"What we need, Prime Minister," Landgrave Hermann of Hesse-Rotenberg began the morning briefing, "is to send someone to Basel. Margrave Georg of Baden-Durlach's son Friedrich is running the government-in-exile there. He requests an envoy from the USE."
"Surely," said Mike Stearns, "this didn't need to come to me. Send him an envoy."
"He specifically requests that the envoy be an up-timer. His father saw, for himself, some of the up-timers at the Rudolstadt Colloquy. The son now wants to see an up-timer, or more than one, perhaps, for himself."
"Remind me why this is worth our while. We don't really have enough up-timers, or at least not enough who can find their way through the protocol of a down-time court, to waste them on the vanity of every minor princeling in Europe."
Hermann gestured at Philipp Sattler, their expert on Germany south of the Main. Which was not quite the same world as Germany north of the Main.
"The location of Baden-Durlach is strategically important for General Horn's campaigns in Swabia. Basel itself is important because..."
Sattler's lengthy, accurate, important, and dull assessment of the importance of Baden-Durlach and Basel droned on for quite some time. Finally it ended.
"Let me think about it," Mike said. "What else?"
"There is little else of significance that I see in today's pouch" Landgrave Hermann said. "There is an official announcement of the planned Austro-Bavarian marriage; that was expected enough, and should not change any alignments."
"Frank," Mike said at dinner that evening. "It's driving me nuts. We absolutely do not have a single up-timer we can spare to soothe the vanity of this guy. But we have to find someone. Someone whose rank won't insult him."
"Yes," said Diane Jackson. "Yes, you have someone. Like you sent Becky, like you sent Rita. Because these dinosaurs see them as related to someone important. I don't need to be here. When do I see Frank? While he is awake? One hour of the day, perhaps twice in the week? French I do speak. The man expects something strange, probably. How is he to know that the rest of you aren't Vietnamese?"
"Diane!" Frank exploded.
"It is true," she answered stubbornly. "You do not need me. In Grantville, I was helping. Here, there are plenty of secretaries to read the letters you get in French. I am," she said firmly, "a fifth wheel. Use me. All you have to do is write out what I should say. I can say it for you."
"Diane," Mike started. "It's just that we don't want to send you into that mess down in Swabia. The front between Horn and Bernhard has been awfully fluid; for nearly two years now, between them, they've been turning the countryside into a wasteland. It's a sideshow, I suppose, to the Baltic, but for somebody in it, it's a damned dangerous sideshow."
"You think," Diane asked, "that I have not seen dangerous?"
Mike and Frank looked at one another. Finally, "Who could we send with her?" Mike asked.
"Tony Adducci—young Tony, that is. That will be another appeasement to their damned rank-consciousness, considering that his father is secretary of the treasury for the State of Thuringia-Franconia. With an up-time radio, since that's his MOS. No radio, no go," Frank said firmly. "And a full company of down-time bodyguards, at least. If things blow up in Swabia, we're pulling you out of there, Diane." Frank reached across the table and took her hand. "I need you more than Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar or Turenne does. Even if you have only been seeing me a couple of hours a week while I'm awake."
Diane blushed.
Officially, Ed Piazza was in Magdeburg for a meeting of Parliament. As a head of one of the component states of the USE, he had a seat in the upper house, and would until they got around to adopting a constitution that provided some other form of representation. He could hardly wait for the elections.
Even though Mike might lose them. Wilhelm Wettin wouldn't be all that bad. Though, of course, Ed thought, grinning as he looked at the decor in the prime minister's office, it would require some redecoration. The incredible paintings of Stearns with Gustavus would be shipped to some outer corridor if Wettin moved into this room.
Mike, who had no qualms whatsoever about maintaining a "kitchen cabinet" with which he felt comfortable alongside his official set of appointees, had set apart two hours.
After providing Mike with a rundown on everything that he had heard from Venice, a lot of it along backchannels, Ed paused. Then, "There's a lot of the Italian peninsula beyond Venice, you know."
Mike nodded.
"Some of it's Spanish."
Mike nodded.
Ed continued. "I don't want to pry, but the general rumor is that you have something bubbling away that involves the Cardinal-Infante in the Spanish Netherlands. Nothing specific, of course."
"Can I nod to half of that? Agreeing only that there is a general rumor to that effect," Mike asked.
"Certainly." Ed suddenly looked a little more serious. "Would you be interested in background on some possible developments—not certain ones, by any means—that might soon drive a wedge, at least temporarily, between the papacy and Spain and, perhaps, provide Urban VIII with a little more room to maneuver?"
"Rumors, of course," Mike said.
"Rumors, certainly," Ed agreed. "Let's start with Naples."
Mike could make one very definite statement. "Naples is a long, long, way from here; the USE hasn't been doing anything in Naples at all."
"That doesn't mean that things aren't happening in Naples that may have an impact on the USE. It's not the good old butterfly effect, again. Call it the 'spaghetti effect,' if you want to think of it that way. You have a pot of water on the stove, simmering away. Drop in one strand of spaghetti—just one—and all of a sudden the pot boils over in a roiling upsurge and you have a mess all over the top of your stove. Sorry, Mike, but we've dropped in the spaghetti, whether we meant to or not."
"So tell me, what is going on."
"First, there's the actual piece of spaghetti, in the form of the Encyclopedia Britannica article about the Portuguese revolt of 1640. I know definitely that at least one copy of that is floating around in Naples. Probably more."
"Definitely?" Mike raised his eyebrows.
"From Leopold Cavriani. Definitely."
"Why is it causing trouble in Naples instead of Portugal?"
"'Instead' probably isn't the right word. Perhaps, 'as well as,' but I don't have anything current on Portugal," Ed answered. "In that world, the world that wrote the encyclopedia, the duke of Osuna—the third one— who was stirring up trouble in Naples died in 1624 and his son, the fourth duke, didn't follow up. In this time, however..."
Mike raised his eyebrows. "Yes."
"Would it give you a clue if I said that the fourth duke's mother is a granddaughter of Hernan Cortes?"
"The Mexico Cortes? Implying a certain inherited adventurousness?"
"Yes, that Cortes. Anyway, through his paternal grandmother, this Osuna the Fourth is also a cousin of João of Braganza—the man who will end up on the throne of Portugal six years from now if things go the same way here that they did in our old world. Osuna's somehow gotten hold of the article."
"Heaven forbid," said Mike, "that our friend Leopold should have put a copy in the mail when he was in Grantville last year."
"Heaven forbid," Ed agreed piously. "Anyhow, he's apparently thinking, 'If Joao can do it, why can't I? King of the Two Sicilies? Now that has a nice ring to it.' The Spanish aren't happy, as you can imagine."
"Ed, where do you dig up all these connections?"
"Count Ludwig Guenther's librarian, mostly—royal genealogies are his hobby. With some assistance from Cavriani."
"Okay. That explains a lot. Is this project of Osuna's going anywhere?"
"It probably wouldn't by itself, but when it's combined with all the other factors, it could. Conditions in Naples—not just the city but the whole Spanish viceroyalty—have been wretched for years. Antonio Alvarez de Toledo was there from 1622 to 1629 and actually tried to do something, but the crisis, both commercial and monetary, has kept rolling merrily along. His successor, the duke of Alcala, has taken some measures to try to solve the problem of grain supplies and storage for the city itself. That's been popular enough. However, there have been a series of bad harvests. The famine situation is pretty grim."
Ed grinned suddenly. "But they've recently invented a mechanical pasta machine that is about to make the cost of spaghetti, ziti, and many of the other staffs of life affordable to the average man. SoTF has sent formal enquiries about opening trade relations."
Mike frowned a little. "Now that we have the USE rather than the CPE, a union rather than a confederation, what is the State of Thuringia-Franconia doing conducting its own foreign policy?"
"Foreign policy?" Ed gestured. "Heaven forbid, once more, I assure you. Just a modest venture into a mutually profitable field of economic development. No different at all from the trade relations that we are opening with Genoa. Until such time as the USE adopts a constitution that specifically says we can't, we can."
"Spaghetti diplomacy," Mike groaned. Then, "Why Genoa?"
"Jeans," answered Ed. "Everybody's jeans are wearing out. Genoese sailors wear work pants made of cotton denim. Obviously...."
"I don't," said Mike, "even want to know about this. Really."
"All right, then. Back to Naples. We've covered Osuna, so that brings us to the second guy: Dom Giulio Genoino. He's a priest—a scholar, a political theorist. And, I think, a lawyer. I figure that he's about seventy years old, but he's going strong. He has interesting ideas about equity in taxation. He's been in jail for his ideas, which include wanting the voice of the people on the city council to be equal to that of the patricians. Even without the Committees of Correspondence, there's a lot of agitation going on there. The question is whether it will just be one more rebellion—people rioting, attacking the prisons, attacking the armories, lynching a few unpopular persons, and then being put down by the Spanish military. Or if something actually comes of it... Which it might, if Genoino somehow links his people up with Osuna the Fourth. Anyway, that's part of why the Spanish and the Curia aren't exactly on speaking terms at the moment, because for various reasons, Urban VIII isn't doing anything firm to oppose Osuna the Fourth."
"Why not?"
"I honestly don't know. Then, thirdly, there are the Albanians."
"What are Albanians doing in Naples?"
"They've been there for a hundred fifty years, at least—exiles."
Mike groaned. "Don't tell me about it, please don't. Is there any spot on the map of Europe that isn't harboring exiles from somewhere else?"
"The short answer is, 'No.' Shall I proceed?"
"Yes. But I don't want to hear it."
"Scanderbeg. Famous Albanian hero. His son turned the Albanians' holdout against the Ottomans over to Venice in 1474. Venice turned around and sold it to the Turks. The Albanian nobility took off for refuge in Naples. Some of them, like the Arianiti family, have been very prominent in the Imperial diplomatic service; others have burrowed in. The Kastriotes heiress married into the Orsini, for example, which pulls a whole complex of the Italian nobility into having interest in what the Albanians do. Anyway, the Albanians have decided that this would be a wonderful time to try to get Skopje back, and they're throwing almost all of their resources into mounting a flotilla. Think Cubans in Miami. If it goes out, we'll have a Balkan crisis on our hands, of course."
"We don't need a Balkan crisis," Mike protested.
"You can't avoid having a Balkan crisis," Ed answered quite serenely. "Cavriani tells me that this falls under the rubric of predestination. There is always a Balkan crisis. If we had arrived five hundred years ago, there would have been a Balkan crisis. If we had been thrown five hundred years into the future, there would have been a Balkan crisis, too. It's a given. So, think about what this means."
"It means that there will be a lot of small boats in the Adriatic Sea."
"At the most elementary level, true. But factor in the word, 'crusade.' For the guys down at the Curia, 'crusade' has the same ring as, 'The South will rise again' for the Sons of the Confederacy. It causes emotional reactions in the most improbable sort of people. Think of Pius II, for goodness sake! Aeneas Scipio Piccolomini, the ultimate secular humanist—say 'crusade' and he started to drool. If the curia doesn't excommunicate Osuna or take some kind of action that could give his more wavering supporters a religiously acceptable excuse to leave his camp, the Spanish will have to focus mainly on him, which means that the Albanians will have enough wiggle room to launch their little fleet."
Mike winced. "It doesn't make sense."
"No, it doesn't make sense. Some things don't, but that doesn't make them any the less real."
"We don't need a crusade on top of everything else," Mike protested.
"It will," Ed answered cautiously, "be a small one. I think."
"How is Cavriani involved with the crusade?"
Ed's answer came as something of a relief. "Not at all, I think. He is, after all, a Calvinist. They're having the crusade on their own. Next."
"More?"
"More," Ed agreed cheerfully. "Now, to move on to the fourth factor, there's Tommaso Campanella. He finally—or, at least, in combination with Dom Genoino—probably gets us to what the Cavrianis are messing about with."
"Who's he? Campanella, I mean. Never heard of him."
"Well, Campanella's a Dominican. He has been for the past fifty years or so. He's a philosopher. He's probably a heretic. At least, the Inquisition has been trying him for heresy of one form or another for the last forty years. You will note, however, that he's still alive to cause trouble. If nothing else, the man has a genius for attracting influential supporters, climbing right up the ladder from local feudal lords in Naples to the Orsini again to the Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany in Florence to Maximilian of Bavaria to the Austrian Habsburgs—the late Rudolf and our beloved Ferdinand II both. At this point in our old world, up-time, he was in Paris under Richelieu's protection."
"Richelieu. All we need is Richelieu. Why is Richelieu supporting a Neapolitan heretic?"
"Supporting is the exact word for it, at the moment. Richelieu is paying Campanella's bills. I think you'll enjoy the reason, but I'm not quite ready to get to it yet. I need to run through some other stuff, first. Unlike Galileo, it isn't Campanella's natural history that has kept him in hot water with the Inquisition. He started thinking about political theory. He wrote things about the authority of the Catholic church. He wrote things about the role of the Spanish monarchy in Italy. He developed all sorts of plans for reforming society. Starting in 1599, he got involved in political conspiracies in Calabria. That's the general area outside the city of Naples itself. This landed him in prison for thirty years, but it didn't keep him from writing. What's more, he got involved with Osuna the Third. Remember Osuna the Third?"
"It was inevitable, I suppose," Mike said.
"Well, of course—once you get to know the people," Ed agreed.
"Ed, how on earth do you keep track of all this? Starting from ground zero, so to speak?"
"It's really no different from being a high school principal—not from being a good one, at least. You have to know the cliques, the inherited animosities, the buzzwords. The main difference is that I don't have the level of personal acquaintance, now, when I'm sorting all these things out. But the principle is the same."
Mike groaned at the pun. Ed grinned and continued.
"Anyhow, in 1626, Campanella was moved to Rome. Urban VIII let him out of prison in 1629. Keep in mind, all this time that Campanella's been in the Inquisition's prisons, he's been living on a church pension and using the money to appeal to important politicians for support, so what did Urban have to lose?"
"Oh, no. Not the Barberinis, too!"
Ed Piazza smiled blithely. "Oh, yes. The Barberinis too. Anyway, as of 1629, Campanella got out. Then, this year, he got himself implicated in the new conspiracy in Naples. He may not actually have been involved to start with—probably wasn't—but the people doing it were certainly inspired by him. It looked like it was back to the comfortably cushioned dungeons for Tommy, but up-time the French ambassador, Noailles, helped him escape from Italy. He stayed for a few months with Peiresc and Gassendi in Aix-en-Provence, doing mathematics, and then he went to Paris under Richelieu's protection. Mike, I tell you, this guy is connected. Up-time, he was received at court by Louis XIII. Down-time, he's just in the French embassy in Rome. Every antenna that I have wiggling out of my head says that pretty soon he'll be publishing books that substitute France for the Spanish Habsburgs as playing the lead role in his grand schemes of political reform."
"Why should the Spanish Habsburgs care?"
"That brings us full circle. Campanella's supporters in Naples have apparently linked up with Osuna the Fourth. That's one thing. However, they've also linked up with simmering popular revolutionary movements in Palermo and Messina. Also with Genoino's people in Naples itself. Osuna's gotten the idea that he can display himself as the strong protector of the common man against the exploiting feudal landlords. The peasants in Bari, Puglia, all over Calabria, in the Abruzzi, the people in Salerno, seem to think the idea has something to be said for it. 'S funny, Mike, how much the history textbooks left out because they needed to arrange things in nice neat units with topic headings like, 'The Rise of Absolutism.' The bits and pieces are almost all in the encyclopedia, once I find out the names and dig them up. This crazy century is full of popular revolts, in Switzerland, in Lisbon, in Russia, in Upper Austria, all over. And just by being here, by demonstrating that one of them succeeded, we're speeding them up. They're coming faster. More spaghetti. Did I think to mention that someone in Sicily has invented the pasta press? Spaghetti's getting cheaper and more abundant, becoming the food of the people . . . But I digress."
"Have the Committees of Correspondence, the CoCs, gotten that far? To Naples, I mean?"
"It's not just Gretchen's CoCs by any means. Sometimes I think that it isn't her propaganda in favor of revolutions that's having the most effect. No matter how much it may have slipped the minds of the people who wrote the textbooks, the European common people didn't need to be introduced to the idea of revolution. And their rulers know it, since the events of the1580s and 1590s are a bit more recent in their memories than they were in ours. Gretchen and Spartacus don't really have to stir up revolutionary sentiment; it's already there. They're tapping it and molding it, but they're not creating it."
Mike nodded. "The real effect of the Committees of Correspondence is in their practical manuals on how to run a revolution effectively. It's the organizational side where modern ideas are going to make the most difference, I think."
"But, to get back to the topic. The curia doesn't want to oppose Osuna because he's distracting the Spanish from sitting on the Albanians who are going to have a crusade, so they're tacitly letting this revolutionary tie slide through. The Spanish Habsburgs have said furious things in the diplomatic correspondence. At least," Ed said primly, "that is what I am told.
"Do I dare to ask who told you?"
"I would prefer to consider it a privileged communication."
Mike waved his hand. He had heard the same thing himself, from Don Francisco Nasi. But Ed did not have Don Francisco at his disposal. Of course, there were a lot of Don Francisco's cousins in Grantville. Samantha Burka, Ed's good right hand during his tenure in the Department of International Affairs of the New United States before it became the State of Thuringia and then, since the February elections, the State of Thuringia-Franconia in the USE, had just married whom? He'd remembered to send a letter with his felicitations, he was sure. Yeah—she had married Diego Nasi.
"In any case," Ed was saying, "the distractions that Spain has in the southern part of the peninsula, just now, means that they are putting less pressure on the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Which may have some impact on how Urban VIII decides to handle the whole Galileo matter, though nobody can be sure."
"Galileo has a lot of public relations appeal," Mike said, "but that's out of our hands. Grantville isn't going to be involved in it, one way or the other."
"As far as we know at the moment," Ed answered.
"Ed, stop going all diplomatic and cover-your-ass on me."
"I'm holding to my position," Ed said. "But Naples, I think, is the key. The problems in Naples will also mean that the Spanish are in such a pinch that they can't divert any kind of actual force against Don Fernando up in the Netherlands if he decides to try for some kind of appanage. The idea of quasi-independence for the Netherlands isn't something that's going to appeal to Philip IV, or to Olivares in Philip's name, since they 'know' from our encyclopedias that they're staring comparable events in Portugal, Catalonia, and Andalucia in the face, while having one start in Naples right now. Or, at least, pretty soon. But nobody knows which way Don Fernando is going to jump. And, at least, since he's in the church, even if he did decide to carve out a piece of the pie for himself, it would escheat back to Spain eventually."
"Why," Mike asked, "do the Cavrianis care?"
"To be quite honest," Ed answered, "I don't have the vaguest idea."
He drank his cold coffee.
"But at least Leopold is going off to the Upper Palatinate to try to make a profit from rocks this summer. That should keep him safely out of any immediate messes."
The next morning, when it was too late—Ed was already on his way back to Grantville—Mike said out loud over breakfast, "Wait a minute. We got distracted. Ed never got back to saying what Richelieu wants of Campanella."
He found himself juggling twenty-seven different balls that day. He forgot to make a note to ask Ed about Tommaso Campanella.