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

[Dr. Waterhouse]

I don't really find anything to object to in re Friedrich protecting the Jews from forced conversion - there's plenty of precedent for that - it's the granting them full legal equality (at least de jure if probably often not de facto) to Christians which is remarkable. After all, by the 1500s everyone "knows" the Jews are hell-bound, Christ-killing, Sacrament-stabbing, money-grubbing Christian haters: I suspect there will be accusations of Freidrich being a secret Muslim Judaizer, for starters.

Yeah, the narrative at that point didn't really permit me to elaborate too much. The equality mentioned is with respect to choice of profession or business. There's no prohibition from the elector saying a Jew can't make shoes, or be, say, a barber-surgeon, or hold land. The rule is if a line of work or business is not denied by law to Christians, it's not denied to Jews. That's the equality, and it's fairly narrow. Because is there any requirement that local guilds admit Jews? No. And are rules limiting business to guild members done away with? No. And are there mandates for educational institutions to admit Jews? No. The decision is to not impose, as Hesse did, one layer of explicit, state-directed prohibitions. But that's different from a modern set of anti-discrimination laws that would mandate the similar treatment of Christians and non-Christians throughout society. Or let's take the example of real property. There is no legal prohibition from the elector on a Jew buying a house. But that doesn't restrict the prerogatives of a town from restricting who purchases homes there, and it doesn't require sellers to sell, and it certainly doesn't require them to sell on the same terms. Once again, a layer of prohibition is not there, but that does not mean that other social rules have been invalidated, or that the state has acquired new powers to regulate contracts between parties, or commercial life generally.

Also, something that is going to be the case going forward for a while not just with the Jews, but with the other reformed religions and even the Catholics (bonus points if you can spot the bump in the road they just hit) is that this is still a medieval enough world that the church is a fundamental building block of the society. And here that's still, for all Friedrich's permissiveness, the Lutheran Church. For example, the schools we are all going to be finding more about shortly, all operate through the structure of the parish. The idea, of, say, non-Lutheran holders of court or local offices is not going to happen for a very long while, particularly while they're in this death struggle with Charles, and Catholicism is aligned with the external foe.

And finally, because once again that this is still the late-medieval world, the idea is not that converting the Jews has ceased to be desirable, or that Christianity does not want to either absorb or expel anything not itself. Instead, the critical juncture here is that Friedrich thinks the use of duress to do that is bad practice. If it can't be done without violence, force or privation, it ought not be done because that's not going to be true Christianity. Now, that actually even echoes a position of Luther's from earlier in his career. The vehemently anti-semitic Luther of the 1530's and 1540's is partly the result of him having previously thought the Christian conversion of the Jews would be quick and easy, getting mad over that not happening, and throwing a tantrum over it. No kinder way to put it.

And of course it's interesting that our Saxony is far from the only exception to the rule in sixteenth century Europe. In fact, OTL's Johann Friedrich's decision to expel the Jews in 1537 tells you implicitly something about the policies of Friedrich the Wise and Johann the Steadfast, doesn't it? But my favorite example is actually Pope Alexander VI, who is of course better known for a few other things. When Ferdinand and Isabella do their thing, he welcomes the fleeing religious minorities of Spain. Wait, the Jews, you say? No, the Moors too. The Borgia pope may have been many things, but he wasn't some barbarian.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Philip of Hesse, by Lucas Cranach the Elder

In the days of autumn 1546, following the ignominious defeat at Rieneck, the situation of the Protestant Army was disintegrating rapidly. The Count of Buren had met up with Charles V at Schweinfurt, creating a combined army of some 58,000 soldiers, easily enough to command the strategically pivotal Franconian valley and to outmatch any army that could conceivably be fielded against them by anyone but the Great Turk. Knowing this full well, Friedrich and Philip fled north, without illusion, without pretense. While the Saxon elector had at his disposal the nigh impregnable fortress of the Coburg Veste just east of where he was, the Imperial army lay between he and it. There was no way he could flee that direction without running headlong into the emperor.

At this point, buoyed by reports of the Saxon elector's poor generalship at Rieneck, Charles V decided to pursue a quick victory before the close of the campaigning season, to save him the expense of raising another army of the same size the next year. And so with great confidence the Imperial Army bestirred itself from Schweinfurt, and gave chase to Elector and Landgrave north. Less from any design than the urgent need to head the direction opposite the 60,000 man enemy, the Protestants plunged into the valley of the Werra River.

On their way, it was first Philip of Hesse who realized the possibility opened up by the hilly terrain around them, ill-suited to large-scale field tactics. On October 20, the army of the Schmalkaldic League made to ford the Werra in the vicinity of an old convent named Kreuzberg. The process was slow. The river, dried by the summer and autumn heat, was low, but still treacherous. And though slowed by its enormous size, the Imperial Army proceeded quickly down the valley of the Ulster river, a tributary of the Werra, to intercept, trying to reach it before the Schmalkaldic Army could complete its crossing. Arriving at the place, they found they had just missed the Reformist princes. Their tracks were fresh, and manure from the horses had not even cooled. Impatient, Charles ordered the army forward, lest the Schmalkaldic Army make its way into Friedrich's territory and shut themselves behind the walls of a city.

At first, the crossing of the Werra proceeded without any problem. Relaxed and cheerful, the emperor's generals believed they were mere days from a decisive victory. Card games were being played in the emperor's tent. Then, Saxon infantry attacked the leading edge of the Imperial army from the east. There was no warning, and the Imperials had no opportunity to form up in the tercio formations in which they were close to invulnerable. Soon, the Saxons occupied the heights overlooking the river and the imperial van.

Now, at this point it is necessary to recall that since 1509, when guards in the employ of the English delegation bearing the Princess Elizabeth had proved their skill against a peasant mob, the Ernestine Saxons had been impressed with the English longbow, and had endeavored to cultivate their own corps of longbowmen in the hope that it would make them unstoppable conquerors. This was, sadly, the case even though the glory gays of the longbow in even the English army had long since passed. This was so for various reasons, not least the increasing use of plate armor. For decades, every report from England of some new permutation, technique or trick, that would enable longbow arrows to finally pierce steel had been received with enthusiasm, and not long afterward, once tried, disappointment.

Now in the Peasant's War, the Saxon longbowmen had acquitted themselves wondrously. Of course, this had been precisely because they were deployed against foes without plate to speak of. In fact, for some years it had become the conventional wisdom that the success of the longbowmen at Frankenhausen had been a misfortune for the House of Saxony, because it had prolonged the collective delusion that the longbowmen would win them their very own Crecys and Agincourts in the middle of Germany, plate armor and gunpowder be damned. This was in fact the opinion of the elector Friedrich, who had retained them half out of nostalgia, half out of the recognition of the outrageous expense that had already been sunk into them and the unwillingness to declare it a total loss.

Finally, at Riebeck the time had come for them to prove themselves, and against the Spanish tercios they had performed miserably. In fact, as Friedrich explained in a letter recounting the battle to his brother, the best quality they had displayed was that their light weaponry enabled them to quickly run away from the fight. And so, on the whole dreary flight northeast into the wild country between Thuringia and Hesse, Friedrich had been cursing the great trouble his uncle, father and himself had gone to to train the longbowmen, and the even greater expense of feeding the burly fellows necessary to pull the strings on the giant bows. He had even threatened, if his longbowmen did not prove their worth otherwise imminently, to use them as replacements for his train's draught animals.

But now the moment came.

The Imperial Army, though by now aware of events and rushing to dispose itself for an attack, could not armor itself on short notice. Many men while crossing the Werra had greatly feared the danger from crossing water with the weight of steel on their backs, only to now find themselves in much worse circumstances. Likewise, the horses were completely unprotected and vulnerable, and once the air turned black with the repeated volleys, many panicked and drowned or broke their legs. Likewise, the guns were unavailable, given that men could not reach the gunpowder that had been bagged so as to safely get it across the river. For their part, the Saxons, having swept the imperials from the high ground, could now give their archers the best fixed position, at the head of a slope too steep for cavalry or even a pike charge. It would not be necessary even for them to drive stakes into the ground to prevent an attempt against their position from the front.

Without facing the defense of plate or the competition of gunfire, the advantages of the longbows, long obscured, reigned. Their range was such that they made sport of the men in the water, and some of the stronger archers could reach the Imperial soldiers on the opposite bank. And they could reload several times faster than even the most efficient gun.

The Imperial commanders were just organizing themselves for a pitched battle when the Saxon cavalry attacked from north and south on the east bank, creating a box for what remained of the approximate one-third of the imperial army that had made it across. Suddenly, the imperials lost their resolve, and the survivors began a frantic flight west across the river. Water now began to claim more imperial soldiers than the copper tips of the arrows. On the heights over the Werra, where Friedrich surveyed and commanded, the worst problem the Saxons faced was the possibility they might run out of projectiles. But now came the Hessians' moment, as Philip, having traveled a few miles east upriver to an easier ford, and crossing there, suddenly appeared from the east, attacking the flank the Imperials believed safe.

Confidence and certainty had been transformed into its opposite, defeat became rout. In disorder the Imperial army fled.

An estimated 20,000 of the Imperial Army lay dead, most of them on the east bank of the Werra. Virtually the whole of the imperial cavalry, both men and horses, was lost. For its part the League had sacrificed only 5,000 men. The aged Count of Buren, who just before had been the hero of the Imperial Army, was drowned, pinned beneath his wounded horse, mid-river. Duke Moritz, caught on the east bank in the pfeilsturm, himself survived only because he was strong enough to swim back across the river in his armor, even as the arrows fell around him. The emperor himself had been forced to flee for his life from his tent on the Werra's west bank, pursued by Hessians who helped themselves to his armors, reliquaries and priceless objets d' art. Philip was in a position to pursue, and did so. Friedrich sent word cautioning him against overconfidence, but went unheeded. The landgrave had ridden a mile down the path of the tributary Ulster River, pursuing the Imperials, before he had to be dragged back to camp by his own men lest he risk assassination.

As word traveled, Protestant church bells rang, even in those princely states like Brandenburg that had sided with emperor against elector, a caution that perhaps the wrong choice had been made. The Protestant princes, by luck, guile and obsolete weaponry that had found its unique moment, had proved they could vindicate their claims against the emperor in a pitched battle. The emperor realized there might be absolute limits to what his might could accomplish, if the German princes remained solid in their resolve. In short, the whole nature of the conflict had changed, and in place of a superior army's chase of an overmatched foe it seemed as if two closely matched forces contested for the Empire. Word of the battle was received with rejoicing in the England of the dying Henry VIII, whereas in Italy and Spain embellished tales were spread that at the end of the Battle of Kreuzberg Friedrich had re-crossed the Werra on the backs of slain men, and as he did so blasphemously compared himself to Jesus, walking on water.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

The Rieneck campaign, September 1546

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Schloss Johannisburg, in Aschaffenburg, as Schloss Alexanderburg, near Wittenberg, or as it is more commonly known, Die Kaiserresidenz

"Descent into the Underworld" from Outlaw Saxony: New Perspectives on the Sechszentes Jahrhundert Empire by Louis Hadrami

From the very day of the victory at Kreuzberg, the Elector Friedrich and Landgrave Philip sought to make the most of the moment. Kreuzberg had reduced the emperor’s numbers to, at best, 35,000 infantry, to their 40,000. Both Friedrich and Philip knew though that Charles had the advantage of superior resources. A constant stream now fed his army from allied princes and his own possessions in Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. Over time, he could rebuild his strength, and allowed to fully bring that advantage to bear, he would inevitably smash them. Whatever chance they had at victory lay in pursuing the emperor immediately and prosecuting the war to its close, perhaps by capturing the emperor, or even killing him. So as soon as they could bring the whole of the Schmalkaldic Army back across the Werra, they marched west down the path the Imperials had left for them.

For its part, the Imperial Army was dispirited. Winter was not far off, provisioning a large force in this country would be difficult in the best of circumstances, even more so without alienating politically sensitive allies by raiding or extortionate taxation. Charles’s army could conceivably have taken what it wanted from the countryside of Hesse, but that was made more difficult by the fact that Philip had prepared his people, who were now shut up behind town walls. And for a third time now, following the humiliations at Dueren and then Regensburg, the emperor’s artillery had fallen into the hands of the Saxon elector, so the possibility of the army taking what it needed from the towns was minimal.

Thus, simultaneous with the marching came the diplomacy. Charles to Friedrich and Philip: restore the lands of ducal Saxony to Moritz and otherwise return to your own territories, and we will have a six-month truce followed by a national council of the kind the Lutherans had been calling for before the start of war. Friedrich and Philip to Wilhelm of Bavaria: join us against the emperor, agree to respect our liberties, and we will elect you his successor. Charles to the South German war council of Wuerttemberg, the Palatinate and the imperial cities: agree to a six-month truce, withdraw your forces from the army of Friedrich and Philip, and I will pardon you for all that has just transpired, and permit you your freedom of worship indefinitely.

Heralds were scurrying between courts with these various messages when word arrived of yet another blow against the old order: the Archbishopric of Magdeburg, which Charles had just recently promised to Moritz, had been entered by the Duke Johann on behalf of his brother. The Saxon electors held among their many titles that of Burgrave of Magdeburg, though all of Friedrich’s predecessors would have been surprised to know that among the responsibilities that imparted was that of serving “as the defender of the city’s eternal German liberty”, which was what Johann was declaring now.

Then, not four days following Kreuzberg, the Imperial and Schmalkaldic armies met again at Rosdorf, in the territories of the bishopric of Fulda. Friedrich once again tried to make innovative use of his archers, this time by loading them on wagons, so that they could be whipped about the field and easily withdrawn when pressed by the Imperial pikes. Normally these would have been vulnerable to a cavalry attack, but Friedrich now had superiority mobility due to the slaughter of the emperor’s horse in the Werra. Such plans worked well, but nevertheless, due to the superior generalship of Moritz, the Imperial army was able to deploy its squares and repulse the attack.

Casualties that day however were 6,000 for the Imperial Army and 5,000 for the League. However, if the two sides appeared to be wearing each other down at an equal rate, in one sense that had a net effect of disadvantaging the emperor more, given that he led the offensive force in what was, despite what he asserted, enemy territory. Moreover, Protestant states like Brandenburg, Mecklenburg and Pomerania who had abstained from assisting Saxony on the supposition there would be no ramifications for that choice now looked more anxiously than ever on the events in ducal Saxony and Magdeburg.

In the early Habsburg war plans, it was imagined Duke Moritz would invade Electoral Saxony from the south with the assistance of a Bohemian army provided by Ferdinand. Friedrich's neat preemption of Moritz by propaganda, espionage and force had derailed these notions completely. Ferdinand, for one, was wary of committing to an invasion of the Wettin lands without a component of the local, Lutheran nobility giving the effort the color of legal validity. But Moritz was now displaced, and moreover was now in the west with Charles's force in the wild countryside of the Bishopric of Fulda.

Reluctantly, Ferdinand ordered the invasion of Saxony. The ambition of the Saxon princes, as much as their vulnerability, weakened them at this crucial moment, with Friedrich in the far west and Johann in the far north. So when the Bohemian hussars crossed into the Vogtland, they met little competent resistance. The elector left orders that any attack in the absence of defending armies should be met by a retreat behind town walls. Nonetheless, the stout peasants of the electorate marched out to confront the invaders, meeting a terrible defeat at Adorf.

Meanwhile, in the west the Schmalkaldic Army marched first to Hersfeld, and then Marburg, in Philip’s territories, for necessary rest and re-supply, when word reached them that the South Germans had reached a separate truce with the Emperor, specifying an end to hostilities for six months. The Imperial army would quit the field for the time being and the Palatinate, Wuerttemberg, Ulm and the rest would withdraw their contributions to the army for the duration.

The Emperor for his part had returned south into the more hospitable territories of the Franconian ecclesiastical lands, where he could more easily receive support along lines from the Rhine and Danube. It was now that word reached them of Ferdinand's invasion of the Vogtland. Friedrich and Philip had thought the Bohemian nobility would be reluctant enough to roust themselves to take sides in an inter-German dispute they need not worry, and that Ferdinand would not risk a Protestant revolt in his own kingdom. That bet had now been proved terribly wrong. For his part however, the Duke Johann seemed unworried. As he wrote to his duchess, "A week after we entered the prince-bishop's castle at Magdeburg we received word of the trouble in the Vogtland. I do believe it tallies to our profit though. There's more gold in Magdeburg than Adorf."

At the same time Philip could not disregard the danger to his own country from the Emperor's army.

Thus, at Marburg Philip and Friedrich took their leave. As if there were no other powers in Germany that mattered, Philip recognized Friedrich’s rights to ducal Saxony, Magdeburg and for good measure, Halberstadt. Friedrich reciprocated by allocating to Philip the Bishopric of Fulda, the lands of the Archbishop of Mainz in Eichsfeld, and the Waldeck country. Both elector and landgrave would strengthen their defenses in their own countries, recruit armies for the next year, and respond to any attack by the Emperor on the other. And with that, Friedrich left with his army, now somewhat more hardened than when he marched them to Regensburg not five months before, and returned home.

What followed was the hard snow march of December 1546. Charles's Italian and Spanish forces had been disadvantaged by the weather of Germany in late autumn and early winter, but even with men native to the region, transit by foot across mountains in mid-winter was painful, difficult and slow. Friedrich used the opportunity to consider how to deploy his longbowmen to best advantage. He had displeased his army on the cruel march east by favoring his longbowmen, letting them ride in covered wagons so as to avoid the dangers of fever and frostbite.

For their part, the Bohemian army had laid siege to Zwickau. On Christmas Eve, word came that the elector's army was approaching and meant to offer battle. The bulk of the Bohemian forces present were cavalry, the remainder mostly pikemen, and the snow was fifteen inches deep. Mobility would be extremely limited. In the Battle of the Snows, fought the next day at Werdau, the Saxon longbowmen basically used the fixed position of the west bank of the Pleisse from which to attack the Bohemian hussars. The hussars thought to cross the frozen river. Critically slowed by the snow, and not familiar with either the range or the firing rate of the kind of archers they were facing, they faced volley upon volley from the longbows before they could close. When the survivors reached the Pleisse, Friedrich ordered his cannon to open up the river beneath their feet.

By the time it was done, so much of the work had been done by the distance weapons that, as one of the Saxon pikemen wrote his father, "we may might as well not have even got out of bed that day." 5,000 of the 7,000 Bohemians who had invaded the Vogtland were dead, and the Saxons had suffered only nominal losses. The Saxon longbowmen finally had their Crecy.

On New Years 1547 he was welcomed at the Electoral residence of Altenburg by the electresses Elizabeth and Dorothea. He also formally made Johann the Administrator of Magdeburg and Halberstadt. By this action in terms of personal territories and rents, the younger brother now surpassed the elder in his personal wealth, a situation Friedrich seemed only too comfortable with, given the degree to which he was relying on Johann in his time campaigning against the emperor. After a few days Friedrich then traveled to Erfurt, which he enfolded into his dominions on the understanding he would respect the city’s unique bi-confessional arrangement and defend it from all external attack.

Friedrich had not been a party to the truce reached between the emperor and the other members of the League. That truce had weakened him critically to the point that he could not continue offensive operations against the emperor. It was this Charles had counted on when he quit the field and returned south to repair his forces. Nor did Friedrich think he would have to face further invasion from the humiliated king of Bohemia. Thus, Friedrich realized, this situation had left him open to act against the emperor’s allies adjacent to his territory. And as word spread of his victory in the Battle of the Snows, he realized his use of distance weapons in the winter landscape gave him an advantage he would be unwise not to press while he could.

One target for Friedrich was Duke Heinrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbuettel. Heinrich had provoked and menaced the Saxons before the war, interfering in the affairs of Goslar and Naumburg in order to catch Friedrich in a breach of the peace. Friedrich had abstained from violence against Heinrich then to avoid the trap, but acted now with full resolve.

So in late January 1547, Friedrich marched across the lands of the Count of Mansfeld, made good his claim to Halberstadt, and promptly marched on Goslar. February 9, he entered Wolfenbuettel and sent Heinrich fleeing. However, it was now that Friedrich’s overconfidence got the better of him. Returning overland to Thuringia from his acquisitions, he was caught in a snow that separated him from the main body of his army. A small force of men loyal to Duke Heinrich who had been shadowing his army seized the opportunity. The house in which he was staying for the duration of the storm was surrounded. A pitched fight ensued. His guards were killed, the elector taken, and the soldiers of the duke of Braunschweig were vanishing over the horizon with their prisoner just as the main force of the Saxon army arrived. Friedrich was secreted through the countryside of Paderborn and Westphalia, with no one knowing who he was lest an attempt be made to free him. Finally, reaching Aachen on March 24, he was conveyed into the presence of the emperor, now his captor.

Charles V gave him a choice. If he agreed to cede all territory seized since the beginning of the war, renounce his heresy, abdicate the electoral dignity and all other titles in favor of his son, and then surrender his son into the care of the Habsburgs to be raised as a Catholic, his life would be spared and the electoral dignity of the Ernestine House of Wettin would be kept intact. If he or any other members of his house failed to surrender his son, the electoral dignity and all the lands of the Ernestines would pass to Moritz and the Albertine line. But in no uncertain terms, Friedrich was told that if he wanted to live he must return to the Catholic Church, cede his conquests, and abdicate.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Quiz Answers

Thursday, December 25, 2014

1. Wittenberg has the second largest Jewish community in Europe. Which is the largest?

C. Amsterdam.

It's close, though. Immigrants from points east make Prague almost equal to Amsterdam and Wittenberg.


2. What is the size of the Jewish community of the Haupstadtbezirk Wittenberg?

(D) 1.3 million.

This might sound like a lot, but it's out of a total population of 7.6 million, which means fewer than 1 in 5 Wittenbergers are Jewish.


3. During the Abfluss, which German colony received the most Jewish settlers?

(A) Neuprussia

The License of Settlement of the Empress Sofie sought to encourage migration to what was at the time the land between Louisiana and New Spain.


4. Controversially, the Alexanderstadt Synagogue, the largest in Germany, was built in what architectural style?

(B) Gothic

When the synagogue was built, some thought it unseemly for Gothic architecture to be used in a non-Christian house of worship.


5. Historically, though Wittenberg never had a ghetto, several different neighborhoods have served as the hub of Jewish life in the city. Which one serves that purpose now?

(A) Eichenbrueche

Founded in the seventeenth century, this district at the south foot of what was formerly the oak bridge crossing the Elbe began attracting Jewish tradespeople from the time the old walls of Wittenberg had filled, and has been a Jewish-majority neighborhood for the past 150 years.


6. Whose statue adorns the plinth immediately in front of the Alexanderstadt Synagogue, on Herzogjohannstrasse?

(C) Martin Luther

The Alexandrines, a seventeenth-century cadet branch of the House of Wettin on whom the succession had been settled at the time, and who were instrumental in the planning and building of the Alexanderstadt, were emphatic in their reaffirmation of Luther as a historical figure.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Portrait of a Man with an Embroidered Cap, by Lucas Cranach the Elder, as the Duke Johann the Younger of Saxony


I don’t know if you’re like me, but if you are, you have enough to worry about. Will the new common American currency make it? Are these new Russian kovcheg-class darts going to give everyone cancer, and I mean everyone? Of course they say it’ll be great, that Mars is only marginally less habitable than Siberia anyway, so how hard can it be, but that won’t exactly matter if getting there renders our whole planet less inhabitable than that.

But you know what no one has time to worry about? A close shave. And that’s why starting when they became our sponsor here at Resignations Privatcast, I have been using the Spektrum Zaehklinge. Spektrum offers the very best solid light blade available, no replacements, no mess, no cuts, no water, just a little smoke and that weird burnt smell we won’t talk about. Best of all, one shave with the Zaehklinge can last up to a week, depending on how your beard grows.

So take it from me, and take it from Mrs. Resignations, who loves the new look.

Now, let’s get to it. I'm Duncan Duncan, and this, is...Resignations, our continuing privatcast look at all the great quitters of history, and the story of how they all came to make the decision to walk away from it all. This week we reach part 83 in the ongoing struggle of the Emperor Charles V and the Elector Friedrich of Saxony, over the Holy Roman Empire too small to hold them both.

Now you will recall last week Charles finally captured Friedrich, his conniving antagonist who has shown himself thus far to have a love of the suckerpunch and a talent for taking artillery that is most definitely not his. Friedrich, having been conveyed all the way to Charles’s court at Aachen in a circuitous route through northern Germany in the wintertime, tied up and bleeding in the back of a covered wagon, was received as kindly as could be expected in his secure new lodgings.

Now, let’s be clear. Just like Francis I of France, Friedrich’s confinement would be honorable. There would be no rack, no torture, no question about him getting regular meals. But all the same, when Francis was held by the Emperor Charles V he was an anointed king and a fellow Catholic monarch. Whatever else he was, Friedrich was by contrast a rebel and a heretic, and had made off over the years with a fair amount of Charles’s stuff, including, like we said, artillery, a niece, and, oh yes, Magdeburg, not to mention the other half of Saxony that was not a family heirloom. And while Charles was glad to think of himself as a nice guy, he was determined not to be so nice he didn’t turn out Friedrich’s pockets getting everything back.

And so we get the very much capitalized Ultimatum of Aachen. Charles told Friedrich, who was maybe brought before him in chains, maybe not, it depends on the source—you are going to convert, you are going to give back every territory you’ve annexed on this little frolic of yours the past year, and you are going to abdicate. Or you can just die. Now, Friedrich was allowed some choice in the matter. His family, the Ernestine House of Wettin, could keep their original lands and the Electoral dignity following Friedrich’s abdication, but only if Friedrich’s infant son Alexander was given into Habsburg care to be brought up a good Catholic. Plainly, this was a sop to Charles’s niece, Dorothea, who was now Friedrich’s wife and mother to the little baby Duke Alexander. If little Alexander was not surrendered, everything the Ernestine Wettins had would go to the head of the Albertine house, Charles’s loyal lieutenant Duke Moritz.

And of course, because he was just so thoughtful, Charles had already prepared the documents whereby Friedrich could do just this thing. Declare himself a Catholic, renounce his claims to the new lands, abdicate, and give his son to the Habsburgs. Of course, as Charles V explained, none of this meant Friedrich could, even if he did everything as requested, actually go home. Nope, the plan was for Friedrich to spend the rest of his life in Spain, once again, honorable confinement, though not so honorable as a king of France.

As with so much else about these two, what happens next depends on what national creation myth you happen to be reading. Sources in Charles’ camp report a fair bit of groveling and crying from the victor of Kreuzberg. And not a Lutheran historian of the past five centuries has failed to report the Elector’s bluff answer, referring to the Lutheran practice of the congregation partaking of both parts of the communion, “Why sir, I am well used to taking a bit of drink with it, else a man might choke.”

In short, Friedrich’s answer was no. No to the conversion, no to the surrender, no to the abdication, and no to little Alexander becoming a proper Habsburg prince educated by Spaniards. Following the example of his mother in a similar argument with his father but with the doctrinal roles reversed, Friedrich informed Charles he’d just have to kill him. Charles, though not especially the vicious sort, was by now well past the point of frustration with Friedrich, by about I would say a decade, was hardly unenthusiastic about that prospect. Moreover, all his advisors were urging him to do just as Friedrich requested and be done with it.

Friedrich was, they declared a rebel. If Charles wanted to forge Germany into a proper country, he would have to treat a rebel like a rebel. And if he wanted to restore Germany to the proper religion, he had to treat a heretic as a heretic. There were no two ways about it. But as ever, the Germans thought differently. For their part, the representatives of the German princes traveling alongside Charles were shocked at the notion, most particularly the inclusion of the heresy charge.

Princes like the Elector of Brandenburg or the Duke of Mecklenburg may not have rebelled against the emperor’s lawful authority in their view, but they had certainly committed heresy as the emperor would understand it. Even the agents of Charles’s brother Ferdinand, King of the Romans, King of Bohemia, King of Hungary, objected on the grounds that an execution on the heresy charge would provoke an immediate uprising among the Protestants that might sweep away Habsburg rule in the elective monarchies of the East.

So then Charles inquired about a compromise: “What if I just kill him on the grounds of rebellion?” Plenty enough of the princes including ones just lately pardoned for their part in the war thus far, like the Elector Palatine and the Duke of Cleves, were guilty of that too, so it was not met with the unabashed enthusiasm Charles wanted. Moreover, by then Friedrich was beginning to give ground on the religion question.

From the dungeons came a counter-offer: “what if I become a Catholic, and my son becomes a Catholic, and I abdicate in his favor, and even spend the rest of my life in a traveling road show promoting Catholicism, but in addition to the electoral dignity, we keep the lands of the Albertines?” Charles ultimately turned down his prisoner, but not before an enraged Duke Moritz, who had, let us remember, in fighting for Charles lost all his lands, become a de facto exile, suffered some pretty vicious slanders, and been made to swim a literal river of blood at Kreuzberg, left Aachen in outrage. This was the first real sign Friedrich still thought in earnest he had a role to play, and that role was nothing short of taking a flensing knife to the alliance against him.

His move had demonstrated for the assembled German princes and their representatives just how large the restoration of Catholicism loomed in the thought of Charles, enough so that the Emperor was willing to consider slighting one of his most loyal and effective lieutenants to strengthen the hand of the Church. This left Charles’ Lutheran adherents and the neutral princes wondering just how secure they would be if the only party that had emerged to effectively oppose Charles’s designs on the country was eliminated outright. At Aachen in spring 1547 the reality of what Habsburg domination meant was beginning to dawn on some of the gray heads of the empire, and they were not pleased.

Moreover, murmurings in the halls and at the tables began to take an even darker turn. Friedrich’s insistence, Juelich aside, on not breaching the peace when faced with provocations in the Wurzener lands, in Naumburg, in Goslar, now gave him a saintly glow. It was Charles who now seemed the aggressor against a poor, peace-loving electorate where they just wanted to to drink some blood alongside the body of Christ. Even Saxony’s annexations in 1546 seemed far from unreasonable: Friedrich had moved against the lands of the princes who had moved against him, which seemed to originate more in prudence than a burning lust for conquest. Even now, Brandenburg, Bohemia, and even tiny little Anhalt, which would have been little more than a snack for the Saxon army, lay intact on the borders of Saxony.

So as the truce of the previous year near its end, and the time approached for the Imperial Army to retake the field, Charles V could not help but notice the dirty looks he was getting from the same princes who the previous year were rushing to reassure him of their undying loyalty.

But now let’s cut to Saxony, which since the capture of the Elector was verified sometime in early February had been under the regency of Friedrich’s brother Johann.

Johann had taken the situation as only a man could, when he was asked to begin a regency for his somewhat indisposed elder brother and that brother's sickly two year-old, whose only advocates in the court was one woman, who half-delusionally demanded she be called the Queen of Denmark, and another who was basically thought of as running the local branch office for the Anti-Christ himself. In short, Johann was warm, and snug, and happy, in his new position. And when the plainly distraught Elizabeth of England began making inquiries about raising a cash ransom to help grease the wheels for getting her first-born back, the response had been noncommittal, somewhere between a “hey, let’s see how this all plays out” and “that’s a lot of silver you’re talking about for the one who made me eat sand when we were kids.”

Now, this is as good a time as any for us to chat a bit about the personality of Mr. Johann the Younger, who is going to play a big part of our story for the next bit. He was born in 1515, late enough that while he was raised up on all the same bedtime stories about the fun times of the Houses of Lancaster and York that Friedrich was, and bore some of those same influences on his character, he did not have the same traumatic response to his mother’s exile in 1520 Friedrich did. Instead, Johann the Younger was much more his Daddy’s boy, growing up with a fervent love of the hunt and the tiltyard and the six-hour ordeal the Germans called supper.

And so, whereas Friedrich was weird, willful, unpredictable and dishonest, Johann was affable, plainspoken, and utterly, boringly conventional. Whereas Friedrich had weighed the various theological arguments of the era with a jeweler’s eye, Johann had the attitude that if Martin Luther said it, that was enough for him, and if it wasn’t enough for you, the problem is with you. You will recall how, back in episode 59 when Friedrich went to England to meet his beloved Onkel Henry, part of the arrangements was that Johann’s first-born would reside with Philip of Hesse while they were gone. This is the firmest early evidence we have that the trust and affection between the two brothers had its limits.

Of course, Friedrich had never shied away from laying significant responsibilities on Johann, as well as even more significant gifts. Word is, for instance, he wanted to turn Magdeburg and Braunschweig-Wolfenbuettel into a hereditary duchy for him. At any point, if Johann had wanted to betray Friedrich to the emperor, Friedrich would have been well and truly screwed. But Friedrich knew his brother, and understood well beyond even questions of personal honor the fact that Johann was, for all the obvious reasons, more fiercely opposed to the rule of Charles V, and more ready to throw off the Habsburg yoke, than he would ever be.

Thus what quickly became apparent in early 1547 was that, the good badge being taken off the board, the bad badge was free to do as he wilt. You will recall the arrangement, dating all the way back to 1534, by which Friedrich had granted tolerance to his Catholic subjects in exchange for Ferdinand’s agreement to do the same with the Lutherans of Bohemia. Well, Johann had little patience for that nonsense in the first place, and even less so with the Habsburgs sending armies after him and kidnapping his brother. So the word went out: everyone still loyal to the pope and the emperor had until Michaelmas to convert or leave, and literally they could only take the clothes on their backs with them as they left. They could not even pile their belongings on a horse or mule.

When, finally, the embassy of Charles V arrived under flag of truce, announced officially the capture of the outlaw Friedrich, and explained the terms by which the Ernestines could continue as princes of a much-reduced dominion, Johann laughed it all off. Whether Johann was indeed certain his brother would rather die than him surrender to the emperor, he certainly had no less reluctance than big brother when it came to calling the Emperor’s bluff. He even went further, and declared any documents the Habsburgs might produce with Friedrich’s name attesting to any peace terms would be the result of forgery, torture, or abominable duress, and that “he would know no such devilish instruments.”

So, as the delegation returned to Charles’ traveling court, the message was loud and clear: nothing was resolved, nothing was over, and whether Saxony would fight to the last man, it would certainly fight past the end of the one sitting in stir at Aachen.

Next on Resignations Privatcast, more war. Lots more.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

From The Habsburg Struggle for Europe (1940) by Perez Wolfman

On August 29, 1544, the Electress Elizabeth knew triumph, love, and for one fleeting moment something like real joy. In 1542 while her son the Elector had been holed up at the western frontier of the empire, engaged in a desperate effort to keep the lands of Juelich-Cleves-Berg from vanishing down the Habsburg maw, the electoral court had been plunged into crisis when it was believed his young wife had come very close to fleeing Saxony and willingly placing herself in the hands of her Habsburg relatives. Friedrich’s response had been to grant his lady mother control over the disposition of his household, with the singular brief of making his wife happy enough that when he returned they could reconcile, not only for the narrow purpose of making heirs, but experiencing in some form the marital happiness that thus far had proved fleeting for the 31-year old elector and his 22-year old wife.

It had been years since Elizabeth had been so entrusted by a close family member, but she set to work at the task with her characteristic tenacity, and with it the determination to prove her son’s faith well-founded. So when in the autumn of 1544 Dorothea had finally given birth to a healthy boy after ten years of marriage, Elizabeth received almost as much credit as her daughter-in-law. The gold saltcellar Friedrich gave her in gratitude, depicting Venus and Aeneas (a running motif in his gifts to her) is still in the collection of the Kaiserresidenz. Suddenly as well, the electresses were inseparable, the elder finally after thirty years no longer reputed to be an enemy of the state, the younger enjoying that fullness of power that always attends a consort producing an heir to her prince. And together they quite eclipsed their longstanding rival at court, the Duchess Sybille, wife to Elizabeth’s younger son.

Even as war became more inevitable for Saxony, Elizabeth’s life, focused now more than ever on her grandson, was indifferent to its threat. There were apartments to furnish, nurses to hire, tutors to select, and she was certain she would be more thorough with respect to these responsibilities now than she had been in the last generation. She had hoped the child would be named Heinrich, after her father, and thought naming him thus would allow her son some well-timed flattery of her royal brother. Alternately, she advised, Karl might be a prudent choice, making a certain emperor less likely to make at them like Zeus wielding his lightning bolts. But Friedrich himself chose the name Alexander.

Though the Saxons reveled in the historical allegory they thought surely Friedrich had made, and there were no end to the poems and songs featuring Spanish Dariuses for the newborn to vanquish, in fact Friedrich had named him for a penurious Scottish maternal cousin who had entered Saxon military service and distinguished himself at Dueren. That had done little to diminish the enthusiasm for the name, though, and anxiously the workmen of Cranach’s painting the infant’s nursery had sent for visual references as to what an elephant might look like. Faced with such small troubles as these, Elizabeth knew happiness. Even the decline of her health, and the intransigence of her whole family against a faith she felt to be true, were as far out of mind as she could make them. Neither Friedrich’s march to Regensburg, nor the unsuccessful Riebeck campaign, nor the long flight culminating in the surprise at Kreuzberg, had shaken her that much. Her years with her son and her long experience of these matters had given her a calm that was not easily disturbed. Her confidence was rewarded with the news of Kreuzberg, and the triumphant welcome she herself organized at the castle of Altenburg when he returned to her, bearing captured Imperial standards like a new Arminius.

Thus, the news of his capture by the emperor came very hard to her. However, Elizabeth of England was not the sort of royal woman to meet misfortune with just idle tears or prayer. She pleaded first to begin collecting a ransom by which the emperor could be persuaded to return her Friedrich. When Johann, the obstinate younger son with whom she had the more distant relationship, refused her, she next begged that she be allowed to go see the Emperor in person to make her case for the Elector’s release, or failing that, see him in person and ascertain his condition. But Johann had a long memory, and did not trust Elizabeth to best represent the interests of Saxony or the Lutherans to the Habsburgs.

At the same time, Johann’s elevation to a regency (the military situation almost precluded a woman in the situation in the conventions of the time) meant that his wife, the hated Sybille, was once again in fact if not in title the first woman of Saxony. As such, a distinct series of slights and embarrassments directed against Dorothea began. That she had apparently conceived during the Elector’s time at home in the winter of 1546-7 made little difference.

These worsened as Johann took the field to prosecute the war with the emperor. Months went by, and the unhappiness and uncertainty of the electresses increased. Finally, Elizabeth hit upon an idea: they would retire away from Torgau, where they were staying at Johann’s court, back to either Wittenberg or Elizabeth’s dower residence at Lochau. In that day, and for a long time after, the safest route for travel between the official residences was the river. Elizabeth decided that she and her daughter-in-law would take the luxurious bark that had been one of the final gifts of her husband, decorated in all the symbols of her adored homeland, with roses, fleur-de-lis and portcullises for the house of Beaufort.

So in July 1547 they boarded Elizabeth’s bark at Torgau, the enceinte Dorothea bringing with her the little prince. But immediately Dorothea realized the oarsmen were rowing in the wrong direction. Elizabeth drew close, and explained that instead they were going to Dresden, the site of the abandoned court of the Albertine Saxons. Dorothea recoiled, frightened that she had been lured onto the bark under false pretenses, and that the truth was still something else than what she had been told. More unnerving still, it turned out the guards and rowers were all of Elizabeth’s household at Lochau, close confidantes, who had not been part of the elector’s court. At length, Elizabeth’s story began to break down, and the Electress became more upset.

Finally, she began to hail startled ships passing them by on the river. Neither Elizabeth nor her rowers took any steps to silence or restrain her, until finally, a grain barge bound for Magdeburg stopped. Dorothea first handed to the surprised bargeman and the itinerant laborers on his boat that day a frightened three year-old Saxon prince across the water, then hopped between the two boats herself. When guards regiments of Torgau finally caught up to them, Dorothea told them her story. The wily electress made as if her daughter-in-law’s spirits had been overcome by pregnancy and the strain of her husband’s time in the emperor’s captivity. But when Chancellor Brueck and the Duchess Sybille found out, these efforts at misdirection were for naught.

The Electress’s residence at Lochau was searched, and under a random rock in the curtilage was found correspondence with Ferdinand, King of the Romans. At Pirna, the Electress Elizabeth was to meet agents of the Habsburgs. There she would turn over Alexander, and if she could be persuaded to accompany him, Dorothea too. They would then vanish across the border into Bohemia. In return for Alexander, who would then be raised in the Catholic Church by the Habsburgs to succeed to the electoral dignity, Elizabeth would be guaranteed the life of her son Friedrich, who would be held in a secure confinement within Saxony, not in any foreign country.

Of course it cannot be known whether the promises made Elizabeth were earnest. Perhaps, with Friedrich’s wife in their grasp, the agents would take her whether she willed it or not. Perhaps, having secured the heir to Saxony, the Habsburgs would be content to keep or kill the present holder of the electoral dignity. The one ameliorating detail in the incriminating letters was that they made it seem as if the possibility she might intervene on the side of saving her son from the intransigence of the regent was the one thing that had prevented the emperor from executing him as a heretic so far. She did actually believe failure, or inaction, might seal his death.

It was thus just as plain that Elizabeth had been cruelly manipulated as it was she had betrayed country and family. Brought before her younger son she was stripped of her properties, rents and privileges, to be kept in close confinement, not in some distant house—too often already she had proven herself ingenious at finding ways to do in such places just as she wished—but in the electoral court, under the watchful eye of hostile guards, and an even more hostile daughter-in-law, Sybille. However, such measures would not prove necessary long. The debacle and the resulting stress destroyed Elizabeth’s health. Having already outlived Mary (1533), Margaret (1541) and Henry (1547), she was already the last living child of Henry VII. Soon, she would trade the confines of the terms of her imprisonment for those stricter still, those of a sick bed and a wheeled chair.

The one uncertainty, as Chancellor Brueck noted in his letter relating all these events to the Electress Elizabeth’s other child, the Duchess of Suffolk, was how she had been able to get so far in her plans without the connivance of other people at court. It was possible she had help, though not to fulfill the Electress’s misguided purpose, but their own. His implication was the duke regent, or persons close to him. For it is one thing to kill, imprison, or usurp a young child. It is quite another to hand him over to be raised in the hated religion and unfamiliar customs of a foreign nation, and thus render him unsuitable to exercise the power he was born for, thus leaving oneself and one’s own heirs to wear the coronet, without reservation.

The Coat of Arms of the Elector Johann Friedrich of Saxony, with his full title, by Lucas Cranach the Elder

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

August, Duke of Saxony by Lucas Cranach the Younger


"No Outlet" from Outlaw Saxony: New Perspectives on the Sechszentes Jahrhundert Empire by Louis Hadrami

In early 1547, with the truce nearing its expiration and the parties nowhere near the peace Charles earnestly believed was his when the Saxon elector was placed in his custody, planning began on both sides for the summer campaigns. At the Imperial court, the necessity of satisfying his allies dictated that Charles undertake to free ducal Saxony before anything else. To this end he attempted to enlist his brother Ferdinand, who was going to involve himself by invading Saxony from the east, in the Elbe river valley towards Dresden, while Charles attempted to penetrate from the west via Vogtland.

However, it quickly became apparent no such assistance would be possible. Ferdinand's standing forces had been exhausted by the disaster at Werdau the previous December, and his attempts to convert Bohemia's elective monarchy into an hereditary one triggered public outrage in Bohemia. Worse still, the Saxon printing presses had done their work. Efforts to raise infantry for the king's service in Prague was a miserable failure. At Leitmeritz, where feudal affinities were set to gather, only a handful of Catholics appeared. Instead, there were widespread demonstrations in favor of the Lutherans. Worst of all, the rhetoric of Friedrich's denunciations of Charles were transposed to that of the rebellious Bohemians toward Ferdinand: rather than Bohemian forces going to Germany, they should stay to fight "the foreign and unchristian Spaniards." For Ferdinand, the situation was so unsteady that rather than sending assistance to Charles, he was forced to ask for it out of fear of losing his crown.

The Saxons for their part undertook to wage a defensive war built around a strategy of forcing the emperor into sieges, dragging out the war and extracting from the Habsburgs the greatest possible cost in the hopes the burghers of the Netherlands and the grandees of Spain would finally bridle at the flow of their taxes into Germany. Simultaneously, plans were laid for an attack from the south. With Saxony ringed by princes either hostile, or indifferent to the exercise of imperial agents in their territory, it was too great a risk to send money overland to the Swiss Cantons to hire mercenaries. Instead, before the Elector Friedrich had been captured, he and Johann had hit on the idea of making use of their English allies to this purpose. Instead of sending the usual subsidy directly to Wittenberg, the court of the young Edward VI would dispatch its agents through France to the Cantons and there recruit for the Saxons.

This project ran into some trouble, and not due to the influence of the Empire or any hostile power. Instead, Henry Brandon, the new Duke of Suffolk, wanted this mission for himself, and with it the command of the landsknechts to be thus raised. The problem was, he had heretofore shown himself much unlike his father in his lack of talent for war. But he insisted though, precisely because his prestige at court now rested disproportionately on his “German connection”, his relation by marriage to Friedrich and Johann, whose accomplishments were being lauded by the Protestant intellectuals of the court. Henry believed, and his wife Katherine was certain, that he was but one defeat of an imperial army away from pre-eminence. These notions rendered the Saxon ambassadors horrified, because even meager military skill aside, Suffolk was entirely without the subtlety necessary to travel into the Cantons and do the necessary work there without attracting the unwanted attention of Charles’s agents. Thankfully for the Saxon ambassadors, Edward's regent the Duke of Somerset for his own obvious reasons, agreed to their request and Suffolk was denied the mission.

When the armies began to muster for the campaign in late April, Charles found himself unhappily surprised. Contributions from his provinces in the Netherlands, from Italy including the papal lands, and from Spain totaled only some 30,000 troops. Contributions in addition to that from the German princes were negligible. Even more than the military problems these numbers posed for waging a successful war of conquest in the east, they threatened to validate Friedrich’s longstanding characterization of Charles’s efforts as one of invasion and occupation by an outside power cloaked in the threadbare legalism of the imperial office. What was worse, Ferdinand once again failed to persuade the Bohemian nobility to move against Saxony, partly out of fear that they would only provoke an uprising among their own evangelical subjects. The decade of the “Reciprocal License” had done its work: the Lutherans and Sacramentarians of Bohemia had spread, and were bold in denouncing efforts to wage a crusade the next country over, which they said would inevitably target themselves immediately after.

This is not to say the Schmalkaldic League did not face similar problems. The Palatinate and the South German powers in the League whose separate negotiations in 1546 had resulted in the truce now ending expressed little interest in returning to the field and risking Charles’s pardon of their princes. They were willing to offer their own contributions toward raising mercenaries, and some Protestant powers within the empire like Juelich-Cleves-Berg, which were technically outside the League, were willing to help raise mercenaries. But compared to the year before, the native German armies arrayed against the emperor were now primarily those of Philip of Hesse and the Duke Johann of Saxony, and no one else. Of course, a countervailing factor was that both these states had now been fed by annexations, so that men of Fulda and Eichsfeld now marched for Hesse, while Johann made liberal use of the Archbishopric of Magdeburg’s treasury for his purposes. Devout traditionalist papists in northern and central Germany that year had a ready supply of saint’s relics, offered sometimes at steep discount.

Eventually, the time came to take the field. Charles, vexed by the flow of dispossessed Catholics now streaming out of Saxony, decided that if he could not execute Friedrich without doubling his problems in Germany, he could at least move the captive elector to Spain. He announced this measure from Mainz, hoping to cripple the Saxons’ morale, but found this not to be the case. Finally on June 22 the Imperial Army crossed the border into Vogtland from the lands of Brandenburg-Kulmbach, with Charles certain now that no timed second invasion in the east from Bohemia could be expected. On June 26, the Saxon and Imperial armies engaged at Weischlitz. The numerical advantage was almost prohibitively in favor of the Imperial forces, their 32,000 soldiers facing 18,000 Saxons. While Philip of Hesse was marching to face the Emperor's army, he was still several days away when the Imperial forces under Moritz of Saxony forced the battle. The Saxons lost 6,000, to an equal number of the Imperials. To his credit, Johann withdrew before his defeat became a rout.

Moritz and the Imperial commanders were puzzled however by the absence of the Saxon longbowmen, for whom they had gone to some trouble to find defenses and countermeasures, including a more liberal application of helmets and cuirasses to the regular infantry. Johann divided his forces between Plauen, Zwickau and Gera, distributing them among the three cities on the plan that whichever one became the target, the other two would counterattack and attempt to lift the siege. He himself shut himself up behind the walls of Plauen, the closest, and due to his presence, now the most likely target. The Imperial Army proceeded north. Due to the long time the Elector Friedrich had anticipated war, much work had been sunk into modernizing the walls of Plauen, and no doubt Charles when he came into view of the city could recognize some of the guns that lined those walls as his own.

Immediately, those guns began pummeling the Imperial Army as it began to set up a siege camp and begin the process of investing the city. On June 29, Philip of Hesse reached Gera with his own force of 10,000, to which he added the Saxon force of 3,000 that had retreated there. 5,000 Saxon forces under separate banner marched south from Zwickau.

Inside Plauen meanwhile, the atmosphere was confident, almost festive. Duke Johann was effortlessly cheerful in the face of adversity, and was frequently present in the town market, rallying public spirit and developing the public impression of his character that would long survive him in historical memory. There he regaled townspeople with stories about playing on the knee of Martin Luther and pulling on the beard of Friedrich the Wise while a little boy. He drank beer constantly, in extraordinary quantities even by the standards of the time, and kept little ceremony.

On July 2, with the counterlines not yet begun, Philip attacked the Imperial positions from the northwest, while the force from Zwickau attacked from the north. Not wanting to be caught between the town of Plauen and the river, remembering well the Saxon tactics at Dueren and Kreuzberg, the Imperials were in the hills west of the city. Pushed downhill by the initial press of pike, the Imperial forces were careful to stay out of range of the artillery ringing the city walls. What they forgot however, was that longbows had a longer range than guns. All the Saxon longbowmen had been placed for their safety in Plauen before the battle of Weischlitz, and now, with the imperial army drawn to the town, and then literally pushed into their range, they were free to use the fixed position of the city wall from which to attack. Though the Imperial army did have the advantage of more armor this time, for obvious reasons this was less in use at its rear, the side exposed to the archers. Moreover, the effect of the surprise was to ruin the concentration of the men at the oncoming push of pike, with the result that the Imperials were steadily pushed back toward the walls, being fed to the longbowmen on the walls like meat to a sausage grinder.

Eventually, the Imperials rallied sufficiently to pull themselves out of the fire raining on them from the walls. Knowing the usefulness of the longbowmen for the day was done, Duke Johann led the reinforcements out the gates of Plauen, riding west. Coming as it did at the end of a long day’s fighting, and with Johann still wearing the drool from an apparent mid-afternoon nap on his beard, this was enough to finally break the resolve of the imperials. Of the imperial army of 32,000, 10,000 lay dead, more than half of them killed in the first hour after the army was pushed before the walls. Of the 22,000 Saxons, 5,000 had died. The casualties included several important commanders and persons of high birth, including Duke August, Moritz’s heir and younger brother. This was dynastically significant because it meant that if Moritz died, the Albertine line of dukes would go extinct, and by the terms of the Partition of Leipzig (which of course the Ernestine Wettins no longer recognized anyway) ducal Saxony would revert to the more senior Ernestine branch.

If there was a silver lining in the defeat for the Imperial Army, it was that Charles had been stung often enough by the loss of his artillery that the Imperials had been careful to render it more mobile, and so this time it was not lost in the retreat.

Six days later, as the Imperial army regrouped in the far west of Thuringia, word came of another embarrassment: the Saxon force assembled at the Festung Konigstein to guard against an invasion across the frontier from Bohemia had marched east, and taken with hardly any struggle the Sagan exclave, the last set of lands in the Empire held in fact rather than empty title by the Albertine Wettins. The villages of rural Lusatia lining the route of their march there and back had welcomed them with hymns and flowers.

Morale had even before then been especially low among the Albertines because they believed, with some reason, that August had been targeted at Plauen, and that the Saxon army had killed him rather than take him prisoner, mindful that it would make their masters more secure in their rule over the whole country. This made, in turn, the mercy the emperor had shown the Elector Friedrich IV seem obnoxious to them. And so Moritz, joined by his friend and lieutenant Albrecht Alcibiades of Brandenburg-Kulmbach, demanded the immediate execution of the Elector Friedrich, whose departure for, and confinement in, Spain was still being arranged. And they made dark threats as to what they might do if the Elector was still alive at the end of the campaign season.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Why Sagan?

When the Kaiserliche Luftfahrtforschungdienst was looking for sites at which to develop Germany's civilian space research program, several factors were considered. Locations in the tropics, especially in the German colonies of the era, were at first favored because of lower construction costs, the advantages offered by year-round warm weather, and distance from home country population centers and the safety problems that might present. And for some European countries, these factors proved decisive.

However, in the German context, it was believed that placement of strategic technological assets far outside the home realm would invite aggression by hostile powers, either against the site itself or assets in transit to or from the facilities. Likewise, advantages in labor costs would be offset by the costs of transportation of persons or assets to or from the facilities.

Proximity and isolation made Heligoland the preferred site in several preliminary surveys and reports. However, ecological groups, fishing interests, and the Heligolanders themselves all registered their opposition. The Imperial Navy also worried its presence on the tiny islands would be displaced. Denmark and other neighboring countries lodged protests. And decisively, it was believed that once again hostile powers could menace traffic to or from an island research station.

Tourism interests staged dramatic protests opposing the selection of sites in Bavaria, Frisia or Mecklenburg. Sites in Prussia were disallowed, once again for the obvious security reasons.

In the end, the finalists for the German raumhafen were two relatively isolated, rural communities where the presence of a new large-scale employer would be welcomed: Berlin, in the old Mittelmark of Brandenburg, and Sagan, in Lower Silesia. But it was feared historical structures in Berlin related to the old margraviate would be damaged by the vibrations from test launches, and so Sagan was selected.

It was also believed that in the event of an airborne aggressive act by a hostile power against the capital, Sagan would lie along the most likely axis of attack and could double as an installation for emergency last-minute defense efforts.

Construction was begun in 1898 and finished in 1907. The first launch from the Sagan Raumhafen came in 1910. Several milestones in the history of human spaceflight occurred in the decades thereafter, most famously of course the successful launch of the Bonifaz. Anyone alive who has stepped inside a German schoolroom has seen the pictures!

Following the development of the kernelsplitter, and after that, the possibility of space-borne attack, the former air defense facilities were expanded and became the focus of some of the most sensitive German military technological research. This increasing military dimension to the raumhafen led to the most controversial aspects of its history, with calls for neutral-power inspections and surveillance to prevent either its use in developing prohibited weaponry, or as a staging ground for offensive military operations against points east.

In 1972 an imperial expert committee (fachausschuss) recommended the decommissioning of the facility and its conversion into a museum, partly to open more of the vicinity to residential development. Today of course Germany is not the space-faring country it was formerly, partly because of the commitment of the government to pursuing only safe and ecologically appropriate extro-atmospheric propulsion, in contrast to some other "schnell billig und dreckig" powers.

Eventually, in 1989, the former dart test facilities were converted into a youth camp. In 1997 the last security restrictions, including those with respect to international visitors' nation-of-origin, were ended, and in 2005 an official friendship and exchange program began with the Peter the Great Cosmodrome.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Moritz und Agnes von Sachsen, by Lucas Cranach the Elder

from The Heresiarchs, by Sigismunda Killinger & Lise Freitag (1987)

The defeat at Plauen left Charles V in a dilemma: prudence demanded he retreat for the remainder of the campaign season, to take advantage of his superior resources and return with fresh forces the next year, but he had promised Moritz Duke of Saxony the recovery of his lands before the end of this year. Retreating empty-handed seemed bound to make the emperor’s political situation with the German princes still worse.

So, Charles pivoted from Plauen and launched a strike north against the town of Neustadt, a stronghold of the Ernestines that seemed less likely to be strongly fortified and which offered excellent opportunities against either Weimar in the west or Altenburg in the east. For once, the Imperial Army had the initiative and arrived at the gates of Neustadt before Philip of Hesse and Johann of Saxony. Worse yet for the Ernestines, Neustadt was mostly unprepared for a long siege.

By the time Philip and Johann had reorganized their armies and marched north, the Imperials were in possession of the town. At this point, it was the League that faced the dilemma: Johann wanted to withdraw to a secure position east of the White Elster River and try to catch the Imperial Army as it forded, essentially repeating the Kreuzberg campaign. Philip was impatient with this idea, not least because it would expose not just Thuringia to the Imperial Army, but his own lands, while the bulk of Saxony remained protected by their armies.

It was at this point that the mercenaries procured with the help of the English court in the Swiss Cantons began their campaign. Schaertlin led an army of 13,000 into Sundgau and Franche-Comte before descending the Moselle into Luxembourg. This time, the objective was squarely Charles’s own territories in the west. It was a transparent attempt to draw him away from his primary objectives. At first, Charles was reluctant to oblige. Then on August 8, the Swiss managed to defeat a force fielded by the duke of Lorraine and some of the loyal ecclesiastical princes, opening the possibility they would menace Charles’ home territories in the Netherlands.

Gradually the possibility dawned on Charles this might be, or might ripen into, an effort to free the Elector Friedrich of Saxony from the Netherlands before he could be taken to Spain. Leaving a garrison in Neustadt, Charles began a frantic march west in the hopes of reaching Aachen. To be safe, he sent word ahead of him that Friedrich was to be removed from the Empire immediately, and that in the event of an actual rescue attempt he was to be executed.

On September 16 Friedrich was placed on a ship for Spain, where he arrived on October 1. By October 14 he was in Toledo, deep within Castille, with the only threats to his captivity coming from ongoing efforts to kill him as punishment for his persistence in his heresy.

The day after the Saxon elector was loaded onto the ship in the harbor at Antwerp, a force organized by Governor-General Mary of Hungary and the Burgundian estates engaged the Swiss at Remich. This again resulted in a Habsburg defeat. The Swiss then laid siege to Luxembourg. Charles arrived at the end of September. His presence resulted in the siege being lifted almost immediately. The Swiss dispersed before his arrival, their raiding of the west having earned them far in excess of their original pay.

For Charles this was not the worst result: the damage to his dominions, apart from Franche-Comte, had been slight, and the elector was still his prisoner. However, the garrison left behind at Neustadt in Thuringia had been easily overthrown by Johann the Younger. Once again, the campaign season was drawing to a close without the Ernestines and their allies having been made to disgorge their conquests.

It was now, with military operations winding down for the year, that diplomacy and intrigue began to take over, once again. A diet had been called for the following spring, also at Augsburg. The Elector Palatine was circulating a proposal by which the Elector of Saxony would be returned to his country and the imperial courts perpetually barred from hearing cases on religious matters, in return for the Ernestines’ and Hessians’ surrender of the conquered territory, and the resumption of the borders situatio ante bellum.

This notion satisfied neither party, with an aggravated Charles refusing to concede the existence of a permanent split in Christian belief, not to mention to countenance the resumption of rule by the prince he regarded as a rebel and brigand. For their part, the Saxons were just happy his intransigence would permit them to keep their acquisitions in ducal Saxony, Magdeburg and elsewhere, so the duke regent passed on the proposals without comment.

That is not to say the League was not diplomatically active. Philip was father-in-law to Moritz of Saxony, by his eldest daughter Agnes. Those bonds had been terribly strained by the two years of war, but there still existed a relationship of wary respect between the two men. But now their relationship proved stronger than what that existed between Moritz and the Emperor Charles: at length Moritz had come to realize that Charles was merely using him to wage war on his own religion, and that even if Charles had intended to make good on his promises, their fulfillment was becoming less and less likely.

Two years before, Moritz had been a young and popular ruler of prosperous territories, an advocate of the new religion known for founding new schools in the shells of the old monastic institutions. Now he was an itinerant soldier dependent on his imperial employer, hated in his own lands as a betrayer of his faith and a pawn of a foreign tyrant. He knew that in supporting Charles he had made a dire mistake. Now, somehow, he felt he must try to reverse it.

So, making use of Agnes and her ladies as intermediaries, Moritz proposed to defect. He would reject the legitimacy of Charles and embrace the Schmalkaldic League in return for the guarantee of his old lands. The Ernestines in this scheme would still keep Magdeburg, the former lands of the duchy of Braunschweig-Wolfenbuettel, and other territories they had seized. Moreover, Moritz would bring Albrecht-Alcibiades, still in possession of his margraviate of Brandenburg-Kulmbach, with him. This would carve away the last of Charles’s active support among the German Protestant princes, the likes of Brandenburg and Cleves having been happy to parrot his pronouncements but extremely hesitant tp provide anything like material support for Charles’s objectives.

Philip, for his part, was wildly enthusiastic over the idea, thinking it would both reconcile his family and most likely give the war a prompt end. He forwarded the letter to the court of Duke Johann, then at Wartburg, and from there it was forwarded through the English ambassador directly to the Emperor Charles V. Already frustrated by the stalemate, and by what he thought to be his poor treatment by the German princes, Charles took the information of Moritz’s treason badly. Summoned to appear before the emperor and explain themselves, Moritz and Albrecht Alcibiades instead fled with their soldiers into Albrecht’s margraviate of Brandenburg-Kulmbach.

However, the maneuver by whoever it was in the Ernestine Wettin court who forwarded the correspondence to Charles created a crisis on their own side as serious as the one on the emperor’s: the place of the Ernestines’ ambitions toward the Albertine lands in their war aims was now impossible to deny. Without doubt, they understood the religious cause as subsidiary to the territorial one, or at least that was how it looked to Philip of Hesse. And just as Charles could not wage war against the Schmalkaldic League without the presence in his retinue of a prominent Lutheran prince to give his cause legitimacy, Saxony could not wage war against the emperor without the close cooperation of Hesse.

Philip, who had always maintained closer relations with the emperor than the Ernestine Saxons, now wrote to him warmly endorsing the Elector Palatinate’s proposal of a peace on terms situatio ante bellum, and advocated for the release of the Elector Friedrich. He believed, more and more, that Johann was interested in converting his regency into a permanent usurpation against his elder brother and young nephew, and he hinted to the Emperor that such a release might work in his favor, as Ernestine Saxony might become so embroiled in a contest between the two it would cease to be in a position to defend its conquests.

However, Charles was not so easily taken by this argument. His response to Philip on the issue of liberating Friedrich was nothing short of condescending. But Philip and the Emperor nonetheless negotiated a truce that would last through the Diet of Augsburg in the coming year and give the parties a chance to reach some form of settlement, given the one issue on which the princes of Germany see,ed to agree on was that continued bloodshed advanced no one’s interests.

The diplomatic and legal situation, in the broader sense, was by now a parlous mess. Saxony, Hesse, and many of its Schmalkaldic brethren no longer recognized Charles as emperor because he broke the promise in his coronation oath with his use of foreign troops on German soil in controversies against his German subjects. For his part, Charles had placed the Imperial ban on many of these same princes, essentially voiding their role in the government of the Empire. And even if they were forthcoming, no one believed safe conducts for the princes of the Schmalkaldic League would be respected in the heat of the present moment. At the same time, princely rulers of such lands as the Duchy of Braunschweig-Wolfenbuettel, the Archbishopric of Magdeburg, and the Bishopric of Fulda, that had been gobbled up inside the new frontiers of Saxony and Hesse were carrying on as if they still ran the territories that now existed only as names.

So the princes actually running much of the empire could not attend, many of the princes who would attend ran nothing at all any more, and no formula existed diplomatically whereby the states most in need of direct contact could talk to each other. Even inside Saxony, fractures were emerging following what many at court saw as the dishonorable treatment of a loyal ally, Philip of Hesse.

Only one man possessed the intimate familiarity with all the principles, their characters, and the quarrels between them, the discretion to not engage in idle gameplay or self-interest, and most importantly the trust of all parties. Moreover, his unique position would enable him to avoid the otherwise unavoidable questions of recognition and etiquette. Thus to him was turned over vital matters pertaining to the survival of the Saxon state and the future of the reformed religion. And so, Lucas Cranach the Elder left for Augsburg, supposedly to seek work at the Diet in these lean war years by painting the great and good.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Mary of Hungary, Governor of the Netherlands, receiving Emperor Charles V at the Castle of Binche.

from The Heresiarchs, by Sigismunda Killinger & Lise Freitag (1987)

Lucas Cranach the Elder's first week in Augsburg, well in advance of most of the princes who would be assembling there, was spent polling the participants and their advisors their views of the present conflict. His reports were relayed to the Duke Johann and key members of his court at Coburg, where they were protected not just by the walls of the Coburg Veste but a formidable army and, needless to be said, the whole Saxon corps of longbowmen.

Cranach even received the courtesy of an audience with the emperor, conducted on the most pleasant terms. Charles inquired after the well-being of Cranach's benefactors, particularly the Electress Elizabeth, whom he regarded as a paragon of piety and tragic dignity. Cranach answered, with his characteristic charm but with the appropriate discretion. Gradually, the questions became more substantial, and Cranach began relaying to Charles the positions of the duke regent on the various questions facing the empire. The audience ended without Charles expressing a direct opinion.

A few days later Cranach was visited by Charles' court painter, Tiziano Vecelli. Expecting gossip and a conversation about craft, Cranach received an oral peace offer from the emperor himself. Since the Albertine Saxons had proved themselves only marginally more trustworthy than the Ernestines, Charles would not begrudge the Ernestine Saxons his validation of their repudiation of the 1485 Partition of Leipzig. They could have the lands of Saxony united under their rule. Moreover, while Charles still had no intention of allowing Friedrich anywhere near the borders of the Holy Roman Empire, he would not require the surrender of his heir into Spanish hands. Instead, Alexander would succeed and govern under the regency of his uncle or whomever was chosen by the Saxon estates until his majority. In return, Saxony would cede Magdeburg, the Braunschweig lands seized from Charles's ally, and all their conquests outside Albertine Saxony. And they would have their freedom of worship, but only until such time as a General Council of the Church meeting at Trent decided the doctrinal disagreements within Christianity.

In short, the great number of people who believed Saxony's policies under the Duke Regent was more about its aggrandizement than any matter of faith plainly included Charles V. In fact, the Emperor was now counting on it.

Dutifully, Cranach passed the proposal on. But in his account to the duke he made clear that to his eye the emperor seemed exhausted and unwell. Imperial elections might be not that far off, and if so the Ernestine Wettins would not want to be denied their role on account of any imperial ban.

Thus as Cranach relayed the proposal word spread through the delegates at Augsburg that the empire might be close to peace. The mood at Augsburg was almost festive. But the response that came from Duke Johann was of such a character and tone that Cranach feigned illness rather than deliver it in person and so offend the emperor. Essentially, Johann's answer to Charles was that Albertine Saxony was not his to give, nor Magdeburg or Braunschweig his to take away. Moreover, Johann now took a position on the question of a council more radical than any Saxon ruler had before, that he would not subordinate his faith to the judgment of the theologians of a fallen church. The final barb had been his use of the terminology of the Anti-Christ to describe the pope, which Friedrich had always been as careful to avoid in his diplomacy as he had been glad of in his propaganda.

Thus ended the first effort at a peace for the empire. Johann's fresh indignities having restored his resolve, Charles proceeded to try to force his agenda through the diet. His Protestant allies had convinced Charles that the procedural imperfections of his bans against Friedrich and Johann of Saxony, Philip of Hesse, and others weakened his legal position, and that the first order of business was to re-issue them with the approval of the full diet, as required. This Charles did, but he quickly found himself blocked by the majority. He had in fact been checkmated, having admitted the legal insufficiency of the process against Friedrich in his application to re-issue the ban, and then denied the passage of a valid one. The emperor then found the diet reluctant to vote further funds to his armies, even when nominally for the purpose of waging war against the Turk, they having heard that argument before, and trusting it less now.

What followed made the debacle of the Augsburg Diet complete. Charles presumed to legislate a set of common practices which would be required of all Christian churches in the empire. Charles had consulted such Protestant theologians as Agricola in these efforts. Philip Melanchthon had been invited to participate, but had been barred from doing so by Duke Johann. The result was a decree from Charles V proclaiming that all Christian churches in the empire recognize and administer the Seven Sacraments, accept the doctrine of justification by Grace, and obey the authority of the pope and his bishops. In return, clerical marriage would be permissible in some churches, the cult of the saints would be reformed, and limits would be placed on episcopal authority. These decrees had been intended as a compromise that would unite the Holy Roman Empire, offer a way back to the church for moderate Protestants, and isolate the intransigent and violent. Instead, it was roundly rejected even by the three ecclesiastical electors (the estates of the Archbishopric of Cologne had restored the traditional faith there in 1547) as a corruption of doctrine, and not accepted by any of the evangelical princes.

Announced on May 16, it became imperial law six weeks later, but was disregarded everywhere outside those lands held by the Habsburgs themselves. Though Charles had tried to build by diplomacy and consent what he could not by force, he had failed abjectly, and the emperor's authority in Germany was now at low its ebb.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

****************SAXONY 1548************************

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, the Third Duke of Alba, called the Iron Duke, by Antonis Mor

Before we begin I would once again like to take a moment to talk to you about our upcoming Resignations Privatcast tour, in which we will be visiting the places so pivotal to the events of our story. Our itinerary of course includes glorious national capitals, glittering cultural centers, and metropolises famous for their night life. And in the case of Wittenberg, two out of three of these ain’t bad.

Which is not to insult the virtues of Wittenberg, which sports the biggest Lutheran seminary in the world, serves as the beating heart of global insurance markets, and is headquarters to a nimble and honest, if somewhat bloated, national bureaucracy. It’s just, that, well, Wittenberg sports the biggest Lutheran seminary in the world, serves as the beating heart of global insurance markets, and is headquarters to a nimble and honest, if somewhat bloated, national bureaucracy. Do you get what I’m saying here?

So while Wittenberg has palaces, museums and churches without end, not to mention parks like the kaiseringarten so large that urban legend has it Russian soldiers from the last General War are still hiding out in there somewhere behind the duck ponds, and no end to the upscale shopping possibilities, it is also a place where a wild night out means herbal tea with accountants.

For sin, you have Hamburg. For potables, you have Munich. But Wittenberg has history, which is what we’ll be going there for, anyway.

So with that out of the way, let’s get back to our story. This…is Resignations, our continuing privatcast look at all the great quitters of history, and the story of how they all came to make the decision to walk away from it all.

Of course, there are a great many women in history who, faced with the unfairly restricted role allotted their sex in public affairs, nonetheless acted with resourcefulness, intelligence and indomitable will to shape events to their interest.

The Electress Dorothea was not one of these women. Of course, her mother-in-law was, and her sisters-in-law both were, though one of them would probably have cause to regret it before all was said and done. But Dorothea? Was not.

What Dorothea was, as we discovered two episodes ago, was smart enough to know when the boat was going in the wrong direction, and determined enough to not passively accept it, but to create the biggest possible ruckus until things finally started going her way.

In the summer of 1548 this was precisely the situation she found herself, once again, just not in a literal boat. It was becoming increasingly obvious to Dorothea that her brother-in-law was not only not making any heroic efforts to retrieve the elector her husband, but instead actively steering Saxony away from a peace with the emperor that would return Friedrich, safe and sound, and force Johann to surrender the regency.

Dorothea feared it was only a matter of time before power solidified around Johann enough that he usurped the electoral dignity permanently, dispossessing her son of his birthright in favor of his own three burly ducal princes. After all, who had the authority to stop him? The imperial courts whose authority Saxony had been giving the finger to for the past three years? The emperor whose power Johann mocked openly?

What Dorothea also understood about her situation was how weak it was. That prior, ill-considered effort at a flight from the court at which she was nominally the highest-ranking woman had exacted a heavy price on her influence now. Moreover, she was without natural allies strong enough to help: the dowager electress was now, for multiple reasons, in no situation to help anyone, and Friedrich and Johann’s sister Katarina was off Duchess of Suffolk-ing, and engaged at that moment in her own very serious power struggle on Dubious Succession Island.

So the best Dorothea could do was go to the longtime chancellor and Ernestine Wettin family consigliere, Gregor Brueck. Brueck’s taste for risk had long since been exceeded by both of Johann the Steadfast’s sons, and more and more, he was retiring from public affairs, partly perhaps to create some plausible deniability in the event of a subsequent trial for rebellion before an imperial court. But Brueck knew better than to interpose himself in a family power struggle, so he counseled Dorothea to withdraw from Johann’s court and begin developing her own relationships with members of the Saxon estates, with an eye first to counter any effort he might make against the succession of her son.

Taking this advice to heart, Dorothea retired to Elizabeth’s former residence of Lochau, which was beginning to acquire the reputation it would continue to have for the next few hundred years as the rural and unaffected scheme hatchery of interfamilial conspiracies among the Ernestine House of Wettin. With her she took her infant daughter, named Elisabeth. Whether the littlest Wettin was named after Dorothea's ferocious mother-in-law, or her own mother Isabella, is a matter of some contention.

Now, we return to Charles V where we left him, at Augsburg. And while we don’t know for certain that he was in a major sulk after the events of the Imperial Diet, we can forgive him if he was, considering the absolute disappointment of all his efforts, both military and diplomatic, over the past three years.

Thus frustrated, Charles decided the only thing to do was to return to the battlefield. To that purpose he ignored the fact that the Imperial Diet had just refused him the funds to wage further war, and decided to field the best army he could from his own and his brother’s lands.

Unfortunately, by now the stress of these long years riding around Germany chasing Lutherans had well and truly gotten to him, and so in his place Charles gave the command to the Duke of Alba, Fernando Alvarez de Toledo. This was most decidedly not an unproblematic move, politically, the whole of the Ernestine Wettin case against him being that he was not a German Holy Roman Emperor enforcing native laws, but a King of Spain imposing foreign rule. But Charles was now faced with a very limited menu of choices, especially since he was fresh out of friendly German princes willing to take up arms for him.

By early July, Charles had managed to assemble an army of 26,000 out of his own lands, to which Bavaria and the ecclesiastical princes added some 5,000 more. It was a force both larger and more potent than the Lutherans had thought possible for him after the two previous years. Moreover, Johann had wrongly calculated Charles to be a spent force, and was significantly underprepared to face this threat. Worse still, there had been little contact between the chief allies of the Schmalkaldic League since the embarrassing disclosure of Moritz’s correspondence, and there were now real questions as to how solid the relationship between Saxony and Hesse still was.

At this point, Charles was approached on another front. His sister, Mary of Hungary had always been more sympathetic to the plight of the German Lutherans than Charles, and was literally as sympathetic as one could be, and still be a member of the House of Habsburg in good standing. Moreover, she had conducted significant personal dealings with the Elector Friedrich, not just in the humiliating marriage negotiations of 1534, but in the time he had been captive in the Netherlands. Her suggestion now was to begin negotiations with the Wettin in the hand, rather than the Wettin in the bush.

In short, her idea was to use Friedrich to get a favorable settlement. If Friedrich stayed obstinate, keep him where he was. No one in Electoral Saxony was in contact with him so for all and intents and purposes if the gambit failed, then it did not happen. But if he cracked, or was willing to make concessions of the kind his younger brother would not, he could be brought back and restored to power. That way, the Habsburgs could get the peace they wanted, or force their enemies into a figuratively, and maybe literally, fratricidal war.

That said, Charles dispatched to Spain a revised version of his earlier peace proposal Johann had treated so shabbily. Keep the Albertine lands, give up the ecclesiastical lands and all the territory taken from the other Habsburg allies, accept the Augsburg Interim, the judgment of the Council of Trent after it, and of course, return home to your castles, your family, and your intact electorate. These were of course quite liberal terms for a man who had been kept in “honorable confinement” among jailers who thought him a heretic devil for almost two years, and Charles thought seriously anyone would be a fool to respond to them in any way but “Please” and “Thank you.”

Unfortunately, as the ship was bearing Charles’s terms to Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor was once again cruelly inconvenienced. For, quite against expectations, the Duke of Alba had absolutely murdered the Saxon army.

The Duke of Alba had begun his campaign by advancing, as the Habsburg armies had some times before, into southern Thuringia. This time the objective had been the town of Rodach. Saxon and Imperial armies had met nearby, at Straufhain, on July 18.

This time, there were no obvious fixed positions behind which the Saxons could place their longbowmen to just fire volley upon volley into the human meat of massed Imperials. There were no rivers at which to catch the larger Imperial Army as it crossed. There was no seasonal factor limiting the mobility of the Imperial cavalry or pikes. And, perhaps most notably, there was no Hessian army under Philip coming to haul Saxon asses from out the fire. Instead, it was just those 30,000 Imperial infantry, organized into tercios, against half as many Saxons.

Johann evaded capture and fled behind the walls of Altenburg, but that was the best that could be said for the Saxon situation. Because the casualties at Straufhain had been truly overwhelming: of those 16,000 soldiers, fully 10,000 lay dead on the field afterward. The Saxons no longer had the ability to field an effective army against the Imperials, and it was only mid-July. Alba may not have had the mobile artillery to reduce the cities of all the territories the Wettins held, but he could burn and terrorize the countryside from one end to the other, and he could reach much of it before the harvest was in. For two years, Saxony had waged war more or less as an adventure, fighting on and frequently winning others’ territory in a largely cost-free exercise. Now it would face the nightmare of despoliation by a foreign army, followed by famine.

But perhaps even that was not the worst of it. The Wettins’ beloved longbowmen had finally been caught and enveloped at Straufhain by the Spanish cavalry. Their numbers had already been whittled down heretofore by the progress of the war. But at the start of the day at Straufhain there had been almost 300, and at the end, only 16.

And it needs to be said, these were not easily replaced. One does not just find lying about an adult man with a frame big enough to hold, and arms strong enough to pull, and skill enough to aim and fire, a longbow. The corps Saxony had been employing throughout this war it had been building literally since the surviving guards of the Princess Elizabeth’s progress reached Wittenberg in 1509. Even if they wanted to, it would take the Saxons more than a few decades to replenish their corps of longbowmen into any kind of true military significance.

Next on Resignations Privatcast: The return of well, not the king, but surely someone not lacking a certain royal self-regard.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Congratulations on the royal wedding!

We here at Enthusiast: A Magazine of Royal History would be badly remiss if we did not take note of the royal history taking place even as we write. Thus we would like to extend our warmest wishes to Her Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess Irina Petrovna and her new husband, English actor Eddie Truro. Irina is the third daughter of you-know-who and his second wife, formerly a Maryland attorney. Eddie first gained notoriety in his role as the young Henry VIII in the imagebox program Charles Brandon.

The wedding, to be solemnified in the Grand Church of the Winter Palace, is to be limited to the bride and groom's families and 900 other invited guests. Dress for Russian gentlemen is to be full regimental, for Russian women to be full court dress, for foreigners to be formal with full awards, and for state bureaucrats as stipulated in Peter the Great's Great Table of Ranks.

It is believed the marriage will be a further step in the process of modernizing the monarchy for the 21st century.

Once again, congratulations, Irina and Eddie!

(Note: original photo taken by one Mark Jones and used under a creative commons license. Photo author is some dude from a parallel world and has no part in any present mischief.)

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Allegory of the Reign of Charles V: From left to right, Suleiman the Magnificent, Pope Clement VII, King Francois I of France, Duke Wilhelm of Cleves, Duke (formerly Elector) Johann Friedrich of Saxony, Landgrave Philip of Hesse.

from Elizabeth of England, Mother of Two Dynasties (1912) by George Jane

So as the Iron Duke lay waste to the land of Saxony, Dorothea's little court at Lochau, which first was ignored by the great of the country, began receiving steadily more visitors. Whether magnates of the countryside whose houses had been burned, or merchants of the towns who had seen their trade dry up, the complaint common to them all was the recklessness of the duke regent. To her guests Dorothea answered plainly that she knew little of military matters, but that all she wanted in the world was to see her husband returned and safe, and her son secure in the rights which he was presently being robbed of. And that, she added, she was sure know one knew better the matters her guests complained of, than her dear lord, and that no one would act more quickly to secure the benefit of peace.

It was the sort of performance that sincerity could offer, which guile lacked. In no time at all she began to take on a fresh role as a kind of mother of the country. This accusation, from his well-defended castle of Schloss Hartenfels at Torgau, Johann answered forcefully that he had not done the first thing to prejudice the rights of his nephew, that the whole object of all his acts as regent had been the defense of every inch of that nephew's patrimony, even at great cost and inconvenience to himself, and that if Dorothea of Denmark or any other person could name in one particular any action he had taken to the contrary, he would be glad to quit the regency in her favor.

Of course that he had far greater concerns at large than Dorothea went without saying. On October 10 an army of the Saxon peasant levy, half-trained farmers mustered into service by common rage at the abuses of the Duke of Alba, were slaughtered at Grimma. Then on All Saints Day, November 1, Weimar fell to Alba, becoming the first town with an electoral residence to be so overcome. It was spared the worst excesses expected of Alba or the Imperial army. This despite the fact that its defenders had made him penetrate its wall. However on November 20 Gotha offered no such resistance, its gates were opened in exchange for the guarantee of the lives of its citizens. Nonetheless, in both towns a great show was made of burning all the German bibles, Lutheran hymnals, and works otherwise heretical to Spanish eyes that could be found.

Now this violated the spirit of Emperor Charles's Augsburg Interim if not its letter, but of this conflict the celebrated Spanish general was clear, that given the choice of satisfying his emperor or his God he knew his true duty. It was following this same notion that the Army of the Duke of Alba chastised most harshly all Lutheran ministers they found who had married, and present polite discourse, not to mention the discretion we allot the eyes of the fairer sex, prohibits us from describing the treatment given their wives. Of some of the more ghastly tales repeated about the Duke of Alba's army we may have some doubt, the motives for exaggeration being only too plain. But we feel confident the house of at least one Saxon family was spared on account of some member or other producing a rosary, or of its older members demonstrating for the Spaniards they could still say an ave maria.

Faced with such enormities the formerly ingenious Johann found himself without recourse, and devoid of ideas as to counterattack. Hesse and his other former allies, suspicious now of Saxony's policy, seemed too content to watch the columns of smoke rise over Thuringia from inside their own borders. The state was paralyzed, until at length not a few members of the Saxon estates offered that if such as this performance was all the duke offered, Dorothea of Denmark may not be half bad, at that.

Thus when on December 12 the heralds arrived at Torgau, it was like the prayers of the whole Saxon nation had been answered. An honorable peace had been reached between emperor and elector, secured by immediate truce. The elector was being returned, presently, and would enjoy in full his rights and dignities over both Ernestine and Albertine Saxony. Alba would be forced to withdraw his army, which even then was close to reducing additional walled cities, and which given another year might have overmastered the whole Electorate from Magdeburg to Dresden, and the cities he had already taken, he would be made to give back.

However, it was to much consternation that the full terms of the treaty were not made known. Would Saxony's Lutheranism be preserved? Would it be contingent upon the results of a council of the whole church, a national council, or eliminated outright? Had the offenses of Alba the autumn before been just a preface? For a moment Johann's most unreserved defenders made a show in the estates of requiring the full text to be made known, and their consultation properly given, before any term of the treaty was enacted.

The answer of the Lochau Party to this was outrage, as pure and unrestrained as the joy when Dorothea heard of Friedrich's imminent return. Moreover, not a few of the sager heads in the estates and consistory were heard to ask, what were the alternatives to even a poor treaty at this point, but further abuses by Alba? How long before, inevitably, Saxony would break under the violence of him and his successors? What were, in fact, the limits of one small country of Germany before the ruler of half the Earth?

Finally, at length, Friedrich returned. Met at Wartburg on February 9, he rode a common donkey, and wore the clothes of a common soldier, borrowed from a man of similar size in Charles's army. Gone almost exactly two years, he returned thinner and much aged. Most of the terms of the treaty were far from unsatisfactory: as previously disclosed, the Ernestines would keep their cousins' lands of ducal Saxony; though they were committed to observance in accordance to however the Council of Trent decided, orthodoxy would be not enforced by the pikes and guns of foreign armies; all licenses previously given by Friedrich to Saxons still loyal to Rome would be restored, and Johann's policy of conversion or expulsion ended. Friedrich had once and for all accepted Charles as emperor and his liege-lord, and dropped any protests about Ferdinand as King of the Romans. Magdeburg and all other lands seized by Saxony would be returned outright, with an extraordinary ransom in addition to that.

Friedrich had negotiated though that the territorial and monetary terms of the treaty could not be acted upon immediately, because of the necessity that he first recover the reins of the Saxon state. So, of all the terms that he had to relate, the most bitter certainly was that he had to surrender, immediately, Duke Alexander to the care of the Emperor, as a pledge in advance of his compliance to all these promises. Hearing this, Dorothea's joy turned to rage. At this moment, it was actually, to the surprise of all, Johann who broached the possibility of simply taking Friedrich, keeping Alexander, and daring the Duke of Alba or whomever else was sent against them to do their worst.

But Friedrich, apprised now of the condition of the country, knew this was no option at all. Alexander, with no notice, nor even time to gather his toys, was surrendered, and rode back with the very Spanish soldiers who had accompanied Friedrich. Many things would change from that day, it would by no means represent the last turn of the wheel of fortune for either Friedrich or for Saxony. But one thing would remain constant from then on: Friedrich's marriage to Dorothea had ended. No longer could she be suffered to speak to him, or to remain in his presence longer than required. All her hopes of his return he had betrayed, and her heart no longer knew him as a husband or a father to their son at all.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Portrait of a Young Nobleman by Lucas Cranach the Elder, as The Elector Alexander

So, if you're like me, you enjoy a good night's sleep. After all, who needs to lay awake all night tossing and turning, worrying over whether Philips' Folly about Origin Point might actually be true, or what we'll do with our lives if our Privatcast sponsors abandon us, and we have to go out and find real jobs! That's why Mrs. Resignations and myself only sleep on LuriComfort Mattresses. Fresh from the mattress factory in Morocco--and Morocco is famous for its mattress factories!--LuriComfort offers supreme rest at affordable prices. And best of all, with the easy return policy all you have to do if you are not satisfied is physically haul your LuriComfort Mattress to the nearest convenient collection depot--and there are three in North America alone!--surrender it, fill out a short series of forms, provide a few valid forms of identification, demonstrate you are acting of your own volition, convince the clerk you are not a robot, and you will get your money back, minus certain offsetting service fees.

LuriComfort--you won't regret it.

And now, where were we? Oh yes, someone had just realized they had made a terrible mistake and that it was too late to do anything about it now. Because, this…is Resignations, our continuing privatcast look at all the great quitters of history, and the story of how they all came to make the decision to walk away from it all.

Almost as soon as Charles V had dispatched his generous peace proposal to Friedrich, imprisoned in Toledo, on the assumption that the war in Saxony would be a never-ending, resource-draining quagmire, the Duke of Alba proved to his satisfaction none of this was necessarily the case. So, what to do?

Charles knew by now what he was getting in the duke of Alba's reports just might be wishful thinking. Whatever might be said about herding cats, it is nothing against herding Lutheran princes of the sixteenth century. So he didn't want to make it that much more difficult for Friedrich to come around. What he really wanted to do was jack up the price for Friedrich doing the precise same thing he had already done several times before, and reneging at the first opportunity.

And so he hit on the idea of once again requiring the young Duke Alexander be surrendered as a hostage for his father's good behavior, in a matter much similar to that of the French princes when Charles had previously released Francis I. Thus, if Friedrich proved recalcitrant on the matter of disgorging the territories apart from the Albertine lands that Saxony had absorbed, or worse still, not accepting the Augsburg Interim that Charles was still trying to impose as a religious settlement on the German nation, he would have recourse.

Charles knew from experience there was only so far he could go with this--no one would be hurt worse than he would be if he got the reputation of a child-killer. But holding the Duke Alexander would still mean leverage, and leverage was what Charles badly needed. So he sent word of this amendment to his proposal. It might complicate matters, but no way was he going to release Friedrich without the countervailing receipt of Friedrich's heir.

While Charles was waiting to hear back from Toledo, he was well-pleased to hear of the progress the Duke of Alba was making turning scenic Thuringia into charcoal. With Duke Johann not venturing out of Torgau to meet Alba face-to-face, the peasants of Saxony took matters into their own hands and, certain that God was on their side, ventured to fight the now mostly-Spanish, with a dash-of-Italian, Imperial Army at Grimma, with a somewhat obvious, and unpretty, result.

At this point the prosperous and usually well-fed cities of Saxony started to fold. Weimar made a brave face of it, and forced the Duke of Alba to actually pierce its walls before a surrender was negotiated November 1. Gotha followed not long after, and without as much resistance, and around now the duke regent's war council started to get panicky that all the towns of Saxony were going to cut deals to spare themselves, until eventually the war was lost.

Now, the story usually runs that this is the high water mark of Charles's fortunes. But in truth the matter is a bit more complicated. Charles, during the period of his personal management of the army in the (for him) nightmare days of 1546 and 1547, had been careful to keep track of both the military and the political dimensions of the conflict. Beating down one Lutheran prince is easy, if you're not too concerned about motivating all the rest to go at you to the very death. And so Charles had been careful to keep a figleaf over his religious motives, ally with Germans generally and Protestant Germans specifically however much possible, reward those allies lavishly even when their help was meager, and most importantly, offer as few possible of the sort of provocations that would push those allies away.

And no doubt, when Charles had charged the Duke of Alba with bringing Saxony to heel, he had explained all this in great detail. But plainly, as reports--many exaggerated for obvious purposes--began to leak out of Imperial atrocities against the villages of Saxony, Charles's reputation with the Lutheran princes outside Saxony caught cold. Everyone else--Catholic, Lutheran, Sacramentalist--in the summer of 1548 had wanted to see the obnoxious Saxons, swollen on their gains against their Albertine cousins, Braunschweig and Magdeburg, taken down a peg. But what few wanted was the nasty spectacle of the sort of exemplary justice the Imperial Army was meting out to the wives of Lutheran priests, and to those rural families in places like the Pleissnerland and the Osterland who couldn't recite enough Latin to satisfy the whims of the occupying power.

For what no one was paying enough attention to in the late autumn of 1548 was that though Saxony had lost its longbowmen, the Duke of Alba's cavalry had not taken out its printing presses, and between the two the latter was infinitely more powerful. And so the same Protestant princes who at first after Augsburg had been glad to sit back and watch Saxony's comeuppance now faced tough questions from their own people--like, if you let Saxony fall now, who are you going to get to help you when the Duke of Alba comes for us?

These were the preoccupations of the German courts when the answer to Charles from Friedrich arrived in early November. Charles had asked for, and expected, a simple yes or no. He received detailed notes on various points of agreement, reservations where the terms were insufficient or too vague, and some counteroffers. But the overriding thrust of the letter Friedrich had written him was that he must have unrestricted access to outside information, including ambassadors resident in Toledo, including representatives of his family and the Saxon estates, and including theologians and religious leaders of the reformed movement in Germany.

Frustrated beyond belief--it's impossible to imagine him not thinking "Who does this guy think he is?" and "It would have been so easy just to kill him and be done with it"--Charles decided to ignore Friedrich's actual response and treat it as a yes to the offer as it had originally been made. So he wrote a letter to Friedrich, reiterating--just so the point was not lost--the terms upon which the Elector would be released. Implicit in the letter?: "Oh, you thought this was negotiation? How silly of you." Included were instructions to Friedrich's gaolers to convey him back to the Netherlands, where the necessary deals would be concluded in person.

Now, it is useful to comment briefly on just what Friedrich had been doing with his time in Toledo. Apparently he had been free to read as much Thomas Aquinas as he wanted, to take his exercise walking in circles in a courtyard, and to set his thoughts down on paper so long as he didn't try to communicate with anyone on the outside.

Towards that purpose he had started a grandiloquent work--the Instruction, or Unterweisung--for his son. It was an apologetic work that purported to explain to the young Alexander why his father was willing to go to his own death rather than submit his son to the control of a tyrant who would destroy his immortal spirit. For obvious reasons, the work was abandoned before it was finished, and does not survive.

It was midwinter before a hastily fetched Friedrich was standing before Charles and Mary at Binche. He did actually win some qualifications. Charles had to promise he would never again use non-German armies to secure the obedience of the German princes on religious matters. In truth, virtually every prince of the empire was now impressing upon Charles the necessity of the same promise, and so this seemed a good way to make a concession that would be imminently necessary anyway.

Also, Friedrich had been pretty lawyerly on the matter of little Alexander's care. He would be held at the court of Mary, not in Spain, and ambassadors from the princes of the empire and those of interested foreign kingdoms--meaning France and England--would have the privilege of communicating with Alexander and ascertaining the suitability of his conditions and education. Charles had rejected a further condition, that a native Saxon servant of the Elector's choice be with Alexander at all times.

Thus, with all the terms agreed upon, Alba having withdrawn from Saxony for the time being in recognition of the truce, and the duke regent and the electoral court notified of his imminent return though not of its price, Charles and Friedrich started their journey east to Wartburg, where would be made what the Saxons thought would be a one-way drop-off, but which would actually be an exchange.

Charles had still kept much information about the situation of the war and of everything that had happened in the intervening two years from Friedrich on his travels, up to the very moment they arrived in his lands. So on Friedrich's homecoming, one can imagine he had some difficult questions for Johann--"How's Mutti?"; "Where are my longbowmen?"; and "Why is everything on fire?"

But these paled in comparison with the difficulty on his side, which involved literally taking his five year old son from out of his mother's hand, and giving him to Spanish soldiers to take away for an unspecified period of time, then and there. Those prior betrayals of Charles exacted a heavy price now, because as there was no trust between them, there was no room for either softening the blow or executing a quick escape.

We'll not dilate too much on the family drama this provoked. Except to say that however much Dorothea hated Friedrich for this gambit, she was going to hate him more shortly, because Friedrich had no intention of keeping his deal with Charles. Like Francis before him, he meant to abrogate almost everything he had agreed to at the first opportunity.

He knew Charles would not actually kill Alexander. But what he also knew was the manner in which the French princes had been treated following their father's similar renunciation of the bargain by which he had won his freedom. They had been kept alive, but just. Their treatment had been, to all accounts, atrocious. And Friedrich, as he handed Alexander over, knowing this, and knowing his own intention even then, knew all that was in store for his only son.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Sigismunda Killinger, Lecture Record, October 22, 1998 Charpentier-Synthtranslate Edition.

Now, questions?

STUDENT: Dr. Killinger, what I have trouble understanding is how Emperor Charles V didn't know, as many times as the Elector had deceived or betrayed him previously, it would happen again?

DR. KILLINGER: Well, there is a temptation when we are thinking about the Spanish War to treat Charles V as somewhat naive. In fact, what I would impress upon you, particularly with respect to the release of the Elector Friedrich, is that the Emperor is a sophisticated party. And I use that as a term of art, referring to it in the sense in which the phrase is used in the commercial law.

It is not so much a matter of how smart a given person is, though I have no doubt the Emperor was a very intelligent man.

Let's say you are a corporation, say for instance a hospital, or a candy manufacturer. And you need a new building. You contract with a construction firm to build it. Of course you intend for the firm to do as it agreed. But if you are as I said a sophisticated party, you will not simply rely on the construction firm to do as it said it would, and make no plans for what to do if it doesn't. You may insert appropriate penalties into the contracts. You may buy insurance. You may plan potential suits in the appropriate law courts.

The sophisticated party games out, if you will, how to protect its interests in all conceivable circumstances. And for many sophisticated parties--Krista! Are you watching that pseudobushido trash again on your slate? Shut it right now and take your notes by hand, or else I will fail you. I don't care what people in this story you're descended from, that von in your name does not do the work it used to!--Excuse me

As I was saying, the sophisticated party to a contract games out the various consequences of a breach. In some cases, a sophisticated party of some virtuosity may create a situation where it can actually profit more by having its rights under the contract violated than if they are fulfilled.

I would submit to you that is the situation of the Emperor here. He knew the likelihood of the elector Friedrich reneging. And he arranged matters to profit by that likelihood.

For what does Charles get if Friedrich reneges? Custody of the heir of Saxony until he ceases to renege, and complies. And if Friedrich never complies? Then Charles raises his heir all the way to Alexander's majority.

So consider it. Friedrich had sunk his life's work into building a nascent Protestant super-state in north-central Germany, dominating the whole Elbe river valley where you once had a profusion of states--Ernestine and Albertine Saxony, Magdeburg, Halberstadt, Erfurt, Merseberg--a fortress, a mighty fortress if you will.

Krista--don't you roll your eyes at me! It is a perfectly legitimate turn of phrase.

But, as I was saying, Friedrich's life's work, this bulwark against papist and Habsburg power, could then at the end of Friedrich's life belong to the heir that Friedrich had just deposited with the Emperor, whose spiritual, moral and intellectual education Charles V now controlled.

Understandably, given the bad blood between Ernestine Wettin and Habsburg by this point, the worries of the Wittenberg court were all about poor little Alexander's survival and good treatment. But these were, however much the spectacle of the isolated little boy might tug at the heartstrings, perhaps not the greatest threat arising from the situation.

And this is the case, not just because, remember, through the Electress Dorothea little Alexander is the grandson of Charles's sister. In the sixteenth century princes had killed more proximate kin than that all the time. It is because, unlike the example of the French princes that consumed everyone's common imagination at the time, issues of confession were at work.

So Charles was going to see to it that little Alexander was well cared-for, well-exercised, well-groomed, and most importantly of all given the best Roman Catholic education possible, which is no small feat given the Emperor's unequaled resources. And just as importantly, he was going to make sure the young duke knew he had been removed from out of his home and family, and kept away from them, entirely by his father's choice.

Whatever Friedrich won by force or guile over the course of his life, Charles now felt he had a way to take back, in a way. So, like they say in those awful movies, who was playing who?--That's it! Krista, out!

***

Below, the Dauphin Francis, surrendered by his father Francis I into the care of Charles V, by Corneille de Lyon

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Werwolf, by Lucas Cranach the Elder

"Amok Time" from Outlaw Saxony: New Perspectives on the Sechszentes Jahrhundert Empire by Louis Hadrami

At Wartburg, Friedrich took several days to reacquaint himself with affairs of state. From there, he had told Charles V he would proceed immediately to Torgau and Wittenberg, where he would meet with the Saxon estates and the Lutheran consistory to secure uniform compliance with the doctrinal requirements of the Augsburg Interim. Instead, he moved to Altenburg, close to the center of his territories. Even before he arrived, a flow of letters began to various other princes of the empire. Their terms, in particular the ones addressed to the Landgrave Philip of Hesse and the Elector of Brandenburg, were urgent. Friedrich stood on no ceremony: "I will come to you now, wherever you are," he wrote to Philip.

On March 2 and 11 he made ceremonial reentries into Weimar and Gotha, tossing out the Imperial garrisons and immediately beginning work rebuilding the ruined fortifications of both places. His letters to Charles V at this point were reassurances that he was restoring the personal authority that would be necessary to enforce compliance in the difficult matters that lay ahead. From there he ventured north towards Magdeburg. Friedrich even spent a night in the house from which he had been stolen by the knights of Duke Heinrich of Braunschweig, though this time with upwards of a thousand men in his entourage.

Arriving at Magdeburg, he was informed arrangements had been made ready, and from there proceeded north to Havelberg, in Brandenburg's Mittelmark region. There he met first with the Elector, Joachim II Hector, hoping to strengthen ties with perhaps the most prominent evangelical prince of the empire who had never once since the war began offered assistance.

Soon afterwards, Duke Erich II of Braunschweig-Lueneburg and Duke Heinrich V of Braunschweig-Wolfenbuettel arrived. Erich had been a Schmalkaldic ally who had refrained from offering support in the campaigns of 1547 and 1548 for fear of the emperor, whereas Heinrich was the Catholic ruler who had provoked Friedrich without response for years before the Spanish War, only to be turned out of his lands completely for his trouble by Friedrich in January 1547. At this point, Joachim II Nestor took the role of mediator among his fellow princes.

Friedrich's first offer was straightforward: he would cede Braunschweig-Wolfenbuettel straightaway to Heinrich, provided that Heinrich swear not to take up arms against him, and not to prejudice the liberties of the Protestants of those lands that they had hitherto enjoyed under Saxon rule. Heinrich, knowing Friedrich had already made solemn commitments to the emperor to surrender his lands back to him, and not missing the point that for him to accept these conditions would place himself in non-compliance with the Augsburg Interim, was outraged. His position was that he would pay no price to get back what was his, and could not be manipulated into entering a state of rebellion against his emperor.

Friedrich's next offer was to his old ally, Erich: Erich could receive the lands of Braunschweig-Lueneburg in exchange for an alliance with Saxony separate from, and on terms closer than, even that of the Schmalkaldic League. Each would be obliged to answer to all the other's quarrels, under any circumstances. Thus Erich would get not just the lands of Heinrich, but the means to defend them by having the Saxon army at his disposal.

This, while Friedrich would get access likewise to the resources of Braunschweig, which he would need badly once Charles realized the game he was playing. And the fact that Charles would seek to sever the Wolfenbuettel lands from Erich to restore them to Heinrich, one of Charles's most fiercely loyal adherents, made the new alliance even sturdier. With Erich absorbing the territories of the other princely state of Braunschweig, his self-interest and Friedrich's would align completely.

For Heinrich, one of the proudest and most honor-obsessed princes of the Empire, if never the most powerful, the final insult was that the term of the arrangement between Friedrich and Erich would be the length of his own life. Enraged, Heinrich left Havelberg and wrote straight to the emperor, relating to him all the terms of the betrayal of the reformed princes.

For his part though, Erich had no trouble accepting. Thus Friedrich had both ceded territory but strengthened his hand against the emperor. But he had saved the more knotted, and the more consequential, problem for second. So in May he proceeded to Eichsfeld, in the country Hesse had absorbed since the Spanish War began. There he met with Philip on a camp in the open. On his arrival for once, it was Friedrich who was surprised: Philip had brought with him his son-in-law the Duke Moritz and his ally, the Margrave Albrecht-Alcibiades of Brandenburg-Kulmbach.

Duke Johann was excluded from this meeting, and Friedrich signaled at the opening he wanted all quarrels resolved, and meant no matter what arrangements were reached, for no man to be able to speak against his honor. What the other parties might have said to this is not recorded. Nonetheless, there as at Havelberg, everyone there had come to strike a deal. Friedrich himself though was in no mood to cede an inch of Saxony itself, and bluntly informed all present he had received a better deal than that himself from the very emperor.

But Friedrich was willing to commit to was a match between his heir, the Duke Alexander, and the surviving daughter of Duke Moritz, Anna of Saxony. In that way, in the next generation the lands of Saxony would be united, regardless. If for some reason Alexander died, Anna would then marry, at Moritz's election, any one of the sons of Johann. Since Anna was also Philip's granddaughter, he was well-satisfied with this arrangement, but Friedrich struck with him the additional deal that the Elector's young daughter Elisabeth, then 2, would be married to one of Philip's sons by Christine of Saxony, among whom his lands would be eventually divided. There were four such sons, ranging in age at that time from 18 to 3, so which son it would be would be left for later, as Philip's choice.

The importance of this term for Philip is hard to underestimate: Moritz was without male heirs, Friedrich's male heir was at that moment in the care of his greatest enemy, whom they were presently conspiring against, and the Duke Johann's own claim, and even that of his three fairly robust sons, might not prove too durable given the enmity that seemed to exist now between the Saxon brothers. The future husband of the then-baby princess Elisabeth may yet inherit the whole of Saxony.

The loyalty of Moritz and Albert Alcibiades were further secured by an enormous stipend. In return, Friedrich would get their military services. However, all future territorial acquisitions by the Protestant league would be set aside for them. In short, rather than expanding Saxony or Hesse further, the evangelical princes would endeavor to get Moritz his own new duchy in Franconia.

By this point, it was impossible to hide Friedrich's course of action. No steps had been taken to secure the obedience of the Saxon church to the Augsburg Interim. None of the Saxon garrisons in Magdeburg or Halberstadt had stirred. His letters to Charles were all filled with pleas for patience and ingenious excuses, but meeting with the fraternity of Friedrich's other Protestant enemies in the wilds of Eichsfeld left little real doubt as to his intentions.

The elector had reinstated Saxony's toleration of papists, and he had ordered the towns of Saxony to end their efforts to seek and root out those who had lingered beyond the deadline the Duke Johann had given them to leave Saxony. However, this had little practical effect given that Johann's policy had been in effect for two years. Worse still, the bitterness stirred up by the continuing war, the predations of the Duke of Alba, and the propaganda use of those atrocities by the Saxon state had long since encouraged the remaining Catholics in the territories held by Saxony to leave. This was even the case in those places, like Magdeburg, that had remained Catholic until Friedrich had annexed them during the war.

For his part, the Duke of Alba did not tarry long before readying his forces to begin a fresh campaign against Saxony, and he began organizing forces on the Tauber, safely south of the Main River. Friedrich however believed that before the Emperor would march against him, he would make threats with respect to his son first. So Friedrich decided to move first, while these communications were still in transit back and forth. So he began organizing his new alliance at Eisenach into a new army.

Once they had assembled some 40,000 men, Friedrich and his allies issued the Eisenach Principles. They announced the Emperor had no authority under the constitution of the Empire to impose religious doctrines, neither upon the reformed princes nor the Catholic. Unlike before, when the Schmalkaldic League stood to vindicate Lutheran freedoms against Catholic rule, Eisenach stood for the proposition that Catholic and Lutheran churches alike should not have the emperor deciding the doctrines they follow or teach. Ostensibly, in what was no doubt a perplexing turn for them, the Catholics of the empire now confronted the claim that the Lutherans were defending them against their own emperor.

Though no Catholic princes embraced the new League of Eisenach, the new formulation made for great difficulties on the side of those rulers who both called themselves Catholic and were having a hard time reconciling themselves to the doctrinal oddities the Augsburg Interim were enforcing upon them. They may not hate the Augsburg Principles as much as the Lutherans did, but no one among the Catholics was eager to sanction married priests and the other innovations the Interim would permit Lutheran churches to keep.

However, the theological debate was now quite beside the point, because Friedrich chose not to wait for the Emperor to answer the Eisenach Principles. Instead, this new League made straight for the Duke of Alba. Word from his scouts informed Alba of the army's movement, but Friedrich, Philip and Moritz had crossed the Werra and entered Henneberg before the Imperial Army could organize itself to march. Alba badly wanted to get north of the Main River to try to shield the lands of the friendly ecclesiastical princes from the depredations of the powerful League of Eisenach force, and so began his march with a force of 25,000. The duke of Bavaria this time declined to participate.

At Lauringen, near Schweinfurt, the two armies met. Moritz's familiarity with Spanish tactics and the sheer numbers the evangelical princes had mustered proved decisive. The Imperial Army was sent reeling with 8,000 casualties, while the Eisenachers suffered only 6,000 in their much larger force. Crossing the Main at Schweinfurt, Friedrich declined to pursue Alba, fearing the Spanish might try to spring a trap in a false retreat. Instead the League of Eisenach marched east to Bamberg, which it occupied, and the territories of which, Friedrich made a present to Moritz, with the promise of those of Wurzburg to follow.

So far away did their former quarrels seem, that when Johann joined the army in Bamberg with fresh supplies and reports from Saxony, Friedrich met him at Moritz's side: "Well, what have you to say to our other brother?"

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Spass mit Geographie!

Miss Jodorowsky's Class - 8th Level

1. What currency does Germany use today?

(A) Mark
(B) Guilder
(C) Thaler
(D) Krone

2. In recent polls, what characteristic do other Europeans find most annoying about Germans?

(A) Litigiousness
(B) Impiety
(C) Greed
(D) National self-regard

3. What is the German head of government called?

(A) Kanzler
(B) Praesident
(C) Premierminister
(D) Vertreter

4. What limitation on the right to vote is still the law in Germany?

(A) German-language literacy tests
(B) Membership in a reformed, or evangelical, church
(C) A poll tax
(D) Exclusion of convicted felons

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Some people do their best thinking on the facility. Others, in their cars. Still others, in crowded cafes. But Friedrich IV, Elector of Saxony, always seemed to do his best thinking careening through the German countryside pursued by an imperial army funded by loot from the despoiled empires of the New World. Which was a good thing for him, given that in the late summer and autumn of 1549 he was doing a lot of that.

This…is Resignations, our continuing privatcast look at all the great quitters of history, and the story of how they all came to make the decision to walk away from it all.

So, we left Friedrich and his friends, old and new, in possession of the prince-bishopric of Bamberg. With the bishop, the wily and formidable Weigand of Redwitz, having fled into Bavaria, Friedrich, with Philip of Hesse and Albrecht Alcibiades of Brandenburg-Kulmbach, had named Duke Moritz administrator of the territory. Now Moritz was already a duke, just of a territory now occcupied by someone else. He was a duke ruling Bamberg though, and a duke in Bamberg for the moment, and I guess the guys just thought no matter what the emperor, the diet and the imperial courts said, with enough time it would all just sort of get squished together until he was Moritz, Duke of Bamberg. But not yet.

His defeat at Lauringen had left Alba with only 16,000 soldiers, whereas the League of Eisenach force was now twice as large, with around 33,000. Alba had hoped to play on the arrogance of the Protestant generals and lure them into a pursuit so that he could then catch them in a surprise and administer to Friedrich his own Kreuzberg. So he retreated west. But Friedrich was not such an easy mark in a trap he had laid so many times himself, and instead he had gone the other way, into Bamberg.

If the Eisenachers faced a problem, it was that once again their success had shifted the pendulum. Fearing the domination of the newly enlarged club of evangelical outlaw princes, other powers would now enter the picture. Foremost among these was Bavaria. Duke Wilhelm disdained Charles V, was as opposed to the idea of untrammeled Habsburg domination of the empire as much as Friedrich was, and had been glad to keep his armies at home when he thought the campaign for the year was going to be about administering a final coup de grace to the powers committed to resisting the emperor.

However, Wilhelm's calculation was completely different now: Bavaria was the largest Catholic principality in the empire outside the Habsburg dominions, and a 30,000+ Protestant army was on his northern border looking to cobble together new territories for previously dispossessed members of the Protestant nobility. In short, Charles or the Duke of Alba did not even have to ask before Wilhelm committed an army of 8,000 immediately to the Imperial cause, with the specific brief to drive the League of Eisenach out of Bamberg.

Heeding Wilhelm's call, more particularly wanting no less than Wilhelm did to stop the Eisenachers before they marched into Bavaria, Alba agreed to join the Bavarians at Nuernberg, which lay between Bamberg and Bavaria on the Pegnitz River.

Not wanting to menace the free city of Nuernberg, Friedrich and his somewhat rowdy war council decided instead they would intercept Alba on his way. Also not wanting to lose the initiative, the Protestant force struck south into Ansbach, moving as fast as they could. However, it was now the Duke of Alba's turn to show he would not be drawn into a battle on inconvenient terms. He evaded the army of the League of Eisenach by turning further south. With none of the company really one for half-measures, the League Army gave pursuit.

At which point, the trap was sprung. Just a different trap than the ones the Evangelical princes had seen. The Bavarians who were in Nuernberg, instead of passively waiting for the larger, more potent force of the Duke of Alba, now marched north into Bamberg, almost completely unimpeded.

Moreover, Ferdinand had finally enforced sufficient order in Bohemia to risk sending his army outside its borders. At the start of the campaign season his intended target was Saxony, which he would enter from the east through the wilds of Lusatia. However, the imminent danger faced by the vital ecclesiastical principalities of Franconia rendered that plan obsolete. Instead, Ferdinand ordered his army to march west into Bamberg, burning and looting as much of Albrecht-Alcibiades' country of Brandenburg-Kulmbach as possible on the way.

Normally, this sort of behavior would apply pressure on a prince to desist his policy of aggressive war-making and consider the welfare of his people. But this is Albrecht Alcibiades here, what were they thinking?

Regardless, by the time word of all this reached the Eisenacher army, Bamberg had been completely recovered. At this point the League became badly divided: Friedrich and Johann were anxious by the presence of the two Catholic armies that lay between them and home, and realized full well that while they were fruitlessly chasing the Duke of Alba into the Alps those armies could march north into Saxony. Meanwhile, Philip, Moritz and Albrecht would have been happy to chase the Duke of Alba all the way to Sicily.

In the end though, Saxon silver (and their English stipend) was paying the soldiers, and paying Moritz and Albrecht for that matter, so Friedrich and Johann won out, albeit contingent on the promise that the army would recover Bamberg for its new duke. Friedrich at this point probably would have promised the other princes anything, so long as it got him as quickly as possible to the north bank of the Main River before the Bavarians and Bohemians could either once again invade the Vogtland or trap him in a box.

Thus Friedrich's army turned north, and now like a mouse suddenly chasing the cat, Alba began shadowing the Saxon army, just out of range of being forced into battle with his numerically inferior force. Several times Friedrich stopped his flight north and tried to force a confrontation. The two armies came very close to a reckoning this way at Bad Windsheim. Instead, the duke just kept following, and evading.

As the League Army retreated north back into the lands of Bamberg, the scouts returned disturbing news: the Bavarians and Bohemians, rather than making for Saxony as Friedrich had feared, were instead advancing south to meet them. Friedrich badly wanted to fight them sequentially and so make use of the League army's numerical advantage against any one of them. But Alba had proved himself unavailing. Thus he sped his army on to meet the two oncoming foes, until at Frensdorf they met on August 27. By this point the League could command 30,000 men, against the Bohemian and Bavarian combined force of 16,000.

The Bohemian Catholics badly wanted to take revenge for the destruction of the hussars in the Battle of the Snows, and the Saxons were still experiencing great difficulty trying to fill the gap left by the absence of distance weapons in their tactical repertoire. In the end, the Evangelical princes' effort to clear their path back to Bamberg was defeated, but they were able to withdraw in good order. The combined forces of the Bavarians and Bohemians however were now reduced to 10,000, with a good 5,000 dead on the field. The Eisenach force had lost 7,000, but still had 21,000 ready for battle.

At this point, Fredrich and Philip came to an agreement with Wilhelm of Bavaria. They would concede Bamberg and not oppose the restoration of Weigand of Redwitz to his bishopric if the Bavarian army would decline to menace them further. Wilhelm enthusiastically agreed. This accomplished, the League proceeded to Stassfurt, where a frantic effort to ford making use of a boat bridge began.

Now once again the Imperial army sprung its trap. Forces from upriver launched a tenacious attack on the boats, making for close quarters combat as the League Army was trying to effectuate its escape. Then the Duke of Alba and the Bohemian force both launched attacks on the League Army while it was gathered on the south bank of the Main. There was something like parity, with their combined 23,000 against the Saxons' 20,000. Friedrich had never distinguished himself with battlefield bravery in the way his Albertine cousin Moritz had, but he had been given command of the rear that day, which actually faced the strongest assaults.

The soundness of the bridge was almost impossible to maintain over the course of the battle, as boat after boat came at it while the Saxon, Hessian, Braunschweigian and other forces moved across. Moritz acquitted himself splendidly, waiting for the Bohemian hussars to be fully engaged before charging at them from the side with pikes. Friedrich for his part waited too long to make use of the boat bridge, and was trapped with the last 600 Saxon infantry on the south side of the Main.

He knew the consequences of capture by the armies of Charles V a second time, and certainly knew better than to risk the mercies of the Duke of Alba. His soldiers captured him a boat from the enemy, and placed him in it. As he was being rowed across, he could see the last of his Saxons being cut down, them giving their lives for his to delay the armies of the duke.

At the close of the battle, fully 8,000 of the Eisenach forces lay dead, along with 10,000 of the Bohemians and the Duke of Alba's armies. At Schweinfurt and points west, writers reported the Main River ran red with blood.

North of the Main it was a mere day's march to the Coburg Veste. Unfortunately for the evangelical princes though, now Alba sensed he had the advantage just as deftly as he had understood he lacked it earlier. Knowing the armies of the League were too spent to offer immediate resistance, he built a new boat bridge from the same vessels that had destroyed the previous one, and moved his army across.

The armies of the league were in Saxon territory, and the princes secure behind the walls of the Coburg Veste, by the time Alba completed his crossing unimpeded. He was requesting from Charles the heavy artillery necessary to bring down the Veste's walls, and kill or capture "all the devils at once."

It was at this point diplomacy intervened: the Dukes of Bavaria and Cleves and the Elector Palatine called for an indefinite truce between the parties, on the simple terms that no one side would offer hostile force against the other, that everyone would be secure in the lands they held at that time, and that no terms of worship would be enforced on any prince by any outside force. In the event either side broke the truce, the three princes sponsoring the truce would intervene on the side of the other. Alba counseled that he was but "a siege and a scaffold" away from giving Charles everything he wanted, and to treat the proposed truce as just further treason.

But even the resources of the emperor were not inexhaustible, the war had been going on for years with very little to show for it, and if Charles had heard anything about this war from his heralds before, it was "this time, we have them just where we want them!" Moreover, Charles and his counselors believed that the unwieldy coalition of Friedrich, and Johann, and Philip, and Moritz, and Albrecht, and Erich, would inevitably collapse into infighting, and that it would be best to wait for it to do so than to batter them while they presented a united front. In fact, if the reports from Stassfurt was true, Friedrich and Moritz were behaving with trust and even gallantry towards each other. It was not that either had forgotten their history, or the messy business of kept and unkept promises that knitted their destinies together. It was that they had now marched and fought together, and were bound by all that meant. And for Charles, watching it all from Speier, that would just never do.

So, Charles was the first to accept the proposed truce. When the imperial heralds reached Coburg October 19, Friedrich assumed they were delivering the ultimatums now so familiar he could recite them from memory. Then they were heard, and the assembled understood that what was being offered was at least a temporary peace, and at that a peace on terms by which Saxony and Hesse could keep their conquests, everyone could keep their religion, and best of all, everyone could keep their heads out of reach of the Duke of Alba.

Friedrich, Erich and Philip almost tripped over themselves in their rush to accept the terms. Moritz and Albrecht were by this point nothing if not realists, and understood continuing the campaign as it stood at that point would likely win them little more than an opportunity to find out for themselves just how forgiving a person the Duke of Alba was. However, there was a wide gulf in how the various princes understood the truce, and this would come back to haunt them later: Friedrich, Philip and Erich would have been happy to let things stand as they did at that moment from then to literal judgment day, whereas Moritz and Albrecht understood it as a short term breather to enable them all to collect more soldiers, weapons, and most importantly, money from Friedrich's English relatives to continue the fight.

One can actually imagine, as the various rulers were filing out of Coburg to their respective courts, lean, dirty and exhausted, Moritz chasing after them excitedly: "But guys? I'm still the Duke of Bamberg, right, guys?"