No, no! The optimism is good! We can all use a bit of optimism every now and then. And I'm sure that there will be plenty of tension to come -- it's pretty clear than not everything will go well for Courland in the future.
The Dukes of Fernau, for now.
No, no! The optimism is good! We can all use a bit of optimism every now and then. And I'm sure that there will be plenty of tension to come -- it's pretty clear than not everything will go well for Courland in the future.
35. Letter to Jakob from Tevel, 1655
My dear Duke Jakob,
When last I wrote you, I provided you with "all the mundane details" as you so kindly put it before admonishing me to give you more narrative, and more 'Tevel-ness." Since receiving your response, I've taken up the habit of separating my "Fernau notes" from my "Continental notes" and my "Converso notes" - when I began referring, half-jokingly, to these stores of notes as the Saint Mary Library after your most recent daughter, suddenly everyone who knew their letters volunteered their own notes to grow its collection. Now, quite by accident, Fernau has a library. As you would surely expect of me, I've turned it into the centrepiece of a school. In the same naming tradition, this is the the Saint Sophia school, after the middle name of two of your daughters (please consider this my expression of sorrow to have never met Christina while she lived). Do not worry over a Jew having things named for your Christian saints, either. I trust in the God's sense of humour being charitable.
All that is surely Jakob-ness infused with only a dash of Tevel-ness. But the story grows from there, and the school. We have sought the knowledge of the blacks of Fernau, and of mulattoes from São Tomé and Santo Antão, and even slaves whose journeys pause in Fernau before crossing the Atlantic. We have written so much of what we've heard. As a consequence, paper making is now a trade in rather greater demand than our population would suggest. If you can send Fernau a master paper maker, it would be most appreciated. For my part (here comes your requested "Tevel-ness"), I've applied our growing local custom to ever more useful ends. Wherever we go, we now send translators and scribes, as though we were an agnostic expedition of Jesuits. For your wife, Courland and its ships scour the world in search of the world's interesting plants. For the Saint Sophia School, and for you and I, they gather the wisdom and recipes associated with those plants. This habit should be considered in Tobago and the Gambia too - though it can certainly be applied less avidly than here.
We lack the means and population we would require to make all the things we might have access to in Courland. But the peoples around this gulf have a history of trades we can make use of. When we travelled the rivers to our East, we met with peoples skilled at iron-working, though they use rather different furnaces than we see in the Baltic. We write what we learn from local masters, and invite the masters to trade knowledge with ours, usually by inviting them or their apprentices to Fernau for a time. People rely on different foods here, and we are as glad to learn from their cooks as from their farmers or hunters. For at least three years, we've seen a satisfying cycle of importing skilled people to teach us their skills and knowledge, then sending them back to their people with a knowledge of German, and more importantly a knowledge of us. Fernau is making friends.
Which brings me to my more personal reasons for being here, and to diplomacy. Further south on the continent - on the shore roughly as far south as Annobón, though that island is too far out in the Ocean to have any relationship with the shore - is a kingdom called Loango, which itself lies to the North of the larger Kingdom of Kongo, from whose other neighbours come most of Portugal's slaves. It is in Loango that I have discovered communities of Jews. The only certain relationship between these communities and descendants of the converso orphans I hoped to find in Santo Antão is that both originated in Portugal. I doubt they are the descendants of the converso orphans, who would surely have struggled to retain their Jewishness. Instead, these communities must have been Marranos in the service of the Portuguese crown, exploring and trading with the continent while hiding from their masters that they were still practicing Jews. Such work was overwhelmingly done by either single men or men whose (previous) families remained behind in Portugal. I say this to explain that, after generations of taking local wives, these Jews are no less black than any other peoples I have met with.
Just as we have established exchanges between Fernau and nearby peoples, so too have we established exchanges between Fernau and these Loango Jews. In this case, though, we are both receiving them in greater numbers and sending more of our people (disproportionately my fellow Fernau Jews) to their villages. This exchange has brought about a strange and happy religious accident, the direct offspring of your own happy religious accident in Poland in 1638 that ended up seeing Courland (and, to a lesser degree, Semigallia) welcome so many Jews from Ruthenia and then Poland.
The Kingdom of Kongo is pre-eminent among those to the south of us. And they have thoroughly adopted Christianity, through Portugal's influence. In Loango, this has been noted, and more than one King here has asked for Jesuits or other missionaries to convert them, or more of them. It is not clear whether they pass their Christianity to their descendants as the Jews I've met have passed Judaism to theirs. In any event: these people, or at least those who rule, seek God. Fernau's exchange with the Loango Jews was noticed. To skip to the end of the story: if they are asking for God, I have decided to give them God the in what has been the Courland manner for a decade or more. By a beautiful gorge adjacent their capital, they and we are jointly building a Lutheran church, a Jewish temple, and a temple to the locally-revered spirit Mbona.
I find myself wondering whether your enterprise will quite accidentally spread some festival of Mbona across oceans and miles, to Libau, Tobago, and why not Nieuw Amsterdam, one day?
Liba sends her regards. Give our regards to your family, as ever. I thank you for all the good meeting you has brought to my life.
TEVEL
When last I wrote you, I provided you with "all the mundane details" as you so kindly put it before admonishing me to give you more narrative, and more 'Tevel-ness." Since receiving your response, I've taken up the habit of separating my "Fernau notes" from my "Continental notes" and my "Converso notes" - when I began referring, half-jokingly, to these stores of notes as the Saint Mary Library after your most recent daughter, suddenly everyone who knew their letters volunteered their own notes to grow its collection. Now, quite by accident, Fernau has a library. As you would surely expect of me, I've turned it into the centrepiece of a school. In the same naming tradition, this is the the Saint Sophia school, after the middle name of two of your daughters (please consider this my expression of sorrow to have never met Christina while she lived). Do not worry over a Jew having things named for your Christian saints, either. I trust in the God's sense of humour being charitable.
All that is surely Jakob-ness infused with only a dash of Tevel-ness. But the story grows from there, and the school. We have sought the knowledge of the blacks of Fernau, and of mulattoes from São Tomé and Santo Antão, and even slaves whose journeys pause in Fernau before crossing the Atlantic. We have written so much of what we've heard. As a consequence, paper making is now a trade in rather greater demand than our population would suggest. If you can send Fernau a master paper maker, it would be most appreciated. For my part (here comes your requested "Tevel-ness"), I've applied our growing local custom to ever more useful ends. Wherever we go, we now send translators and scribes, as though we were an agnostic expedition of Jesuits. For your wife, Courland and its ships scour the world in search of the world's interesting plants. For the Saint Sophia School, and for you and I, they gather the wisdom and recipes associated with those plants. This habit should be considered in Tobago and the Gambia too - though it can certainly be applied less avidly than here.
We lack the means and population we would require to make all the things we might have access to in Courland. But the peoples around this gulf have a history of trades we can make use of. When we travelled the rivers to our East, we met with peoples skilled at iron-working, though they use rather different furnaces than we see in the Baltic. We write what we learn from local masters, and invite the masters to trade knowledge with ours, usually by inviting them or their apprentices to Fernau for a time. People rely on different foods here, and we are as glad to learn from their cooks as from their farmers or hunters. For at least three years, we've seen a satisfying cycle of importing skilled people to teach us their skills and knowledge, then sending them back to their people with a knowledge of German, and more importantly a knowledge of us. Fernau is making friends.
Which brings me to my more personal reasons for being here, and to diplomacy. Further south on the continent - on the shore roughly as far south as Annobón, though that island is too far out in the Ocean to have any relationship with the shore - is a kingdom called Loango, which itself lies to the North of the larger Kingdom of Kongo, from whose other neighbours come most of Portugal's slaves. It is in Loango that I have discovered communities of Jews. The only certain relationship between these communities and descendants of the converso orphans I hoped to find in Santo Antão is that both originated in Portugal. I doubt they are the descendants of the converso orphans, who would surely have struggled to retain their Jewishness. Instead, these communities must have been Marranos in the service of the Portuguese crown, exploring and trading with the continent while hiding from their masters that they were still practicing Jews. Such work was overwhelmingly done by either single men or men whose (previous) families remained behind in Portugal. I say this to explain that, after generations of taking local wives, these Jews are no less black than any other peoples I have met with.
Just as we have established exchanges between Fernau and nearby peoples, so too have we established exchanges between Fernau and these Loango Jews. In this case, though, we are both receiving them in greater numbers and sending more of our people (disproportionately my fellow Fernau Jews) to their villages. This exchange has brought about a strange and happy religious accident, the direct offspring of your own happy religious accident in Poland in 1638 that ended up seeing Courland (and, to a lesser degree, Semigallia) welcome so many Jews from Ruthenia and then Poland.
The Kingdom of Kongo is pre-eminent among those to the south of us. And they have thoroughly adopted Christianity, through Portugal's influence. In Loango, this has been noted, and more than one King here has asked for Jesuits or other missionaries to convert them, or more of them. It is not clear whether they pass their Christianity to their descendants as the Jews I've met have passed Judaism to theirs. In any event: these people, or at least those who rule, seek God. Fernau's exchange with the Loango Jews was noticed. To skip to the end of the story: if they are asking for God, I have decided to give them God the in what has been the Courland manner for a decade or more. By a beautiful gorge adjacent their capital, they and we are jointly building a Lutheran church, a Jewish temple, and a temple to the locally-revered spirit Mbona.
I find myself wondering whether your enterprise will quite accidentally spread some festival of Mbona across oceans and miles, to Libau, Tobago, and why not Nieuw Amsterdam, one day?
Liba sends her regards. Give our regards to your family, as ever. I thank you for all the good meeting you has brought to my life.
TEVEL
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This "next morning" post was almost written consecutively with the chapter above, because of excited momentum, but I restrained myself in the event other slower reflections would come to me with a little more time.
I've been generally frustrated at the relative lack of timeline-actionable historical information (especially online) about the stretch of coast from about Calabar through Cameroon through Gabon around this time period. I've located information about language, about ironmaking and other technologies as done here versus elsewhere in Africa. When I can find information about peoples, I don't see a story hook this timeline can latch on to. The downside of that is I lose historical granularity writing stories in this area; the upside is that I have freer rein to inject events and stories around the facts I am able to find, provided I accept the risk of getting the history a bit wrong.
Against the backdrop of that feeling, imagine my joy (and the fictional joy of Tevel ben Elisha in my head) at the discovery of a Jewish community on the Loango coast. They were noted in the 1700s and 1800s before disappearing. It seems eminently reasonable they would have been present rather earlier too, or at least nearby. I gift-wrapped them for Tevel as a consolation prize for having been unable to find echoes of Judaism in the descendants of the converso orphans - it was simply too long ago for him to succeed on the islands. This chapter in an extremely minor way tips my cap in thanks to @not livius , for whom we have the general tone of optimism (amplified by Tevel's combination of tireless building and whimsy), and to @Jonathan Edelstein , whose writing enters my thoughts whenever I do something that may come to positively affect Africa, so many generations before an Abacar would have found himself crossing the Atlantic on a slave ship.
Jews were almost certainly already in Loango before its kings asked for conversion. Many in Loango received conversion, only to have the request repeated again later (I'm not going to worry over how Christianization stalled between conversions). The biggest mass conversion would have happened in a decade OTL. How might it change things to have an enthusiastic neighbour promoting religious freedom and diversity instead of signing up for Catholicism and all that comes with it?
More slaves were shipped across the Atlantic from Kongo and its neighbours than anywhere else (Cameroon, two or three modern-day borders to the north, was one of the least-affected countries). There are contrasts here I look forward to exploring.
Upcoming:
I've been generally frustrated at the relative lack of timeline-actionable historical information (especially online) about the stretch of coast from about Calabar through Cameroon through Gabon around this time period. I've located information about language, about ironmaking and other technologies as done here versus elsewhere in Africa. When I can find information about peoples, I don't see a story hook this timeline can latch on to. The downside of that is I lose historical granularity writing stories in this area; the upside is that I have freer rein to inject events and stories around the facts I am able to find, provided I accept the risk of getting the history a bit wrong.
Against the backdrop of that feeling, imagine my joy (and the fictional joy of Tevel ben Elisha in my head) at the discovery of a Jewish community on the Loango coast. They were noted in the 1700s and 1800s before disappearing. It seems eminently reasonable they would have been present rather earlier too, or at least nearby. I gift-wrapped them for Tevel as a consolation prize for having been unable to find echoes of Judaism in the descendants of the converso orphans - it was simply too long ago for him to succeed on the islands. This chapter in an extremely minor way tips my cap in thanks to @not livius , for whom we have the general tone of optimism (amplified by Tevel's combination of tireless building and whimsy), and to @Jonathan Edelstein , whose writing enters my thoughts whenever I do something that may come to positively affect Africa, so many generations before an Abacar would have found himself crossing the Atlantic on a slave ship.
Jews were almost certainly already in Loango before its kings asked for conversion. Many in Loango received conversion, only to have the request repeated again later (I'm not going to worry over how Christianization stalled between conversions). The biggest mass conversion would have happened in a decade OTL. How might it change things to have an enthusiastic neighbour promoting religious freedom and diversity instead of signing up for Catholicism and all that comes with it?
More slaves were shipped across the Atlantic from Kongo and its neighbours than anywhere else (Cameroon, two or three modern-day borders to the north, was one of the least-affected countries). There are contrasts here I look forward to exploring.
Upcoming:
- Poland is still overdue.
- Fernau's now at a point where I'm ready for another Economic Historian Blog entry.
- Shipbuilding and astronomy need a bit of attention.
- The Treaty of Westminster, or an alternative to it.
- A Northern War (first, second, or little, depending on what wars you count).
- Requests, as ever, remain welcome.
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I particularly love Tevel's optimism, because he is in fact incredibly lucky to be where he is, doing what he is (sespite the serious threat of death by disease) given the situation in which we first encountered him -- I feel like it's earned, and perhaps even a little determined. I do wonder whether he is being unusually ecumenical, so to speak, but then again he has found the thing he was looking for and that probably encourages his positivity.
I was about four paragraphs into a chapter today when, for the first time, I simply deleted everything I'd written. (Maybe I'll never introduce the Hospitaller colonization I touched on, maybe I will.)
This was going to be an alternate Treaty of Westminster. But while a civil war continues between Charles I and Cromwell in this timeline, any nation-to-nation treaty with Cromwell felt far too implausible without giving the non-English side of such a treaty very particular motivations.
Maybe a narrow deal between the EIC and VOC could be plausible, and even within the interests of this timeline's story. But if so, that's later on, not now.
So, my updated to-do list:
This was going to be an alternate Treaty of Westminster. But while a civil war continues between Charles I and Cromwell in this timeline, any nation-to-nation treaty with Cromwell felt far too implausible without giving the non-English side of such a treaty very particular motivations.
Maybe a narrow deal between the EIC and VOC could be plausible, and even within the interests of this timeline's story. But if so, that's later on, not now.
So, my updated to-do list:
- Sweden, mostly Kristina and a bit of her cousin. Kristina offers so much to this timeline's themes of religious tolerance/intolerance and learning.
- Poland's new King.
- Shipbuilding, astronomy in an Academy chapter
- Iberia and France, though I could dispense with them in another "Jakob's desk" chapter.
36. Stockholm, Rome and Częstochowa, up to 1655
Fuck You Once More, Axel Oxenstierna
Say you are born well to-do. Wealthy. Powerful. Born with a silver spoon in your mouth. Make it a golden spoon. Make that golden spoons encrusted with enormous diamonds in your mouth. And more spoons to spare.
So, extremely well to-do. The one notion you life lacks is lack itself.
Your dad is a king. Your mom is a German royal of some kind, because if you were a King and went window-shopping for a Queen-slash-brood-mare, politically-fractured Germany was a place that had them in relative abundance, and it wasn't that hard to avoid inbred Hapsburg genes and their resulting odds on conspicuous facial birth defects.
Because the market for German brood mares / queens is pretty good, your mom is also noted for her beauty.
Your mom is also known for her crazy. That she's known for it means it's the noticeable kind of crazy.
You're born. Midwives or doctors or chambermaids or someone, at any rate, thinks they spot a penis on you, and your dad gets told he has a son, like fortune tellers said he would. Other midwives or doctors or chambermaids get a closer look, and suddenly the king has not a crown prince but a crown princess.
You are named Kristina. So was your dead older sister. Guess your parents really liked the name.
A little before your fourth birthday, daddy dies. Gustav II Adolf of the House of Vasa, dead in the Thirty Years War.
So, congrats girl, you're the King now. Not to be crowned until your majority, of course, but still King now. The girl King. Swedish rulers were Kings. So you couldn't be a Queen unless you married and gave that guy the crown. Not your style.
Daddy set up a couple provisions for you in the event of, well, what happened. And it happened. So: you were to receive a top-notch education. A royal-tier, male-tier education. Nothing to do with the penis people thought they saw on you at your birth, although rumours about that and stories about it keep coming up, as a means of explaining your behaviour, your whole damn life. And nothing to do with you being King and not Queen. Pure coincidence.
That education was top-tier. It was also uneven. Your passion for arts and philosophy and all that enlightenment stuff was legendary. Your galling inability to understand finances on even the most basic level was shocking. Yes, Sweden absolutely needed 15-kilogram lumps of copper as currency. So convenient. It makes complete sense that your better friends in life were moneylenders, and that at least one had provisions in his will for the money he didn't expect you to manage to ever repay.
Your maids and female servants were rotated in and out to discourage attachments. You never, ever, EVER ended up having a healthy relationship with any female.
You were a firework of disruption, a selectively brilliant, generally incompetent agent of chaos born of Vasa enlightenment and entitlement and your mother's controlling madness.
Clearly, you couldn't rule alone. Fortunately, Axel Oxenstierna tweaked the plans your daddy had, with law and governance changes, and ended up your regent as you grew up.
Fuck you, Axel Oxenstierna.
If there's one thing an aspiring Minerva of Chaos doesn't need growing up, it's a strong vise-like hand of order constraining her. And this man was constraint. You fought against him every which way, resisting anything he wanted in ways thought through and ways petty. Feigning illness after his wife's death, to skip her funeral, only to appear the next day perfectly hale and healthy? Bitchy, girl. Appointing your own ambassador to attend a peace conference with the exact opposite orders as the ambassador Axel sent? Committed, girl.
Fuck you, Axel Oxenstierna.
You brought in artists and philosophers from across Europe. Rene fucking Descartes died and was buried in your miserably cold capital. You loved the idea of his brilliance, but the two of you didn't really get along, so his time as your teacher was brief. You forced him to write the libretto of a ballet.
Blaise Pascal sent you a Pascaline (you thought he might come and stay in your Academy in Stockholm too, but he went to Courland for a time instead, colliding his Pascaline with the slide rulers English mathematicians were refining in Libau). You were rather expensive for Sweden, all told.
Even when you were crowned, you still were constrained by his governance and influence...
Fuck you, Axel Oxenstierna.
You hosted lavish parties, with artists performing, with lewd poetry, and lewd rumours following. Were you a lesbian? Were you celibate? Were you sleeping with these men, those women, or both? Was your perpetual bedhead a sign of your indifference to anyone's opinions of you, an advertisement of how you spent your nights, or was it just another way to say...
Fuck you, Axel Oxenstierna?
You got the idea in your head that a really good fuck you might be to take how much he valued your royal womb for Sweden's future and twist things. First, by suggesting your cousin should be named your heir. Innocuous, by itself: this cousin thought he might marry you, but that's nothing. Second, you started to speak of valuing celibacy. Only, celibacy was especially valued by Catholics. So Third, you floated to certain handsome Frenchmen and Spaniards that you might convert to Catholicism.
That would be a real solid Fuck you to Axel Oxenstierna.
All the while, rumours of sexual escapades abounded. Your correspondence to alleged lovers may have equalled your correspondence to the great minds of the day. These were flames you eagerly fanned, because of who it would piss off. If Axel knew the truth, it wasn't something he spoke of publicly.
But ultimately, you got most of your wishes. You would give up your crown to your cousin, then abscond to Rome to make a succession of Popes turn you into a poster-child for the counter-reformation. As a symbol, many wealthy or powerful people would spend ungodly sums of money on your maintenance. And you would be lavishly expensive, always.
Only most of those wishes, though. When the time came to hand your crown off to your cousin, an occasion for which you wore the same glorious gown in which you'd been crowned, all of Sweden saw your baby bump.
You never told anyone who the father was. With your history, many suspected you might not even know who the father was. Could it have been your cousin? One of the de la Gardie boys? God? One of the sons of Oxenstierna himself? It was the talk of the Baltic, of Germany, and Europe.
Sweden was distracted from its new King for a time. And distracted by tales of their former Queen staying with the Pope for a time, converting so very publicly in Rome. But your new daughter, and the extramarital sex it implied, made you only so good a promotional tool for the Catholic Church. After your Roman holiday, you finally settled in Częstochowa, annoying the nuns by being in and out of the Jasna Góra Monastery. Poland was another country ruled by House Vasa, and one happy to take on an imperfect but oh-so-prominent Catholic convert. And your daughter, too. No, Częstochowa wasn't Rome, but it was something else no one in Sweden ever saw coming.
Fuck you once again, Axel Oxenstierna.
Say you are born well to-do. Wealthy. Powerful. Born with a silver spoon in your mouth. Make it a golden spoon. Make that golden spoons encrusted with enormous diamonds in your mouth. And more spoons to spare.
So, extremely well to-do. The one notion you life lacks is lack itself.
Your dad is a king. Your mom is a German royal of some kind, because if you were a King and went window-shopping for a Queen-slash-brood-mare, politically-fractured Germany was a place that had them in relative abundance, and it wasn't that hard to avoid inbred Hapsburg genes and their resulting odds on conspicuous facial birth defects.
Because the market for German brood mares / queens is pretty good, your mom is also noted for her beauty.
Your mom is also known for her crazy. That she's known for it means it's the noticeable kind of crazy.
You're born. Midwives or doctors or chambermaids or someone, at any rate, thinks they spot a penis on you, and your dad gets told he has a son, like fortune tellers said he would. Other midwives or doctors or chambermaids get a closer look, and suddenly the king has not a crown prince but a crown princess.
You are named Kristina. So was your dead older sister. Guess your parents really liked the name.
A little before your fourth birthday, daddy dies. Gustav II Adolf of the House of Vasa, dead in the Thirty Years War.
So, congrats girl, you're the King now. Not to be crowned until your majority, of course, but still King now. The girl King. Swedish rulers were Kings. So you couldn't be a Queen unless you married and gave that guy the crown. Not your style.
Daddy set up a couple provisions for you in the event of, well, what happened. And it happened. So: you were to receive a top-notch education. A royal-tier, male-tier education. Nothing to do with the penis people thought they saw on you at your birth, although rumours about that and stories about it keep coming up, as a means of explaining your behaviour, your whole damn life. And nothing to do with you being King and not Queen. Pure coincidence.
That education was top-tier. It was also uneven. Your passion for arts and philosophy and all that enlightenment stuff was legendary. Your galling inability to understand finances on even the most basic level was shocking. Yes, Sweden absolutely needed 15-kilogram lumps of copper as currency. So convenient. It makes complete sense that your better friends in life were moneylenders, and that at least one had provisions in his will for the money he didn't expect you to manage to ever repay.
Your maids and female servants were rotated in and out to discourage attachments. You never, ever, EVER ended up having a healthy relationship with any female.
You were a firework of disruption, a selectively brilliant, generally incompetent agent of chaos born of Vasa enlightenment and entitlement and your mother's controlling madness.
Clearly, you couldn't rule alone. Fortunately, Axel Oxenstierna tweaked the plans your daddy had, with law and governance changes, and ended up your regent as you grew up.
Fuck you, Axel Oxenstierna.
If there's one thing an aspiring Minerva of Chaos doesn't need growing up, it's a strong vise-like hand of order constraining her. And this man was constraint. You fought against him every which way, resisting anything he wanted in ways thought through and ways petty. Feigning illness after his wife's death, to skip her funeral, only to appear the next day perfectly hale and healthy? Bitchy, girl. Appointing your own ambassador to attend a peace conference with the exact opposite orders as the ambassador Axel sent? Committed, girl.
Fuck you, Axel Oxenstierna.
You brought in artists and philosophers from across Europe. Rene fucking Descartes died and was buried in your miserably cold capital. You loved the idea of his brilliance, but the two of you didn't really get along, so his time as your teacher was brief. You forced him to write the libretto of a ballet.
Blaise Pascal sent you a Pascaline (you thought he might come and stay in your Academy in Stockholm too, but he went to Courland for a time instead, colliding his Pascaline with the slide rulers English mathematicians were refining in Libau). You were rather expensive for Sweden, all told.
Even when you were crowned, you still were constrained by his governance and influence...
Fuck you, Axel Oxenstierna.
You hosted lavish parties, with artists performing, with lewd poetry, and lewd rumours following. Were you a lesbian? Were you celibate? Were you sleeping with these men, those women, or both? Was your perpetual bedhead a sign of your indifference to anyone's opinions of you, an advertisement of how you spent your nights, or was it just another way to say...
Fuck you, Axel Oxenstierna?
You got the idea in your head that a really good fuck you might be to take how much he valued your royal womb for Sweden's future and twist things. First, by suggesting your cousin should be named your heir. Innocuous, by itself: this cousin thought he might marry you, but that's nothing. Second, you started to speak of valuing celibacy. Only, celibacy was especially valued by Catholics. So Third, you floated to certain handsome Frenchmen and Spaniards that you might convert to Catholicism.
That would be a real solid Fuck you to Axel Oxenstierna.
All the while, rumours of sexual escapades abounded. Your correspondence to alleged lovers may have equalled your correspondence to the great minds of the day. These were flames you eagerly fanned, because of who it would piss off. If Axel knew the truth, it wasn't something he spoke of publicly.
But ultimately, you got most of your wishes. You would give up your crown to your cousin, then abscond to Rome to make a succession of Popes turn you into a poster-child for the counter-reformation. As a symbol, many wealthy or powerful people would spend ungodly sums of money on your maintenance. And you would be lavishly expensive, always.
Only most of those wishes, though. When the time came to hand your crown off to your cousin, an occasion for which you wore the same glorious gown in which you'd been crowned, all of Sweden saw your baby bump.
You never told anyone who the father was. With your history, many suspected you might not even know who the father was. Could it have been your cousin? One of the de la Gardie boys? God? One of the sons of Oxenstierna himself? It was the talk of the Baltic, of Germany, and Europe.
Sweden was distracted from its new King for a time. And distracted by tales of their former Queen staying with the Pope for a time, converting so very publicly in Rome. But your new daughter, and the extramarital sex it implied, made you only so good a promotional tool for the Catholic Church. After your Roman holiday, you finally settled in Częstochowa, annoying the nuns by being in and out of the Jasna Góra Monastery. Poland was another country ruled by House Vasa, and one happy to take on an imperfect but oh-so-prominent Catholic convert. And your daughter, too. No, Częstochowa wasn't Rome, but it was something else no one in Sweden ever saw coming.
Fuck you once again, Axel Oxenstierna.
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Well, his grandfather for starters. But the Caroline era, absolutely.
I'll characterize the approach I've taken to butterflies thus far as choosing my preferred dice and the direction in which I roll them. In this regard, I'm a bit like Kristina by essentially aiming a dose of chaos here and there in search of effect, but not always controlling which effect. Sometimes I'm rolling the big dice, or the ones with many sides, sometimes the ones with fewer.
In this case, I have one (possibly obvious?) butterfly we'll see land in wartime. Kristina's slightly different mark on Sweden could have influenced Gustav's choice of bride, but I'll let that one be and chalk it up to Kristina overestimating her influence on... well, half the things she touches. She's a fascinating character, and I have to pay a lot of tribute to the feminist-history-comedy podcast https://vulgarhistory.com/ for its influence on the tone I took in the chapter above. The pod dedicated 4 episodes to Kristina, of which I've only listened to 2.5 so far, but will surely complete the post-regnal parts too.
I have nothing specially in mind for Gustav. But I'll discover some extra implication down the line (or be told one by @Jürgen or another reader) and file it away for future possible use.
Thank you so much. It's coming fast.
Since this is already doubling as my usual next day reflections post, I'll add that Kristina's conversion was an irresistible dirty magnet for a timeline already so interested in how small religious tweaks can change societies. I'm happy to hear anyone's clever ideas on what to do with Kristina's illegitimate daughter down the line. =)
I really, really need to play with making a good map.
Fernau is Fernão do Po > Fernando Po > Bioko OTL. The main island of Equatorial Guinea.
Instead of the name getting corrupted in Spanish ways, it is corrupted in German ways TTL.
Most Europeans at this point still have very flawed thinking on the Niger - a mistaken belief from a century and more earlier is that a great east-to-west river connects all the way from the Nile across the Sahara/Sahel/Soudan to West Africa. The Senegal, Gambia, or Casamance might each have been thought of as the Western outlet of this river, the stretch of the Niger through Tombouctou was certainly known to Europeans and was thought of as this great river's middle. I haven't read enough on how much reality inspired the purported course it might have taken further east (Lake Chad, perhaps?).
Mostly, Europeans have still only scraped the coast, and the navigable bits of rivers (I killed off some Danish explorers going inland in an earlier chapter). Moroccans with their trade, conquest and camels and blacks who've lived and traded inland are still the best sources for knowledge of inland geography.
As to the Niger delta? Tevel's surely sent a mapmaker or five that way. enough to know there are one or five rivers emptying out into the ocean. But does he or anyone yet know how far inland the main river goes? Not yet.
37. Libau, Courland, up to Summer 1655
Winds of Change - part one
Libau and Windau vied with Riga and Königsberg to be the foremost ports on the Eastern side of the Baltic. Of the four, Riga was the most formidable city, the others being relative upstarts. Riga had the natural advantage of being at the mouth of the Düna river, a convenient trade route for goods from Lithuania and the central parts of Russia. Goods that could as easily go overland Jakob eagerly encouraged to pass overland to meet the Baltic at Libau or Windau instead. Further west, the river Windau that gave the Couronian port its name was already convenient for some Lithuanian goods headed for the Baltic, though the Memel river further south was a stronger conduit for trade out of Lithuania - trade that would then pass via Königsberg or Memel (or Memelburg).
Jakob had chipped away at Riga's share of Baltic trade. Memel and Königsberg were ruled by his brother-in-law, and when it came to matters Baltic and matters trade, he got along rather well with his brother-in-law. So neither Prussia nor Courland undermined each other. Prussia/Brandenburg focused somewhat on being pre-eminent in German trade, or broader European trade. Courland focused on developing industry both as its own reward and as a way of supporting its profitable colonial ventures.
Libau was already the most active port for one thing, though: mail. The Martin Maritime Academy voraciously drew letters, books, and learned people from across Europe, sending others back out. The "Invisible College" of learned folk across Europe, or whatever those smart letter-writers called it, either brought letters in or letters out, and that brought more people in, who sent and received still more letters, which drew more people....
The thing was that Courland's high and still-growing religious tolerance, coupled with Libau's tolerance for the most controversial or fanciful ideas, led to a potent blend of intellect and risk. Risk and intellect each had a way of amplifying the other.
William Petty's ideas came in first via mail from England (or Ireland) to Libau, initially on economic matters in correspondence with Jakob and others, and later on any matters for which his wide-ranging brilliance found a worthy pen-pal.
Today, Jakob was looking at one product of that correspondence. Petty's wide-ranging ideas saw Libau shipwrights (and academy students) build the Zwillingkufe, a third or fourth or fifth iteration of a ship design based on one Petty had included in a wide-ranging missive about ships, wind, water resistance, economics, accompanied by some work-in-progress mathematical formulae on each topic.
The first iteration or two were miniature models, fairly faithful to Petty's hull design, built entirely by academy students and tested - unmanned - in the Libau lake. By now, the students' zeal for maximizing whatever features might prove most measurably impactful about the two-hull design had already evolved it into still greater an oddity. The third Zwillingkufe was neither a scaled-up version of the first two unmanned miniatures, nor a scaled-down version of the two-decked vessel in Petty's design. On a long visit to Libau, to Jakob and the Academy, Petty himself needed a moment to process how the changes might affect the craft.
The third ZK (Petty avoided mangling the full name) was out of all proportion with his Double-Bottom idea. The ship was much smaller (he'd intended a gun deck and main deck, but the ZK's deck looked scarcely bigger than a large raft. Petty hadn't focused on sails, because the novel idea was about the hulls and their minimal contact and resistance against the water. After shrinking the scale of the ship from his original design, these mad Courlanders then equipped the ZK with the largest lateen sail they thought it could manage, simply because it was the best way to amplify the testable difference between this design and a single-hull ship. It was still only testing the ideas, but testing different aspects of them.
But oh, what testing.
It had already outraced a monohull with a matching sail, and was now frequently seen zipping around near Libau, advertising Couronian endeavour or madness. Sailors on inbound ships respected its speed, sailors based in Libau saw the abusive sailing it endured in the name of testing and mistook it for deficiency, and shook their heads.
The fourth and fifth ZKs followed, with growing ambition and scale. Watching both grow in the shipyard, enough sailors kept scoffing at the double hulls for it to influence the design - if you couldn't get enough sailors enthusiastic about sailing it, then it needed to be able to handled by a smaller crew. Square-rigging was out, as that took more men. The biggest ZK would be rigged fore-and-aft on both masts, without a topsail, and with a jib as the only staysail never to leave the design. As a ship meant to not tip all that much, its main deck was still lower than it might have been as a monohull. The shipwrights were working on a modest gun deck now - in Courland, passing up an opportunity to experiment was counted as a failure of missed opportunity.
While work continued on that, the fourth ZK was out on the water too. Two-masted like her under-construction sister, but smaller and without guns, designed for up to 4 sails and as few as two sailors.
Jakob, ever impatient for innovation to be taken up and made use of, undercut the sailors' resistance most simply: he asked for ten of the most vocally skeptical sailors in Libau to be invited to tested to serve as his personal crew for a coming voyage on the Baltic, with a bonus in pay to those selected.
When Jakob then selected the fourth ZK as the ship on which he would travel, the academy students suddenly found the third ZK unavailable for their joy rides around the harbour.
But they consoled themselves watching the feats the professional sailors managed on their craft. The sailors had watched the students sail it, now the students watched the sailors. And that reversal of roles gave the ship a nickname: Der Zweifler (the Skeptic), punning on the ship's two hulls (zwei Rümpfe).
- - -
Part two will be a conversation at the destination of Jakob's voyage on Der Zweifler. First correct guess as to the destination gets a character named after them (I reserve the right to get creative if their handle is less suited to a name).
Anyone interested in speculating as to the value of a ship that is effectively a catamaran-hulled schooner, feel free. Courland and I make this stuff mostly for fun, then see where it goes.
Libau and Windau vied with Riga and Königsberg to be the foremost ports on the Eastern side of the Baltic. Of the four, Riga was the most formidable city, the others being relative upstarts. Riga had the natural advantage of being at the mouth of the Düna river, a convenient trade route for goods from Lithuania and the central parts of Russia. Goods that could as easily go overland Jakob eagerly encouraged to pass overland to meet the Baltic at Libau or Windau instead. Further west, the river Windau that gave the Couronian port its name was already convenient for some Lithuanian goods headed for the Baltic, though the Memel river further south was a stronger conduit for trade out of Lithuania - trade that would then pass via Königsberg or Memel (or Memelburg).
Jakob had chipped away at Riga's share of Baltic trade. Memel and Königsberg were ruled by his brother-in-law, and when it came to matters Baltic and matters trade, he got along rather well with his brother-in-law. So neither Prussia nor Courland undermined each other. Prussia/Brandenburg focused somewhat on being pre-eminent in German trade, or broader European trade. Courland focused on developing industry both as its own reward and as a way of supporting its profitable colonial ventures.
Libau was already the most active port for one thing, though: mail. The Martin Maritime Academy voraciously drew letters, books, and learned people from across Europe, sending others back out. The "Invisible College" of learned folk across Europe, or whatever those smart letter-writers called it, either brought letters in or letters out, and that brought more people in, who sent and received still more letters, which drew more people....
The thing was that Courland's high and still-growing religious tolerance, coupled with Libau's tolerance for the most controversial or fanciful ideas, led to a potent blend of intellect and risk. Risk and intellect each had a way of amplifying the other.
William Petty's ideas came in first via mail from England (or Ireland) to Libau, initially on economic matters in correspondence with Jakob and others, and later on any matters for which his wide-ranging brilliance found a worthy pen-pal.
Today, Jakob was looking at one product of that correspondence. Petty's wide-ranging ideas saw Libau shipwrights (and academy students) build the Zwillingkufe, a third or fourth or fifth iteration of a ship design based on one Petty had included in a wide-ranging missive about ships, wind, water resistance, economics, accompanied by some work-in-progress mathematical formulae on each topic.
The first iteration or two were miniature models, fairly faithful to Petty's hull design, built entirely by academy students and tested - unmanned - in the Libau lake. By now, the students' zeal for maximizing whatever features might prove most measurably impactful about the two-hull design had already evolved it into still greater an oddity. The third Zwillingkufe was neither a scaled-up version of the first two unmanned miniatures, nor a scaled-down version of the two-decked vessel in Petty's design. On a long visit to Libau, to Jakob and the Academy, Petty himself needed a moment to process how the changes might affect the craft.
The third ZK (Petty avoided mangling the full name) was out of all proportion with his Double-Bottom idea. The ship was much smaller (he'd intended a gun deck and main deck, but the ZK's deck looked scarcely bigger than a large raft. Petty hadn't focused on sails, because the novel idea was about the hulls and their minimal contact and resistance against the water. After shrinking the scale of the ship from his original design, these mad Courlanders then equipped the ZK with the largest lateen sail they thought it could manage, simply because it was the best way to amplify the testable difference between this design and a single-hull ship. It was still only testing the ideas, but testing different aspects of them.
But oh, what testing.
It had already outraced a monohull with a matching sail, and was now frequently seen zipping around near Libau, advertising Couronian endeavour or madness. Sailors on inbound ships respected its speed, sailors based in Libau saw the abusive sailing it endured in the name of testing and mistook it for deficiency, and shook their heads.
The fourth and fifth ZKs followed, with growing ambition and scale. Watching both grow in the shipyard, enough sailors kept scoffing at the double hulls for it to influence the design - if you couldn't get enough sailors enthusiastic about sailing it, then it needed to be able to handled by a smaller crew. Square-rigging was out, as that took more men. The biggest ZK would be rigged fore-and-aft on both masts, without a topsail, and with a jib as the only staysail never to leave the design. As a ship meant to not tip all that much, its main deck was still lower than it might have been as a monohull. The shipwrights were working on a modest gun deck now - in Courland, passing up an opportunity to experiment was counted as a failure of missed opportunity.
While work continued on that, the fourth ZK was out on the water too. Two-masted like her under-construction sister, but smaller and without guns, designed for up to 4 sails and as few as two sailors.
Jakob, ever impatient for innovation to be taken up and made use of, undercut the sailors' resistance most simply: he asked for ten of the most vocally skeptical sailors in Libau to be invited to tested to serve as his personal crew for a coming voyage on the Baltic, with a bonus in pay to those selected.
When Jakob then selected the fourth ZK as the ship on which he would travel, the academy students suddenly found the third ZK unavailable for their joy rides around the harbour.
But they consoled themselves watching the feats the professional sailors managed on their craft. The sailors had watched the students sail it, now the students watched the sailors. And that reversal of roles gave the ship a nickname: Der Zweifler (the Skeptic), punning on the ship's two hulls (zwei Rümpfe).
- - -
Part two will be a conversation at the destination of Jakob's voyage on Der Zweifler. First correct guess as to the destination gets a character named after them (I reserve the right to get creative if their handle is less suited to a name).
Anyone interested in speculating as to the value of a ship that is effectively a catamaran-hulled schooner, feel free. Courland and I make this stuff mostly for fun, then see where it goes.
Nothing earth-shattering, no deus ex machina stuff.
The two primary benefits of a boat with two narrower hulls (a catamaran) are increased speed and stability. By having less surface area below the waterline, there is less water resistance, enabling more speed for the same amount of propulsion. As I (only lightly) understand, the speed advantage is diluted the more laden the ship is. The wikipedia page I linked gets into payload efficiency and more. Suffice to say, the Zweifler and its big sister won't make Courland suddenly a bigger player in trans-oceanic shipping. Mostly, we're seeing the culture of innovation at play with a product that will still be useful in exile. Also enabling that exile to happen at all.
Sweden: fair guess. Close by, good diplomatic reasons, and covered in the preceding episode, which suits any writer's goldfish-brain. But no.
Britain: Lovely though it might be to send the ship to visit the man whose dreams inspired it back in his homeland, it's not Britain. I don't think Jakob's men would let him risk such a long journey aboard a ship they haven't learned to fully trust yet. (The Baltic still remembers the Vasa, which I'll bring up in part two).
I imagine that fore-and-aft rigged catamarans will be pretty handy around Fernau itself -- making the most of light or unfavorable winds. I've never sailed one myself though: how do they handle very rough seas?
I am going to guess that they are going to Danzig.
Useless for Courland's main objective of hauling goods and slaves over long distances. A little more stability and speed, a little more ability to sail into the wind than a square-rigged ship, a little less cargo capacity. But definitely able to be sailed by fewer sailors, which should help. As I looked at sail plans and more, I realized I'm in some ways giving Courland a weirder, slightly early schooner.
Originally, I was researching naval ramming, and ships built to support that tactic, but dropped that for two reasons. First, ramming tactics at sea were used less in this ear than much before and much after, so there wasn't much to draw from. Second, Courland both TTL and OTL kinda underthinks the whole military side, so naval innovation focusing on battle didn't feel right.
It's an innovation that will be useful for five minutes, and the lasting utility it has will be the butterflies' gift to my future planning. Smaller catamaran/schooners feel like they'd be extremely useful for Africa's wide and/or shallow rivers. Larger ones might find niches in coastal trade and discovery.
Best guess yet. Fairly nearby, mercantile.
Pity it's not Danzig, a Jesuit priest named Livius would be quite plausible.
Alas, but that's all right -- as the moniker indicates I am not, in fact, Livius.
“Send that impudent Jesuit from yesterday’s awkward discussion to Kongo, or Loango, or beyond.”
“Livius, father?”
“No, not Livius. The other one.”
“Bless me, father. I have erred.”
A poor first attempt at a map.
I excerpted this from a larger African waterways map, coloured Fernau and labelled things. The Oyono is today's Cross River, which was explored upriver a bit by even the Portuguese - by now Fernau's boats will likely have explored it farther than any other Europeans have.
The tantalizing Niger estuary top-left may have been explored to a greater total distance, but that distance will have been spread out among the various different channels. It remains unlabelled because it hasn't yet proven more interesting than the Oyono (which is navigable even farther than than it is drawn on this map), the Kamrau (Rio dos Camarões tweaked into German - a wide estuary but not a sexy waterway for navigability inland) or the Zannaga (Sanaga today, Cameroon's greatest waterway), which will have been explored upriver only a bit.
The island bottom-left is Principe. Draw a line from Fernau through it, and that line then passes through São Tomé, Annobón, a lot of ocean, then eventually Saint Helena. That's the Cameroon Line of volcanoes, and it continues onto mainland Cameroon as well.
38. Memel, Prussia, Summer 1655.
Winds of Change - part two
From Libau, Der Zweifler stayed near the coast, heading south. Its journey would be only fifty nautical miles. It was accompanied by two sloops with enough capacity for all the sailors and Kettlers in the event the experimental ship failed en route.
The first stretch of the coast was along the last stretch of the duchy's coastline. Though its border with Lithuania ran more-or-less east-to-west, it curved southward at both ends. In the east, that extended Semigallia right down the left bank of the Düna to Dünaburg; here in the west, it meant Courland extended south of Libau all the way to Polangen and just beyond it.
Where Courland ended, Prussia began. Together, their borders looked like fangs closing on the Baltic, Courland the upper tooth, Prussia the bottom one. The closing of those fangs deprived Lithuania of a Baltic coastline, though Lithuania was near enough the water to hike with a picnic from Lithuania midmorning, enjoy lunch and a swim, and make it back to Lithuanian territory in time for a well-earned late afternoon nap. Just one of many ways strange borders tempted conflict around the Baltic.
A little past Polangen, then, was Prussia. Its coastline was mostly two long sand spits protecting two huge lagoons in the southeasternmost corner of the Baltic. The ancient Kurs whose presence gave Courland its name extended here too (and were peppered through Lithuania's Samogitia region between), so the the more northerly spit was the Couronian Spit, protecting the Couronian lagoon. And just across from where that spit very nearly connected to land again at its northern extremity, the Teutonic Knights had built one of their better castles. As the Knights had, the Prussians called it Memel. The Baltic peoples has various names for it, some resembling Memel and others resembling the Samogitian Klaipieda. Memel was Prussia's second-largest city and port after Königsberg.
When they neared the channel separating the spit from the coast north of it, they shifted to sail with one sloop ahead of and one astern of Der Zweifler, and turned in toward the lagoon and into port like that. For the rest of their stay, the Courland sailors entertained any idle sailors of Memel by continuing to test the limits of what their mad ship of Courland timber and Courland manufacture could do, out on the Couronian lagoon.
The ancient Kurs, once fierce sailors who repelled even vikings from these shores, might have been proud at the coincidence.
- - -
News of the strange boat flying Courland's black crayfish on a field of raspberry red came to Memel Castle on horseback, allowing Duke Frederick William to meet his guests at the pier. He spent the far greater share of his time in Berlin, or at least in Brandenburg. Though Prussia was his, it wasn't home in quite the same way. Both because he spent little time in Königsberg since leaving it a dozen years earlier, and because Prussia, like Courland and Semigallia, was a vassal of Poland. He was the restless lord of two restless lands, Elector of one and Duke of the other. Still other lands gave him other titles. Formalities.
Formality had its place, and the docks of Memel weren't that place. Frederick William got to der Zweifler before any herald could breathe a word of announcement. It had been too long since he'd seen his sister and her husband.
"Charlotte!" He spread his arms wide. "Sister. I trust you are not sea-sick, having sailed so long on that contraption?"
"Little brother!" They embraced. "How good to see you, and so good of you to meet us halfway. I do hope you'll have time for a little sail with us - you'll likely find our ship remarkably stable. I have neither sea-sickness nor morning sickness."
She pulled back to arm's length to let him see her belly, and to take stock of changes in her brother. At thirty-four, his long, light brown hair was not yet thinning, his belly was not yet too stout. But his body language was unmistakable.
"You look good, brother. And," she turned to draw Jakob into their conversation, "you so clearly wish to get on with some business. Lead us."
Frederick William relaxed a smidgen at her recognition.
"You know me well, sister. But I'll spare a moment to remind you you still look better than I do, even in your state. Your husband is doing something right in his care for you."
Jakob smiled.
"Good to see you, Fred, as ever. How fare Luise and your new son?"
"Both well, but despite my great love for my sister, I regret I've brought neither with me to meet you both. Little Charles is too small, the travel too long, and the nobles in Prussia are somewhat unruly. You, on the other hand, seem to have come en famille, mon ami?" He looked at the youths before him.
"Martin von Kettler," said the taller one, his eyes pausing their apparent memorization of the layout of Memel's port to introduce himself. "And my little brother, Joachim. Our little Frederick and baby Charles stayed home with our sisters."
"You're both at least a head taller than I remember you, boys. Anyway. Welcome, all of you, to Memel, and to Prussia. Let's get you all refreshed at the castle, shall we?"
- - -
Joachim, now 7, was content to have a quiet castle to explore. He was never left alone, whether it was his Prussian guide leading him or the Couronian minder following him when he chose directions differently than his guide. However errant that made his exploration of the castle, Martin always managed to find them when he chose to. Joachim needed watching, and Joachim was more confident when he thought Martin was either watching or close at hand.
The rest of the time, Martin drifted back to his parents and his uncle, conspicuously grazing on buns or cheese or fruit or refilling a water glass. Inconspicuously, also listening with fierce attention. A conversation between two powerful and impatient men, and a clever woman they both loved. They got to the point quickly.
"Jakob, there is likely war coming. And even if there isn't war, there's change coming that might prove just as disruptive. I've managed to build up a meaningful army. My lands won't get pushed around, but they're all disconnected, so there's always risk some defences slip somewhere."
"I assume you mean political defences as much as military ones."
"Certainly. Sweden is restless, and between the good they were seen to do at Westphalia and the attention Mad Kristina's drawn to them, they have so many relationships ready to tip for them or against them. Poland elected Charles Ferdinand in the hopes he'd get them on a war footing. You can argue whether he's succeeding at it with how the szlachta are chafing at paying taxes, but you can't argue they're in better shape than when their boy king died."
"I am pleased you feel you are ready for what comes. But, you have also invited us here, so I take it you have a proposal? A change of your own to turn disruption toward advantage?"
"Sister, you see why I like your husband so. His intelligence and impatience feel so kindred to me." He sipped his brandy. "Sweden has approached me with an offer of vassalage for Prussia. I didn't want to accept without us considering whether Courland and Semigallia might also switch suzerains."
Louise Charlotte's thoughts went back to a happy afternoon kicking over chairs in the company of Jakob's ministers. "The Baltic would be a Swedish lake with Danish islands in it. Sweden and Denmark would be at war, with the Dutch aiding the Danes... Britain might join politically, but would be inconsequential militarily...."
Jakob picked up the baton.
"....Poland would be at your throat, whether in Prussia or Brandenburg. I can only assume you'd be spoiling to take Danzig and connect Prussia and Brandenburg?"
Frederick William nodded. "Yes, if and only if that's the path I choose. Or we choose."
"What of Russia?"
"What, indeed? Therein lies another possibility. Suppose we decide we don't favour a Swedish Baltic. Two other options seem interesting to consider. Concessions to whomever needs them, and then an end to vassalage for both of us, at the same time. The neutrality you've invested so much in, tempered by a favour here or there, but otherwise fully-developed, rather than my approach of juggling shifting alliances."
"You said two other options." Louise Charlotte glanced at her husband, then settled her eyes on her brother, waiting. "It couldn't be vassalage to Lithuania. Denmark, perhaps?"
The answer came from elsewhere in the room.
"Russia would surely be glad to have us as Baltic vassals, uncle." All three adults turned to Martin, whose own attention was apparently focused on disassembling the components of a sweet bun.
"Martin. I hadn't realized how well you were spying on us in each of your visits to this room. I imagine once your father lets you loose on Europe, any number of great universities will be glad to test whether they can add to your intelligence."
Martin had heard praise for his mind before, and its ability to muster thoughts expected of someone older. But conjecture about his own life when he would be a few years older was new, and gave him pause.
"Sit with us, Martin. And tell me, what would Russian vassals on the Baltic bring?"
Martin looked to each of his parents, then back to his uncle. "I don't know. It seems harder to guess than it would be with Poland or Sweden."
"Harder to guess. Just so. Harder to guess."
"Brother, have you made enquiries to Russia to this end?"
"Not quite, sister. I make sure I have all sorts of conversations with all sorts of people, always churning. Always ready to turn a corner if needed. But the conversations where it's me suggesting making a move, those I reserve for family, and for trusted allies. Less so those who are harder to guess. Now," he rose. "Shall we take a little stroll for a bit, then see where our thoughts lead us at dinner?"
From Libau, Der Zweifler stayed near the coast, heading south. Its journey would be only fifty nautical miles. It was accompanied by two sloops with enough capacity for all the sailors and Kettlers in the event the experimental ship failed en route.
The first stretch of the coast was along the last stretch of the duchy's coastline. Though its border with Lithuania ran more-or-less east-to-west, it curved southward at both ends. In the east, that extended Semigallia right down the left bank of the Düna to Dünaburg; here in the west, it meant Courland extended south of Libau all the way to Polangen and just beyond it.
Where Courland ended, Prussia began. Together, their borders looked like fangs closing on the Baltic, Courland the upper tooth, Prussia the bottom one. The closing of those fangs deprived Lithuania of a Baltic coastline, though Lithuania was near enough the water to hike with a picnic from Lithuania midmorning, enjoy lunch and a swim, and make it back to Lithuanian territory in time for a well-earned late afternoon nap. Just one of many ways strange borders tempted conflict around the Baltic.
A little past Polangen, then, was Prussia. Its coastline was mostly two long sand spits protecting two huge lagoons in the southeasternmost corner of the Baltic. The ancient Kurs whose presence gave Courland its name extended here too (and were peppered through Lithuania's Samogitia region between), so the the more northerly spit was the Couronian Spit, protecting the Couronian lagoon. And just across from where that spit very nearly connected to land again at its northern extremity, the Teutonic Knights had built one of their better castles. As the Knights had, the Prussians called it Memel. The Baltic peoples has various names for it, some resembling Memel and others resembling the Samogitian Klaipieda. Memel was Prussia's second-largest city and port after Königsberg.
When they neared the channel separating the spit from the coast north of it, they shifted to sail with one sloop ahead of and one astern of Der Zweifler, and turned in toward the lagoon and into port like that. For the rest of their stay, the Courland sailors entertained any idle sailors of Memel by continuing to test the limits of what their mad ship of Courland timber and Courland manufacture could do, out on the Couronian lagoon.
The ancient Kurs, once fierce sailors who repelled even vikings from these shores, might have been proud at the coincidence.
- - -
News of the strange boat flying Courland's black crayfish on a field of raspberry red came to Memel Castle on horseback, allowing Duke Frederick William to meet his guests at the pier. He spent the far greater share of his time in Berlin, or at least in Brandenburg. Though Prussia was his, it wasn't home in quite the same way. Both because he spent little time in Königsberg since leaving it a dozen years earlier, and because Prussia, like Courland and Semigallia, was a vassal of Poland. He was the restless lord of two restless lands, Elector of one and Duke of the other. Still other lands gave him other titles. Formalities.
Formality had its place, and the docks of Memel weren't that place. Frederick William got to der Zweifler before any herald could breathe a word of announcement. It had been too long since he'd seen his sister and her husband.
"Charlotte!" He spread his arms wide. "Sister. I trust you are not sea-sick, having sailed so long on that contraption?"
"Little brother!" They embraced. "How good to see you, and so good of you to meet us halfway. I do hope you'll have time for a little sail with us - you'll likely find our ship remarkably stable. I have neither sea-sickness nor morning sickness."
She pulled back to arm's length to let him see her belly, and to take stock of changes in her brother. At thirty-four, his long, light brown hair was not yet thinning, his belly was not yet too stout. But his body language was unmistakable.
"You look good, brother. And," she turned to draw Jakob into their conversation, "you so clearly wish to get on with some business. Lead us."
Frederick William relaxed a smidgen at her recognition.
"You know me well, sister. But I'll spare a moment to remind you you still look better than I do, even in your state. Your husband is doing something right in his care for you."
Jakob smiled.
"Good to see you, Fred, as ever. How fare Luise and your new son?"
"Both well, but despite my great love for my sister, I regret I've brought neither with me to meet you both. Little Charles is too small, the travel too long, and the nobles in Prussia are somewhat unruly. You, on the other hand, seem to have come en famille, mon ami?" He looked at the youths before him.
"Martin von Kettler," said the taller one, his eyes pausing their apparent memorization of the layout of Memel's port to introduce himself. "And my little brother, Joachim. Our little Frederick and baby Charles stayed home with our sisters."
"You're both at least a head taller than I remember you, boys. Anyway. Welcome, all of you, to Memel, and to Prussia. Let's get you all refreshed at the castle, shall we?"
- - -
Joachim, now 7, was content to have a quiet castle to explore. He was never left alone, whether it was his Prussian guide leading him or the Couronian minder following him when he chose directions differently than his guide. However errant that made his exploration of the castle, Martin always managed to find them when he chose to. Joachim needed watching, and Joachim was more confident when he thought Martin was either watching or close at hand.
The rest of the time, Martin drifted back to his parents and his uncle, conspicuously grazing on buns or cheese or fruit or refilling a water glass. Inconspicuously, also listening with fierce attention. A conversation between two powerful and impatient men, and a clever woman they both loved. They got to the point quickly.
"Jakob, there is likely war coming. And even if there isn't war, there's change coming that might prove just as disruptive. I've managed to build up a meaningful army. My lands won't get pushed around, but they're all disconnected, so there's always risk some defences slip somewhere."
"I assume you mean political defences as much as military ones."
"Certainly. Sweden is restless, and between the good they were seen to do at Westphalia and the attention Mad Kristina's drawn to them, they have so many relationships ready to tip for them or against them. Poland elected Charles Ferdinand in the hopes he'd get them on a war footing. You can argue whether he's succeeding at it with how the szlachta are chafing at paying taxes, but you can't argue they're in better shape than when their boy king died."
"I am pleased you feel you are ready for what comes. But, you have also invited us here, so I take it you have a proposal? A change of your own to turn disruption toward advantage?"
"Sister, you see why I like your husband so. His intelligence and impatience feel so kindred to me." He sipped his brandy. "Sweden has approached me with an offer of vassalage for Prussia. I didn't want to accept without us considering whether Courland and Semigallia might also switch suzerains."
Louise Charlotte's thoughts went back to a happy afternoon kicking over chairs in the company of Jakob's ministers. "The Baltic would be a Swedish lake with Danish islands in it. Sweden and Denmark would be at war, with the Dutch aiding the Danes... Britain might join politically, but would be inconsequential militarily...."
Jakob picked up the baton.
"....Poland would be at your throat, whether in Prussia or Brandenburg. I can only assume you'd be spoiling to take Danzig and connect Prussia and Brandenburg?"
Frederick William nodded. "Yes, if and only if that's the path I choose. Or we choose."
"What of Russia?"
"What, indeed? Therein lies another possibility. Suppose we decide we don't favour a Swedish Baltic. Two other options seem interesting to consider. Concessions to whomever needs them, and then an end to vassalage for both of us, at the same time. The neutrality you've invested so much in, tempered by a favour here or there, but otherwise fully-developed, rather than my approach of juggling shifting alliances."
"You said two other options." Louise Charlotte glanced at her husband, then settled her eyes on her brother, waiting. "It couldn't be vassalage to Lithuania. Denmark, perhaps?"
The answer came from elsewhere in the room.
"Russia would surely be glad to have us as Baltic vassals, uncle." All three adults turned to Martin, whose own attention was apparently focused on disassembling the components of a sweet bun.
"Martin. I hadn't realized how well you were spying on us in each of your visits to this room. I imagine once your father lets you loose on Europe, any number of great universities will be glad to test whether they can add to your intelligence."
Martin had heard praise for his mind before, and its ability to muster thoughts expected of someone older. But conjecture about his own life when he would be a few years older was new, and gave him pause.
"Sit with us, Martin. And tell me, what would Russian vassals on the Baltic bring?"
Martin looked to each of his parents, then back to his uncle. "I don't know. It seems harder to guess than it would be with Poland or Sweden."
"Harder to guess. Just so. Harder to guess."
"Brother, have you made enquiries to Russia to this end?"
"Not quite, sister. I make sure I have all sorts of conversations with all sorts of people, always churning. Always ready to turn a corner if needed. But the conversations where it's me suggesting making a move, those I reserve for family, and for trusted allies. Less so those who are harder to guess. Now," he rose. "Shall we take a little stroll for a bit, then see where our thoughts lead us at dinner?"
Your traditional next-day post, as I will never become fond of writing footnotes.
Hopefully the end of the chapter above didn't feel too sudden. I paused there because the range of implications of this conversation, or at least of the events it touches upon, are vastly greater than those of any preceding chapter. We've always known war would be coming, you've likely all expected it to rather resemble the Deluge, and nothing I've done in this timeline would cause any might-be belligerent on the Baltic to be left out.
After a day or two of thinking, I'll probably add a part three to "Winds of Change" to at the very least show what Jakob's thoughts and intentions are for an uncomfortable near future (yes, I have some broad strokes of it; no, I haven't pinned down the details - this timeline is far from tightly scripted).
A couple details nudged into the above conversation: your present King of Poland is Charles Ferdinand Vasa. I'd said in the Kristina chapter that Poland was still ruled by a Vasa. After our boy king died, we ended up back on track with the same election Sejm as OTL, but with the opposite candidate winning. In TTL, everyone I've had elected to the Polish throne became king only shortly before being scheduled for an OTL death. I've generally respected OTL lifespans, but with Charles Ferdinand having been a pro-war candidate, it might be better to keep him around a bit. Poland is already diminished, if a little better-disciplined.
Martin is just nearing the age where he might be expected to be shipped off to studies abroad, perhaps in Leiden, Leipzig, or Rostock. Age 14 would only be on the younger end of entirely normal to head to university in these times. Perhaps Jakob would have already received serious enquiries about Martin's eventual marriage.
So, dear readers: do kindly suggest to me any interesting fiancée ideas for our precocious heir. Also, I'll admit (again) my familiarity with matters European further removed from the Baltic is rather lesser - this timeline idea spurred me to acquire the hopefully-sufficient knowledge I have of this era, this area. I've extremely lightly touched on Transylvania, but not Austria, not Saxony, nor other places two countries away from my Baltic focus. I would be very grateful for anyone to point out any party there who might be meddlesome in events to come. I'll still be grateful if it comes as a correction after I screw up, but surely mistake prevention earns still more gratitude.
Hopefully the end of the chapter above didn't feel too sudden. I paused there because the range of implications of this conversation, or at least of the events it touches upon, are vastly greater than those of any preceding chapter. We've always known war would be coming, you've likely all expected it to rather resemble the Deluge, and nothing I've done in this timeline would cause any might-be belligerent on the Baltic to be left out.
After a day or two of thinking, I'll probably add a part three to "Winds of Change" to at the very least show what Jakob's thoughts and intentions are for an uncomfortable near future (yes, I have some broad strokes of it; no, I haven't pinned down the details - this timeline is far from tightly scripted).
A couple details nudged into the above conversation: your present King of Poland is Charles Ferdinand Vasa. I'd said in the Kristina chapter that Poland was still ruled by a Vasa. After our boy king died, we ended up back on track with the same election Sejm as OTL, but with the opposite candidate winning. In TTL, everyone I've had elected to the Polish throne became king only shortly before being scheduled for an OTL death. I've generally respected OTL lifespans, but with Charles Ferdinand having been a pro-war candidate, it might be better to keep him around a bit. Poland is already diminished, if a little better-disciplined.
Martin is just nearing the age where he might be expected to be shipped off to studies abroad, perhaps in Leiden, Leipzig, or Rostock. Age 14 would only be on the younger end of entirely normal to head to university in these times. Perhaps Jakob would have already received serious enquiries about Martin's eventual marriage.
So, dear readers: do kindly suggest to me any interesting fiancée ideas for our precocious heir. Also, I'll admit (again) my familiarity with matters European further removed from the Baltic is rather lesser - this timeline idea spurred me to acquire the hopefully-sufficient knowledge I have of this era, this area. I've extremely lightly touched on Transylvania, but not Austria, not Saxony, nor other places two countries away from my Baltic focus. I would be very grateful for anyone to point out any party there who might be meddlesome in events to come. I'll still be grateful if it comes as a correction after I screw up, but surely mistake prevention earns still more gratitude.