Director, just another of those, "I'm still reading", I'm as far as the muses, but FC and other RL obligations are severely hamstringing my reading time.
V
V
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Storey - thank you. It's good to hear from you. I've let my imagination roam more freely on this one - I hope it hasn't gotten too strange and unbelievable.
Owen - You are gracious and much too kind. What a wonderful compliment. I hope to one day live up to it.
Gjerg Kastrioti - no, definitely no von. The English and German settlers got along about as well as the Dutch and English in our time.
Still, it was quite unusual for Lincoln to be elected Chancellor. As it happened there were multiple candidates and he simply had the largest minority.
I hadn't considered writing anything about the HRE. Some of the electors were incorporated into Protestant Bremen and the rest wound up as Austria-fodder. That empire was a grim and determined foe of Protestants and Bremen, but losing seven wars (the last was 1597-1598) finally convinced them that Bremen was too tough to crack. France then took over as the chief Bremen-hater, and thank the gods France and Austria never teamed up.
What aspect of the HRE would you like to hear about?
Valdemar - I'm just glad you're still reading.
Take all the time you wish - I'm writing pretty slowly on this one. I'm job-hunting and working on some personal programming.
Owen - You are gracious and much too kind. What a wonderful compliment. I hope to one day live up to it.
Gjerg Kastrioti - no, definitely no von. The English and German settlers got along about as well as the Dutch and English in our time.
Still, it was quite unusual for Lincoln to be elected Chancellor. As it happened there were multiple candidates and he simply had the largest minority.
I hadn't considered writing anything about the HRE. Some of the electors were incorporated into Protestant Bremen and the rest wound up as Austria-fodder. That empire was a grim and determined foe of Protestants and Bremen, but losing seven wars (the last was 1597-1598) finally convinced them that Bremen was too tough to crack. France then took over as the chief Bremen-hater, and thank the gods France and Austria never teamed up.
What aspect of the HRE would you like to hear about?
Valdemar - I'm just glad you're still reading.
Take all the time you wish - I'm writing pretty slowly on this one. I'm job-hunting and working on some personal programming.
That wouldn't happen to be a certain game, now would it?
I've gotten ADSL on my own machine, but no mail, so I'm feeling far more adventurous than when my work PC was all I had
V
I've gotten ADSL on my own machine, but no mail, so I'm feeling far more adventurous than when my work PC was all I had
V
Very, very poetic, Director. I tip my virtual hat for you.
It's amazing how you churn out these essays out of your game and create your interesting "what-if" history. Just when I think to myself that there is probably no more to write about, you create another fantastic story. Still reading this one.
People do seem to have an amazing ability to screw up religion don’t they? Well at least they screw up everything else to an equal degree.
An enjoyable read that stretches all the way from notable facts to mystical bells. You’re getting close to a tour de force with this story Director. Joe
Valdemar - the programs under development include an electronic dice set ( up to 100 dice of up to 100 sides each ), a name generator, and a combat game for 'A House Divided'. The rewrite of 'Age of Steam' - American Civil War Naval Combat - will be next.
The current version of AOS runs fine, but it doesn't handle things like visibility the way I want them done.
Commandante - thank you. I thought the story had a certain innocent sweetness to it, and I enjoyed writing it. History isn't all blood, tears, toil and sweat - just 90% or so.
Honestly, I've had a lot of fun creating the half-familiar, half-bizarre culture of Bremen. The game was fun, too...
So what's Brandenburg up to?
Storey - The terrible thing about humans is they screw up 90% of the time. Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap but the 10% makes life worthwhile.
No 'tour-de-force' was intended or planned. Just a little game to get accustomed to v1.06 and some short essays for fun. Thank you for the compliments!
When do I get the chance to indulge in some of your work?
stnylan - Oh, I rewrote that paragraph over and over. I'd think, that's really sappy and stupid, and I'd rewrite it and it would come out the same.
At the risk of sounding sappy, I lived for many years in Memphis, Tn. Every year they celebrate the anniversary of Elvis' death with a candle-light procession down Elvis Presley Boulevard to Graceland. It's awesome, even if you aren't an Elvis fan.
And I've been to too many candle-light vigils, too many AIDS walks, too many silent memorials for too many different kinds of death. I want to go stand in a frosty field with a candle and listen for that soft, soft ring... I want a mystical experience. I'm ready for a sign that all is well.
I'm glad you like that paragraph. I laughed and cried while I wrote it.
The current version of AOS runs fine, but it doesn't handle things like visibility the way I want them done.
Commandante - thank you. I thought the story had a certain innocent sweetness to it, and I enjoyed writing it. History isn't all blood, tears, toil and sweat - just 90% or so.
Honestly, I've had a lot of fun creating the half-familiar, half-bizarre culture of Bremen. The game was fun, too...
So what's Brandenburg up to?
Storey - The terrible thing about humans is they screw up 90% of the time. Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap but the 10% makes life worthwhile.
No 'tour-de-force' was intended or planned. Just a little game to get accustomed to v1.06 and some short essays for fun. Thank you for the compliments!
When do I get the chance to indulge in some of your work?
stnylan - Oh, I rewrote that paragraph over and over. I'd think, that's really sappy and stupid, and I'd rewrite it and it would come out the same.
At the risk of sounding sappy, I lived for many years in Memphis, Tn. Every year they celebrate the anniversary of Elvis' death with a candle-light procession down Elvis Presley Boulevard to Graceland. It's awesome, even if you aren't an Elvis fan.
And I've been to too many candle-light vigils, too many AIDS walks, too many silent memorials for too many different kinds of death. I want to go stand in a frosty field with a candle and listen for that soft, soft ring... I want a mystical experience. I'm ready for a sign that all is well.
I'm glad you like that paragraph. I laughed and cried while I wrote it.
Just to let you know I am still following this one, although I only now caught up. Little to add to what has been said already, and I can only re-assure you it's a pleasure to read!
I've been out of town for a while and it's a great pleasure to come home and be able to read two outstanding (as usual, really) essays.
Let me echo the consensus and say that that story about the bell was great. Can't wait to see what else you might have up your sleeve.
Let me echo the consensus and say that that story about the bell was great. Can't wait to see what else you might have up your sleeve.
When I load 1.07 on my computer, which since I don't have internet access at home means I have to haul it to work and that may take awhile to happen. Until then I'm enjoying reading what others are writing.
Joe
Storey, you could do like me and buy a USB key for those, "larger than disk" size files, it works like acharm.
Sorry Director for kidnapping your thread, carry on
V
Sorry Director for kidnapping your thread, carry on
V
Sytass - thanks for taking the time to post a note. It always helps to know people are reading.
Stuyvesant - this thread is an exercise in not planning ahead. So what comes next will be a surprise to you and I. And since I am a confirmed pessimist, all surprises will be pleasant.
Storey - the latest thing is this little implant - not much surgery, really, except when they remove the eyelids...
Valdemar - all in a good cause. Not that hijacking this thread could hurt - might improve it -.
Stuyvesant - this thread is an exercise in not planning ahead.
So what comes next will be a surprise to you and I. And since I am a confirmed pessimist, all surprises will be pleasant. Storey - the latest thing is this little implant - not much surgery, really, except when they remove the eyelids...
Valdemar - all in a good cause. Not that hijacking this thread could hurt - might improve it -
.
And since I am a confirmed pessimist, all surprises will be pleasant.
That's my kind of pessimism!
The Republic Militant
Part One – 1419 to 1574
Let us begin with an assumption, and frankly mark it out as such: let us say that nations have distinctive characteristics amounting almost to a personality, and that a nation’s practice of the art of war reflects this character. It may be stereotypical to speak of the glory-hunting Frenchman or the gold-obsessed Spaniard, but perhaps behind these clichés hides a kernel of truth. Without resorting to complicated and lengthy lists of examples and proofs, let us examine a series of incidents across a wide span of time and analyze them to see if a pattern appears.
Working from this assumption, let us look at the many wars of Bremen, from her rise to power in the early years of the fifteenth century to the opening years of the nineteenth, and see what common factors – if any – come to our attention. For, surely, if we may trace common elements of style in the fine arts to a single master painter or composer, then likewise we may link common themes in the arts of war to the Shrouded Master of the Baltic.
As an aside, let us define some terms. The word strategy will refer to the grand movements and operations of armies; tactical to the utilization of those forces on the battlefield. This opens up four combinations of strategic and tactical postures, to wit:
The events of the formation of the Customs Union have been previously discussed and will be only lightly touched on here. The early army was characterized by rapid mobility and a reliance on extensive intelligence of enemy forces and actions. The early generals were cautious and preferred an offensive/defensive strategy. The political leadership in contrast was recklessly ambitious, adding vast lands to their control with little or no pretext and with no regard for the opinion of other states. The end result of this was a huge increase in territory filled with restless, resentful subjects and dispossessed nobility. Bremen’s trade was in shambles because of her poisonous reputation abroad, but the Hanse had been forever stopped and all of its potential financial power was delivered into Bremen’s hands.
We may conclude that during this period Bremen became a regional power, one on par with Sweden or Hungary but scarcely able to contend with the adjacent great powers of Poland, England, France, or Austria. The successful result of wars with these powers (England in the Hessian War of 1476, Austria in 1779) may be put down to two causes. One, Bremen was cordially hated but not hated enough or important enough for any of the great powers to fully exert itself; and two, these powers were occupied with other matters, such as the collapse of the English government in 1477.
In the period following the vassalization of Mecklenburg and the dissolution of the Hanse – roughly from 1490 to1500 – Bremen took the unusual step of investing heavily in her army. Unusual because wealthy republics typically are loath to spend great sums on national defense, commonly delaying such measures until it is too late.
Bremen, however, had just concluded a series of wars in which the performance of her army and navy were distinctly subpar. The navy was driven out of the Baltic by the Danes in 1482; the army – despite 4 to 1 numerical odds – had lost battles to Austria and to Kleves (!) in 1494. Kleves was overwhelmed and annexed and the main Austrian forces were dodged while Brabant was occupied. This prompted the Austrians to make a handsome monetary offer of 200 g for peace, and that money was immediately used to hire seasoned military men from France and Spain.
The results, in less than eight years, were remarkable. The First War of English Aggression ended with a gain of 200g and Oldenburg for Bremen; the Second War gained another 200g from the English in 1509 and saw the Poles repeatedly defeated around Danzig, Gniezno and Krakow. Danzig, wrested from the Poles and saved from rebellion in 1509, was to be Bremen’s last expansion for a score of years.
Through these wars, Bremen consistently operated in the offensive/defensive, advancing so seize points of such importance that the enemy was compelled to attack, usually at a disadvantage. In this way, Bremen’s generals offset their usual inferiority in tactics and equipment.
The long, strangely inconclusive war with the Palatinate (1514-1519) was only a symptom of a greater malaise. Bremen had not initiated a war in generations, and for her to launch an unprovoked assault on the small, friendless County Palatine raised the hackles of every ruler in Europe. Too, the Protestant Reformation was sweeping across northern Germany like a wildfire, and the rest of the Catholic states saw little evidence that Bremen was trying to stop it. Bremen’s Protestant traders were being hounded out of markets and Protestant people were not paying their taxes to the Catholic-dominated governments. Bremen’s army was dangerously worn out from long years of campaigning; its tactics and equipage were now antiquated.
1500: [COLOR=FF0000]After 1st and 2nd Austrian Wars, 5th Danish War (Jylland), 1st English War (Oldenburg); Annex Kleves and Mecklenburg[/COLOR]
Why launch a war of aggression instead of devoting time and money to peaceful pursuits? In a word, Hesse. That province, controlled at this time by the Palatinate, formed a giant blade thrust up into the vitals of Bremen. If the Palatinate resumed its former alliance with France, or worse yet allied to Austria, then an army in Hesse could strike into four of Bremen’s provinces, making a successful defense much more complicated and expensive. The threat had to be reduced, and since the Palatine was currently outside an alliance, the deed had to be done immediately.
Bremen’s armies rolled into Hesse and the Palatine, quickly occupying those provinces; they were, however, unable to get to Burgundy and Franche Comte, which formed the other half of the Palatine lands. Why persist in a profitless war with so many domestic obstacles in the way of victory? The most plausible theory is that the social fabric of the country might have come completely apart if the war were ended and the demobilized army veterans turned loose in the cities and countryside. Thanks to the bad economic times and booming birthrate, adding tens of thousands of men to the ranks of the unemployed must have resulted in chaos. Allowing Protestant and Catholic factions to recruit private armies from the unemployed soldiers would have literally launched a civil war.
At any rate, the Palatine refused to give up Hesse and Bremen refused to accept peace without it, and there the stalemate sat and grew ever more stale. After five years of discussion, the Palatine abruptly gave up Hesse and was promptly swallowed up by France. This victory confirmed the correctness of Doktor Gropius’ observation that “War does not judge who is right, war determines who will be left. The last man standing wins it all; persistence in resistance is the surest key to victory.”
Archbishop Cristoph converted publicly to the Lutheran faith in 1521, sparking off a series of rebellions and prompting England, Aragon and Friesland to declare war. This first War of Religion, with its internal and external aspects, taught the Bremen army hard lessons in a hard school. To paraphrase Doctor Johnson, the prospect of death for heresy did concentrate the national will to a remarkable degree, and a certain amount of paranoid insecurity came permanently into the national character. As any Russian can tell you, even paranoids have enemies – and if you think you have no enemies, you simply aren’t paying attention.
Assurances of tolerance of religion were backed by force of arms and slowly, the ship of state righted itself and began to repair the storm damage. Fortunately for Bremen, her neighbors had been hoping that the native Catholics would prevail, and by the time those neighbors did intervene the Customs Union had saved itself from dismemberment.
This first War of Religion marked a change in philosophy in that it was fought on the defensive. Her fleets patrolled the German Bight, winning several battles and preventing the English from coming ashore there. Unable to contemplate a campaign in the Baltic, the English chose to fight in Scandinavia. By sheer force of will, Bremen mustered the armies and fleets and gold to outlast her opponents, and the fall of the English government brought this war to a close in 1526.
There was a short, profitable respite lasting from the Peace of Bergen to the Third Austrian War in 1530. During those five years, the people of Bremen struggled with internal reforms but made rapid strides in refitting the army. The tone of the times can best be found in Archbishop Cristoph’s letter to the Proconsul of Danzig in 1528: “Can anyone doubt that every state under the sway of Rome must hate us? We are the only state in Europe that dares protest against the unholy rapacity of the Church. And if the armies of the Pope march on us, can you doubt they will kill us all, Catholic and Protestant alike? As dead men debate no points of theology, let us secure our mutual safety and then come to know the grace of God.” Succinctly put, one may say that the issues of religion were hotly debated while the immense appropriations to the army and navy passed almost without comment.
It was, thus, an army drilled in the new routines of pike and arquebus that took the field in 1530. An army, moreover, that was principally infantry rather than based on cavalry. It was an army filled with the spirit of the Reformation and driven by the realization that it was the sword and shield of the only Protestant state on the planet.
The Austrian phase of the Wars of Religion opened in 1530 (3rd Austrian War). The Poles, all too aware of their pressing domestic problems, quickly bowed out. Lithuania contributed little, leaving Austria to bear the brunt of the campaigns – Silesia taken, Prague occupied, Vienna and Salzburg ravaged. For two savage years, spent entirely on foreign soil, the army of Bremen wreaked havoc on its foe, planting itself on critical points and letting the Austrians spend themselves in fruitless assaults. By giving up Silesia, the Austrians also gave up the easily-defensible mountain passes, leaving Prague open to any future offensive from the north and northeast.
Victory and peace brought other benefits. In 1536, tax rolls reveal that income from trade surpassed all other government revenue, a clear sign that Bremen’s traders were at long last recovering their places in the markets of Europe. And Bremen’s successful defense gave other monarchs the courage to publicly convert, so Bremen no longer stood alone.
In 1538 the Emperor of Austria, goaded by the Pope, resumed the war. This Third War of Religion (4th Austrian War) was intended to settle the Protestant Question for all time, and it did. As Doktor Gropius has remarked, “A war commonly begins with both sides convinced they will win. Sometimes one side actually does.”
Had Austria not been conducting campaigns in Italy and Switzerland at the same time, her arms might have triumphed. Marshal Beren carefully left Bohemia open, lured Bremen’s Eastern Army into a siege of Prague, and then drove his own armies into Bohemia from three sides. But for poor coordination among the Austrian armies and ferocious fighting on the part of General von Witte, disaster would have been inevitable. As it was, the Austrian field forces were dispersed in turn and Prague taken before winter set in.
The remainder of the war can be easily summed up. The Austrians decided to concentrate their resources on Savoy, Genoa and Helvetia. Bremen’s ally Gelder waged a brilliant war against Lithuania in the Black Sea, capturing Jedisan in 1540. Bremen’s attention was distracted by repeated corruption scandals, failing attempts at converting the Catholic southern provinces, and by an Austrian field army of 40,000 men in Salzburg.
With Bremen wracked by revolts in Kleves, Mecklenburg, Erz, VorPommern and Silesia, the Austrians made the fatal decision to commit the army in Salzburg to the Italian meatgrinder. When Bremen occupied Ostmarch, the Emperor decided he had done enough and gave away the Sudeten – the last defense of Bohemia - for peace in 1542.
1545: [COLOR=FF0000]After 2nd English War, 1st Polish War (Danzig), War on Palatine (Hesse), Religious War of 1521, 3rd & 4th Austrian Wars (Silesia, Sudeten)[/COLOR]
The next years were marked chiefly by the growing power of France. As the professional royal armies pulled the rich and populous heartland together, the kings of France broke the power of the nobility and established a centralized government of professional ministers. Professional diplomats had brought the Palatine into the kingdom in 1547 and French priests (and French gold) were active in the Catholic southern region of the Customs Union; not even one of the eight efforts mounted by Lutheran missionaries succeeded.
Like the rest of Europe the kings of France envied Bremen’s trade-based wealth. Unlike the rest of Europe, the French kings and their ministers took active measures to take that wealth for their own. The ministers of trade crafted mercantilist policies and launched trade missions backed by the royal treasury of France, and a titanic struggle for control of trade began in France and northern Italy.
Against this backdrop came the first declaration of war by France in May of 1547. Encouraged by this, Austria joined the war in October of that year, only to see the French promptly pay a nominal sum for peace. After all, the French wanted Bremen to feel the strain of war, not to experience it for themselves! So ended the so called ‘Phony War’.
This 5th Austrian War lasted only one year. From a central position in Erz, Bremen’s armies defeated thrusts into Silesia and the Sudeten. Austria was then brought to face the consequences of giving up Silesia and the Sudeten in prior wars: even if lightly defended, the mountainous provinces were a daunting task to take. The war ended with Austria’s offer of a nominal payment in compensation for damages.
In this same period, the Palatine broke away from France and looked to Bremen for defense. In the markets of Europe, the war of Bremen’s small independent traders against French mercantilist policies raged on – and the French were winning. Twenty-eight new merchant companies were formed in Bremen in this decade; thirty-six were out of business by 1547; five more bankrupted in 1553 alone. There were some successes for Bremen: her control of the Baltic, Hispanic and Russian trade was unchallenged; Saxony accepted limited membership in the Customs Union in 1554 and Norway came into full membership in 1555.
After a decade of peace one might expect the armed forces of Bremen to be rested and ready, but they were not. The ‘silent, deadly war that will determine if we may drink from the wellsprings of trade or thirst and die’ (Proconsul Detlef Kuiper, 1555) had crippled the nation’s finances and focused her attention to the west.
Thus, the 6th Austrian War (1557, Austria and Scotland versus Bremen and Denmark) came as a great surprise, not least one suspects to the generals of the imperial Austrian army. The usual Austrian offensive into the Sudeten was mismanaged and suffered cruelly from weather, bad logistics and disease. Despite their superior muskets, the Austrians were beaten twice in the Sudeten; Bremen’s greatly superior numbers, strong fortifications and better generalship tipped the balance. With the Danes besieging Edinburgh and Bremen plunging into Bohemia, the Austrian Emperor was resigned to writing off another war – and another 225g – in 1558.
There followed another unremarkable decade and a half of peace, broken this time by Bremen’s own actions.
Part One – 1419 to 1574
Let us begin with an assumption, and frankly mark it out as such: let us say that nations have distinctive characteristics amounting almost to a personality, and that a nation’s practice of the art of war reflects this character. It may be stereotypical to speak of the glory-hunting Frenchman or the gold-obsessed Spaniard, but perhaps behind these clichés hides a kernel of truth. Without resorting to complicated and lengthy lists of examples and proofs, let us examine a series of incidents across a wide span of time and analyze them to see if a pattern appears.
Working from this assumption, let us look at the many wars of Bremen, from her rise to power in the early years of the fifteenth century to the opening years of the nineteenth, and see what common factors – if any – come to our attention. For, surely, if we may trace common elements of style in the fine arts to a single master painter or composer, then likewise we may link common themes in the arts of war to the Shrouded Master of the Baltic.
As an aside, let us define some terms. The word strategy will refer to the grand movements and operations of armies; tactical to the utilization of those forces on the battlefield. This opens up four combinations of strategic and tactical postures, to wit:
1) defensive/defensive: the pure defensive, remaining in ones own territory and fighting purely on the defensive on the battlefield. Commonly thought of as ‘playing for time’, or ‘fighting not to lose’.
2) defensive/offensive: operating primarily on home ground but attacking forcefully any enemy that moves into range.
3) offensive/defensive: moving into enemy territory and encouraging the enemy to attack your army, hopefully in a situation that favors the defender. The campaigns of Belisarius would be an example of this style.
4) offensive/offensive: the pure offensive, operating in enemy territory and attacking his forces at every opportunity.
The events of the formation of the Customs Union have been previously discussed and will be only lightly touched on here. The early army was characterized by rapid mobility and a reliance on extensive intelligence of enemy forces and actions. The early generals were cautious and preferred an offensive/defensive strategy. The political leadership in contrast was recklessly ambitious, adding vast lands to their control with little or no pretext and with no regard for the opinion of other states. The end result of this was a huge increase in territory filled with restless, resentful subjects and dispossessed nobility. Bremen’s trade was in shambles because of her poisonous reputation abroad, but the Hanse had been forever stopped and all of its potential financial power was delivered into Bremen’s hands.
We may conclude that during this period Bremen became a regional power, one on par with Sweden or Hungary but scarcely able to contend with the adjacent great powers of Poland, England, France, or Austria. The successful result of wars with these powers (England in the Hessian War of 1476, Austria in 1779) may be put down to two causes. One, Bremen was cordially hated but not hated enough or important enough for any of the great powers to fully exert itself; and two, these powers were occupied with other matters, such as the collapse of the English government in 1477.
In the period following the vassalization of Mecklenburg and the dissolution of the Hanse – roughly from 1490 to1500 – Bremen took the unusual step of investing heavily in her army. Unusual because wealthy republics typically are loath to spend great sums on national defense, commonly delaying such measures until it is too late.
Bremen, however, had just concluded a series of wars in which the performance of her army and navy were distinctly subpar. The navy was driven out of the Baltic by the Danes in 1482; the army – despite 4 to 1 numerical odds – had lost battles to Austria and to Kleves (!) in 1494. Kleves was overwhelmed and annexed and the main Austrian forces were dodged while Brabant was occupied. This prompted the Austrians to make a handsome monetary offer of 200 g for peace, and that money was immediately used to hire seasoned military men from France and Spain.
The results, in less than eight years, were remarkable. The First War of English Aggression ended with a gain of 200g and Oldenburg for Bremen; the Second War gained another 200g from the English in 1509 and saw the Poles repeatedly defeated around Danzig, Gniezno and Krakow. Danzig, wrested from the Poles and saved from rebellion in 1509, was to be Bremen’s last expansion for a score of years.
Through these wars, Bremen consistently operated in the offensive/defensive, advancing so seize points of such importance that the enemy was compelled to attack, usually at a disadvantage. In this way, Bremen’s generals offset their usual inferiority in tactics and equipment.
The long, strangely inconclusive war with the Palatinate (1514-1519) was only a symptom of a greater malaise. Bremen had not initiated a war in generations, and for her to launch an unprovoked assault on the small, friendless County Palatine raised the hackles of every ruler in Europe. Too, the Protestant Reformation was sweeping across northern Germany like a wildfire, and the rest of the Catholic states saw little evidence that Bremen was trying to stop it. Bremen’s Protestant traders were being hounded out of markets and Protestant people were not paying their taxes to the Catholic-dominated governments. Bremen’s army was dangerously worn out from long years of campaigning; its tactics and equipage were now antiquated.
1500: [COLOR=FF0000]After 1st and 2nd Austrian Wars, 5th Danish War (Jylland), 1st English War (Oldenburg); Annex Kleves and Mecklenburg[/COLOR]
Why launch a war of aggression instead of devoting time and money to peaceful pursuits? In a word, Hesse. That province, controlled at this time by the Palatinate, formed a giant blade thrust up into the vitals of Bremen. If the Palatinate resumed its former alliance with France, or worse yet allied to Austria, then an army in Hesse could strike into four of Bremen’s provinces, making a successful defense much more complicated and expensive. The threat had to be reduced, and since the Palatine was currently outside an alliance, the deed had to be done immediately.
Bremen’s armies rolled into Hesse and the Palatine, quickly occupying those provinces; they were, however, unable to get to Burgundy and Franche Comte, which formed the other half of the Palatine lands. Why persist in a profitless war with so many domestic obstacles in the way of victory? The most plausible theory is that the social fabric of the country might have come completely apart if the war were ended and the demobilized army veterans turned loose in the cities and countryside. Thanks to the bad economic times and booming birthrate, adding tens of thousands of men to the ranks of the unemployed must have resulted in chaos. Allowing Protestant and Catholic factions to recruit private armies from the unemployed soldiers would have literally launched a civil war.
At any rate, the Palatine refused to give up Hesse and Bremen refused to accept peace without it, and there the stalemate sat and grew ever more stale. After five years of discussion, the Palatine abruptly gave up Hesse and was promptly swallowed up by France. This victory confirmed the correctness of Doktor Gropius’ observation that “War does not judge who is right, war determines who will be left. The last man standing wins it all; persistence in resistance is the surest key to victory.”
Archbishop Cristoph converted publicly to the Lutheran faith in 1521, sparking off a series of rebellions and prompting England, Aragon and Friesland to declare war. This first War of Religion, with its internal and external aspects, taught the Bremen army hard lessons in a hard school. To paraphrase Doctor Johnson, the prospect of death for heresy did concentrate the national will to a remarkable degree, and a certain amount of paranoid insecurity came permanently into the national character. As any Russian can tell you, even paranoids have enemies – and if you think you have no enemies, you simply aren’t paying attention.
Assurances of tolerance of religion were backed by force of arms and slowly, the ship of state righted itself and began to repair the storm damage. Fortunately for Bremen, her neighbors had been hoping that the native Catholics would prevail, and by the time those neighbors did intervene the Customs Union had saved itself from dismemberment.
This first War of Religion marked a change in philosophy in that it was fought on the defensive. Her fleets patrolled the German Bight, winning several battles and preventing the English from coming ashore there. Unable to contemplate a campaign in the Baltic, the English chose to fight in Scandinavia. By sheer force of will, Bremen mustered the armies and fleets and gold to outlast her opponents, and the fall of the English government brought this war to a close in 1526.
There was a short, profitable respite lasting from the Peace of Bergen to the Third Austrian War in 1530. During those five years, the people of Bremen struggled with internal reforms but made rapid strides in refitting the army. The tone of the times can best be found in Archbishop Cristoph’s letter to the Proconsul of Danzig in 1528: “Can anyone doubt that every state under the sway of Rome must hate us? We are the only state in Europe that dares protest against the unholy rapacity of the Church. And if the armies of the Pope march on us, can you doubt they will kill us all, Catholic and Protestant alike? As dead men debate no points of theology, let us secure our mutual safety and then come to know the grace of God.” Succinctly put, one may say that the issues of religion were hotly debated while the immense appropriations to the army and navy passed almost without comment.
It was, thus, an army drilled in the new routines of pike and arquebus that took the field in 1530. An army, moreover, that was principally infantry rather than based on cavalry. It was an army filled with the spirit of the Reformation and driven by the realization that it was the sword and shield of the only Protestant state on the planet.
The Austrian phase of the Wars of Religion opened in 1530 (3rd Austrian War). The Poles, all too aware of their pressing domestic problems, quickly bowed out. Lithuania contributed little, leaving Austria to bear the brunt of the campaigns – Silesia taken, Prague occupied, Vienna and Salzburg ravaged. For two savage years, spent entirely on foreign soil, the army of Bremen wreaked havoc on its foe, planting itself on critical points and letting the Austrians spend themselves in fruitless assaults. By giving up Silesia, the Austrians also gave up the easily-defensible mountain passes, leaving Prague open to any future offensive from the north and northeast.
Victory and peace brought other benefits. In 1536, tax rolls reveal that income from trade surpassed all other government revenue, a clear sign that Bremen’s traders were at long last recovering their places in the markets of Europe. And Bremen’s successful defense gave other monarchs the courage to publicly convert, so Bremen no longer stood alone.
In 1538 the Emperor of Austria, goaded by the Pope, resumed the war. This Third War of Religion (4th Austrian War) was intended to settle the Protestant Question for all time, and it did. As Doktor Gropius has remarked, “A war commonly begins with both sides convinced they will win. Sometimes one side actually does.”
Had Austria not been conducting campaigns in Italy and Switzerland at the same time, her arms might have triumphed. Marshal Beren carefully left Bohemia open, lured Bremen’s Eastern Army into a siege of Prague, and then drove his own armies into Bohemia from three sides. But for poor coordination among the Austrian armies and ferocious fighting on the part of General von Witte, disaster would have been inevitable. As it was, the Austrian field forces were dispersed in turn and Prague taken before winter set in.
The remainder of the war can be easily summed up. The Austrians decided to concentrate their resources on Savoy, Genoa and Helvetia. Bremen’s ally Gelder waged a brilliant war against Lithuania in the Black Sea, capturing Jedisan in 1540. Bremen’s attention was distracted by repeated corruption scandals, failing attempts at converting the Catholic southern provinces, and by an Austrian field army of 40,000 men in Salzburg.
With Bremen wracked by revolts in Kleves, Mecklenburg, Erz, VorPommern and Silesia, the Austrians made the fatal decision to commit the army in Salzburg to the Italian meatgrinder. When Bremen occupied Ostmarch, the Emperor decided he had done enough and gave away the Sudeten – the last defense of Bohemia - for peace in 1542.
1545: [COLOR=FF0000]After 2nd English War, 1st Polish War (Danzig), War on Palatine (Hesse), Religious War of 1521, 3rd & 4th Austrian Wars (Silesia, Sudeten)[/COLOR]
The next years were marked chiefly by the growing power of France. As the professional royal armies pulled the rich and populous heartland together, the kings of France broke the power of the nobility and established a centralized government of professional ministers. Professional diplomats had brought the Palatine into the kingdom in 1547 and French priests (and French gold) were active in the Catholic southern region of the Customs Union; not even one of the eight efforts mounted by Lutheran missionaries succeeded.
Like the rest of Europe the kings of France envied Bremen’s trade-based wealth. Unlike the rest of Europe, the French kings and their ministers took active measures to take that wealth for their own. The ministers of trade crafted mercantilist policies and launched trade missions backed by the royal treasury of France, and a titanic struggle for control of trade began in France and northern Italy.
Against this backdrop came the first declaration of war by France in May of 1547. Encouraged by this, Austria joined the war in October of that year, only to see the French promptly pay a nominal sum for peace. After all, the French wanted Bremen to feel the strain of war, not to experience it for themselves! So ended the so called ‘Phony War’.
This 5th Austrian War lasted only one year. From a central position in Erz, Bremen’s armies defeated thrusts into Silesia and the Sudeten. Austria was then brought to face the consequences of giving up Silesia and the Sudeten in prior wars: even if lightly defended, the mountainous provinces were a daunting task to take. The war ended with Austria’s offer of a nominal payment in compensation for damages.
In this same period, the Palatine broke away from France and looked to Bremen for defense. In the markets of Europe, the war of Bremen’s small independent traders against French mercantilist policies raged on – and the French were winning. Twenty-eight new merchant companies were formed in Bremen in this decade; thirty-six were out of business by 1547; five more bankrupted in 1553 alone. There were some successes for Bremen: her control of the Baltic, Hispanic and Russian trade was unchallenged; Saxony accepted limited membership in the Customs Union in 1554 and Norway came into full membership in 1555.
After a decade of peace one might expect the armed forces of Bremen to be rested and ready, but they were not. The ‘silent, deadly war that will determine if we may drink from the wellsprings of trade or thirst and die’ (Proconsul Detlef Kuiper, 1555) had crippled the nation’s finances and focused her attention to the west.
Thus, the 6th Austrian War (1557, Austria and Scotland versus Bremen and Denmark) came as a great surprise, not least one suspects to the generals of the imperial Austrian army. The usual Austrian offensive into the Sudeten was mismanaged and suffered cruelly from weather, bad logistics and disease. Despite their superior muskets, the Austrians were beaten twice in the Sudeten; Bremen’s greatly superior numbers, strong fortifications and better generalship tipped the balance. With the Danes besieging Edinburgh and Bremen plunging into Bohemia, the Austrian Emperor was resigned to writing off another war – and another 225g – in 1558.
There followed another unremarkable decade and a half of peace, broken this time by Bremen’s own actions.
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Once again, you deliver the good stuff.
The thing I liked best was the way some of the things you mentioned earlier are seeping into this essay (i.e. the trap around Prague and the fighting prowess of General von Witte in the Fourth Austrian War). It helps to tie things together and make the history sound ever more convincing. Great job!
The thing I liked best was the way some of the things you mentioned earlier are seeping into this essay (i.e. the trap around Prague and the fighting prowess of General von Witte in the Fourth Austrian War). It helps to tie things together and make the history sound ever more convincing. Great job!
Judge - Oh, Austria may be down but not out. Stay tuned - there's another five or six Austrian Wars coming up. I think. Maybe more. The Hapsburgs had a SERIOUS burr under the saddle where Bremen was concerned. It's a lot, anyway.
Stuyvesant - Good readers make good writers. In fact, just for the compliments, I'll let you have another installment tonight. I'm such a softie.
I'm glad you like the 'weaving'. I've put more effort into that than any other part of the story - not much research done for this one, I'm afraid. Keeping all the dates and factoids straight has been hard for me, I hope I'm not confusing you guys.
Wasa - Thank you. Autographed copies will be available in the gift shop as you exit... no, wait, that was HistoryPark. Sorry, wrong script!
I had never attempted a German country before, much less a poor one-province minor without even a CoT. it was H-A-R-D. What they say about the middle position is true. THe only good thing was that France and Austria never hit me at the same time.
It really was a great game, though - a nail-biter for a good 250 years and still interesting up to about 1750.
What I hoped to achieve with the 'essay' format was to offer readers something they could read in one sitting and not have to keep up with a complicated back-story and multiple characters. This topic - the wars - will be multi-part because EVERYBODY IN EUROPE waged war on me. (*Sniffle*). How many wars? Well, take 400 years, divide by 3.5, carry the... a lot. Really, a lot.
By the way, a sincere apology to any German or Scandinavian readers if I'm mangling the names, cultures or languages. If I am it's not intentional - I really am trying - but feel free to PM me with any observations or post them here.
Stuyvesant - Good readers make good writers. In fact, just for the compliments, I'll let you have another installment tonight.
I'm such a softie.I'm glad you like the 'weaving'. I've put more effort into that than any other part of the story - not much research done for this one, I'm afraid. Keeping all the dates and factoids straight has been hard for me, I hope I'm not confusing you guys.
Wasa - Thank you.
Autographed copies will be available in the gift shop as you exit... no, wait, that was HistoryPark. Sorry, wrong script!I had never attempted a German country before, much less a poor one-province minor without even a CoT. it was H-A-R-D. What they say about the middle position is true. THe only good thing was that France and Austria never hit me at the same time.
It really was a great game, though - a nail-biter for a good 250 years and still interesting up to about 1750.
What I hoped to achieve with the 'essay' format was to offer readers something they could read in one sitting and not have to keep up with a complicated back-story and multiple characters. This topic - the wars - will be multi-part because EVERYBODY IN EUROPE waged war on me. (*Sniffle*). How many wars? Well, take 400 years, divide by 3.5, carry the... a lot. Really, a lot.
By the way, a sincere apology to any German or Scandinavian readers if I'm mangling the names, cultures or languages. If I am it's not intentional - I really am trying - but feel free to PM me with any observations or post them here.
The Republic Militant
Part Two – 1574 to 1602
With the addition of the Palatine as an associate member of the Customs Union and military alliance, Bremen’s attention turned to Mainz. Strategically located in the middle section of the Rhine, across the river on the western (French) side, any military operations in the area would be impossible without possession of that fortified city and bridge. Of equal importance, Mainz at that time controlled a great swath of territory stretching from the city on the Rhine east to ancient Wurzburg and the lands around that place – all of it lying across the natural invasion route from France to Bremen, or vice versa.
The good citizens of Mainz were aware of their precarious position between the contending powers, and rather than see their homes become a battle-ground they strove to remain uncommitted to either side. Proposed treaties were studied indefinitely and rich gifts smilingly accepted without any hint of an obligation being incurred. This situation might have continued indefinitely had not the good citizens of Mainz made one fatal miscalculation: they assumed that Bremen and France would respect the neutral in their midst. As any police officer will tell you, the middle of a domestic squabble is the very worst place to be. If the people who are fighting can’t fight each other, they may gang up on the person keeping them apart.
Regardless, this situation might have continued for a very long time were it not for Chancellor Helmuth Kirche. While no detailed account of his time in office is possible in this limited space, a brief touch on some salient points may be helpful in explaining the events that followed.
Kirche was born and raised in Danzig, son of a blacksmith who settled in that area after it was ceded to Bremen by Poland. His father developed a reputation for fine swords and for high-quality steel work, and prospered. The blacksmith was able to send his son to academies and then to university, and young Helmuth did well scholastically and politically. Taken up by Albert Rugge, who was then Proconsul of Danzig, the young man rose rapidly through posts as clerk and secretary, following his patron to Proconsular posts in Hesse and Jylland before receiving his own Proconsular posting to Trondelag in 1556. By 1561, he was serving as Chancellor, which at that time was an office with ill-defined powers and responsibilities that acted as a chief clerk, administrator and bridge between the Archbishop and the Proconsuls.
Studying his behavior from the vantage point of five centuries, we may well wonder if the collapse of the Teutonic Knights and the Polish ingestion of Lithuania simply unhinged his reason. Kirche led the ‘Eastern’ faction that proposed alliance and annexation of Prussia and Courland, as opposed to the slim majority in the Senate who favored a western policy of opposition to France. From all accounts – including the surviving pieces of his own correspondence – Kirche became convinced that Poland was a mortal threat, to be countered at any cost. Unable to sway the Senate by ordinary means, he perverted the Office of the Eye and attempted to blackmail the opposing Senators. The resulting investigations – and wave after wave of revelations and scandals – paralyzed the government through 1569 and 1570. Kirche retained a shaky hold on the office of Chancellor largely because of what the Senators feared he would reveal if he fell, but as the scandals multiplied they surely reasoned that he must go regardless of cost. By analysis of his own private papers, we can deduce that Kirche had completely succumbed to paranoid schizophrenia by early 1571; his ranting on the subject of Poland is matched only by the invective he lavished on the Senate. The exact circumstances of his death are obscure – purposefully, one suspects – but whether it was suicide or murder, his removal was a blessing for Bremen.
The eastern faction having been discredited and driven from office, the western faction was able to force the country’s foreign policy into a sharp, sudden shift. Doubtless the good citizens of Mainz greeted the embassy of 1574 as they had every other, and the warnings they received about the seriousness of this offer were largely disregarded. After all, they had been playing France and Bremen against each other for twenty years, and neither had dared to do more than complain.
But the diplomatic landscape had shifted in ways they did not comprehend. Bremen’s indecision over priorities had been misread as scruples against aggression. But Bremen was no longer debating whether to face east or west, and France was fully occupied with breakaway counties in the south. The deadline on the ultimatum – which Mainz had never recognized as a deadline or an ultimatum – expired in August of 1574 and Mainz and Wurzburg were swamped under a hundred thousand men and more than a hundred cannon. The resulting peace gave Wurzburg and 235g to Bremen and reduced Mainz to complete dependency on Bremen.
Sweden’s declaration of war in 1576 (December 27th, 1575 for purists) marked a watershed of sorts, a convenient point for recognizing that Bremen had risen above the status of a regional power. This war marked Sweden’s last chance to regain the territories she had lost to Mecklenburg more than a century before, but even with England’s assistance she lost battles on land and at sea and sued for peace after only nine months. If not yet a major power, Bremen was now not far from it, and Sweden would become a vassal of England.
1584: [COLOR=FF0000]After Phoney War with France, 5th & 6th Austrian Wars, War with Mainz (Wurzburg), Swedish War, Annex Norway[/COLOR]
There followed twenty years of peace, years in which Halle’s expeditions discovered North America and colonies were established there, and years in which Bremen’s finances were established on a new, more solid footing.
In part, this was due to the Customs Union’s response to French competition in the markets. The great advantage of French-style centralized, state-backed mercantilism is that it allows common policy to be supported by immense resources. It is not, however, flexible or inventive – it does not cope well with changing circumstances – and it is completely at the mercy of the state ministries. Should the King decide to cut off subsidies to fund a war, or grant subsidies to incompetent friends and relations, it is done without regard to consequences. The more diffuse, free-market power of Bremen’s independent traders coped with the monolithic French invasion by developing new products, new markets and new methods and services.
Chief among the new methods and services were attractive interest rates on loans and secure, reliable banking and credit. Chief among the new products were tobacco and the lowly codfish.
As we have previously discussed, the Colonial Corporation shipped large numbers of colonists to the New World and needed freight to fill the holds for the return trip. Standard bulk cargoes such as grain and timber were not cost-effective to transport across the ocean, cotton was unavailable in quantity (the seeds had to be removed by hand-combing) and native art and artifacts had a limited market. Tobacco, planted in the vast up-river plantations of Roanoke colony, was an ideal luxury product, but codfish was the bulk staple that filled the ships’ holds.
Bremen’s often-overlooked first colony was Placentia on New Found Land. The fine harbor there served as a sheltered harbor and resupply point for Halle’s voyages of discovery. It also hosted a large fleet of fishermen who worked the Grand Banks and a small army who cleaned, smoked or salted and packed the cod, many of whom came from Bremen’s Baltic fisheries. Unglamorous in the extreme, the codfishers transformed the demographics of much of Europe. Plentiful, inexpensive protein improved the diet, health and life expectancy of millions. The profit margin per barrel was miniscule, but such was the volume of barrels shipped that a single year’s barrelhead fees paid for a garrison of 10,000 men in 1614.
Since the initial Spanish explorations, tobacco smoking and snuff had been wildly popular among the nobility. Like chocolate, the supply was scarce, expensive and exclusive. But the important factor for Bremen was not necessarily that they could supply good quality tobacco in quantity, but that only Bremen’s merchants could do so. England conquered the Lenape lands in 1595 partly for their precious tobacco, but most of that tobacco was bought by Bremen’s factors, carried in Bremen’s ships and sold by Bremen’s merchants. (Manhattan tobacco was always found inferior to the rich Roanoke leaf and never brought the price the English had hoped for).
Any merchant who sold tobacco sold a host of other things as well, of course. Amber from the Baltic rim, furs from Russia and Canada, fine cotton and wool, excellent leather. Beer, flour, beef, salt cod, copper and bronze, axe heads and clocks and pottery and pots and needles… but tobacco was always the wedge product. If you wanted tobacco, you had to buy it from Bremen’s merchants, and you had to allow those merchants into your markets with all their other wares.
Needless to say, during these years of peace Bremen rolled back the French commercial challenge and spread her trade into every market in Europe and North America.
The collapse and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire affected Bremen very little, in a direct sense. Indirectly it mattered a great deal since it freed the Austrians of their ancient threat and left the Emperor’s armies idle for the first time in decades.
The 7th Austrian War (August of 1597 to October of 1598) opened with a crushing defeat for Bremen. Her invasion of Bohemia foundered against an Austrian army one-third the size. The Austrians had recent battle experience while the Bremen troops did not, but the campaign’s failure can be laid to other causes. Signally, in fighting the lightly-armed and armored, fast-moving Turks, the Austrians had developed comparable light forces of their own. These light cavalry squadrons sliced up supply trains and slashed at the ponderous infantry columns. Bremen’s cavalry proved unable to deal with the nimble threat, and as the army fell back it suffered greatly from hunger, disease and desertion. Fresh disaster followed in the spring of 1598 as the outnumbered Austrians pulled off a stunning upset victory in Wurttemburg.
Unfortunately for Austria, as she transferred her forces west to reinforce success in Wurttemburg, the Palatine launched an invasion of the Tyrol. Ultimately unsuccessful, the offensive dislocated the Austrian plans and allowed Bremen to seize the initiative. By fall, Austria had offered a non-conditional peace and Bremen had eagerly agreed.
Why then, as the balance of the war began to turn against Austria, did Bremen agree to a simple, profitless peace? To paraphrase from the speech of Proconsul Karl Nordstrom in 1599, there were no provinces they could wrest from Austria that would be as valuable as the lands that were opening up in America. Funds spent on war were not available for exploration, trade and colonization, and the war promised no return on investment. Given that her merchants were spreading out into new markets, that inflation was actually dropping and the government running at a small surplus, that the small states of the west and south were joining the alliance and the Customs Union – given all that, war against a tough, determined Austria must have seemed a very poor choice.
Despite the earlier ‘Phony War’, the War of 1601 is usually referred to as the First French War because it marks the first significant combat between these states. Spanning only sixteen months, the war was fought across greater distances and with larger armies than any in Bremen’s history.
The events follow a simple sequence. The first campaign was General von Hertzow’s convoy of troops from Carolina to French Mobile and the occupation of Biloxi and Bayou, all of which occurred virtually without resistance. Small detachments would sweep up the Mississippi River in the following months, occupying the French trading posts in the interior.
As an aside, the movement and supply of these ten thousand men was largely possible because of the large ships of the Colonial Corporation. Already fitted for transporting and feeding large numbers of people, the ships needed little modification to become excellent troopships.
In Europe, the French assembled a massive army of more than 75,000 and launched it through Luxembourg into Pfalz (the independent Palatinate having been incorporated into the Customs Union under that name in 1601). By rapid troop movements on the Rhine and the few decent roads, Bremen managed to amass a comparable 75,0000 men in defense. Neither side was able to maneuver very far from the Moselle River (they could not yet feed such large forces without river transport) so the decisive battle occurred outside the little town of Bernkastel-Kues. Neither side had much experience in maneuvering such large forces on a constricted front, so the battle devolved into a brutal three-day-long slugging match. Unable to force a decision and bled white in the process, the French withdrew only when Luxembourg exploded in rebellion in their rear, cutting their army’s only supply line. As Pfalz and Luxembourg were the only points of contact between the two nations (in Europe, at least), Bremen was content to reinforce its army and let the French expend themselves against the rebels.
Two furious naval actions took place in August of 1602. Bremen won the critical skirmish in the Channel, forcing a French invasion fleet to put back for repairs, but lost a skirmish in the German Bight – the last not so very serious as their own base was near at hand.
Completely occupied with the revolt in Luxembourg, France offered up her three colonies in North America for peace and this short brutal war came to a close.
This turn of the century may be said to mark the full emergence of Bremen as a great power. Not only had she stood off a full-scale assault by the pre-eminent military power of the age, she had carried out a campaign of epic scope in North America and gained a territory as large as Italy. From a strategic view the war set the pattern for Bremen’s conduct of operations from then onward: rapid strikes at colonial possessions, naval control of the Channel and German Bight, and a strong defensive posture in Europe.
Part Two – 1574 to 1602
With the addition of the Palatine as an associate member of the Customs Union and military alliance, Bremen’s attention turned to Mainz. Strategically located in the middle section of the Rhine, across the river on the western (French) side, any military operations in the area would be impossible without possession of that fortified city and bridge. Of equal importance, Mainz at that time controlled a great swath of territory stretching from the city on the Rhine east to ancient Wurzburg and the lands around that place – all of it lying across the natural invasion route from France to Bremen, or vice versa.
The good citizens of Mainz were aware of their precarious position between the contending powers, and rather than see their homes become a battle-ground they strove to remain uncommitted to either side. Proposed treaties were studied indefinitely and rich gifts smilingly accepted without any hint of an obligation being incurred. This situation might have continued indefinitely had not the good citizens of Mainz made one fatal miscalculation: they assumed that Bremen and France would respect the neutral in their midst. As any police officer will tell you, the middle of a domestic squabble is the very worst place to be. If the people who are fighting can’t fight each other, they may gang up on the person keeping them apart.
Regardless, this situation might have continued for a very long time were it not for Chancellor Helmuth Kirche. While no detailed account of his time in office is possible in this limited space, a brief touch on some salient points may be helpful in explaining the events that followed.
Kirche was born and raised in Danzig, son of a blacksmith who settled in that area after it was ceded to Bremen by Poland. His father developed a reputation for fine swords and for high-quality steel work, and prospered. The blacksmith was able to send his son to academies and then to university, and young Helmuth did well scholastically and politically. Taken up by Albert Rugge, who was then Proconsul of Danzig, the young man rose rapidly through posts as clerk and secretary, following his patron to Proconsular posts in Hesse and Jylland before receiving his own Proconsular posting to Trondelag in 1556. By 1561, he was serving as Chancellor, which at that time was an office with ill-defined powers and responsibilities that acted as a chief clerk, administrator and bridge between the Archbishop and the Proconsuls.
Studying his behavior from the vantage point of five centuries, we may well wonder if the collapse of the Teutonic Knights and the Polish ingestion of Lithuania simply unhinged his reason. Kirche led the ‘Eastern’ faction that proposed alliance and annexation of Prussia and Courland, as opposed to the slim majority in the Senate who favored a western policy of opposition to France. From all accounts – including the surviving pieces of his own correspondence – Kirche became convinced that Poland was a mortal threat, to be countered at any cost. Unable to sway the Senate by ordinary means, he perverted the Office of the Eye and attempted to blackmail the opposing Senators. The resulting investigations – and wave after wave of revelations and scandals – paralyzed the government through 1569 and 1570. Kirche retained a shaky hold on the office of Chancellor largely because of what the Senators feared he would reveal if he fell, but as the scandals multiplied they surely reasoned that he must go regardless of cost. By analysis of his own private papers, we can deduce that Kirche had completely succumbed to paranoid schizophrenia by early 1571; his ranting on the subject of Poland is matched only by the invective he lavished on the Senate. The exact circumstances of his death are obscure – purposefully, one suspects – but whether it was suicide or murder, his removal was a blessing for Bremen.
The eastern faction having been discredited and driven from office, the western faction was able to force the country’s foreign policy into a sharp, sudden shift. Doubtless the good citizens of Mainz greeted the embassy of 1574 as they had every other, and the warnings they received about the seriousness of this offer were largely disregarded. After all, they had been playing France and Bremen against each other for twenty years, and neither had dared to do more than complain.
But the diplomatic landscape had shifted in ways they did not comprehend. Bremen’s indecision over priorities had been misread as scruples against aggression. But Bremen was no longer debating whether to face east or west, and France was fully occupied with breakaway counties in the south. The deadline on the ultimatum – which Mainz had never recognized as a deadline or an ultimatum – expired in August of 1574 and Mainz and Wurzburg were swamped under a hundred thousand men and more than a hundred cannon. The resulting peace gave Wurzburg and 235g to Bremen and reduced Mainz to complete dependency on Bremen.
Sweden’s declaration of war in 1576 (December 27th, 1575 for purists) marked a watershed of sorts, a convenient point for recognizing that Bremen had risen above the status of a regional power. This war marked Sweden’s last chance to regain the territories she had lost to Mecklenburg more than a century before, but even with England’s assistance she lost battles on land and at sea and sued for peace after only nine months. If not yet a major power, Bremen was now not far from it, and Sweden would become a vassal of England.
1584: [COLOR=FF0000]After Phoney War with France, 5th & 6th Austrian Wars, War with Mainz (Wurzburg), Swedish War, Annex Norway[/COLOR]
There followed twenty years of peace, years in which Halle’s expeditions discovered North America and colonies were established there, and years in which Bremen’s finances were established on a new, more solid footing.
In part, this was due to the Customs Union’s response to French competition in the markets. The great advantage of French-style centralized, state-backed mercantilism is that it allows common policy to be supported by immense resources. It is not, however, flexible or inventive – it does not cope well with changing circumstances – and it is completely at the mercy of the state ministries. Should the King decide to cut off subsidies to fund a war, or grant subsidies to incompetent friends and relations, it is done without regard to consequences. The more diffuse, free-market power of Bremen’s independent traders coped with the monolithic French invasion by developing new products, new markets and new methods and services.
Chief among the new methods and services were attractive interest rates on loans and secure, reliable banking and credit. Chief among the new products were tobacco and the lowly codfish.
As we have previously discussed, the Colonial Corporation shipped large numbers of colonists to the New World and needed freight to fill the holds for the return trip. Standard bulk cargoes such as grain and timber were not cost-effective to transport across the ocean, cotton was unavailable in quantity (the seeds had to be removed by hand-combing) and native art and artifacts had a limited market. Tobacco, planted in the vast up-river plantations of Roanoke colony, was an ideal luxury product, but codfish was the bulk staple that filled the ships’ holds.
Bremen’s often-overlooked first colony was Placentia on New Found Land. The fine harbor there served as a sheltered harbor and resupply point for Halle’s voyages of discovery. It also hosted a large fleet of fishermen who worked the Grand Banks and a small army who cleaned, smoked or salted and packed the cod, many of whom came from Bremen’s Baltic fisheries. Unglamorous in the extreme, the codfishers transformed the demographics of much of Europe. Plentiful, inexpensive protein improved the diet, health and life expectancy of millions. The profit margin per barrel was miniscule, but such was the volume of barrels shipped that a single year’s barrelhead fees paid for a garrison of 10,000 men in 1614.
Since the initial Spanish explorations, tobacco smoking and snuff had been wildly popular among the nobility. Like chocolate, the supply was scarce, expensive and exclusive. But the important factor for Bremen was not necessarily that they could supply good quality tobacco in quantity, but that only Bremen’s merchants could do so. England conquered the Lenape lands in 1595 partly for their precious tobacco, but most of that tobacco was bought by Bremen’s factors, carried in Bremen’s ships and sold by Bremen’s merchants. (Manhattan tobacco was always found inferior to the rich Roanoke leaf and never brought the price the English had hoped for).
Any merchant who sold tobacco sold a host of other things as well, of course. Amber from the Baltic rim, furs from Russia and Canada, fine cotton and wool, excellent leather. Beer, flour, beef, salt cod, copper and bronze, axe heads and clocks and pottery and pots and needles… but tobacco was always the wedge product. If you wanted tobacco, you had to buy it from Bremen’s merchants, and you had to allow those merchants into your markets with all their other wares.
Needless to say, during these years of peace Bremen rolled back the French commercial challenge and spread her trade into every market in Europe and North America.
The collapse and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire affected Bremen very little, in a direct sense. Indirectly it mattered a great deal since it freed the Austrians of their ancient threat and left the Emperor’s armies idle for the first time in decades.
The 7th Austrian War (August of 1597 to October of 1598) opened with a crushing defeat for Bremen. Her invasion of Bohemia foundered against an Austrian army one-third the size. The Austrians had recent battle experience while the Bremen troops did not, but the campaign’s failure can be laid to other causes. Signally, in fighting the lightly-armed and armored, fast-moving Turks, the Austrians had developed comparable light forces of their own. These light cavalry squadrons sliced up supply trains and slashed at the ponderous infantry columns. Bremen’s cavalry proved unable to deal with the nimble threat, and as the army fell back it suffered greatly from hunger, disease and desertion. Fresh disaster followed in the spring of 1598 as the outnumbered Austrians pulled off a stunning upset victory in Wurttemburg.
Unfortunately for Austria, as she transferred her forces west to reinforce success in Wurttemburg, the Palatine launched an invasion of the Tyrol. Ultimately unsuccessful, the offensive dislocated the Austrian plans and allowed Bremen to seize the initiative. By fall, Austria had offered a non-conditional peace and Bremen had eagerly agreed.
Why then, as the balance of the war began to turn against Austria, did Bremen agree to a simple, profitless peace? To paraphrase from the speech of Proconsul Karl Nordstrom in 1599, there were no provinces they could wrest from Austria that would be as valuable as the lands that were opening up in America. Funds spent on war were not available for exploration, trade and colonization, and the war promised no return on investment. Given that her merchants were spreading out into new markets, that inflation was actually dropping and the government running at a small surplus, that the small states of the west and south were joining the alliance and the Customs Union – given all that, war against a tough, determined Austria must have seemed a very poor choice.
Despite the earlier ‘Phony War’, the War of 1601 is usually referred to as the First French War because it marks the first significant combat between these states. Spanning only sixteen months, the war was fought across greater distances and with larger armies than any in Bremen’s history.
The events follow a simple sequence. The first campaign was General von Hertzow’s convoy of troops from Carolina to French Mobile and the occupation of Biloxi and Bayou, all of which occurred virtually without resistance. Small detachments would sweep up the Mississippi River in the following months, occupying the French trading posts in the interior.
As an aside, the movement and supply of these ten thousand men was largely possible because of the large ships of the Colonial Corporation. Already fitted for transporting and feeding large numbers of people, the ships needed little modification to become excellent troopships.
In Europe, the French assembled a massive army of more than 75,000 and launched it through Luxembourg into Pfalz (the independent Palatinate having been incorporated into the Customs Union under that name in 1601). By rapid troop movements on the Rhine and the few decent roads, Bremen managed to amass a comparable 75,0000 men in defense. Neither side was able to maneuver very far from the Moselle River (they could not yet feed such large forces without river transport) so the decisive battle occurred outside the little town of Bernkastel-Kues. Neither side had much experience in maneuvering such large forces on a constricted front, so the battle devolved into a brutal three-day-long slugging match. Unable to force a decision and bled white in the process, the French withdrew only when Luxembourg exploded in rebellion in their rear, cutting their army’s only supply line. As Pfalz and Luxembourg were the only points of contact between the two nations (in Europe, at least), Bremen was content to reinforce its army and let the French expend themselves against the rebels.
Two furious naval actions took place in August of 1602. Bremen won the critical skirmish in the Channel, forcing a French invasion fleet to put back for repairs, but lost a skirmish in the German Bight – the last not so very serious as their own base was near at hand.
Completely occupied with the revolt in Luxembourg, France offered up her three colonies in North America for peace and this short brutal war came to a close.
This turn of the century may be said to mark the full emergence of Bremen as a great power. Not only had she stood off a full-scale assault by the pre-eminent military power of the age, she had carried out a campaign of epic scope in North America and gained a territory as large as Italy. From a strategic view the war set the pattern for Bremen’s conduct of operations from then onward: rapid strikes at colonial possessions, naval control of the Channel and German Bight, and a strong defensive posture in Europe.
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The way you're going, there might be quite a few posts to 'The Republic Militiant'. Not, of course, that that's a bad thing.
I can only imagine the fearsome amount of time you invest in these essays, what with all the background information and 'real world' explanations you devise to make all the game mechanics look realistic. I particularly liked the explanation of the Transatlantic trade system and the way the Bremer tobacco domination was used to gain access to other markets. All that just to explain that Bremen's trade level was high in the game!
I can only imagine the fearsome amount of time you invest in these essays, what with all the background information and 'real world' explanations you devise to make all the game mechanics look realistic. I particularly liked the explanation of the Transatlantic trade system and the way the Bremer tobacco domination was used to gain access to other markets. All that just to explain that Bremen's trade level was high in the game!