Fernando I, King in the Netherlands, as he now styled himself, judging from the signature on the letter.
"Are you seriously considering this, Your Majesty?" Drugeth asked quietly. He resisted the temptation to glance at the two other men in the room. Whatever else, Janos knew, he had to be able to react to his monarch in this situation without being influenced by the attitude of others.
"Quite seriously, Janos. Be assured of that. Not that I feel bound by any of my sister and new brother-in-law's specific suggestions. They face a very different situation than I do, over there in the Low Countries. And while my sister is an exceptionally well-educated and intelligent woman, and was raised here, in the nature of things her knowledge of the Austrian empire was limited in many respects. Quite limited, in some. She has no close knowledge of military affairs, for instance." The new emperor chuckled, a bit heavily. "Of course, the same cannot be said of her new husband, who could legitimately lay claim to being the most accomplished military leader produced by the family in generations."
All that was true enough. Janos had encountered Maria Anna, and had been quite impressed by her forceful personality, as much the product of an acute mind as the self-confidence of a princess. What was even more true was that the situation in Austria and its possessions was quite different-radically different-from the one she now dealt with in her new domain.
There were but two or three languages in her new kingdom, for instance, and not too distantly related at that. Whereas in the Austrian empire, how many languages were spoken? And not by a handful of foreign emigres or small groups in isolated pockets, either, but by entire regions and by powerful persons?
Janos didn't actually know, for sure. German and Italian, of course. Hungarian. A veritable host of Slavic dialects. Three very different groups of languages, with little similarities at all.
Maria Anna and her new husband only had to deal with a few religious strains, to name another difference. Catholicism and two brands of Calvinism. Some Jews. Almost no Lutherans. Whereas in the Austrian empire, although they'd been largely driven underground by the harsh policies of Ferdinand's rigidly Catholic father, there still lurked every variety of Protestantism, Christians who adhered to the Greek church, as many if not more Jews as there were in Holland-and, should the full scope of the successor's plans come to fruition, a great number of Muslims as well.
"All of the Balkans?" he asked, managing to keep any trace of quaver from his voice.
"Constantinople, too," said the emperor flatly. "The Turks have had it long enough."
Privately, Janos made a note to himself to try to limit the emperor's ambitions in that regard. He could see no real advantage to seizing the southern Balkans, beyond seizing territory for the sake of it. Especially given that the rest of the proposal was already so ambitious.
"Insanely" ambitious, one could almost say. Ferdinand proposed to overturn centuries of Austrian custom, social institutions and policies at the same time as he expanded Austrian power.
The older one of the other two men in the room cleared his throat. "I have read many of those same up-time history books, Your Majesty. I feel constrained to point out that, in essence, what you propose to do here in Austria is what another monarch in Russia would try to do at the end of this century."
"Yes. Peter the Great."
The man-Johann Jakob Khiesel, Count von Gottschee, who had served the Austrian dynasty as its principal spymaster for decades-cleared his throat again. "He failed, you know. In the long run, if not in his own time. His Romanov dynasty would be destroyed in two centuries-and, in great part, by the same forces he set loose."
The emperor nodded. "I'm aware of that. But simply because he failed does not mean that we shall. We have many advantages he did not possess. And please show me any alternative, Jakob? Given that those same histories make quite clear the fate of our own Habsburg dynasty. We were also destroyed, in that same conflagration they call the First World War."
Somewhere in Janos Drugeth's mind-perhaps his soul-he could feel the decision tipping. Pulled toward the emperor by Ferdinand's unthinking use of the pronoun "we," in a manner that made quite clear he was using it in the common form of a collective pronoun, rather than the royal We.
Although he'd only read some of the up-time accounts of the future history of Russia-which were fairly sparse, in any event-Janos was quite sure that Peter the Great had never done any such thing. The Russian Tsar had tried to transform his realm without ever once contemplating the need to transform himself and his dynasty.
That… might be enough.
Even if it weren't, Janos could not gainsay the emperor's other point. Drugeth had studied exhaustively every American account he could find-Austria had many spies in Grantville, and good ones, so he was sure they'd found most of them-and the accounts of the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and its likely causes, were clear enough. Insofar as anything was ever clear when it came to history.
If they continued as they had been, they were surely doomed. Not in their own lifetimes, probably, but so what? If a man had no greater ambition than to go through his life satisfying his personal wants and desires, ignoring what might happen to his descendants, Janos thought him to be a sorry sort of man. Not to mention a Catholic in name only.
The fourth man in the room put the thought to words. "I think we have no choice, Father. Like you, I can see all of the pitfalls and perils in the Netherlanders' proposal. But what choice do we have? And I will point out that if we have advantages that our counterparts in another universe did not have, we also have disadvantages." A thin smile came to the face of Georg Bartholomaeus Zwickl, the count's stepson and official heir. "They did not have to face Michael Stearns."
Stearns. Mentally, Janos rolled the harsh-sounding English name on his tongue. A former coal miner, now grown into a force that had struck Europe like Attila and the Huns a thousand years earlier. In his impact, at least, if not in his methods.
Janos had seen him, once, although only at a distance on the streets of Grantville. The man had been laughing at some remark made by his companion, the president of the USE's State of Thuringia-Franconia. That was Ed Piazza, whom Janos had met briefly and in person in the course of a casual social affair.
He'd liked Piazza's friendly and unassuming manner. Just as he'd liked the look on Stearns' face when he laughed, for that matter. Being fair, it was hard to imagine such a laugh ever issuing from the mouth of Attila.
Maybe…
He filed that possibility away. For the moment, and for the foreseeable future, Austria and the USE were enemies.
While silence filled the room for a time, Drugeth went back to scrutinizing the letter.
Very shrewd, many of those suggestions. Janos wondered who had actually originated them? For all their undoubted intelligence, he didn't think Maria Anna and Fernando would have thought of some of them. Being born and raised in royal families also created limits. They had-must have-at least one adviser who was capable of seeing beyond those limits.
"You have my full support, Your Majesty," he said. For the first time since he'd begun reading the letter, he looked directly at von Gottschee. The old man looked tired, more than anything else. As well he might, given that he'd served Austria's dynasty faithfully and well for so long-and now, almost at the age of seventy, he was being asked to undo much of what he had done.
Privately, Janos made another note. It was unrealistic to expect the count to do more than maintain Austria's spy network. Indeed, it might even be dangerous to try to force him to do more. Fortunately, Count von Gottschee had long been grooming his stepson to take his place. Janos got along quite well with Georg Bartholomaeus, who was in his late thirties.