Ring of Fire III

Prologue

Magdeburg, November 1634

“Bernhard is,” Mike Stearns said, “ your brother. You might want to keep your tendency to view with alarm within pretty strict limits on this one, even if it did happen on my watch.”

Wilhelm Wettin looked at him sourly.

“We were preoccupied with the League of Ostend. I admit it,” Mike offered.

“Southern Alsace,” Wettin said. “Not only the Franche Comte, which is the problem of the Isabella Clara Eugenia and the king in the Netherlands rather than the USE, but all of southern Alsace, except for Strassburg itself.”

“Not all,” Francisco Nasi interjected. “Strassburg is a USE city-state and has managed to annex a considerable rural hinterland in the midst of all the confusion. Not to mention that it was Bernhard’s pulling his cavalry back to the line south of Strassburg last spring that permitted Nils Brahe to annex the Province of the Upper Rhine for the USE.”

Duke Albrecht, who usually stayed home to run the Wettin family’s day-to-day business, so to speak, interjected, “He also had enough sense not to annex Mompelgard-Montbeliard, as the French call it, when he took southern Alsace. That is a Wurttemberg exclave, you do realize? The young dukes are Gustavus Adolphus’ allies. And they are Lutheran! That’s one major potential point of contention that Bernhard had sense enough to walk away from.”

“He isn’t insane,” Philipp Sattler said. “He also left Mulhausen alone-Mulhouse, the French call it. Trying to annex a city that’s been an allied Swiss canton for over a century, even if it’s not geographically contiguous to anything else in the Swiss Confederacy, would stir up a hornet’s nest. Better just to pass it by.”

Wilhelm Wettin frowned and kept counting his youngest brother’s offenses on his fingers. “The Sundgau, formerly Austrian-Tyrolese to be more precise. The Breisgau, formerly Austrian-Tyrolese, to be more precise. Innumerable Reichsritterschaften and petty lordships. And in regard to those, he has the gall to say that he has done nothing different from what your own State of Thuringia-Franconia has been doing in Franconia.”

“Ah,” Mike said. “Actually, that last is pretty close to the truth, as far as I know.”

This did not seem to mollify Wettin at all.

Mike continued. “Also, he did leave the Basel border and has pulled his troops out of southern Swabia into the Breisgau, at least for the winter, which means that Horn can also go into winter quarters in a more favorable location than right on the northern border of Switzerland. And, as far as I know, the margrave of Baden-Durlach, as USE administrator of the proposed Province of Swabia, from the perspective of his headquarters in Augsburg, is not totally dissatisfied with the current situation.”

Wettin stopped counting off his fingers and examined his fingernails. “It is a lot to ask. I don’t make this request as the leader of the loyal opposition. We have come together to ask as his brothers. We have dealt with Bernhard all our lives, you realize.”

Duke Albrecht continued to sit quietly. Wettin, apparently, was not capable of continuing his request to the end.

Albrecht leaned forward. “Please,” he said. “We would like to have a copy of the ambassadress’ report. Frau Jackson’s report. We would like to know how she persuaded him to go away from Basel. Nobody else has ever managed to persuade Bernhard to do anything that he did not want to do.”

“By the time Diane was finished,” Mike said, “he no longer wanted to threaten Basel’s borders, at least if I understand Tony Adducci’s report correctly. It involves a map that Lee Swiger sketched, and all sorts of arrows that Diane drew on it, following lines that Archduchess Maria Anna had marked with her finger. In short, she illustrated that he is going to have enough on his plate for the time being dealing with the lands you just listed-so much on his plate that he should not be suckered into any more distractions on the right bank of the Rhine. He was convinced that he should focus on protecting his core territories, if he really wants to keep them. That wasn’t the purpose of the map, but that is how Diane used it.”

Duke Albrecht raised an eyebrow.

Mike cleared his throat. “Well, ultimately, Diane said she recognized the problem almost at once. Your brother never went to kindergarten. Therefore he never learned the lessons of Everything I Ever Really Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten. She’s been giving Bernhard a ‘back to the basics’ course on prudent and proper sandbox behavior, so to speak. With flannel boards, cutout figures, and everything.”

“There should be a hiatus for a few months,” Nasi said, his tone placating. “Bernhard is going to be preparing and entrenching, organizing and making plans to deal with the plague epidemic ‘scheduled’ for Swabia in the spring and summer of 1635 according to the history books.”

Stearns nodded. “He’s already hired a nurse out of Grantville. He’s got three well-recognized down-time plague doctors coming in from Franconia right about now-the Padua men that Claudia de Medici, the regent of Tyrol, loaned our administrators in Bamberg to deal with the outbreak in Kronach. I think he’s smart enough to know that a ruler is a lot better off with living subjects than dead ones.”

Wettin’s face was still sour. “ ‘Dumb’ was never one of our touchy, overambitious baby brother’s problems.”