessen Sud
117. Schliessen Ost
118. Breslau
119. Schliessen Nord
120. Sachsen oestlich der Elbe
121. Thueringen
122. Naumburg
123. Vogtland
124. Altenburg
125. Chemnitz
126. Torgau
127. Meissen und Dresden

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

And this is how it all fits together. We've had discussions of the footprint of the contemporary alt-Germany before, but essentially, it's 1871 in the west, 1919 in the east. And yes, how Silesia and Lusatia but not Moravia and Bohemia are part of the empire will be, eventually, a whole thing. Also, Silesia is a bit, ahem, longer because there were not the cessions that there were in OTL after it was separated from the other Bohemian Crown lands.

EDIT: I suppose some of you might remember the discussion we had, forever ago, about how in the alt-world it would be considered ASB for someone to pull off a Napoleon and actually conquer Europe. Well, another impossibility as far as the people of the alt-world is concerned would be reducing Germany to fewer than forty regional units.

 

[Kitiem3000]

Such power concentrated away from the cities into the rural areas should make for a pretty conservative country. Though the effect might well be tempered by the fact that a lot of the Western districts are approaching 'micro' in size. A single city in a rural district can easily outnumber any rural area attached to it.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Such power concentrated away from the cities into the rural areas should make for a pretty conservative country. Though the effect might well be tempered by the fact that a lot of the Western districts are approaching 'micro' in size. A single city in a rural district can easily outnumber any rural area attached to it.

It's very similar to the situation in the US, where in the senate a small state like Wyoming gets the same representation as New York or California. And though its' been a while since I've read on this issue and may be mistaken, I believe Spain, post-Franco, has some kind of constitutional prohibitions on changing representational boundaries.

But you're also correct in that growing populations and changing patterns of urbanization keep it from being quite so cut and dry here. Magdeburg's metro area probably fits neatly in the district, but Wittenberg's metro area extends west into Anhalt, north into Jueterbog, and south into Torgau. And like you say, in the tightly compacted west that becomes key. Frankfurt in the alt-Germany is not all that far behind Wittenberg and Magdeburg in terms of size, and the districts it abuts, like Darmstadt, Mainz, and Aschaffenburg, are not sparsely populated.

But Stolp? Gera? Hersfeld? What can be gleaned from the map is that though the districts do not change over time for the most part, the original boundaries were sometimes drawn with some strategic thinking behind what is and is not sufficient to constitute a district. And that translates into the divisions between urban and rural, immigrant and native, Catholic and Protestant, and also, in the former Bohemian areas, Slav versus German. South Silesia is one district, though it has several substantial towns and distinct historically significant regions like Teschen, whereas Reuss is also one district. So just because the specific game of gerrymandering was prohibited by the Elector Alexander way back when, that doesn't mean the politicians have given up all the games.

That's one reason why in developing this update I became so interested in the contemporary political issue as it would be dealt with by our alt-German parties. The parties supporting change represent electorates corresponding roughly to what we think of as the socially progressive left and the free market, internationalist right. The chief opponents are the outright traditionalists and Heimat, which is a coalition of environmentalists, domestic feminists and economic leftists who if you squint hard enough appear to have nativist and social conservative tendencies.

So I think the alt-Germany would probably have a fairer representational system if the districts were reformed somehow. Whether it would be further to the left in terms of policy results is not something I'm quite ready to say.

And of course there is a utility in terms of representation to the lack of intentionally created safe seats, or to the ability of parties to just shove a party favorite from outside the district into a list where the party is certain to win.

 

[Hohensaufen]

Argh, I was holding out some hope (against all hope) for Austria to be inside the New Realm. Alas, it is not but I really like the look of this Germany that is different enough from OTL to be notable but still eerily recognisable; it all seems believable to me for the most part.

BTW is there some legislative reason for the outline of the HRE on the map? I think there isn't but I wouldn't be completely surprised if there exists some supranational entity binding the former HRE together in some way, shape or form.