18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 37

[cahn]

More diaries of our favorite 18th-century Prussian diary-keeper have been unearthed and have been synopsized!

January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!

Comments

[selenak]

Some replies from the previous post:

these recent Ferdinand-Lehndorff interactions have totally got me wondering if they were friends with benefits too, mind you :P

Alas Ferdinand comes across as utterly straight. Before his marriage, he tries to imitate brother AW with the ladies (and then also crushes on Mina), then he falls in love and married, and it may be due to his shattered health/hypochondriac nature post 7 Years War, but no gossip ever has him cheat on her. (Some gossip claims the reverse, but interestingly enough not Lehndorff, despite not liking Mrs. Ferdinand. Also, there's no gossip as there was with Heinrich and Fritz to connect him with male favourites. And lastly, Lehndorff never swoons about him the way he does about Hotham and Heinrich.

FW 2 and the spiritualist sects: this really was a big thing, in the end to the degree that his very practical mistress, Wilhelmine Encke, decided to claim their dead son (they had a kid together who died as a child, which btw Lehndorff even mentions in this latest bunch of diaries, though without mentioning the mother, he's a snob in that he only mentions FW2's noble-born mistresses) was contacting her from beyond and faked spiritualist sessions where the kid gave her orders to countermand the Rosencreuzer bunch (who wanted to get rid of her and any other influence on FW2 that wasn't them). It worked, but it also worked against her because after FW2's death, it was one of the things FW3 used to claim she'd been in league with the Rosencreuzer (which she had not). Reminder, FW3 hated her and blamed her for his parents' marriage not working out, stripped her of her possessions and sent her to Glogau in Silesia in exile. Wilhelmine did find a young adorer marrying her (a pal of E.T.A. Hoffmann's, btw) there, but once Napoleon had kicked Prussian backsides, she petitioned L'Empereur for the return of her property and the clearing of her name, and what do you know but the French obliged.

Mrs Calderwood's take on Fritz' claim to fight MT to save all Protestants (save the Swedes, one presumes, who are fighting on MT's side): that he has cried out religion, as folks do fire when they want assistance; and that this has not been a sudden impulse of his, but that he has laid his scheme some time before, to make religion a handle to exequte what he intends.

Hats off to Mrs. Calderwood, she's very sharp and insightful indeed.


Huh. So what would the average Scotsperson and Englishperson have said? Would they have actually said the Queen of Hungary?

Well, Andrew Mitchell, Scot in English service, definitely calls her "the Queen of Hungary" in his 7 Years War era papers, except when it's time for the peace negotiations when she's back to being the Empress-Queen. (Which I presume she was before the Diplomatic Revolution when England was still allied with Austria.) Alas I can't recall a mention of her in Boswell's diaries, for Boswell who didn't work for the crown would be a better representative of how "civilian" Scots referred to her. But generally use of "the Queen of Hungary" signals you're Team Fritz, or allied to same.

(I'M also reminded of the Duc de Croy calling her "the Queen of Hungary" in his diaries right until the Diplomatic Revolution, after which point she's the Empress.)

Sidenote: during the long anarchy/Civil War when Maude the mother of later Henry II and her cousin Stephen fought for the English throne in the 12th century, you could also tell her admirers from her foes in the chronicles going by the title they used for Maude. If it was "the Empress" (which she had been in her first marriage, to HRE Henry V.), they were on her side, if it was "the Countess of Anjou" (after her second marriage to Geoffrey Plantaganet), they were Team Stephen.

Zweig at least made the case that there were a billion rumors about MA going around.

There were, but Lehndorff might have had another perspective through Heinrich's very recent visit to France. Where according to Lehndorff MA treated him first somewhat cooly (unsurprisingly, since she suspected him of being secretly there on a mission to wreck the French/Austrian alliance) but ultimately came around to him. My point is, while Heinrich had no reason to feel particularly fond of her, he did see her and her court up close and thus presumably had an opinion on whether she was simply spending too much money or whether she was another case of MESSALINA (tm). Oh, and of course, very recently before that, Lehndorff had met Lafayette, though since he quizzed him about American I doubt they talked about the French court as well.

Lastly, here's a question for salon: what do we think Fritz' motives for denying Lehndorff's spring of 1756 request to emigrate with Charles Hotham Jr. were:

a) If I didn't get to London with my lover, NO ONE gets to go to London with their lover.
b) I don't want Fredersdorf to have to go hunting for another chamberlain for my wife, especially now that he's sick and I have a war upcoming
c) He's known Hotham for how many months? A guy who first shows bad judgment by swooning over my brother Heinrich and then wants to spend the rest of his life for a man he hardly knows clearly can't be trusted to make his own decisions, so I'm making them for him.

(Let's not forget that Lehndorff isn't married yet at this point.)

[mildred_of_midgard]

FW 2 and the spiritualist sects: this really was a big thing

I think Horowski spends some time on it too. If I end up rereading that chapter, I'll try to do a write-up for you, cahn. I remember there being some memorable Horowski quotes (the man has a way with words).

Lastly, here's a question for salon: what do we think Fritz' motives for denying Lehndorff's spring of 1756 request to emigrate with Charles Hotham Jr. were:

a) If I didn't get to London with my lover, NO ONE gets to go to London with their lover.
b) I don't want Fredersdorf to have to go hunting for another chamberlain for my wife, especially now that he's sick and I have a war upcoming
c) He's known Hotham for how many months? A guy who first shows bad judgment by swooning over my brother Heinrich and then wants to spend the rest of his life for a man he hardly knows clearly can't be trusted to make his own decisions, so I'm making them for him.

I think (a) may have been operating at a subconscious level, (b) was likely a practical consideration, but I think the way (a) manifested at the conscious level was to be rationalized as "If *I* can stay and do my duty to the state, Lehndorff can damn well stay and do his duty!"

That's my headcanon.

I was going to say last post, I'm glad at least Fredersdorf got to go to Paris. For his sake, of course, and also because it was probably the next best thing to getting to go himself for Fritz.

And cahn, I agree, the story of signing the last three letters is heartbreaking to me too. :(

Lehndorff replies

[mildred_of_midgard]

Since I didn't manage to get in all my replies before the new post.

I think Heinrich really wrote it just for emotional release, and either later destroyed it himself, or it was confiscated by Hohenzollern censorship after his death. Totally fits with my Unwritten Letters present!

It does! :D

But Mildred, naturally he's in heaven, sees the error of his Voltaire loving ways and hangs out with the greats of German literature instead. We know because various pamphlets tell us so!

Selena, this was hilarious and I kept laughing every time I reread this comment, even BEFORE Cahn came along and took it from hilarious to downright hysterical.

Caaaaahn! I may be a nonreligious American now, but I was raised mainstream American Christian, and I know this song well from my childhood. I'M DYING. :'DDDDD

Wow, Amalie. I didn't realize she had an eye removed!

I think a distorted version of this shows up in Thiébault; didn't he claim she plucked her eyes out for love of Trenck? Or was that one of the later writers?

I don't remember this at all! I'm also not seeing it when searching through salon, though salon is BIG so I may be missing it.

Because I've still got a very thin grasp of chronology -- one day I'll get it straight! -- I always assume now that it's probably someone else with the same name because EVERYONE HAS THE SAME NAME, ahem :P

But they also have three or four different names each, so I spend a lot of time thinking people are different people when they are the same, and equal time thinking people are the same (*cough* Friedrich von Marschall) when they are different!

It's a pity I'm unlikely to become famous, because future salongoers would not have this problem: I have a highly unusual first name, even more unusual last name, and unique combination!

(Still agree with Selena that Melchior Guy-Dickens is just asking for fanfic. ;))

Ah, I didn't realize that was what that meant, thank you!

Oh good, glad it helped! The idea of French gardens was to highlight how, just as Louis XIV dominated France and France dominated Europe, he also dominated nature. (This is why the fountain failures were especially galling, and why Louis XIV was so offended after visiting his minister Fouquet and finding he had a better garden than Louis did!)

I saw quite a few English gardens before I saw any French gardens, and I was shocked the first time I came across a French garden! I'm with Amalie, English gardens are nicer :) (I realize you're saying it was also the style, but also!)

I agree! Haha, though Googling tells me that what I thought was my first disappointing in-person French garden (Hofgarten in Munich) was actually based on the Italian Renaissance garden style, which influenced the French formal garden style but was not the same. Clearly I don't know my garden styles very well!

The Munich English Garden is super great, though, and I was a fan. <3

Re: Lehndorff replies

[selenak]

Selena, this was hilarious and I kept laughing every time I reread this comment, even BEFORE Cahn came along and took it from hilarious to downright hysterical.

I'm chortling on my side of the Atlantic, too, at the reading of the filk. Also because, let's face it, spending eternity with no Voltaire and German writing writers would be Fritz' idea of hell...

Re: French gardens, here's the ultimate Italian-French combo, not Versailles but the Renaissance gardens of Villandry (one of the Loire chateaus):

















Which I found very pretty indeed, but yes, I prefer the English style, too. For some photos of the Munich English Garden in autumnm, see here.

Incidentally, FW2 changing the garden style at Sanssouci from French to English may or may not have been just for aesthetic reasons, of course....

Luzula replies

[mildred_of_midgard]

I was puzzled by the extremely high hedges in parts of the garden at Versailles, which were three or four times the height of a person. Does anyone know the reasoning behind that?

I don't for sure, but from what I've read (having never been there!), Versailles was built on a hill (which limited the ability to expand--Colbert is supposed to have protested), and rooms with a view over the garden were at a premium, so it might have been designed to look good from the palace.

I also know that people took advantage of the high hedges to have secret rendezvous, since privacy was Not A Thing in the palace, but I don't know if that was part of the design intent or just a side effect that came in handy later.

Good question!

that he has cried out religion, as folks do fire when they want assistance; and that this has not been a sudden impulse of his, but that he has laid his scheme some time before, to make religion a handle to exequte what he intends.

AHAHAHAHA, I see this woman has Fritz's number. :D

But then she loses the plot a bit with "not but his intentions are good, but who can depend upon executing their projects?" Fritz's execution was better than his intentions (though with a certain amount of luck and the occasional miracle.)

led his body a gray gate

I had to look this one up in the OED:

Scottish, Irish English (northern), and English regional (northern). to go a grey gate and variants: to become bad or wicked; to come to a bad end.

It seems that "gate" in this sense is Scottish spelling for the word that standard English spells "gait", and the Scottish has a wider variety of meanings, such as "way, road, path," both literal and figurative. In the case of "go a grey gate," it would be the figurative meaning.

the Saxons are protestants, and have a popish king who is otherways provided for ; he has shown he is not able to protect them, so that, if the King of Prussia could make them beleive he has abdicated the crown, they may call a convention of the states, and call a king of their own religion, and let him be head of his own protestant subjects, but not of any body else's.

That is interesting! Alas, Fritz had far more nefarious plans for Saxony, and they did not involve making his neighbor stronger for the sake of a religion he didn't believe in anyway.

Thanks for the write-up!

Re: Luzula replies

[selenak]

Fritz's execution was better than his intentions (though with a certain amount of luck and the occasional miracle.)

Heinrich: And with his exploited co-workers saving his butt, cough, cough.

It’s interesting that despite seeing through the “I’m doing this for the Protestant cause” excuse, she still seems to think Fritz letting the Saxons vote for a Protestant (client-?)King is an option.

Fritz: busy checking out the Saxon loot instead.

Belated Penny Dropping

[selenak]

Mes amies, it just occured to me that the Cardinal de Rohan, infamous dupe of the Diamond Necklace Affair, whom Lehndorff has heard only good things about but whom the MA biographers disapprove of, is none other than the original author of the "She cried but she took" gibe about MT & Poland which was ascribed to Fritz in later centuries (and used to be one of Mildred's favourite quotes of his). (Discovery courtesy of Jürgen Luh and gambitten.)

...no wonder that a) he had a stellar reputation in Prussia, and b) was decidedly unpopular in Austria.

Re: Belated Penny Dropping

[mildred_of_midgard]

Aha! Yes, it sounds like he is not Team MT by any means, and that might indeed explain a lot. Good find!

Religious vocabulary question

[mildred_of_midgard]

I feel like there's a technical word for when you become an abbess/abbot and formally assume your responsbilities/membership at the abbey, but I'm drawing a blank. Like "inaugurate," but I suspect that's not it. (Schmidt translated whatever the French word is as eingeführt, but unfortunately, I have to write this essay in English.)

Context: Amalie is going off to Quedlinburg in 1756 to be ______ [inaugurated] as abbess, after which she will return to court.

ETA: Formey gives it as "inauguration" in French. Is it "inauguration" in English? cahn, do you (or D) know?

Re: Religious vocabulary question

[luzula]

Don't know if this is helpful, but on the "inaugurate" entry, the OED has a quote:
1637–50 J. Row Hist. Kirk Scotl. (Wodrow Soc.) 261 They behoved to be doctorated ere they were inaugurated bishops.

Which shows that it is at least used for religious offices?

Lafayette

[mildred_of_midgard]

I couldn't resist sharing this quote from Hero of Two Worlds, the bio I recced to cahn a while back and finished today. Context: French political upheavals in the 1820s, aka "France still can't decide what kind of government it wants":

The popular banker Jacques Laffitte later recalled a conversation with the doctrinaire deputy Pierre Paul Royer-Collard. Laffitte said Lafayette was not only a leader in the conspiracies, but actually seemed to be *trying* to be accused publicly. “Is he crazy?” asked Royer-Collard. On the contrary, Laffitte said, Lafayette was “the wisest, the most reasonable, the sharpest man you will ever meet… insurrection according to him is the most sacred of duties.” Royer-Collard replied, “I’m not sure. Lafayette is a monument wandering around in search of its pedestal. If on the way he should find a scaffold or the chair of president of the Republic, he would not give two cents for the choice between them.” Laffitte later told Lafayette about this conversation and Lafayette laughed and said it was true.

selenak, I don't suppose you want to read this? It's as readable as Goldstone, and any summary by you will be a million times better (and more likely to exist) than a summary by me!

Re: Lafayette

[selenak]

I would, but I have a crowded life right now and no idea when I'll be able to summarize it for salon!

Polish Succession

[mildred_of_midgard]

I still don't have a good source on Manuel of Portugal's life, but I picked up a couple more tidbits in my reading that contradict a point as I originally reported it.

According to a book on the War of the Polish Succession I'm reading, Manuel was actually the first compromise choice for the next king of Poland that Charles VI and Anna Ivanovna were planning to support when August the Strong died, and they had a tentative agreement to that effect. Then I remembered that Horowski talks at some length about the options for August's successor in "Grumbkow trinkt," and sure enough, Manuel/Emanuel is mentioned.

There [in Berlin], people had long wondered who should land the Polish throne, after the Portuguese Infant Emanuel, originally intended by the three eagles [Russia, Austria, Prussia] turned out to be useless. No sooner had Don Emanuel discovered that he would find himself in the middle of an Austro-French-Russian-Prussian-Saxon-Spanish-Italian war of everyone against everyone else, than he had resigned his candidacy.

Some call that useless, Manuel, others (me) would call it sensible!

Also, since Selena asked, another example of a royal traveling incognito successfully. When the French decided to try for Stanislas Leszczynski, father-in-law of Louis XV, as their client king on the throne of Poland, they first had to get him to Poland. He said he was quite happy not to go, but! The powers that be in France decided that needs must.

Once the debate over whether he had abdicated in 1709 was settled in favor of "Of course not!", the French sent a guy disguised as Stanislas to Brittany and thence to Copenhagen by ship, and Stanislas himself in a coach across the Holy Roman Empire, disguised as a private secretary to his traveling companion. Both incognitos were successful: everyone, including his escort, thought the random guy was Stanislas, and no one recognized Stanislas until he announced he was in Warsaw and ready to be elected!

I'm starting to think that, as with Bonnie Prince Charlie, deposed monarchs make better incognito travelers, as they have at least some idea how to pose as a convincing random noble. (And Stanislas, of course, was born a random noble and only had a brief acquaintance with the throne of Poland.) I mentioned Marie Antoinette's nightly excursions to masked balls in Paris, but I forgot to mention the most obvious case: the flight to Varennes, a conspicuous failure to remain incognito, with fatal consequences.

Re: Polish Succession

[selenak]

Quite. Poor Antoinette really was bad at this, and Louis was worse. I was going to add that they had the odds against them in that they were travelling in an extremely hostile situation, but then I recalled Charles II pulling off the same feat way better, and he had a physical obstacle they did not - Marie Antoinette didn't look different from your avarage noble lady, she wasn't especially tall or small or especially striking in her coloring, whereas Charles was far taller than average (as mentioned in all the "Wanted!" posters) and with his black hair and (relatively) dark skin had unusual coloring for England, too. (Not to mention sore feet, given he had to wear far too small shoes.) (Since he accomplished his flight in the previous century, I did not mention him before.)

deposed monarchs make better incognito travelers, as they have at least some idea how to pose as a convincing random noble.

Though Charles was only just starting to learn this, since up to this point (when he'd fled for his life), he had always been the Prince of Wales, and his parents really weren't of a mind for their kids to pass as random nobles.

Incidentally, I don't know whether I mentioned it before, but one of the best historical movies I know deals with the night of Varennes; I've reviewed it here.

The Man in the Iron Mask

[mildred_of_midgard]

Horowski's take! Since I'm rereading some chapters.

Now, I osmosed from pop culture that we didn't know who the Man in the Iron Mask was, so I was very surprised to see Horowski making definitive statements, but he seems to have documentary evidence on his side. And I don't think we've talked about this episode, so here's my write-up.

Obligatory Fritzian Connection
Reminder that Fritz and Wilhelmine were (Wo)Man in the Iron Mask geeks:

On a more fun note, my checking out individual letters from Wilhelmine's France & Italy travel correspondance years post reconciliation let me discover that she and Fritz were "Who was the Man in the Iron Mask?" geeks. So when she's travelling along the Cote d'Azure (having lunch in "a little town named Cannes"), she's visiting the Island St. Marguerite where the Man in the Iron Mask was supposedly kept, visits his cell and interviews people who swear their parents interacted with him. And gets this bit of sensational news: "(Feri) and others who saw him say that they believe it was a woman, that he had tiny and smallboned hands, and that the skin was very smooth and soft, despite being a bit bronze." The woman in the Iron Mask! That's a new one for me. Wilhelmine finishes her interview report to Fritz by saying the common most featured theories are that it was either the Comte de Vermandois (illegitimate son of Henri IV, i.e. Louis XIV bastard uncle, literally) or "the first Dauphine", by which she means this lady.

Who was the Man in the Iron Mask?
Horowski: The Man in the Iron Mask was a servant named Eustache Danger. Or Eustache who came from the French city Angers (i.e. d'Angers), because it's the 17th century and what is spelling and who cares about servant names, anyway?

Horowski: Certainly not historians, who called him Eustache Dauger for a long time.

Mildred: Wikipedia still calls him that, where it says "Eustache Dauger" was a pseudonym for who-knows-what real name.

Crime and Punishment
Eustache was involved in the top secret Treaty of Dover between Charles II and Louis XIV in 1670.

I'll repeat Selena's write-up about said treaty:

Charles' favourite sister Minette, married to Louis' brother Philippe the Gay to their mutual misery, was kind of C2's unofficial ambassador at Versailles. (There were official English envoys, of course, but Minette has the one entrusted with the very very secret thing about to unfold.) So Minette brokered the Treaty of Dover, the official part of which was a mutual aid and assistance contract where Charles promised to side with Louis against the Dutch. (Whom he'd been warring with unsuccesfully before but then had reconciled with, not least because his nephew William of Orange (the most famous to hold that name, the future King of England) had come of age and was rapidly turning into a thorn in Louis' side (as in, no more willing to let Louis run rampant over the Netherlands than his regents had been). The unofficial, secret part of the Treaty of Dover was that in exchange of a considerable yearly pension from Louis, Charles promised to convert to Catholicism "if the state of the Kingdom permitted it" and if the expected uproar would happen would accept Louis' troops to help quell said uproar in England. As it happened, Charles converted about five minutes before he died, after years and years of cash from Louis without converting or making the slightest move to do so, thereby technically fulfilling his promise but as to whether he meant it... BTW, since his subjects couldn't be sure he'd do this, of course had this treaty been known to the public there'd been Civil War, Part II. It was an incredible risky thing to do. (And a reason why this additional clause to the Treaty of Dover was so super secret, not just on the English but also on the French side. Minette and Louis knew, but Philippe did not. (And did majorly resent his wife being sent on diplomatic missions to England anyway.)) However, it did pay off for Charles, not just in terms of having more cash, but having more independence from Parliament.

To repeat: EXTREMELY SECRET Treaty of Dover.

We don't know what Eustache did, exactly, but we know he could read and write, and we know that he "had seen something he shouldn't have seen," and we know he got locked up immediately after a flurry of secret letters went back and forth between Minette and Charles and some disappeared.

Conclusion presented by Horowski: Eustache probably stole or copied one or more of these letters for the unknown person he worked for.

Eustache is Not a Royal (No, Really)
Now, how do we know Eustache was actually a servant and not a secret half-brother of Louis XIV or even a nobleman? Well, when he's locked up, he ends up waiting on another prisoner. And while Ancien Regime France was happy to lock you up for life or murder you brutally, the one thing they WOULD NOT DO was force someone highborn to act as a SERVANT, omg, can you IMAGINE. The degradation! It would endanger the foundation on which society was built!

Therefore: Eustache Danger = born into the servant class.

Horowski also makes a snarky comment that when Eustache's new master Fouquet (more on him below) believes it's very important to teach servants to read, both because he himself is losing his eyesight and because being able to read is important! Eustache might have harbored some private skepticism, since if he'd been illiterate like the other servant before Fouquet got a hold of him, he wouldn't have ended up in prison in the first place!

A valid point.

Cast of Characters
So why all the mystery about Eustache? Well, that's a long story, but as Horowski says in this chapter:

Prisoner 1: So how did you end up here, Prisoner 2?
Prisoner 2: It's kind of a long story.
Prisoner 1: Well, you know, we really have a lot of time.

Prisoner 1 is Fouquet, disgraced top minister of Louis XIV and current master of Eustache (who does not yet wear a mask).

Prisoner 2 is the Comte (future Duc) de Lauzun, whose life story is its WHOLE own thing, but we'll just say for now that he was a courtier with a sense of adventure, and we may talk more about his life and adventures at some point.

Fouquet and Lauzun are both locked up in the fortress of Pignerol, which is near the border between France and Savoy. Fouquet and Lauzun are not supposed to meet, in part because Fouquet's servant is Eustache, and Eustache has this secret that Lauzun isn't supposed to know. But Lauzun bores a hole in his fireplace and sneaks into Fouquet's room, and they chat and get to know each other.

Meanwhile, Saint-Mars is the governor of the prison, who has to deal with things like:

1. Lauzun breaking out before getting caught, meaning Saint-Mars now has to get up in the middle of every night to check all prisoners are in place before the gates are opened for commerce at dawn.

2. The French gov't getting word of Lauzun meeting Fouquet and the "Shit! Shit! Emergency coverup time!" reaction.

3. Being stuck in the middle of nowhere, because D'Artagnan*, head of the Musketeers, got the honor of escorting prime minister Fouquet to prison, but he got to delegate actually staying there and minding him to Saint-Mars, while D'Artagnan went back to Paris, the happening place.

* Yes, that D'Artagnan, although Dumas heavily fictionalized his story.

In conclusion, Saint-Mars is not happy with his job. This will become a plot point later.

Keeping Secrets
So why does Fouquet get to talk to Eustache and learn his secret, while Lauzun doesn't? Because the government can tell Fouquet he'd better keep that secret to himself, or he's not getting out of prison.

Lauzun, on the other hand, is getting out no matter what, because he has a big inheritance coming his way that Louis wants for his illegitimate son, and Lauzun won't agree to sign it over. This is a WHOLE other story of its own, but the point that Horowski makes is that the Ancien Regime might deprive you of your liberty with the wave of a royal hand, but they couldn't deprive you of your property so easily, since one threatened only the less important individual liberties, and the other threatened the welfare of the all-important clan.

So when Lauzun gets wind of Eustache's secret, now it's coverup time. Once Lauzun and Fouquet get more freedom, Eustache gets moved into hiding and Lauzun is told that he's been set free. This is meant to convince Lauzun by implication that Eustache's secret is either not important or totally made up by him, as an indirect way of getting Lauzun not to talk about it once he goes free.

Then he and Fouquet are released. Notice that Louis is more willing to take the risk of letting word of the Treaty of Dover get out than he is to lose that inheritance for his illegitimate son (the Duc du Maine) by Madame Montespan.

Changing Political Winds
In 1685, Charles II dies, having converted on his deathbed, and the Treaty of Dover is pretty irrelevant. Three years later, William III invades and James II is overthrown and it's really irrelevant.

So Eustache should really be free to go now. There's nothing more for the French or English to hide.

Saint-Mars and the Quest for Job Satisfaction
But! Remember that Saint-Mars, governor of the prison, is stuck in Pignerol in the middle of nowhere, with no prospect of advancing his career. And now that Fouquet and Lauzun are gone, Saint-Mars doesn't even have any important prisoners to add to his prestige.

But he has one important advantage. It's been 20 years, and everyone who knew or cared about who Eustache is or why he's in prison is either dead or gone. So Saint-Mars can tell people whatever he wants.

In order to make it look like he's got charge of this really important prisoner with a really sensitive secret, Saint-Mars starts treating Eustache deferentially. He also steps up the security measures, acting like it's life or death if anyone finds out who the prisoner is.

When he gets an order to move to another prison (this is the island off the coast of Provence that Wilhelmine visited), Saint-Mars has Eustache transported in a hermetically sealed chair, accompanied by an escort of guards, and treated like a prince. Saint-Mars keeps emphasizing to all and sundry on the journey, in all the villages and towns they pass through, that it is of the utmost importance that no one ever identify the prisoner.

Rumors start flying. People claim to have been eyewitnesses to Saint-Mars helping a man with a steel mask out of the chair.

Horowski: If there was an metal mask at all, and this wasn't just a game of telephones ("stille Post" in German, as I learned), then this was the only time he wore it. The mask that Saint-Mars made him wear for the rest of his life was a black velvet mask, such as was fashionable at court to protect your complexion.

Upon arrival, Saint-Mars promptly has half the prison rebuilt to be worthy of its new prisoner, whom he addresses as "my prince."

After he's built up enough hype, Saint-Mars switches from extreme security measures to personally escorting visitors to come stare at the man in the (black velvet) mask, who is now a tourist attraction.

Move to the Bastille
Then one day, Saint-Mars gets an unexpected reprieve from life in the provinces: he gets appointed governor of the Bastille. Return to Paris!

But now that he's built up his entire life around Eustache, an annoyed Saint-Mars has to write back,

"But it's EXTREMELY IMPORTANT that I bring my EXTREMELY IMPORTANT prisoner with me, right??"

The authorities in Paris, who have long since forgotten all about poor Eustache: "Sure, bring whatever prisoners you see fit."

So of course Saint-Mars makes a *big production* of the entry of Eustache into the Bastille, and continues addressing him as "my prince" in front of witnesses.

Eustache Danger (or d'Angers) dies there, in 1703, leaving life and entering into legend.

Pignerol Coda
Horowski adds that Pignerol, the prison on the Savoy border where most of the action of this chapter took place, was ripped down by Louis XIV so that not one stone stood on another. Why? Because in one of the many peace treaties, Victor Amadeus was granted this territory. But since you could set your watch by his side-switching*, Louis didn't want any of the important fortresses in VA's hands the next time Savoy ended up at war with France again, so he had all the fortresses, including Pignerol, torn down before handing over the territory to VA.

* Horowski's phrasing and part of the reason I just had to read up on VA.

And this is the story of how all the mystery and hype around the Man in the Iron Mask and whether Louis XIV was really the legitimate heir was apparently because...Saint-Mars was bored.

Re: The Man in the Iron Mask

[luzula]

And this is the story of how all the mystery and hype around the Man in the Iron Mask and whether Louis XIV was really the legitimate heir was apparently because...Saint-Mars was bored.

Heh. This is the kind of thing that would never happen in fiction!

Reading requests and recs

[mildred_of_midgard]

Requests:

1. The next time you have time to summarize a book for salon, selenak, I would like to request Evgenii Anisimov's Empress Elizabeth: her reign and her Russia, 1741 - 1761.

As you know, since the beginning of salon I've badly wanted a modern Russian perspective on Elizaveta's reign, and this is the most promising I've found in English translation. I would totally read it myself and not ask you, except it's an out of print limited edition that has proved impossible to acquire so far, no matter how much money I'm willing to throw at it. (I will let you know if that changes between now and when you have time.)

The author has written two other books that I've read: one is personality-focused (see below), and the other is politics-focused (The Reforms of Peter the Great), so this one could go either way in terms of readability.

2. I continue to hope for a summary of the Lafayette bio when you have time, but it's less important, as I've already read it and cahn might.

Recs:

1. Benjamin Kaplan's Cunegonde's Kidnapping (Kindle, Stabi via interlibrary loan only, sadly), the true story of a religious mini-war that broke out on the Dutch-German border in 1762 over which faith a baby with a Calvinist mother and a Catholic father should be baptized in. I can recommend it for narrative readability, and it might be of interest to both of you!

2. Evgenii Anisimov's Five Empresses (Kindle, Stabi) is a gossipy take on the lives of of Catherine I, Anna Ivanovna, Anna Leopoldovna, Elizaveta, and Catherine the Great. Hardly any politics or military history pokes its head in, selenak, it might be your thing. ;) The author is openly opinionated in the way that Acton and Orieux are opinionated, and he often stops to address his readers. cahn, this one didn't blow me away as much as Massie's Peter bio did, so this is more a Selena rec.

(I suspect the prose style suffers a little from translation, it's probably more elegant in Russian, but the author's personality still shows through.)

Request for a rec:

1. Anything good on Louis XI, either in English or German?

Re: Reading requests and recs

[mildred_of_midgard]

Elizaveta of Russia is a salon kindred spirit, per Anisimov.

Elizabeth enjoyed reading messages from envoys, especially those that gave a detailed description of the ups and downs and of court life and the intrigues going on at the courts to which they had been appointed.

Envoys are where it's at, even the Czarina thinks so!

Also:

The empress read foreign newspapers with special curiosity. Excerpts from them were made for her so that she could keep up with the most important European rumors and scandals.

cahn: the Empress of our salon!

I must say, I'm tickled by the idea that Elizaveta must have been having excerpts made of many of the same rumors and scandals that we're having excerpts of made!

Heinrich

[mildred_of_midgard]

Another tidbit from Anisimov. He quotes from a letter from Catherine the Great, preparing for the arrival of Heinrich. She wrote to Field Marshal Saltykov*:

I should tell you one more thing: at first sight Prince Heinrich appears to be an extremely cold person, but you should disregard this coldness, since it will thaw.

I found this extremely interesting, in light of selenak telling us about all those authors (e.g. Koser, Klepper) inexplicably writing Heinrich as a cold fish, unemotional human clockwork.

BUT. There's still really no excuse, because an author is not someone meeting him for the first time and having only five minutes of data to go on, but someone with access to a lifetime of information like, say, anti-Fritz diatribes, country palaces for Kaphengst, constant fighting and making up again with Mara, a giant obelisk...Like Catherine says, the impression of coldness wears off.

Still, it makes me wonder if there are other primary sources out there describing Heinrich as extremely cold.

*Not the Saltykov who was her lover and the putative father of Paul, but the cousin who had handed Fritz his worst defeat at Kunersdorf.

Re: Heinrich

[selenak]

Still, it makes me wonder if there are other primary sources out there describing Heinrich as extremely cold.

Well, there's Fritz in the year after Marwitz, and Lehndorff whenever he's convinced it's over between them.... More seriously, I don't recall it from early envoy reports (say late 1740s/early 1750s), but then these are more likely to mention him in conjunction with AW, as in, "AW nice but not brilliant like Fritz, will listen to/get dominated by younger brother Heinrich", and don't talk about his temper (hot or cold). Post 7 Years War mentions depend on the author. Certainly and for good reasons are memoirist like Sophie von Voltz, who was friends with Mina, thought he was godawful and cold and she couldn't abide him. Otoh you have the Lafayette quote which you've found which could hardly be more complimentary. And from what I recall of the descriptions from his first visit to France, there's one by a salonnière which emphasizes that the first impression is off putting ugliness (i.e. the physical) but then once you talk to him you're struck by his conversation and intelligence and charmed etc. Gertrud Schmeling Mara certainly doesn't describe him as cold, but then, as Mrs. Mara, she wouldn't.

Mind you, I can well believe Heinrich was the type to come across as cold at first to strangers, since especially in the later half of his life, strangers are bound to start the conversation by telling him how wonderful Big Brother is. And let's not forget, even Lehndorff, arguably the person who felt most passionate about Heinrich on the planet, did not fall in love with him when they first met but about two years later. While young Lehndorff befriended the Divine Trio as a whole, I did have the impression the one he immediately took to was the approachable AW (and not just because AW was at this point the future monarch and thus befriending him seemed a smart thing to do for a young courtier). So maybe young Heinrich, too, was distant when talked to at first.

Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I

[selenak]

On Mildred's special request, a write up for this diary. The edition Stabi loans out is the updated one, meaning the original prefaces etc. by Jan Peters, where he didn't know yet Peter Hagendorf's name - because the diary writer never identifies himself by name - and talks about him only as "our mercenary" - "unser Söldner" are theree, but also the later afterwords reporting on the discoveries since. (Because Peter Hagendorf does identify his wives and children and a great many other people by names and often places, his identity could eventually be tracked down.) Now, the diary as it exists today is probably a transcript made in the final years of the war. Which we know because we even know the papermill where Hagendorf got the paper from, and because his handwriting through the decades until the final two or so war years is consistent, and then starts to change (as happens when you make entries at different points in time. So whether Hagendorf had a diary/a collection of notes now lost which he transcribed (and added to) in the final war years, or whether he wrote the majority of entries based on his memories, we don't know, but having read them (twice) now, I think it's the former, because the phrasing actually isn't one of hindsight. (When people look back with the knowledge of how events would turn out, I think it's almost inevitable that this colors how they report developments.) So I'm with the theory that says that Hagendorf when the war was winding down and he didn't yet know whether he'd be able to adjust, but he also finally had surviving children, wanted to both reassure himself and keep his history for them, and so he bought new paper - which he stitched together himself, the pyhsical diary isn't a book with blank pages into which he wrote, stuff like that wasn't made in the 30 Years War, but paper which was then stitched together by hand - and transcribed the notes he'd made through the years.

Now, this isn't a diary comparable to the ones we know from the 18th or 19th century and certainly not from the 20th, with long introspective explorations of one's feelings. The best comparison I can make is to another 30 Years War diary, by Abbot Maurus Friesenegger of the Monastery Andechs (which btw I've visited, it's near Munich). That one starts out as a regular type of chronicle the way they were written in monasteries through the centuries, and then as the war heats up becomes more and more focused. It also starts out with clear heroes and villains (Catholics = good, obviously, since it's an Abbot doing the writing, Protestants are scum), and then when the countryside around Andechs gets ravaged by Catholic warlords as well, this changed to a "war is evil" central perspective, with a focus on the suffering of the civilians (not that the term "civilians" was used back then). Meanwhile, Peter Hagendorf most likely starts out a Protestant who mostly, though not always, fights in Catholic armies. When he does switch to the Swedish side for a while, it's not for ideological reasons, but for practical ones, and when he does return to his old (Catholic) regiment, ditto. He does believe in God and an afterlife (as can be seen from the entries dealing with the deaths of his wives and children), but seems to be utterly uninterested in dogma, and if he has an opinion as to who is right or wrong in this war, he doesn't share it. There's the occasional snark - as when during a brief campaign in French territory, they come across a church where a candle has supposedly burnt for centuries, and Hagendorf notes that this may believe who wants, he doesn't - but, for example, he does not doubt for a moment that there are witches, and the only thing to do with them is to burn them. (Reminder, in the German territories the 30 Years War coincided with the height of the witch persecution, and it was absolutely brutal; in my hometown with a population of ca. 8000, over 1000 were burned within 5 years. And unlike in England or later the colonies where they were mostly hanged, witches in German states really were burned. This became a problem because of the prizes for wood, and the solution was to make the families of the accused pay for it.) An atheist or unusually progressive thinker, he's not. Basically, being a soldier is his job, it's how he survives, and he's indifferent to the reasons why this war is fought.

Something he notes is that in the later stages of the war, the farmers and rural population, sick of being ravaged by both sides, start to fight back; Hagendorf himself at one point gets beaten up and mugged by farmers who have banded together. This is presented in a matter-of-fact way, without cursing the farmers. (Though he does organize some fellow soldiers and goes after them to get his stuff back later.). Basically, it is what it is. It's interesting that while like most soldiers in this war, he lives more and more by plunder the longer the war takes, he pays innkeepers (and notes down particularly good inns) when he stays longer somewhere (usually in the winter). He also pays for what we'd call medical expenses. For example, when his second wife takes months to recover from the latest childbirth. Whom he pays in this case is the local executioner's wife. Now I knew that executioners often earned additional income by providing medical services to the poor part of the population (who couldn't afford a doctor), because, let's face it, they knew better than most of their contemporaries how the human body worked by taking it apart, but I didn't know executioner's wives also provided such services. (This one must have been good at it, too; Mrs. Hagendorf recovered.) Anyway, these kind of expenses are also noted in the diary, as is generally how much or little Hagendorf earns or spends, but it is a diary, not a calendar. At times he's interested in the landscapes around him, though he limits himself to the adjectives "lovely" or "beautiful". Or if there's a particular good wine or bread to be had in the area, he notes it down. (The bread thing applies to the early stages of the war, when a young Hagendorf is impressed by black Pumpernickel bread. In the later stages, if he and his wife wanted to have fresh bread, they had to bake it themselves, if they could.)

He's familiar with the myths surrounding the Nibelungenlied, which I found intriguing, because generally the assumption is that after the Middle Ages, awareness of those stories disappeared until they were rediscovered in the 19th century. But Peter Hagendorf when mentioning coming through Mantua notes down that the grave of Old Hildebrand is there, how it looks, and that Hildebrand and his son who fought here are depicted on their two big stone horses in the middle of the market square. I mean, he's wrong as to whom those sculptures depicted, but clearly he knows the story of Hildebrand and Hadubrand and applies it to what he's seeing. And when he's in Switzerland, he mentions the Wilhelm Tell legend.

Both times he marries he uses the same phrase "ehrtugendsame" - "the honorable and virtuous" for the bride in question before her name, just as every time, one of the children (usually as babies) dies, there's the phrase "God grant her/him a merry resurrection" - "eine fröhliche Auferstehung" - which I take it must have been common at the time, as we use the phrase "rest in peace". Compared to later ages, these entries on personal tragedies seem Spartan, but to me the way he notes the birth and death of every baby by name is touching by itself; they lived only a few months or sometimes days, but apparantly he was determined not to forget them.

One of the most (now) famous entries comes at the siege of Madgeburg, which resulted in one of the most brutal sackings of the war. Hagendorf got wounded early on, in fact this was the most serious wounding he received in three decades of war, which aside from behing lethally dangerous was a serious economic problem because it meant he couldn't participate in the sacking, and as mentioned, plunder was how most of the soldiers supported themselves, since their payment appeared with months of delay, if at all. So his (first) wife went in his stead after the fall of the town. The entry, which is also one of the rare occasions where Hagendorf lets on how he feels about a place getting sacked, possibly because he originally came from near Magdeburg, and I'll quote it at length because it paints a vivid picture and gives a good impression of the diary style:

On May 20th, we started in seriousness and stormed and conquered. I took part in the storming and made it into the town without any damage. But in the town, at the Neustädt gate, I was shot through my body two times, those were my spoils.
This happened on May 20th in the year 1631 early in the morning at 9.
Afterwards I was brought to the camp, and was patched up, for I was shot once though the stomach, with the shot doing through entirely, and secondly through both shoulders so that the bullet was in my shirt. So the surgeon bound my hands on my back so he could use his chisel. So I was brought to my tent, half dead.
I was heartily sorry that the town was so terribly burned, because it was a beautiful town, and because it belonged to my fatherland.
So when I was bound up, my wife went into the town, despite it burning everywhere, and she wanted to find a cushion and material to bind me and where I could lie upon. So our sick child was also lying with me. Then there was screaming in the camp taht the houses were all falling down, so that many soldiers and their wives who went to plunder remained there. So I was worried more about the wife and the sick child than about my own damage. But God has preserved her. After one and a half hours, she came with an old woman from the town. She guided her with herself, it was the wife of a boatsman and she helped her carrying linen and beddings. So she brought me a huge jug full of wine and also found two silver belts and clothing, which I could later sell for twelve Taler at Halberstadt. In the evening, my comrades came and each donated something to me, a taler or half a taler.
On May 24th, Johan Philipp Schütz was presented to us. I and all the other wounded were transfered to Halberstadt. There we were given quarters in the villages. From our Regiment 300 were quartered in a village, and they all were healed.
Here I got a really good host, who didn't gave me beef but veal, young doves, chicken and birds. So after seven weeks I was sound and healthy again.
Furtherly my little daughter died, Elisabeth. God grant her a merry resurrection

Because history is like that, both of Hagendorf's wives are called Anna, so I'll refer to the second one as Anna Maria to differentiate them. When Anna dies in 1733, she does so after another birth and death (of a daughter named Barbara), and Hegendorf notes:

God grant her and the child and all the children a merry resurrection, Amen. For in the eternal blessed life we will see ach other agan. So now my wife and all her children have passed away. ("sind entschlafen", literally "have fallen into sleep forever".) Their names are these:

Anna Stadler from Traunstein in Lower Bavaria
Children
The first one we couldn't baptize
the other three all have enjoyed the blessed Christian baptism
The mother
Anna Stadlerin
The Children
The first NN
Anna Maria
Elisabeth
Barbara
God grant them eternal calm, 1633.

Between wives, it's noticable that Hagendorf drinks more, and gambles. Typical entry:

From Straubing to Regensburg. On my way, I received two beautiful horses, for I had a good boy, Bartelt by name. He organized both of them for me.
From Regensburg to Dinkelsbühl. Here I met a cousin of mine, named Adam Jeligan, a bellmaker. With him, I drank away one of the horses. We were very merry. For three days. Then the boy cried for the horse.

Poor Bartelt. Though I dare say the horse was safer with the bellmaker than with the army? The rest of Hagendorf's possessions don't stay long, either, for:

On our way, my boy remained sick in Aalen. When he got healthy again and wants to go to me, he was robbed of everything. For he had all my linnen which I got in Landshut with him. In the night when we wanted to attack and where we all had to be battle ready, it got stolen along with my passport and all I had. So all my plunder was gone and my passport which was most important to me. But it was gone.

Something as casually mentioned when Hagendorf is between wives are entries like "here I got a young girl" (whom he let go again, trading her for new linnen); this gets less diary attention than cattle ("my boy got a beauitiful cow out of it; it was sold at Wimpfen for 11 Taler"), but is of course one of the dreadful aspects of not only this war - the ever present rape. (At least I assume Hagendorf didn't ask the girl, anymore than his boy asked the cow.)

An example for the entires re: the farmers who had it with the passing armies:

On July 4th, we arrived at the French border and marched past a castle. In it were seven farmers. They fought against the entire army So we laid fire on the castle and burned it down with the farmers in it.
Here a thousand man on foot and a thousand five hundred on horseback were commanded to go to a village. I was there as well. The farmers in the village cemetary fought back so fiercely that we couldn't do anything without canons. So we left again, for there were a thousand farmers in it. So we burned down the vllalge.

Yeah, that. As one of the essays in the volume notes, most of the soldliers probably had come from such a rural background, but you're looking in vain for a sense of "these were my people" or "I was once like them". The army - all armies, including their entourages - on the one hand, and the not-army humanity on the other; the rift is incredible. When I say "entourage", I don't just mean the wives or the army prostitutes; you get the impression entire families of the wives went along as well. (Presumably on the rationale that this got you protection.) For example, in one entry after Hagendorf is married the second time he notices his mother-in-law has died (of the pesitilence) and that he buried her on September30th 1636. Since he's on the move with the army at that time, not in winter quarters, it means his in-laws must have been with the army as well. On the occasion when he's separated form his wife (either one), he's always anxious, and you get entries like this one about reuniting with Anna Maria:

Here the baggage train of the regiment arrived. Thus I was reunited with my dearest - meine Liebste - again, and in good health she was. Bless the good lord for this, may he grant his blessing furtherly. This happened on April 11th in the year 1638.

He seems to have been faithful to both his wives, at least there is no mention of female prisoners when he's married, but there is also no sense of him regarding this as wrong in the in between time. It's another thing that's taken for every day granted: if you're a soldier, and you don't have a woman of your own, you get yourself one one way or the other.

Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I

[cahn]

This was really interesting! If depressing :P

I think it's the former, because the phrasing actually isn't one of hindsight. (When people look back with the knowledge of how events would turn out, I think it's almost inevitable that this colors how they report developments.)

This makes a lot of sense -- I see my sister and myself doing this a lot, when we talk about what happened earlier in life (vs. when I find stuff I actually wrote at the time).

because, let's face it, they knew better than most of their contemporaries how the human body worked by taking it apart, but I didn't know executioner's wives also provided such services.

Ah, right, I remember you told us this now -- but that's really interesting about the wife as well!

but to me the way he notes the birth and death of every baby by name is touching by itself; they lived only a few months or sometimes days, but apparantly he was determined not to forget them.

:( That's really touching, especially given all the dead babies :(((((

for I was shot once though the stomach, with the shot doing through entirely, and secondly through both shoulders so that the bullet was in my shirt.

Holy cow, I'm really surprised he lived!

Then there was screaming in the camp taht the houses were all falling down, so that many soldiers and their wives who went to plunder remained there. So I was worried more about the wife and the sick child than about my own damage.

:( This is really a very interesting passage, thank you for sharing it. But war is awful :(

The farmers in the village cemetary fought back so fiercely that we couldn't do anything without canons. So we left again, for there were a thousand farmers in it. So we burned down the vllalge.

:(((((

Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - II

[selenak]

One of the ways Hagendorf and his wife support themselves when the plunderings are slim and the cash from the army is non existent is this way:

On the way, we were doing badly A pound of bread was a head piece, a measure of salt three Gulden, a measure of wine three Taler, a pound tobacco six Taler, a pair of shoes three Gulden. Peas, beans were our best meal in this time. I myself and my wife had enough bread, though. We were even able to sell some, for we made ourselves a mill out of two grindstones and dug into the earth to make an oven and baked bread.

Sometimes, the Hagendorf gets separated because one of them is ill (or pregnant), like this:

On April 9th, my wife was delivered of a young daughter. She got baptized here in Tirschenreuth in the Oberfallz near the Bohemian Forest. Her name is Barbara. God grant her long life.
On the 12th we went to Waldsassen, then Cham and to Straubing at the Danube. When I came to Straubing, the Colonel was gone already, to Ingolstadt. So my quarters were gone as well.
From Straubing to Paring. At Paring, my wife got sick, and had such pain in her thights that I could not bring her with me. I had to let her lie at Paring, with the judge there, who was my good aquaintance. I went with the colonel to Ingolstadt. There I got my quarters at an ale inn.
The wife with the child and the horse remained at Paring. After fourteen days, I went there again, and got them. She still could not walk, so I sat her on the horse and led her. I travelled like Joseph in Egypt. I had left her on April 16th, and picked her up again on April 30th. She could not go further as where I carried her.
On May 19th in the year 1641
my daughter died at Ingolstadt.
The good lord grant her a merry resurrection.
Barbara

On the 24th I had to sell my horse. It was worth 24 Gulden, for I needed the money here. On May 26th I approached the town master because of my wife, and pleaded for her, so he took her in. But this needed money, for she was like a cripple. She could walk only with two crutches. For seven weeks. But the executioner's wife who bathed her regularly managed to make her healthy again after seven weeks.

Eventually, one of the Hagendorf kids survives beyond the baby stage, and Peter Hagendorf is able to pay for his schooling, leaving the boy with a schoolmaster in a secure (as secure as you could get in this war) area so the kid gets a good education. Which was important to him. You can tell Peter Hagendorf made it to the ranks among other things by the way he's able to list godparents for his later children, and they are officers and officer's wives. When the war is finally over, the famiily reunites. The diary breaks off suddenly shortly after the war, so Jan Peters in the original edition wasn't sure whether the diarist managed to adjust to civilian life, but later research which was able to identiy the diariest as Hagendorf was also able to tell he became a mayor in the place he finally settled down. We don't know whether his second wife was still alive then, since it's no longer covered by the diaries, and the church register entries in towns were only starting to get reestablished. But that Hagendorf made it through the entire war and found despite all the tragedies some personal happiness was certainly the exception, not the rule.

Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - II

[cahn]

We were even able to sell some, for we made ourselves a mill out of two grindstones and dug into the earth to make an oven and baked bread.

Heh, that's kinda neat.

On April 9th, my wife was delivered of a young daughter...
The wife with the child and the horse remained at Paring. After fourteen days, I went there again, and got them. She still could not walk, so I sat her on the horse and led her. I travelled like Joseph in Egypt. I had left her on April 16th, and picked her up again on April 30th...
On May 19th in the year 1641
my daughter died at Ingolstadt. .

ARGH. You could not pay me enough to live in the past, especially as a woman!! part seventeen million. (Yeah, and when I had my first kid I also could barely walk after a couple of weeks, and that was without getting sick!) But also, all those dead babies :(

but later research which was able to identiy the diariest as Hagendorf was also able to tell he became a mayor in the place he finally settled down.

I'm glad he made it through! But wow.

Dog Addendum

[felis]

The last time we talked about the dogs, Biche's death date was still in question, but I got my hands on this catalogue, which has a short chapter on the dogs and it says that she died in 1752 and gives Volz' second volume of Fritz/Wilhelmine letters as the source, so that one checks out as suspected. (I still don't know what Preuss did there, but I suspect that the exact same date for her and Rothenburg also comes from something he got mixed up.)

The catalogue also says that Rothenburg, who'd been sent to Paris in spring 1744 to negotiate the treaty with France, brought Biche back with him as a gift for Fritz. But: no source given at all for that one. It does mention that Louis XV. owned English whippets (levrettes anglaises) as well, even had them painted, so there's some connection, but possibly that connection is where the idea came from instead of an actual source, who knows. It's a data point, though.

Finally, one more box bill the catalogue mentions and which I didn't get last time because it wasn't tagged for the dogs, even though it totally should have been:

March/April 1751: musician Bach [yes, Carl Philipp Emanuel] for two pieces of clothing, "so ihm die Mené entzwey gefreßen hat" - 59 taler and 12 groschen

Hee. Poor Musicus Bach, having his clothes destroyed by the dog.

Re: Dog Addendum

[mildred_of_midgard]

What?! This went to my spam folder? Google, don't you know that Fritz's dogs are highly Relevant to My Interests??! I only found it by accident, looking for another email I'm impatiently awaiting.

Well, now that I have seen it, thank you for the update, felis!

The catalogue also says that Rothenburg, who'd been sent to Paris in spring 1744 to negotiate the treaty with France, brought Biche back with him as a gift for Fritz. But: no source given at all for that one.

The lack of source continues to annoy me, but, the specific date and timing is new or at least a good refresher! I knew we'd seen 1744, but I don't remember seeing the bit about negotiating the treaty with Paris in the spring.

March/April 1751: musician Bach [yes, Carl Philipp Emanuel] for two pieces of clothing, "so ihm die Mené entzwey gefreßen hat" - 59 taler and 12 groschen

Hee. Poor Musicus Bach, having his clothes destroyed by the dog.

Awww, omg, that's amazing! I personally would consider it an honor to have my clothes destroyed by one of Fritz's dogs...except if I worked for him, at which point I'd be too infuriated over the low pay and constant micromanagement. :P

HIstory in Emojis: The Return

[selenak]

This time, the saga of Sophie of Hannover, née Sophie of the Palatine, which contains a lot of marriages and dead people. I shall not include a who is who at the start in order to make it a little salon quiz:



❄️🏰👑🤴🏻🤶🏻
🗺 ⚔️ 🩸
🧳 🤴🏻 🤶🏻
🤶🏻🤴🏻: 👶🏻 ✖️12
🤴🏻:⚰️
🤶🏻: 🖤
👩🏻‍🦱: 👣
👥👋🏻
🧔‍♂️ :💍👩🏻‍🦱
👩🏻‍🦱:✔️
🧔‍♂️:🤔💃🏻
🧔‍♂️:🔙💍🔜🧔🏻
🧔🏻:💍👩🏻‍🦱❓
👩🏻‍🦱:😏📜❗️
👩🏻‍🦱🧔🏻🧔‍♂️:📜
👩🏻‍🦱🧔🏻:🪢
👩🏻‍🦱:✍️🌿🔭👶🏻
🧔‍♂️💃🏻:👶🏻
👩🏻‍🦱🧔🏻:😒
🇬🇧🔎🐣
🇬🇧👁👩🏻‍🦱
👩🏻‍🦱:😎
👩🏻‍🦱👩🏻‍🎓:🧳🏰⚜️
👩🏻‍🦱🧔🏻:🙅🏻‍♀️➕🤦‍♂️🟰📜
🙅🏻‍♀️🤦‍♂️💍:🤮
👩🏻‍🎓:💍🧙🏻‍♂️🦅
🧙🏻‍♂️:🦅 🎗🎉👑
👩🏻‍🎓: 👨🏻‍🏫🔬📚🧮🏰
🙅🏻‍♀️😍🕺🏻
🕺🏻:⚰️
🤦‍♂️:🔗🗝🙅🏻‍♀️
👩🏻‍🦱:🤦🏻‍♀️
👩🏻‍🎓:⚰️
👩🏻‍🦱🧙🏻‍♂️:😭
👩🏻‍🦱:🔜🇬🇧❓
👸:❌👩🏻‍🦱🤦‍♂️❗️
👩🏻‍🦱:🙄🥱
👩🏻‍🦱💡:🧟‍♂️🧟💍
👩🏻‍🦱:🏞⛈⚰️
🇬🇧:👑🤦‍♂️

Re: HIstory in Emojis: The Return

[mildred_of_midgard]

LOLOL!

🧔‍♂️:🤔💃🏻
🧔‍♂️:🔙💍🔜🧔🏻

Ahaha, you always find the best emojis.

👩🏻‍🎓: 👨🏻‍🏫🔬📚🧮🏰

Awww. Woman after my own heart!

👩🏻‍🦱:🔜🇬🇧❓
👸:❌👩🏻‍🦱🤦‍♂️❗️
👩🏻‍🦱:🙄🥱

Heee! Well, I can see where Anne was coming from. ;)

👩🏻‍🦱💡:🧟‍♂️🧟💍

No, don't do it! It will end badly!

👩🏻‍🦱:🏞⛈⚰️

Oh, this is great, this is one of my favorites. I love how you encapsulate little episodes like this in just a couple emojis, and I know exactly what you mean!

Allow me to register my extreme pleasure in the return of emojis to salon!

If I can manage to summarize Cunegonde's Kidnapping, which I keep trying to do, I think that would make a great emoji fic...but concentration is short this week, and summarizing is hard at the best of times. We'll see. Meanwhile, a thousand thank yous for this!

Royal beds

[mildred_of_midgard]

So remember when Lehndorff laments the fact that Fritz is selling a magnificent royal bed, and we tried to figure out how old the bed was? I don't know if it's the same bed, but I ran across one in my reading that could be it!

Here's Lehndorff description:

The bed of red velvet, embellished with embroidery, which all strangers admired, and which was the place of their first lying-together for our kings and our princes, is being sold. It is a pity that such monuments, which testify to the splendor and taste of our ancestors, are disappearing. I am sure that if we should come into possession of some furniture which Cleopatra or Livia once used, we should be delighted at the sight of this ancient glory. Likewise, after hundreds of years, posterity will probably have the same interest in the objects of our age.

You're not wrong, Lehndorff!

Well, I read Barbara Beuys' bio of Sophie Charlotte, the one selenak read years ago, and I found this:

A magnificent bed for King Friedrich arrived in Berlin from the Netherlands. The Republic of the United Seven Provinces wanted to favor Prussia's king, a key ally. Three days before the performance of Britannicus, to which the Countess was invited, Electress Sophie wrote that a Dutch emissary, Juffer van der Bent, had send "a stately piece of furniture for the King in Prussia, which the lord states are giving to Her Majesty, and one too for the Countess Wartenberg and nothing for the Queen, who has such a good sense of humor that Her Majesty only laughs at her".

For context, it's 1703, and Prussia and the Netherlands are allies in the War of the Spanish Succession, which is breaking out.

If the bed arrived in 1703, it could, at least in theory, have been used for:

- 1706: FW and SD
- 1708: F1 and his third wife, Sophia Louise of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (she of the psychotic breakdown, who unintentionally terrified F1 into thinking she was an apparition of the White Lady)
- 1733: Fritz and EC
- 1742: AW and Luise
- 1752: Heinrich and Mina

before being sold in February, 1753.

I think that's old enough and a good enough line-up of usages to impress Lehndorff, especially if the bed was really gorgeous.

Lehndorff: It was used for my dear Heinrich's marriage. Of COURSE it will be of interest to posterity!

Re: Royal beds

[selenak]

It could very well be, and I salute the Royal Detective! Though I would question the translation of the Sophie quote - is it "her" or "his" Majesty? Because that sentence would sound more logical if it says "a stately piece of furniture for the King in Prussia, which the lord states are giving to his Majesty, and one too for the Countess Wartenberg and nothing for the Queen" - given that the Countess Wartenberg was supposedly F1's mistress because a crowned King needs to have one (though she herself, the Countess, later said they never had sex, it would mean that the Queen, i.e. Sophie Charlotte, needs to have a sense of humor about her husband and her husband's supposed mistress getting a bed and she not getting anything. (I don't have the book with me, so I can't look it up myself.)

Also, I can so see Lehndorff's reasoning. :)

"Empress Elizabeth" and "Five Empresses" by Evgenii Anisimov - I

[selenak]

The two books are written a few decades apart, with "Empress Elizabeth" published in 1986, i.e. a year after Gorbachev in earnest practiced perestroika and glasnost, and the preface (not by the author) declares it to be very much a product of glasnost applied to history, doing away with both the Marxist pov and with the dea that the post-Peter the Great era until Catherine the Great's ascension is not worth studying. For me, the most obvious difference between the two books is actually that the second one, "The Five Empresses" is far more anecdotal, chatty and emotionial in nature. "Empress Elizabeth" may not be Marxist, but it does apply thematic structures the way I'm used to from current day German biographies (for example of FW, F1 or the Great Elector) I've read in recent years, i.e. foreign policy, domestic policy, private life - which means we go back and forth in time a few times - while "Five Empresses" does not.

Otoh, the other thing I noticed is that while both books describe the relationship between Anna Leopoldovna and Julia Mengden as "unusually close", it does not speculate on it being sexual, and the "Empress Elizabeth" biography when mentioning the Chevalier d'Eon describes their transgender nature as "pathological". I.e. Queerness of all sorts either does not get mentioned or is pathological; yep, that's a Russian historian, alright. This said, he at various times makes fun of Russian nationalism and at one point wistfully speculates what would have happened if the start of Anna Ivanova's reign had gone differently and instead of folding to completely reinstated autocracy, something like a parliamentary monarchy had developed, thus changing Russian and world history for ever. Speaking as someone who frequently wishes the 1848 revolution in the German states had succeeded and that first parliament had continued, for similar reasons, I hear you, Anisimov.

Both books are easy to read and tell their stories in an entertaining way. Anisimov is an opinioated narrator who is prone to declare he's not judging and then immediately coming up with a judgey statement. (Thus, for example, about Peter the Great's first love and mistress Anna Mons being not interested in the high risk stakes of life with Peter and better suited to happy housewifedom.) He also when talking about non-Russian matters occasionally slips up, as when designing Voltaire, Fritz and even Catherine (in her case secretly) as atheists. (Though this might also be a mistake by the translator. Maybe Russian doesn't have a separate word for "deist"? ) And then there's this gem:

We cannot say now what kind of empress Anna Leopoldovna would have been. Her inertness, reserve, lack of character and preparation would have made her chances for a successful reign over a country such as Russia doubtful. However, anything is possible; power and a crown on a person's head may transform him or her beyond recognition: action, ambition and intelligence can suddenly appear. Suffice it to recall Austrian archduchess Maria Theresa when she became the Empress of Austria. She wa salmost the same age as Anna Leopoldovna when in 1740 she inherited the htrone of her deceased father, Charles VI, and was compelled to immediately start fighting with Austria's old enemies, who dreamed of tearing the empire to pieces. Frederick II, the ingenious king of Prussia, had become Maria Theresa's most formidable and implacable enemy. Nevertheless, young and inexperienced Maria Theresa proved to be worthy of her destiny; she not only managed to preserve the empire but also to strengthen its position in the world. She invited talented ministers to work for her, effected important reforms, and when the time came for her to transfer power over the flourishing country to her son Joseph II, who was born almost at the same time as Ivan Antonovich, Maria Theresa did so. However, let's stop fantasizing - Russia is nothing like Austria, and nothing like any other country, for that matter.

Joseph: She did what when the time came?
Barbara S-R: "Empress of Austria" contains two wrongs. She was Archduchess of Austria, Queen of Hungary and a few other things, and after Silesia 2 when FS was elected Emperor, she became Empress Consort of the HRE. Lots of people on her side dropped "Consort" when talking about her and referred to her as "The Empress-Queen". At no point, however, was she "Empress of Austria".

This said, I now wonder how MT would have fared as Tsarina. It's a somewhat frightening idea, because this was one woman who did use absolute power when given it.

Anyway. Anisimov manages to bring his various characters to life, and he's good at establishing where their various strengths and weaknesses come from. So Anna Ivanova, for example, starts out as the poor relation, one of three daughters of Peter the Great's half-witted brother Ivan whom her own mother does not like and who has to spend the first part of her life constantly begging for crumbs from her terrible mighty relations. This results in a constantly suspicious, lonely woman who once she has power is not gracious about it. Like Fritz, she has learned that power is a zero sum game early on, but unlike Fritz, she's not one of life's hard workers. (In fact, none of the Tsarinas except for Catherine II. are. She's the first Russian monarch since Peter the Great who really is a hardcore worker, as can be seen by the thousands of letters and memoranda she personally signed and/or wrote and/or wrote observations on. Both the Annas - Anna Ivanova and Anna Leopoldovna - weren't, they let their favorites do the actual administrative work. Catherine I., the former Livonian peasant, was a special case in that as long as she was NOT yet Empress, she was diligent and busy, keeping up with Peter (the Great) not just in drinking bouts but also in organisational talent (most famously when she saved his butt in a dire situation against the Turks), and did have the energy and industry of a good monarch, but as soon as Peter was dead and she was safely on the throne, she seems to have spent the not two years of her reign in an unending party, which must have contributed to that early death (she was solidly healthy in Peter's life time - talk about drinking, eating and dancing yourself into a grave) while Alexander Menshikov did the actual governing. Elizabeth did some work herself - about two days a week in the 1740s when she started, with the rest given to the representative partying part of being a monarch. Wheraes the former Sophie of Zerbst liked sex and fun as much as the next Russian czar, but she did rise at 6 am at the latest every day and got work done first.

Mostly, Anisimov brings up the quotes to back up his opinions, but not always. For example: after presenting the Peter I/Catherine I relationship as a love match on both parts backed up by excerpts from their earthy, mutually fond correspondence through the years, he arrives that point in the story where Catherine takes a non-Peter young lover, who happened to be the younger brother of Peter's first love, one Villm Mons. This is after Alexei's death and when speculating why she took that insane risk which easily could have gotten her killed painfully once Peter found out (in effect, he did kill her love, but not Catherine), our narrator suddenly questions whether she loved Peter at all, and points out the former Martha the peasant, war captive, did not have much choice, being handed from man to man until ending up with Peter, and doing anything but please the most powerful man in the land was out of the question. True enough, but might I suggest a third possibility: she both wanted the life with him and loved him until she saw him torture his own son to death. Even if she disliked Alexeii and saw him as a rival for her own children, including her at this point living son (something Anisimov assumes but does not back up with a quote), once you've seen a man do that, I could well see it killing any attachment beyond self preservation.

The Elizabeth biography includes a defense of the Russian general who after defeating Fritz at Kunersdorf did give him the first Miracle of the House of Brandenburg by NOT marching on Berlin.

Why did Saltykov not set off for Berlin? It appears that the Russian commander-in-chief was not certain of the success of such a march. Right after the battle the fatigued army, burened with wounded, trophies and prisoners, could not have resumed its march. Estimating that the losses comrpisied a third of his forces, Saltykov considered a campaign possible only on condition of active Austrian participation. Analysis suggests that Saltykov was not being overly cautious. The emotional, panic-stricken letter of Frederick II declares more about the king of Prussia's unbalanced character than about the actual situation. After the victory the Russian army did not pursue the enemy beyond the field of combat, hence the 29.000 troops that remained with Frederick began to reassamble at Fürstenwalde on the Spree. Frederick started bringing in troops form the garrisons and preapred for the defense of the capital. Saltykov did not wish to march on Berlin without the Austrians. Daun assigned him General Hadik's 12,00 man ncorps in addition to Loudon's corps of 10,000 but himself declined to take the offensive with his whole army. For this he had his own reasons. The most important of these wa sthe presence in the rear of the Austrian armies: Prince Henry's in Saxony and General Fuchs' in Silesia, no less than 60,000 mmen in all. In an advance on Berlin both of these armies, which were covering Daun's army, would have m arched at once to cut the Austrians' commuknications.

In short, Heinrich did (partly) save Fritz' butt?

Speaking of Saltykyov, he's the same guy Catherine wrote the "Heinrich comes across as cold at first, but he's really smart and cool, so be nice and impress him!" letter to which Mildred has quoted to us. I do wonder whether Heinrich had a "so, Kunersdorf, huh?" conversation with him, but if he did, he didn't tell Lehndorff (that we know of), and obviously it didn't come up in his secret letters to Fritz during his time in Russia.

Apropos Fritzian battles: the Elizabeth biography also includes a detailed description of the battle of Zorndorf near Küstrin. Given that at different points the Prussians and the Russians both declared this a win for them, I was curious how our author would present it. He calls it a draw.

Anisimov's judgment on Elizabeth herself remains the same in both books. She has her father Peter's restless energy, personal charisma attracting people to her and the common touch, and not a little courage, but alas she absolutely did not have Peter's mind or eagerness for work or hunger for innovations. After Elizabeth's coup, there was a lot of "now the time of Peter the Great starts again", but what this meant was the canonization of Peter as a historical figure and the complete lack of direly needed reforms, i.e. adapting the dress up but not the mentality. (It is at this point, though, that Peter gets treated as the icon of Russian history he thereafter became. Remember, in his life time, his brutal methods ensured he was hugely controversial abroad and in his country alike, and given his attitude towards the Russian church, there was a solid part of the country seeing him as the antichrist. By the time Elizabeth came on the throne, these memories had faded and he was the good czar, the founding father of modern Russia, pater patriae etc. Elizabeth's popularity largely rested on her being the last surviving child of Peter the Great who successfully marketed herself as his one true heir.

Now, post-Alexei and after the death of his sons by Catherine (I), Peter the Great had famously changed the Russian inheritance laws, so that instead of the throne always going to a male biological heir, the Czar could appoint whoever the Czar decided would be heir (of either sex). And then he didn't appoint anyone in his life time. (He may have wanted Catherine to succeed him - he did have her crowned, after all -, but then he found out about her lover, and that was that.) Catherine I. did leave detailed will about the line of succession, but as opposed to what Elizabeth later claimed, this actually named any descendant of Elizabeth's late older sister Anna Petrovna (not to be confused with either Anna Ivanova or Anna Leopoldovna) before Elizabeth. And in any event, Catherine I. was followed by the short lived Peter II (son of the murdered Alexei), who was followed by Anna Ivanova, and on each of these occasions, Elizabeth swore with the rest of the nobility she'd respect the most recent ruler's choice of successor. In Anna Ivanova's case, this was Ivan the son of Anna Leopoldovna, with Anna Leopoldovna as regent. So there really was no legal justification for Elizabeth's coup, other than "but I want to". Mind you, as our aiuthor points out, she did have to put her own life on the line when finally risking it, because in the event of a failure, she'd have had no plausible deniability about not knowing anything about it. Since no one of her co-conspirators dared, she led the march into the Winter Palace herself, after having gone to the guards who venerated her as the daughter of Peter the Great.

Our old aquaintance La Chetardie, who went from being French envoy in Prussia to being French envoy in St. Petersburg (you might recall Crown Prince Fritz was a fan and grumbled about how way worse his successor Valory was, until Valory backed him up in the First Silesian War), had befriended Elizabeth and till his dying day gave himself credit for the coup, way too much of it in our author's opinion, since while La Chetardie wanted a coup, he actually got cold feet (and there are quotes for this one) in the months preceding the event and cautioned against it. Post-coup, he expected Elizabeth to be putty in his hands, but while she was as willing to party with him as ever, she kept being non-committal on fulfillling what he thought she'd promised him to do, i.e. hand over some Russian territory to the Swedes, until she finally point blank refused and Versailles bitterly noted that Chetardie was useless in terms of actually getting political advantages out of Elizabeth, no matter how many balls he opened with her. As our author points out, that one was a no brainer. The daughter of Peter the Great handing over territory to the Swedes when cousin Anna the almost German had refused to? No way. Elizabeth could have kissed her popularity goodbye right then and there.

Re: "Empress Elizabeth" and "Five Empresses" by Evgenii Anisimov - I

[mildred_of_midgard]

Ooh, thank you! Especially since I had no way of getting my hands on the Elizabeth book. <33

Otoh, the other thing I noticed is that while both books describe the relationship between Anna Leopoldovna and Julia Mengden as "unusually close", it does not speculate on it being sexual

Not explicitly, but I was keeping an eye out for that in Five Empresses, and he does include this line:

Finch, who knew all the company of card players well, wrote that Anna loved Julia as passionately as only a man could love a woman, and noted that they often slept together.

While a woman sleeping with a lady-in-waiting wasn't necessarily sexual in those days, the "only a man could love a woman" was more than I was expecting from Anisimov, and far more than Russian wiki has (or at least had when I checked in our last discussion).

and the "Empress Elizabeth" biography when mentioning the Chevalier d'Eon describes their transgender nature as "pathological".

Ugh, but unsurprising. Transphobia is alive and well today on my Facebook feed; Russia in 1986? Yeah.

I.e. Queerness of all sorts either does not get mentioned or is pathological; yep, that's a Russian historian, alright.

I mean, yes, but MacDonogh was doing the same thing in 1999, so...mostly I would say Russia is lagging behind Europe and the US in this respect, but we're not there yet ourselves.

he at various times makes fun of Russian nationalism and at one point wistfully speculates what would have happened if the start of Anna Ivanova's reign had gone differently and instead of folding to completely reinstated autocracy, something like a parliamentary monarchy had developed

I saw! I was impressed! I thought, "I bet this guy's not a Putin fan."

Both books are easy to read and tell their stories in an entertaining way. Anisimov is an opinioated narrator who is prone to declare he's not judging and then immediately coming up with a judgey statement.

Yes, yes, this! I realized early on that if I wanted to finish the book, I was going to have to simply accept this and be entertained, and not rant at the opinions I disagreed with (and be pleasantly surprised by ones I do agree with, like wistfulness over constitutional monarchy. I have been both wanting a Russian take on Elizaveta for years now, and reluctant to pick up anything that's likely to be a product of Soviet historiography, so Anisimov in general was a pleasant surprise.

He also when talking about non-Russian matters occasionally slips up, as when designing Voltaire, Fritz and even Catherine (in her case secretly) as atheists. (Though this might also be a mistake by the translator. Maybe Russian doesn't have a separate word for "deist"? ) And then there's this gem:

I thought the same thing! It might be a simple mistake, but it's not clear to me that he makes a distinction. I don't know if you had the same impression, but while reading Five Empresses, I had a sense of translationese that I don't usually get from translated history works. It might have been the translator intentionally staying closer to the original, since the author clearly has a distinct voice, or it might simply have been needing another pass-through or two.

I know when I translate something (when I bother to translate something myself as opposed to outsourcing to Google), the first version comes out sounding more awkward, and it takes me a couple edits and consciously thinking, "How would I express this in English?" to make it sound more fluent. (I don't always make that effort for salon, btw--sometimes you just get German-sounding English.) The Five Empresses' translation reads exactly like my earlier drafts and not like my final "How would I express this in English?" translations.

Joseph: She did what when the time came?

ROTFL!!!

I mean, she did better than Catherine with Paul, or most powerful leaders with their successors, Richelieu and Beatrix of Tuscany aside...

But yes, point taken, Joseph. Point extremely taken.

Barbara S-R: "Empress of Austria" contains two wrongs. She was Archduchess of Austria, Queen of Hungary and a few other things, and after Silesia 2 when FS was elected Emperor, she became Empress Consort of the HRE. Lots of people on her side dropped "Consort" when talking about her and referred to her as "The Empress-Queen". At no point, however, was she "Empress of Austria".

A mistake often made by Anglophone authors as well, as you and I have been known to grump about. (I did notice this one, but it's so common in my reading that I kind of sigh and move on.)

I now wonder how MT would have fared as Tsarina. It's a somewhat frightening idea, because this was one woman who did use absolute power when given it.

Oof, yeah. I suspect a lot has to do with how she comes to power, how secure her position is, what her husband (if any) is up to, etc.

Even if she disliked Alexeii and saw him as a rival for her own children, including her at this point living son (something Anisimov assumes but does not back up with a quote), once you've seen a man do that, I could well see it killing any attachment beyond self preservation.

Interesting! I did notice the whiplash of "love marriage" to "oppressed slave," but this explanation hadn't occurred to me (even after recently reading an entire volume of essays on Alexei).

In short, Heinrich did (partly) save Fritz' butt?

I have seen SO many explanations of why the Russians didn't march on Berlin.

1. Fritz had inflicted enough harm on the Russian army that they were too busy pulling themselves together. I've seen Saltykov quoted (no source) as saying, "The King of Prussia sells his defeats dearly."
2. The Austrian and Russian leaders were too busy squabbling over who had supreme command.
3. It was not in the best interests of the Russians to inflict total defeat on Prussia, as that just makes Russia's neighbor and rival Austria stronger. Balance of power. (Same reason Fritz was not interested in helping France and Bavaria inflict total defeat on Austria in the first two Silesian wars.)
4. Heinrich strategically covering Fritz's rear.

The emotional, panic-stricken letter of Frederick II declares more about the king of Prussia's unbalanced character than about the actual situation

Yes, true, but I would also point out that we have the benefit of hindsight that Fritz didn't. At the end of the day, he had something like 3,000 men left out of his whole army. Of course he freaked out, that's not enough to defend a country.

What he didn't realize was that in coming days, the men who had not died or been wounded but had fled (this was the only time a Prussian army had broken and fled under Fritz's direct command) reported back in. Eventually he had a full-strength army of 30,000 again again.

We also have more intelligence about the state of the Russian army than Fritz did. His "unbalanced character" here is partly down to incomplete knowledge. (Blanning argues that the entire Seven Years' War narrative of the "miracles of the House of Brandenburg" was down to Fritz having disproportionately more knowledge of his own weaknesses than his enemies', whereas we have access to the Russian and Austrian archives.)

I was curious how our author would present it. He calls it a draw.

Good for him! That's usually how I see it presented by non-Fritz-mythologizing military historians as well.

Elizabeth's popularity largely rested on her being the last surviving child of Peter the Great who successfully marketed herself as his one true heir.

Yes, this.

Post-coup, he expected Elizabeth to be putty in his hands, but while she was as willing to party with him as ever, she kept being non-committal on fulfillling what he thought she'd promised him to do, i.e. hand over some Russian territory to the Swedes, until she finally point blank refused and Versailles bitterly noted that Chetardie was useless in terms of actually getting political advantages out of Elizabeth, no matter how many balls he opened with her.

Yeah, that was hilarious.

"Empress Elizabeth" and "Five Empresses" by Evgenii Anisimov - II

[selenak]

Which brings me to: in both books our author basically subscribes to the traditional image of Peter III., quoting amply from Catherine (II)'s memoirs. Now, he does admit Catherine had all the reason in the world to make Peter look as bad as possible in order to justify her own actions, but in the Elizabeth biography he quotes some non-Catherine witnesses who have a similar bad opinion of Peter to back her up. (And no, Poniatowski isn't among them.) Since our author bitterly notes that Peter after all that 7 Years War bloodshed handed over Russian conquests to Fritz and then wanted to go to war against Denmark for bloody Holstein, WTF, I suspect that's the main reason for his "no, there is no enigma of Peter III, he really was like that" statements. He does state Peter would likely have been a perfectly decent Duke of Holstein and was a kid brought to a country he didn't like, whose language he didn't speak and never spoke well, whose customs he hated, in care of an aunt who didn't like him, either, and never was there the inheritor of a country with so much of an understandable dislike for the country in question from the outset.

Elizabeth making Peter her heir was atually one of her rare political masterstrokes, because it removed him as her rival - he was ahead of her in the sucession as defined by her own mother - , without granting him all the sympathies the imprisoned Ivan and his siblings (and parents) got. The story of Anna Leopoldovna and her children is tragic in both books. Something I did not know or had forgotten: Anton Ulrich, EC's brother, Anna's unwanted husband and father of her children, fathered a lot of other children as well during those decades of imprisonment. On the female servants. Who then become servants to the imprisoned family. (They went as far as the ship to Denmark with their half siblings when the later were finally released but weren't alllowed to actually enter Denmark, because they were Russian citizens - this, btw, seems to have been Danish bureaucracy, not Russian cruelty. What then became of then, our author does not say.) On the less represensible and nobler side, Anton Ulrich really did refuse to be released without his children when Catherine offered this to him upon her ascension and prefered remaining with them.

What I also had forgotten or didn't know: Julia Mengden originally did go with Anna Leopoldovna, but then Elizabeth separated the two. She thought Anna Leopoldovna did know where the fabled jewles and riches of Anna Ivanova's lover Biron were hidden and in her letter instructed her official to tell Anna Leopoldovna that if she didn't share this knowledge, Julia would be tortured, but Anna L. really did not know.

Elizabeth could be petty and greedy like that - another Elizabeth deed was that when in her later years a dying job on her hair went wrong and she had to cut it, she ordered all the ladies of the court to cut their hair and wear wigs as well - , but she must have been very charming and attractive in general; Catherine (II), who has a lot of criticial things to say about her, and who only met her when Elizabeth was in her mid 30s, nonetheless reports in her memoirs how magnetic she was and how one could not look away when she was in the room, and how Elizabeth looked great both in male and female dressing. This of course was true for Catherine as well. As opposed to Elizabeth, who always had been a beauty, even as a girl, former Sophie hadn't been as a girl (where she'd been repreatedly told she was unattractive) and there are somewhat contradictory reports on her looks even through her 20s, when they were at their best (for every glowing Poniatowski like rave, there's a "small eyes, slight hook in her nose" critique from soneone else), but she, too, was magnetic, and she was far more calculating and self disciplined and smart than any of the previous empresses, with an eighteen years long time (between her arrival in Russia and her ascension to the throne) providing more than enough training ground.

One Catherine detail which had not been known to me before were her instructions on how to raise her grandkids. Remember, just like Elizabeth had taken newborn baby Paul immediately away from his mother (Catherine) and raised him herself until her death, Catherine when Paul's (second) wife produced future Czar Alexander and his brother Constantine immediately took the boys away and took them for herself. And one thing I noticed in the instructions to their teachers she wrote and which our author quotes is is this:

To forbid and discourage Their Highnesses from inflicting any harm on themselves and any other human; hence it shouild be proscribed that anyone be beaten or scolded in their presence and they shouild not be allowed to beat up, pinch, or scold a man or beast or to hurt anyone in any other way. It should not be allowed that Their Highnesses torture or kill innocent animals such as birds, butterflies, dogs, cats or otherws or that they damage anything on purpose, but they should get accustomed to taking care of a dog, bird, squirrel or any other pet at their disposal and to working for the benfits of these down to the potted flowers, which they should water.

Now, aside of these instructions making pedagogical sense, what it immediately made me think of, but which our author does NOT mention, is that this is utterly unlike the education Catherine's husband received (young Peter definitely was beaten and scolded), AND unlike what she claims in her memoirs he was allowed to do. Because one of the things Catherine says which the pro-Peter historians doubt is that he tormented animals in her presence. (Including dogs.) So Catherine's need to vilify her late husband not withstanding, these instructions made me believe the animals thing could very well have been true.

In conclusion, thank you, Mildred, these were two instructive books. Since the author is remarkably not nationalistic - for example, when talking about the Anna Ivanova period is remembered as the time where Germans dominated the court, he points out that firstly, the Germans in question all came originally from different German states, had lived in Russia for many years and were at each other's throats, i.e. were rivals, not a unified German party, and secondly, it was in this very era that the Russian nobility got the massive concessions from the government which plagued every ruler since because they daren't take all those privileges away again, so the Russian nobles had the least cause to complain, as opposed to the general Russian population -, I am somewhat afraid to check whether he's still alive, and how he's doing these days....

Re: "Empress Elizabeth" and "Five Empresses" by Evgenii Anisimov - II

[mildred_of_midgard]

He does state Peter would likely have been a perfectly decent Duke of Holstein and was a kid brought to a country he didn't like, whose language he didn't speak and never spoke well, whose customs he hated, in care of an aunt who didn't like him, either, and never was there the inheritor of a country with so much of an understandable dislike for the country in question from the outset.

Yeah, and I was even more impressed by him pointing out that the way Sophie was punished by her governess for not being diligent at her studies was that the governess would read an interesting book silently, whereas if Sophie had done a good job, the governess would read out loud as a reward...whereas young Peter was deprived of dinner, tied to a table, or made to kneel down on dried peas with bare knees until his feet swelled up. Says Anisimov, This might be one of the reasons that Peter III and Catherine were very different people.

Not the only reason, but I agree with "one of." Much like Lehndorff saying that FW's upbringing had an influence on the negative side of Fritz's character.

Julia Mengden originally did go with Anna Leopoldovna, but then Elizabeth separated the two. She thought Anna Leopoldovna did know where the fabled jewles and riches of Anna Ivanova's lover Biron were hidden and in her letter instructed her official to tell Anna Leopoldovna that if she didn't share this knowledge, Julia would be tortured, but Anna L. really did not know.

Yep, this has come up! I believe Julia actually volunteered to go with Anna rather than be separated from her, which is why torturing her made such a good threat.

UGH ELIZABETH.

what it immediately made me think of, but which our author does NOT mention, is that this is utterly unlike the education Catherine's husband received (young Peter definitely was beaten and scolded), AND unlike what she claims in her memoirs he was allowed to do.

Oh, that is interesting! I like the way you make very convincing connections.

In conclusion, thank you, Mildred, these were two instructive books.

I'm glad! Like you, I found him readable, opinionated, and informative, if not without flaw, and I was hoping the Empress Elizabeth book was good too (and I'm glad to hear it had more depth; Five Empresses was fun and all, but I would have liked more serious history to be included too.)

Since the author is remarkably not nationalistic...I am somewhat afraid to check whether he's still alive, and how he's doing these days....

Surprisingly well, at least according to his university page! 74 years old, tenured professor at the HSE University campus in St. Petersburg, tons of publications, named Best Teacher in 2014 and 2015, Winner of the HSE University Best Russian Research Paper Competition in 2021...

Of course, what's not listed on the page (or even what's listed in Russian that may give clues), I cannot say. But at least not in prison, mysteriously dead, mysteriously disappeared, or in exile.

Thank you for the write-ups of these two books!

Isabella of Parma

[mildred_of_midgard]

So here I am, reading along in a bio of Joseph II for German practice, and I see, "Other sources indicate that Maria Christina showed him the letters that she got from Isabella." The author then goes on to say this is contradicted by the evidence that Joseph sure didn't act like a man who'd seen those letters, and he continued venerating Isabella's memory. No direct citation for the line about showing the letters, but the surrounding citations are all from a bio of Isabella of Parma by Ursula Tamussino.

One, that's multiple "sources." I don't know if that means multiple modern biographers, which we already know say that, or multiple contemporary sources beyond the one we found, Caroline Pichler. But since this question has come up in salon so much, I am curious if it's the latter.

Two, that means there's a bio of Isabella by Tamussino. selenak, I think you've mentioned her before? Remind me, was that a rec or an anti-rec? I can't get an e-book, but if you recommend her, I might order a hard copy.

Also, looking back at my original Anisimov request reminds me that I was wondering if you had any Louis XI recs?

Re: Isabella of Parma

[selenak]

Tamussino: that was an anti-rec. She wrote one of the two Margaret of Austria biographies I read last year (Cahn, that's not Margaret of Parma but her great aunt), and hers really did not encourage me to read anything else she'd written.

Louis XI: alas no. I haven't read any biography of his. Googling, I see Paul Murray Kendall - the classic Richard III. biographer - has written one, though.

ETA: I know movies aren't your thing, but there is a pretty good French movie about Louis XI up at Youtube, with English subtitles. "Louis XI,le pouvoir fracassé", English Title - Louis XI - the Universal Spider. It's set shortly before his death, excellent acting, actual period looking constumes unafraid to committ to medieval fashion (as opposed to what most historical movies and tv shows do these days). A quick summary:

Young Souveterre: My arrival on horseback opens this film, though I'm not a main character, or even an important supporting one. I bring urgent news of a conspiracy against Louis. Will I be rewarded? Stay tuned, it makes a point about Louis. As does the fact my entrance shows how ultra paranoid Louis (for good reason) is and how many obstacles I have to face.

Capitaine Guillaume: I'm Louis' chief of security, ruthless, competent, the ideal Trusted Lieutenant. Off with you in the waiting room, youngster.

Arriving somewhat later Louis de Orleans (future Louis XII) and wife Jeanne de France (younger daughter of Louis XI, crippled).

Guillaume: Sorry, your highness, I'm sending all your servants and guards away at the King's orders. You and her highness will get served by castle staff.

Louis d'Orleans: I'm pretending not to care, not least because I have a conspiracy going at this point. I, audience, am supposed to be sex on legs, which is news to those of you who only know me as the old King Mary Tudor, sister of Henry VIII, marries before marrying her one true love Charles Brandon. At this point in my life, however, I'm decades younger, thirsty for the French throne, and full of mutual loathing re: my cousin and father-in-law, who gave me his younger daughter explicitly so we won't have kids and the French crown will inherit my duchy of Orleans. I'm alternatively verbally abusing and using her, but she forgives because, as mentioned, I'm supposedly sex on legs.

Jeanne: *suffers*

Meanwhile upstairs:

Young Sauveterre: Your majesty, my uncle and the rest of your council want to assassinate you! I overheard them! OMG! It's supposed to look like a natural death!

Louis: Natural, eh. Okay, Guillaume, we don't want anyone to know I'm on to them, lock him away for discretion. Argh, I wish I was in better health. My kid Charles is only 13 and thus will need a regent, which is what cousin Louis d'Orleans is counting on.

Anne de France: I'm Louis' older daughter, the one who has inherited his smarts and guile. Though I'm somewhat nicer in that I do feel sorry for my sister. Readers of Sarah Gristwood's Game of Queens may recall me as the opening major character and the one who mentors Margaret of Austria and Louise de Savoy both.

Louis XI: Don't. She's one of life's victims. So, as I remember you/Mr. Sex on legs used to be an item before I married him to your sister. Are you still into him?

Anne: Am not. Dad, you can't let him anywhere near the regency.

Louis XI: Yeah, but your husband isn't really up to it, either, is he?

Anne: There's a solution here you will arrive at at the end of this movie.

Louis XI: Makes a trip downstairs into the dungeon of doom. There are two prisoners locked up in cages; he plays chess with one of them, who is an archbishop who held a displeasing sermon

Archbishop: Your majesty is still too good at chess for me. But maybe I can influence you to show mercy?

Louis XI: Dream on. That's not how I survived and bested all my enemies so far.

Louis d'Orleans: He, Anne, how about some flirting?
Anne: My hormones say yes, my mind says no. My mind wins. You're scum.
Louis d'Orleans: You'll come around. Meanwhile, wife, find out what your Dad is up to!

Jeanne: *suffers*

Guillaume: Your majesty, I've finally tortured the right person and find out they want to snuff you out via pressing a cushion on your face. Now can we cancel the council session?

Louis XI: We can not. I want to see how far they're willing to take this and have them incriminate themselves. Anne, time for another secret Machiavelli lesson upstairs so I can pretend downstairs I'm distrusting you as much as the rest of my family.

Anne: Strangely enough, Machiavelli will critisize you after your death. Anyway, lesson taken.

Louis: *visiting the dungeon of doom again* Hey, I'll pardon this prisoner locked in a cage
Archbishop: *perks up*: You will?
Louis: Not you, the other one. Also, let's call Louis d'Orleans for a little chat. Hi, cousin and son-in-law, long time no see. You know, let's reconsider our relationship. I'M totally appointing you as regent for my kid Charles once I'm gone.
Louis d'Orleans: Finally! Not that you have any choice, seeing as I'm a Valois and the highest ranking male noble of the realm. Wife, your father finally came around to admitting the inevitable.
Jeanne: I may be the Stella to your Stanley, but I'M not stupid. I think Dad is up to something. No way is he just handing over the regency to you.
Louis d'Orleans: Damn, you could be right. Go and investigate on my behalf!

Jeanne: Anne, is Dad planning something against Louis?
Anne: Why do you care? Louis is scum, he's abusing you all the time. You can't still love him.
Jeanne: I don't, it's just Christian charity. *bursts into tears*
Anne: Alas, you do still love him. Poor kid.

Council of murderous intent: *assembles*

Person dressed up as Louis: *arrives*
Council: *crowds him, kills him per cushion*
Real Louis XI: *arrives*
Person: *is revealed to be the other prisoner in a cage*

Louis XI: Yeah, he was grateful for me releasing him, so he wore my clothes, what can I say. So, friends, I caught you red-handed.
Council: *trembles*
Louis XI: Tell me what you admire most about me.
Council: *sweats, praises Louis*
Louis XI: Trust you guys to leave out the most important thing. I consolidated France from an assembly of fiefdoms into something resembling a modern state and crushed all my enemies. Now, I'm expecting you all to supper, and you can think about which of your territories you'll hand over first to the crown to put me in a good mood.
*exits Louis*

Guillaume: Seeing as Young Sauveterre evidently said the truth, saved your life and wants to serve you, your Majesty, should I hire him?
Louis XI: No way. That guy talks too much. If he betrayed his uncle, he's going to betray me. Kill him.

Guillaume: *kills Young Sauveterre

Supper with well dressed by footankle chains wearing councillors: *starts*
Louis XI: So, suckers. Let me tell you how great I am, how I defeated everyone from my Dad to Charles the Bold to the Brits, and we won't even mention the Habsburgs. You're going to hand over your territories and sing Vive La France while doing or it or...

Louis: *has a stroke*

Louis d'Orleans: Yay! This day is saved after all.

Louis XI: *regains conciousness in his bedroom*: Anne, you have to help me one more time. I made fun of you using make up in our first scene only for you to give me the clever reply that I taught you about the value of appearances. Now, there's a poignant call back as I ask you to help me be put on one last appearance.

Anne: *makes up her father to look like he's not dying in silent poignant scene*

Councillors, nobles, Louis d'Orleans: Damn.
Louis XI: Don't be crushed. I'm declaring my son Charles to be King Charles VIII now. And as regent I appoint... my daughter Anne.
*exit Louis*

Louis d'Orleans: What. How. No way. Nobles, you know I'm the only rightful regent possible. I expect your oaths of loyalty immediately.
Nobles: *start to move*
Anne: Don't you dare. The first one who gives this man as much as a finger of help can kiss his territories goodbye.
Nobles: *are intimidated*
Louis: But Anne, I'm sex on legs!
Anne: You're scum, and if you dare to make for a power grab one more time, I'll crush you. On your knees, everyone.
Everyone, including, at last, Louis d'Orleans: *kneels*
Anne: I'm off to become the best Regent France will ever have

But first:

Louis XI: *death scene, a daughter on each side*
Louis XI: My favourite daughter...
Jeanne: *suffers*
Louis XI:....is France. Always France.
Anne: I understand, Dad.

*the end*

Cunegonde's Kidnapping - Background

[mildred_of_midgard]

Cunegonde's Kidnapping is not, as I first thought from the title, about the kidnapping of Cunegonde, but about a kidnapping attempt by Cunegonde.

The object of Cunegonde's kidnapping attempt was her baby nephew, who had just been born and was in a church being baptized. To understand how a baby's baptism inspired a kidnapping attempt, I'm going to start with some sociological background.

Background

It's 1762. The kidnapping takes place in Vaals, a Dutch village on the border, just across from, and within easy walking distance of, Aachen. Vaals is Calvinist with a Catholic minority. Aachen is Catholic with a Calvinist minority.

The fact that the Holy Roman Empire is made up of a gazillion tiny principalities is highly relevant. Thanks to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, each principality gets to determine what the official religion is, and has to tolerate the existence of minorities, but not necessarily grant them full civil rights or the right to practice their religion. Freedom of conscience is all you get if you're a minority.

But! Because these principalities are tiny, it's easy to practice "Auslaufen": walking out to go practice your religion in a neighboring principality where your coreligionists are in the majority. You may not be able to have a church in your own land, but there's a good chance you can walk to one (weather, health, etc. permitting).

This setup creates a weird dichotomy: odds are you live surrounded by people who agree with you on matters of religion, and you get a strong in-group and echo chamber effect, but you also have to interact a lot with your walking-distance neighbors of the other religion. You may be a Protestant living in a Protestant principality and earning your daily bread in a Catholic principality, or a Protestant living in a Catholic principality, but earning your daily bread and visiting church in a Protestant principality. The priest in our story lived in a church that straddled the Vaals/Aachen border: it's entrance was on the Protestant side but much of it was on the Catholic side, and the Protestant authorities, as our author says, were not pleased to find that he could escape their jurisdiction merely by retreating to his bedroom!

This can lead to religious tolerance--your neighbors, coworkers, people who bring their pigs to your market, etc. are of a different religion--but also contribute to friction: plenty of opportunities to clash over principles.

Religious tolerance and the Enlightenment are only sort of a thing (some say only 5% of the population of Europe counts as educated enough to participate in Enlightenment discourse). As Jean Calas and his family found, beating up or killing your neighbors over their religion is still totally a thing.

Mixed marriages were rare, but they happened. Protestant and Catholic clergy disapproved strongly and preached against them: they feared losing members of their faith to the other side. They, and lay people, also believed that religious differences within a family were a recipe for a breakdown of the traditional family structure. You're supposed to obey your church leaders, but also your parents or husband (if you're the wife), and what do you do if those imperatives conflict? And how can you have a harmonious marriage with someone you think is doomed to hell?

And which religion do the children get raised in? This is where there's a lot of conflict. In practice, it can work out any one of a number of ways:

- All the children are baptized in the father's religion, because patriarchy.
- Less often, all the children are baptized in the mother's religion.
- The children are baptized in alternating fashion: the firstborn as a Catholic, the secondborn as a Protestant, etc.
- Each child gets baptized in the religion of the parent of their sex: daughters are whatever their mother is, sons their father.

The last one was pretty popular, since it reinforced gender roles. Sons are supposed to grow up to be like Dad and daughters like Mom anyway; making religion align with that expectation reduces conflict. Plus it keeps the 50-50 balance, so neither side feels like the other is winning.

Note that by this date, both Catholics and Protestants recognize each other's baptisms as valid. There's no question of anyone going to hell or limbo just because they were baptized in the wrong church. So there *shouldn't* be anything here to get super worked up about.

Plus, in theory, you can always convert once you get old enough. But this is frowned upon by laypeople. There's an ethos that baptism is an initiation rite, that once you've been baptized, you've joined a community of believers, and that this makes converting to another religion a transgression. This is another attitude that the clergy fervently preaches against, because of course they want converts!

But the fact is, once you've been raised a certain way and attended a certain church, your chances of sticking with that are pretty high. So some people get pretty invested in which religion a baby is baptized in.

And that's where our mixed marriage couple comes in.

Re: Cunegonde's Kidnapping - Background

[cahn]

Wow! So the kidnapping saga itself was fascinating, but so is this, not least because yours truly, of course, is in a mixed-religion marriage and a lot of this stuff sounded very familiar. (My church comes out strongly (for a contemporary church) against mixed marriages, although not of course strongly compared to these guys.)

On the other hand... my church doesn't recognize ANYONE else's baptism, and although I was told by the pastor of D's church at the time that they would recognize my Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints baptism, I suspect he may have been a bit of an anomaly. (I can see the logic both ways.)

But... the nice thing is that D's church does baby baptism, and mine baptizes at age 8, and since neither church is that excited about recognizing the other's baptism we have just had the kids get baptized twice (with their consent at my church, to the extent that an 8-year-old can consent), and we alternate which church they go to.

But it would have been a big deal if we could only have picked one, I actually do get that :) (Even though neither of us believes that anyone is going to hell or limbo because of being baptized in the wrong church.) *shrug* Brains can be weird, what can I say.

Cunegonde's Kidnapping - Kidnapping, Trial, and Religious War

[mildred_of_midgard]

Cast of characters:

Sara: A Calvinist woman of good family.
Hendrick: Her Catholic husband, of less good family.
Their baby: The subject of the kidnapping attempt.
Cunegonde: Hendrick's sister.
Father Bosten: The local Catholic priest.
Anna: The local midwife, who is Catholic.

Young Calvinist Sara and Catholic Hendrick have a hell of a time getting married. Neither the Catholics nor the Protestants want to perform this ceremony. Sara and Henrick have to shop around, and they have to make 4 different, mutually exclusive agreements with different people as to how the babies will be baptized.

By the time the first baby comes, the parents haven't decided between themselves how he's going to be baptized, and they're still telling different people different things.

When Anna the midwife delivers the baby, she asks how it's going to be baptized, because she's supposed to make the sign of the cross over the baby if it's to be baptized Roman Catholic. But she can't get a straight answer from either of the parents.

Sara has the upper hand, but Hendrick isn't happy about it. He's muttering to himself, and at one point he announces that he's expressly had something stronger to drink to give him the courage to have it out with his Calvinist in-laws!

Then things get complicated. They get complicated for me to recount because our evidence is about 1,000 pages of records relating to a trial, and in that trial, several people gave evidence several times. Their testimony contradicts each other, the same person's later testimony often contradicts their earlier testimony, sometimes people expressly retract their testimony, and no one is unbiased.

So we have no idea who actually said what.

What we know: While the baby was being baptized Calvinist, Father Bosten came and had a talk with Cunegonde, Hendrick's sister. She was an intellectually disabled woman in her twenties. This will later become important.

What we don't know: Either

a) Father Bosten ordered Cunegonde to march into the Calvinist church, where the baby was being baptized as they spoke, and rescue her nephew so he could be baptized Catholic.

b) Someone else, but not Father Bosten, ordered Cunegonde to march into the Calvinist church, where the baby was being baptized as they spoke, and rescue her nephew so he could be baptized Catholic.

c) Father Bosten was super chill about the whole thing, and Cunegonde marched in and started attempting to kidnap her nephew on her own initiative, so he could be baptized Catholic.

In the aftermath of this conversation, however it played out, the baby is being held over the baptismal basin when Cunegonde rushes in and grabs the baby by the legs. A tug of war ensues. (!) Someone manages to grab her and pull her off. A minute later, she lunges again but is held back.

Then she ends up being detained in Vaals, by the Protestant authorities. The baby is baptized Calvinist.

Back in Aachen, a bunch of Catholic farmhands decide to stage a raid and kidnap Cunegonde back. Again, possibly at the instigation of Father Bosten, possibly not.

They are successful. But this is legally even worse than trying to kidnap a baby from the church, because it was the state authorities detaining Cunegonde, and violating that is treason.

So Father Bosten ends up imprisoned and placed on trial for treason. The authorities try to bring the farmhands to trial too, but the Aachen authorities refuse to extradite them. It was night so there are some questions of identification. One guy is almost tortured to get a confession, but at the last minute, the witnesses change their tune and start saying they're not *sure* it was him. Three months later, the authorities get proof that he is in fact innocent--so they almost tortured the wrong guy.

Sneaky attempts to capture the farmhands are largely unsuccessful. The three ringleaders cut a deal and get immunity in exchange for evidence.

So mostly the trial comes down to the Protestants trying to prove that the Catholic clergy, as exemplified by Father Bosten, are lying, violent, religious fanatics who can't handle the baby of a Calvinist mother being baptized Calvinist, and the Catholics try to prove that Father Bosten is an enlightened, chill man who would never say anything like, "I order you to go kidnap that baby!"

MEANWHILE

Religious tensions are escalating. Both sides are blaming the other.

is violently attacked at night and ends up with a concussion.

Remember the Protestants in Aachen who practice Auslaufen, walking to Vaals to go to church? If they try that now, they get assaulted by Catholics on the way. They fear for their lives. It's no longer safe for them to go to church.

They demand an escort of soldiers from the authorities. These escorts are either not provided or are completely inadequate.

Eventually, one of the Protestants is killed.

The Catholics refuse to extradite the accused murderer.

The Dutch retaliate by shutting down the Catholic churches in their territory.

And this is where the author points out: from a modern perspective, the Catholics look like the villains, because they're committing the murder and assault. But from a contemporary perspective, the Protestants committed violence too: they just committed it against symbols. They went into churches and ripped down saints and crucifixes and generally committed iconoclasm. And to a devout Catholic, that's a crime against *God*, which is much worse than a crime against a mere human.

But not all the Catholics are prejudiced: Anna the midwife attends mass every day, but she not only delivers Protestant babies but is comfortable taking them to church to be baptized.

Once long ago Bosten had asked her, "Do you feel no compunction about bringing children to the Reformed church for baptism?" "Why shouldn't I do it?" she had answered defiantly. "I hear no evil there. You [meaning the pastor] say everything in Latin, but in the Reformed church I hear the baptism in German."

But because most people are not that chill, on either side, the trial is dragging on. Important records are disappearing. People are dying. An unofficial religious mini-war has broken out in the area of Aachen and Vaals. There is no end in sight.

Then Amalie shows up! No, she doesn't single-handedly solve the problem. But her presence is one of several factors that ends up contributing to the de-escalation of tensions.

As a reminder, after the end of the Seven Years' War, when it was safe to travel, Amalie went to the spa in Aachen to deal with what were obviously stress-related or stress-exacerbated symptoms. (I'm increasingly convinced this is how "taking the waters" got its reputation for being medicinally helpful: if you get a break from your stressful everyday life by going to a spa, you might feel better.)

And while she's in Aachen, she wants to attend church. And the reformed church is in Vaals. And the Aachen authorities obviously can't have Frederick the Great's sister being assaulted by local Catholic farmhands on her way to church. So they provide the safe escort while Amalie's there. Which means all the other Calvinists in the Aachen area can safely go to church in Vaals with her.

And since the Protestants are being treated better, the Dutch authorities calm down a bit and re-open the Catholic churches. And gradually things get better.

Meanwhile, Father Bosten is still on trial, and the trial is dragging oooon. There's an attempt to determine whether Cunegonde can be held legally accountable for her own actions, and whether her testimony can hold any weight at all. Remember, she keeps blaming Father Bosten for ordering her to do this.

Bosten's defense obviously wants to insist that she's so mentally disabled you can't believe anything she says. Her defense wants you to believe that she's impressionable and not capable of exercising good judgment, but that she's perfectly capable of remembering and accurately recounting what happened in the past.

Eventually, the case ends up making its way all the way up to the Dutch stadtholder, who at this time, is the husband of Fritz's niece Wilhelmine (the one Fritz thinks should exercise political influence over her husband, and whom FW will later stage an invasion to rescue her from Dutch rebels). He and his people eventually decide that:

1. Father Bosten is guilty. He will be banished from Dutch soil and not allowed to perform pastoral duties there again.
2. Cunegonde is guilty. She will be given an hour in the stocks.
3. Both Father Bosten and Cunegonde need to pay the legal fees for this case.

Legal fees are considerable in this period, partly because prisoners are responsible for their food, lodgings, heating, light, etc., and partly because everyone who gets paid by the parties found guilty has an incentive to drag trials on in order to inflate costs.

Cunegonde, who's disabled and still living with her parents and has no income, is not going to be able to pay a thing, and everybody recognizes this. So she "gets off" with just an hour in the pillory. The Catholics were going around insisting that she, poor disabled thing, was going to be whipped by the evil Protestants, but in the end, the Protestants were willing to make allowances for her disability.

But Father Bosten, who's become the prime target of this trial, and who's spent the most time in prison, isn't anywhere near being able to pay his fees either. So now there's a second legal battle over "How ridiculously high can you drive legal fees that obviously no one can pay?"

An attempt is made to raise the money for Father Bosten by asking his congregation to contribute to a collection. This isn't the first time a Protestant has gone after money from a Catholic in exactly this way, and it may be exactly what the Dutch authorities intended when setting the fees so impossibly high.

But even the collection the Church is able to obtain is only able to pay a portion of the fees. They're getting outraged, and accuse the authorities of overcharging. Eventually, Charles Bentinck, local governor, one of the famous Bentinck family (Horowski has a book supposedly* coming out in October that I'm planning to read), and man of the Enlightenment, agrees this persecution of Catholics is ridiculous and lowers the fees.

* Supposedly it was coming out last year, but publication got pushed forward, and I hope that doesn't happen again!

We're not entirely sure what happened to Cunegonde after this, because she has two first cousins with the same first and last name, but "it seems likely that our Cunegonde never married and that she died in 1771 at the age of thirty-one."

Sara and Hendrick had to flee town early on in this process, and they fell into poverty. Hendrick died young, as did the daughter they had, but Sara married twice more, the last time for money, and after outliving her third husband, she was well off. She lived until 1818.

Father Bosten continued serving as a priest "a stone's throw" from the Dutch border, until he died in 1783, age 71.

Was he guilty? The author says that without a time machine or crystal ball, we can't know, but he has an interesting guess:

Cunegonde's first testimony said that someone she didn't know, *not* the priest, pressured her into the kidnapping attempt. Only her later testimonies insist that it was the priest.

Since earlier testimony may be more accurate, as it's closer to events and less likely to be the result of external pressure, realizing where your interests lie, or just retelling the story in your head in a way that you're comfortable with...maybe it was this other guy who ordered Cunegonde.

Said other guy would, based on other evidence, have been Andries Buntgens, the father of the local sexton. Ironically, if he was the guilty party, he was the only person found innocent during the trial. But if the blame was shifted from Andries to Father Bosten, it may have been for two reasons:

1. Andries was a simple commoner, and classism dictates that people like this don't give orders or dispatch raiding parties. Father Bosten was a priest, which meant he was in a position of authority and influence. So he would have been more naturally seen as an instigator of events, and someone like Andries as a follower rather than a leader.

2. Father Bosten was a Catholic priest. The entire Reformation consisted of insisting that the Catholic clergy, from the Pope down, was full of self-serving, casuistic, un-Christian men who just wanted to exploit the common people. So seeing a priest as a man who would be fanatical enough to instigate violence against Protestants minding their own business, and then lie like a Jesuit about it, would have fit Protestant preconceptions much more than "some courier who happened to be Catholic was responsible for this religious mini-war."

But we will never know.

In conclusion, I have summarized a summary of some super complicated events and retelling of said events. If you want the summary, you can read the book, because there is a whole lot of action and drama and "he said, she said," along with some interesting (to me) sociology.

Re: Cunegonde's Kidnapping - Kidnapping, Trial, and Religious War

[selenak]

*applauds the summarizing art*

Speaking as the granddaughter of a Catholic from Aachen (that's Aix-La-Chapelle, btw, cahn, if you're only familiar with the French name) who married a (Lutheran) Protestant from Osnabrück, I am doubly faszinated by this tale I was hitherto unfamiliar with. (My paternal grandparents, btw, married under the condition that the kids would be raised Catholic, which they were. My Protestant aunt was sideeying my Catholic grandmother for this till her death.) All the kidnappings at the start remind me of the event where some of FW's troops were either in the process of returning with their volunteer when assaulted by a mob or lording with their gang-pressed victim which was liberated by the people, depending whom you believe, also at the Dutch border, I think.

If this visit of Amalie's is the one directly after the 7 Years War, it ought to be also the one where she met the travelling Mozarts (and liked Wolferl and Nannerl just fine, but, as a disapproving Leopold noticed, wasn't generous with the cash). ("If I had a gold piece for every kiss...") If it was, it might be worth checking Leopold's correspondence for mentions of this mini religious war, because as a staunch Catholic, he's bound to have An Opinion on this.

(Note that Wolfgang was in Paris, trying in vain to make it as a young man where he's been feted as a miracle child, when Voltaire died, and wrote home to Dad an "yay, that bastard Voltaire is dead and burns in hell!" letter. Just as an example of how Catholic the Mozarts were, free masons or not.)

Re: how "taking the waters" got its reputation, methinks you're onto something.

Fredersdorf/Fritz fic

[cahn]

For anyone reading salon who ships Fredersdorf/Fritz and who might not be subscribed to felis!

Holding His Space (2505 words) by felisnocturna
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF, 18th Century CE Frederician RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf/Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great
Characters: Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great
Summary:

Five times Fredersdorf has to stay behind - and one time Friedrich doesn't leave.

Re: Fredersdorf/Fritz fic

[mildred_of_midgard]

For anyone reading salon who ships Fredersdorf/Fritz and who might not be subscribed to [personal profile] felis!

Oooh, that's me! :D Thanks for the heads-up!

Sheesh, I'm so far behind on Fritz fanfic...

Trick or Treat

[cahn]

As you are no doubt aware, trick or treat nominations have begun, and we had discussed signing up and the possibility of fandom ghost stories! Let me know what you'd like to nominate (Heinrich & Fritz, ...?) and I can definitely do that if you need my slots.

Non-this-fandom-related, I'm going to nominate some B5... And, uh. selenak, if you request Neroon/Delenn, or Neroon, the chances are high you will get something for it. :P

(And Yuletide is coming sooooooon!)

Re: Trick or Treat

[selenak]

Re: Trick or Treat, definitely Heinrich & Fritz. (For which I could see both a serious (Heinrich at Wusterhausen) and a funny scenario, the funny scenario being the two of them haunting Rheinsberg when the musicians were trapped there in the first pandemic year (something which made the international media somehow) and Heinrich complaining Fritz should haunt Sanssouci, not come here with his ghostly dogs whom the musicians take for wolves) I also have an idea for Gundling (if ever there was someone entitled to ghostly revenge...), which would necessitate him & FW. Depending how many characters one can nominate, one can also throw in Katte, the idea being that FW is prepared for Katte's ghost and still convinced he did the harsh but fair thing there, but then he's completely unprepared for Gundling. Aaaaand then there's always the fact the Hohenzollern have their very own canonical ghost, the White Lady, so one could nominate her, I guess?

B5: oh, if Trick or Treat isn't limited like Yuletide to exclude fandoms with a certain number in stories, excellent idea! BTW, there's a (very good) canonical B5 ghost episode written by Neil Gaiman still waiting for you, Day of the Dead (the sole non JMS written episode of the later seasons), but Neroon isn't in it, so there's no canonical obstacle to a request. :)

Yuletide: we should talk about candidates soon, due to me being on my travels starting with the 9th.

Katte

[mildred_of_midgard]

Starting to read Hinrichs (partly because Selena got me curious about when the secret library is revealed in the interrogations), and I found these two passages from Katte that were of interest.

One is the answer to a question I've had for years, namely, what is the source of the claim I've seen on the internet that a friend of Katte's said that it "physically pained" Katte to be apart from Fritz?

Found it in Hinrichs, and what it says is actually not that, but I see how it got turned into that through a game of telephones (which quite possibly involved me misremembering):

Am 31. August sagte Katte über v. Spaen aus, dieser habe ihm während der Ansbachischen Reise des Kronprinzen einmal in Berlin gesagt, "dass er solche Liebe zum Kronprinzen trüge, dass er sich schwerlich würde resolvieren können, weit von ihm zu bleiben."

On August 31, Katte said about von Spaen that the latter had once said to him in Berlin, during the Crown Prince's trip to Ansbach, "that he bore such love for the Crown Prince, that he would find it very hard to resolve to remain far from him."

Correct me if my translation is wrong, but my interpretation is that Spaen is saying that if Fritz deserts on that trip, Spaen (not Katte) is going to find it hard not to desert too.

Second and very similar point:

In dem Verhör vom 28. August 1730 sagte Katte aus, der Leutnant von Spaen habe ihm in vergangen Winter einmal anvertraut, "dass er seinen Knecht auf Ordre des Prinzen nach Leipzig schicken müssen, einen Reise-Wagen zu bestellen und wollte ihm der Prinz auch 2 Koffers geben, die er doch mir schicken sollte, sich aber nicht weiter erkläret; ihm wäre so Angst dabei, dass der Prinz vielleicht weggehen wollte. Er hoffte aber nicht, bäthe auch fleißig unsern Herrn Gott, dass es nicht geschehen möchte, darauf ich ihm sagte, er sollte sich darüber keine Gedanken machen, es wäre fast ohnmöglich, wegzukommen. Wäre er aber einmal weg, würde ich suchen, hier los zu kommen und dann Ihm nachgehen, wo er wäre."

Now, the pronouns and the reported speech are making me a little uncertain of my translation, but this is what I've got:

In the interrogation of August 28, 1730, Katte said that Lt. Spaen had, in the past winter, once confided to him, "that he was supposed to send his servant to Leipzig on the order of the prince, order a carriage, and the Prince also wanted to give him two coffers, which he however should send to me, but would not explain himself further. This made him [Spaen] afraid that the Prince perhaps wanted to go away. He hoped not, however, and also diligently prayed our Lord God that this might not happen; to which I told him he shouldn't worry about it, it was almost impossible to get away. If he did go, though, I would try to get free from here and go where he was.

The chronology here is what's interesting to me. Reminder:

- Mid 1729: Fritz and Katte start getting to know each other.

- November 1729: Fritz and Peter Keith try to escape; Lt. Spaen is supposed to order horses but doesn't know why; not a single other person knows of this plan (according to Fritz's 1730 testimony).

- January 1730: Peter Keith is sent to Wesel to get him away from Fritz and his escape-planning. Only after Peter's gone do we have evidence that Fritz is trying to get Katte to help him escape/come with him.

November 1729 is the escape attempt that Katte is reporting here. The thing that's interesting to me is that at this stage, Fritz isn't entrusting "we've only known each other a few months" Katte yet with his escape attempts (though apparently considers him trustworthy enough to be sent some coffers after the fact), but Katte, if I'm not misinterpreting the "ich" in that passage, is willing to desert for Fritz already?

And yet only if Fritz leaves. Even though he might be lying through his teeth about his reluctance to desert because of the threat of torture, we do have the evidence that in 1730, Katte had to be talked into helping with stories of "But Seckendorff and Grumbkow want to force me to convert to Catholicism and marry an Austrian archduchess!"

I considered that that might have been before the November 1729 attempt, but if Fritz was already trying to talk Katte into deserting, surely he would have been more involved in November than "Spaen, send him a couple of coffers for me, k?"

I also considered that Katte might be lying about his willingness to leave in 1729, but...that's the opposite of the lie he'd want to tell, so I believe him.

I also considered that Fritz is trying to keep his escape as secret as possible, so maybe he didn't tell Katte to protect him and because he didn't need another accomplice since Peter was already on board (and way more gung ho than Katte), not because he didn't yet trust Katte that much...but 17-yo Fritz really, really sucks at keeping secrets. I genuinely think he would have told Katte asap if he had had the trust in him (and/or desperation with Peter gone) that he had in 1730.

So I'm getting the sense that Katte was a lot more emotionally committed to/infatuated with Fritz than Fritz to him in November 1729.

I suppose the alternative is that both Fritz and Katte are telling the same lie about Katte not knowing about the 1729 attempt, but without being able to communicate with each other, it's interesting that they both independently decided to lie and landed on the same lie. Usually there's some kind of contradiction in the testimony, like when Fritz said he extorted not!Robert by telling him that his brother was going to desert, and not!Robert said he knew nothing about his brother's desertion plan and that Fritz specifically told him not to tell Peter anything when they got to Wesel. Not to mention the nefarious Catholic marriage contradictions. Or Fritz insisting he was planning to come back while page Keith said Fritz said he was never coming back..

So I'm still leaning toward November 1729 being when Katte is head over heels and Fritz is all, "Peter! You are the one person I can trust with this secret! Thank you for being the one person who is totally on board with getting out of this hellhole. No, I won't hold your eagerness against you in the future, why do you ask?"

(Still haven't gotten to the secret library, since I got sidetracked by Katte.)

Oh, lol, I just got to the part where Fritz explains why he picked Katte (and says the first time he took him into his confidence was at Zeithain):

Because I took him for étourdi, the kind of person who likes to dare dangerous things.

Bilingual dictionaries keep giving me "dazed," "thoughtless," "giddy," "inconsiderate" for "étourdi", but given the monolingual definition of "someone who acts without thinking," I'm going to go with "impulsive" here.

It's funny because the phrase used by Prussian Count Rothenburg's wife to describe Katte in 1728 is "charmant mais étourdi." Apparently that was his outstanding character trait! (I'm not sure that's especially noticeable in how Michael Roes portrayed him--not that I've read more than excerpts, so correct me if I'm wrong.)

Re: Katte

[selenak]

Correct me if my translation is wrong, but my interpretation is that Spaen is saying that if Fritz deserts on that trip, Spaen (not Katte) is going to find it hard not to desert too.

Yes, that's what it says. Remind me, Spaen wasn't the one with the teacups, that was Ingerssomething or the other, right? Though Spaen shows up in Nicolai, I think?

Re: the second excerpt, I see the conclusion as a bit more ambigously - the "If he did go, I would try to get free from here" can also mean that Katte, still recounting his conversation with Spaen, told Spaen that if he were Spaen, he'd follow Fritz in the event that Fritz does manage to escape.

This said, your interpretation is also valid, plus of course all the statements aren't given in private conversations but the product of interrogation, and thus always worth being side-eyed re: their veracity. It's entirely possible Katte was more quickly into Fritz than Fritz was into him, though that's the reverse of how all the fictionalisations I'm aware of play it. :)

"charmant mais étourdi." Apparently that was his outstanding character trait! (I'm not sure that's especially noticeable in how Michael Roes portrayed him--not that I've read more than excerpts, so correct me if I'm wrong.)

NO, he doesn't, he portrays him very angsty and as brooding and since he's the sole author who portrays Katte for the majority of the book outside of the Fritz relationship, that's definitely a choice on his part. Because I think the problem is that most fictional Kattes are written in a Fritzian context, where it makes sense that Fritz is the risk taker pushing for action and the older Katte the one cautioning and counselling restraint etc. Hence no impulsive!Katte. Whereas clearly Fritz saw him like that.

Dead or alive

[mildred_of_midgard]

I'm pretty sure I've brought this up, but I'm going to bring it up again, because it's something I feel doesn't get talked about enough, either by historians (especially ones like Luh, who are all "There's no way Fritz could lose this battle with FW! FW couldn't realistically disinherit him because the Holy Roman Empire had RULES!"), or even in salon, where we talk about how Fritz offered his life in place of Katte's but not his crown, not until the last minute, because Fritz took a gamble that FW wouldn't issue a death sentence. Which is true as far as the official punishment goes. But.

The orders FW gave to the guy in charge of transporting Fritz from Wesel to Küstrin include this line:

You are thus bound and obliged to deliver the arrested living or dead to the aforementioned Küstrin. If even the unhoped-for case should arise, that someone at some point wants to make off with him [Fritz], and you are not in a position to prevent this with a larger force, you shall see that those others don't receive him other than dead.

So, you know, if Uncle George *had* sent a rescue force, Fritz could easily have lost this encounter, Luh. Even by your definition of losing (which is rather different than salon's).

I'm also always struck by these lines:

[His guards] should have good pistols and swords

You shall take all humanly possible precautions on this trip that the prince doesn't escape...If he has to relieve himself, then this must happen in an open field, where you can see far all around, and where there are no hedges or shrubs.

Now, as we've seen, there were other people in the 18th century (like his grandfather George I) who didn't like to get undressed or answer a call of nature when servants were around. So maybe Fritz's bodily modesty that gets remarked on as unusual for the time is unrelated, and maybe it even predates 1730. But I can't help wondering if having to relieve yourself in a wide open field with all eyes and possibly pistols trained on you was maybe traumatic.

(Still no signs of secret libraries, but in the battle between German font and ibuprofen, the font has been winning all day, so I'm going to take a break in hopes this headache subsides.)

Re: Dead or alive

[selenak]

So, you know, if Uncle George *had* sent a rescue force, Fritz could easily have lost this encounter, Luh. Even by your definition of losing (which is rather different than salon's).

Indeed. I guess Luh would argue that this applied only to a very limited time space, i.e. the way to Küstrin, and that Fritz was playing the long game. Even so: dead is dead. You bet that those soldiers who just saw that even an officer from an old family like Katte got punished for planning desertion would obey a direct royal order over sparing the life of the Crown Prince, especially since the later wasn't the only male heir.

But I can't help wondering if having to relieve yourself in a wide open field with all eyes and possibly pistols trained on you was maybe traumatic.

No kidding. Incidentally, that's one of the things I credit Der Thronfolger with - they do show Fritz was never alone, even under those circumstances, though in that case it's him and Not!Robert Keith while he's relieving himself and Fritz drops the "btw, get me a horse!" bomb. But as with the scene with child!Fritz and the people sleeping with him in the same room, it's a good way to get across that as a prince, he's hardly ever alone - even before attempting to desert. After, there's the staring at the trip, and also the utter lack of privacy the first few months in Küstrin - the servants he was given there not being allowed to speak with him would make it more alienating, not less.

This said, there's always the chance that somewhere in the SD/FW correspondence there#s the buried remark little Fritz already doesn't like being undressed etc. - all things are possible. But unless someone, probably felis, discovers it, I think your theory has much merit.

Yuletide hashing out of historical fandoms

[cahn]

May be of interest -- at yuletide_admin, melannen and I are discussing the idea of Historical RPF nominations based on media/documents rather than historical eras with the example being, of course, this fandom.