Swiss Arms
Chapter 181
-VB-
The Gorizian-Habsburg War: the Fate of the Alps
By Professor Harttell Goman, University of Zurich
Chapter 11: An Accounting
The Battle of Fluelaberg signaled the true end of the Gorizia-Habsburg War for the Bohemian Crown, and like all battles led by Count Hans von Fluelaberg, it was an overwhelming victory despite the numerical disadvantage the count worked with.
When Duke Frederich the Fair returned home, he came to a house with only himself as the only survivor among his brothers, not including his siblings who had remained at home in Vienna. As he had known, his brother Leopold died at the hands of Count Hans von Fluelaberg, but he also learned upon returning that Rudolph, after losing the Battle of Znojmo, became sick in the stomach and died on his return trip to Vienna. Now the sole ruler of the Duchy of Styria and the Duchy of Austria, he came face to face with the losses his family had incurred. He and his brothers had marched out with ten thousand soldiers. Of them, three thousand were men-at-arms and knights made up almost eight hundred. By the time he got an audit of his military capacity, he discovered he had lost nearly half of his men-at-arms, a third of his knights to death and another third to capture, and a fifth of his levies. Deaths alone for the two duchies were a staggering three thousand (not all of them to combat), and nearly just as many were wounded, infected, and diseased. Worse were the ransom calls that began to filter into the duchies, mostly from Bavaria and Bohemia.
Then he learned about the losses of his Swabian vassals. Another two thousand dead; five hundred more had died from their wounds and diseases after the end of the “Battle of Ricken Pass.”
A staggering four thousand five soldiers lost in total, more than a third of his house’s entire army.
Worse, the Lower Bavarian branch of the House Wittelsbach used this chance to consolidate two of their house’s domains into one, creating a duchy - an ally of his enemy - that rivaled the Habsburg’s eastern domains in size and population. Other allies and opportunists who joined in on the side of the Habsburg also lost. Some, like the Prince-Bishopric of Brixen, were quick to surrender, lest they suffer rampant looting and pillaging at the hands of the victorious Fluelaberg army, who had the Baron of Bruneck, his family, and incriminating letters sent to the baron by the Prince-Bishop that implicated the prince-bishop in the assassination attempt. When Duke Fredrick the Fair learned about what they tried to do and failed, he sent letters to his rival, the King Henry of Bohemia, that he had nothing to do with breaking the guest rights.
As a result of this, the Prince-Bishopric of Brixen had to negotiate peace separately from the Habsburgs and their allies. This resulted in the following: a reparation of nine hundred gold guelders (all of Brixen’s money at the time and then some) to the Count of Fluelaberg, cede all territories north of the City of Brixen to the County of Tyrol (and thus the King of Bohemia), and the Prince-Bishop had to submit himself to the authority of the pope and await his judgement. The pope, upon learning about this, stripped Bishop Johannes Wulfing of his episcopacal titles, including the office of the bishop, and sentenced him to live out the rest of his days in a mountaintop monastery in Corsica.
As for the Baron of Bruneck who carried out the assassination attempt, no one contested the count over his right to punish the baron.
---
Hans
1310
I should be heading to the negotiation table at Salzburg, but this was just as important as the final negotiation itself.
The entire city of Fluelaberg had come out to watch the proceedings. People lined the main road running through the city on either side as a now much slimmer and dirtier man was pulled forward by a single horse via the rope tied to his wrists.
This was Karl, the former Baron of Bruneck. As of the Prince-Bishop of Brixen’s surrender, he was no longer a baron or even a noble. Just like his liege who had been stripped of his titles and exiled from the empire by both the pope and the emperor, the baron too had been handed his punishment.
To be executed.
And I, who suffered at his hands, was to be his executioner.
For the baron, it’s been two long months since his city fell to my army and I. He’s been on a constant march since then, watching his own liege lord’s ally get decimated on the battlefield and hearing from his liege lord’s own mouth disavowing the former baron’s actions. He testified against his former liege lord after that, but his crime was just too great for him to get off his punishment from merely cooperating. His cooperation made sure the youngest of his family lived, however. His two elder daughters? They weren’t surviving. But the family’s youngest daughter and only son? They would live, just not in the empire or as nobles.
As the horse pulled the former baron along, people pulled out rotten fruits and chucked it at him.
I watched from the wooden dais made in front of the town hall as the people kept to my instruction of not throwing rocks at the baron, even though quite a few of the people here were family members of the dead rangers.
The baron’s head snapped to the side after a particularly large cabbage struck him in the temple, and he fell to the ground.
The horse didn’t care.
He got up, stumbling while being dragged, and continued to walk behind the horse with his head bowed and hair in oily and stained disarray.
He endured the thousands of soft, rotten fruits and vegetables hurled at him as he was led up to the execution. He slipped. He fell.
But he moved.
And finally, he reached the foot of the execution dais.
The ranger riding the horse got off, untied the rope from his saddle, and pulled the man up the dais.
He trudged up the stairs as the rotten fruit attacks finally ceased.
And when he got on top of the platform, he finally saw it.
A noose.
The capital punishment for the commoners.
He stared up at it before looking back down at me.
I didn’t say anything, merely standing over the lever that would drop the man, and waited as the town guards who volunteered for this stepped up and dragged him over to the noose and pull it around his neck.
They tightened the noose and stepped back.
The former baron took in a shuddering breath and let it out.
“Any last words?” I asked.
“... I only did as my liege ordered,” he replied. “I was … I was a loyal servant. My only fault was … not having been successful.”
That got the crowd rowdy. They shouted at him. Even the priest who stood to give the last rites looked angry with him, though the man admirably kept himself firmly under control.
I waited for the people to get their grievances out.
I saw tears rolling down on some. Red wrathful faces on others.
Ultimately, this was about their anger being let out. A target for the losses they suffered not through legitimate or understandable means but through treachery.
Personally, I would have killed the former baron just like I had killed the thief at the end of busting the smugglers. A problem that lived even a moment longer was a problem that could cause more trouble. What if the baron had wanted to fight to the end and killed one of my guards? Or one of my soldiers? What if he escaped and then, in the safety of someone willing to offer him sanctuary, declared all of his previous declarations to have been false and under coercion?
If I had my way, then I would have killed him as soon as he made the confession about his Brixen bishop’s involvement.
But not everything was so cut and dry, so black and white.
I glanced to the side.
[Cohesion] County.Fluelaberg\Cohesion\Data\Factors
Legitimacy: A [+]
Internal Politics: A+ [+]
Loyalty: A+ [+]
Bureaucracy: A-
Centralization: S-
Corruption: B+
Employment: A+
Internal Trade: A-
External Networking: B-
International Recognition: B
Language Cohesion: A
Law Enforcement: B+
Power Balance: S
Prosperity: S-
Religious Unity: C+
(20+)
It helped.
This show. This entire production.
It made people feel like I was worth their loyalty and that they owed me. Gave me legitimacy. Gave them revenge and satisfaction. Very few things mattered right here in front of my people right now. Right now, their emotional demand - the need to be satisfied of their anger and loss - was what mattered.
I let them let it out for the sake of the county and the Compact. An already strong loyalty that would not be out of place in a nationalist future grew even stronger with each moment I allowed it to progress and reach its climax.
And finally…
I raised a fist with my elbow bent.
Silence very quickly rippled out and stayed as they all looked at me.
“Here is Karl, a man who has been stripped of his nobility and titles and even his name by the good emperor and the pope,” I boomed out. “A man who, instead of fighting us properly on the battlefield, chose to use hospitality and poison to lay us low. Many of our good men who spent years training and sweating to defend us … died from poison. From being killed in bed. Unable to fight back,” I listed out with a growl. “All because he had been ordered to do so. Ordered to break hospitality. Ordered to do evil by evil men.” I slightly turned to look at him. “You were born a Christian first, a noble second. You were baptized under the light of God before you accepted the vows of fealty. You broke your promise to the Holy Spirit, Christ, and God.”
The crowd bristled as my words riled them up.
“I gave you a chance to repent with your last words. You didn’t. Your last words were the latest in a long list of pathetic attempts to shift blame. You can forget about your last rites.”
The priest looked shocked.
And unceremoniously pulled the lever.
His eyes widened for a second before the floor beneath him dropped. He dropped and - just as planned - he didn’t drop far enough to die instantly.
He choked and struggled, flopping and gasping. But the rope was doing its job.
People screamed and shouted again, throwing rocks and rotten fruits again.
I watched mostly indifferently as an already dead man finally died.
And then the procession repeated all over again with the two Bruneck daughters who participated in the poisoning.
By the end of it, the three Cohesion Factors for the county benefiting from the executions - Legitimacy, Internal Politics, and Loyalty - rose A+ to S-.
---
Count Hans von Fluelaberg would not arrive in Salzburg for the negotiation until the first half of it had concluded.
In it, the House Habsburgs gave up any past, present, and current claims they held to the Crown of Bohemia. The Habsburgs also repaid close to six thousand gold guelders as reparations to King Henry of Bohemia. Finally, the Habsburgs ceded the area around Zwettl to the Crown of Bohemia for the king to agree to not prosecute the war to a ruinous end for the Habsburgs. King Henry created the County of Zwettl from this newly acquired land and gave it to a Czech knight who performed exemplarily in the Battle of Znojmo. This began the House Moulin with their founder Hunnas Moulin. This negotiation did not, however, include the ransoms for all of the knights and other nobles still imprisoned by the Bohemians, Bavarians, and the Compact.
The Silesian rebels, of course, weren’t part of this negotiation, and would soon be dealt with by King Henry once the peace negotiations came to an end.
Roughly a week after the end of the first round of negotiations, Count von Fluelaberg arrived with a small retinue to partake in his share of the spoils. And considering that he had done much more than King Henry had accomplished, the Habsburgs were about to lose more.
-VB-
A/N:
Duke Rudolph does canonically/historically die from a “sick stomach,” so I thought, hey, why not do it again?
So the current roster of HRE Emperors:
Albert I of Habsburgs - 1306, death by assassination. Lived 5 years more than RH.
Albert III of Saxe-Lauenberg - 1306, death by shitting himself.
John of Luxembourg - current. Allies of Habsburgs but didn’t participate in the war because he didn’t get called into it or included in the plan.