Crusader Kings: Prisoners of War

After weighing the pros and cons, Orville decided not to collect taxes first, so as not to add too much burden to the locals, who were already struggling.

The finances during this period were mainly maintained by the property of the nobles whose property was confiscated. Orville was sending special people to measure and count the land of these nobles.

The officers of each legion must have confiscated the property of the nobles during the war. Most of the wealth accumulated by the nobles either went into the treasury or into the wallets of the generals and soldiers. In short, there was not much left in Orville's hands, so Vespa gave Orville a subsidy of 4 million dinars.

However, no matter how fierce and tragic the war was, there were still some things that could not be taken away, such as the land of the nobles. These lands were nationalized, and now the control rights were in Orville, and he decided the fate of these lands.

Some of them would be kept for other uses, but some would be auctioned and sold, and the money would become the operating funds of the provincial governor. The current goal is to find a suitable seller. Orville does not want the Senate to extend its hand to his territory, so he will try not to sell it to the upper nobles in Rome.

After a little thought, he was ready to use these lands to stimulate the Roman citizens of the Apennine Peninsula and attract them to immigrate here. Killing two birds with one stone, on the one hand, it can alleviate financial problems, and on the other hand, it can speed up the Latinization process here and assimilate the locals as soon as possible.

He offered quite generous conditions to Roman citizens who were willing to immigrate to the province of Lugden Gaul, selling fertile and ready-made arable land to civilians willing to immigrate at a relatively low price. If the land buyer was short of money, he could only pay a down payment, and then slowly repay the loan by increasing annual taxes. Moreover, the interest rate was quite touching in ancient society, only 20%.

Priority was given to retired soldiers, former civil servants, doctors, teachers and other useful professions, and there were some additional subsidies and preferential policies for veterans, continuing the traditional virtues of Rome.

There were still many tenants on the Apennine Peninsula. The Romans were an agricultural nation, and their obsession with arable land had penetrated deep into their bones. This clause was very attractive to them. Orwell only had a few thousand places, and these people could still be easily gathered in the Apennine Peninsula.

He was going to sell so much farmland to test the waters. On the one hand, it was useful to keep the land, and on the other hand, it would be difficult to calculate if there were too many people. In the Roman era, banks were temples that also had banking functions. Without those professional staff, the efficiency and ability to process information were limited.

Orville could arrange loans and accurate tax changes for each small farmer and self-employed farmer, mainly because the land he confiscated was all private land of the nobles.

Suppose there was a large manor, he would cut the land of a manor into 100 blocks according to certain rules and data, and then sell it to 100 different Roman farmers. Farmers of the same type were all assigned to the same piece of manor land, which would be much more convenient for tax officials to collect taxes. They only needed to require each household to pay similar grain.

There was another key point, so he would not mind the trouble of doing this - this way, there would be one less big landlord and one hundred more self-employed farmers. The difference would immediately appear when recruiting soldiers. The combat effectiveness of tenant farmers and self-employed farmers can be said to be completely different.

In the ancient world, self-employed farmers were recognized as the best soldiers, and even in modern times, the situation was still similar. If you want to compare the differences between the two in detail, you can see it in Egypt.

At that time, Egypt was quite centralized compared to Rome. The land naturally belonged to the king and the hereditary temples, so all the Egyptian farmers were landless tenants. The combat effectiveness of these people was reflected when Caesar conquered Egypt. More than 20,000 Egyptian troops were unable to defeat Caesar's 4,000 people, but were instead messed up by Caesar.

Although a mistake cannot represent the overall level of the army, the combat effectiveness gap between Rome and Egypt is not only due to the quality of the soldiers, and the Egyptian army does not only have tenants, but it is true that Egypt's martial virtue has been in arrears for thousands of years, and sometimes it is a representative of the whole country.

This is indeed somewhat related to the fact that the opponent does not have the level of self-cultivating farmers. Orwell never expects that an army that is not well fed and clothed can win a tough battle. Therefore, he will expand the number of self-cultivating farmers rather than tenant landlords within the scope. This is also a relatively fair and good way of land distribution, which is better than serfs and slaves anyway.

As for whether there will be land transactions and land mergers between them, this is unavoidable. Orville can only "manually reset" it occasionally like calibrating a clock, worrying that things hundreds of years later will be beyond his ability.

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In addition to preparing to toss real estate, Orville also opened branches of his hotel in several major cities in Gaul.

The starting point is the southern port city of Marseille, then Toulouse, Tours, Orleans, Paris, Caen, and extends to the city where Orville is now.

Several hotels are connected in a line. With the previous network, it can almost reach Caen or any major city in Gaul directly from Rome.

Gaul is not as rich as Italy, and there are not many people going out. Moreover, the people's livelihood is in decline after the war. Orville estimates that it will be good if he does not lose money in a few years, but even if he loses money, he has to do this because it is necessary.

In addition to a simple hotel, he will also prepare a supporting transport fleet. In the future, he will need to frequently send people to and from Rome and Gaul to transport large amounts of supplies. If this kind of work is left to a contractor, he will lose more money. Needless to say, it is still unstable and I don’t know if there will be any accidents along the way.

It is still important to have necessary industries in your own hands, and Orville will not leave any loopholes for others to take advantage of.

Therefore, after the Roman army arrived in Caen and set up camp, the first thing they did was not to build a port, but to help Orville make a carriage.

The craftsmen in the army are relatively good at manufacturing. They know everything they know how to do. It is very easy to make something when there are enough materials. They rushed out hundreds of carriages in a short period of time. Orville also made some of these things. A little modification to make them a little more humane.

As mentioned before, according to the normal historical development process, European horse harnesses during this period were quite simple and crude. They used reins to fix the horse's neck, so that the horse would easily suffocate when pulling the cart to plow the fields, so the horse would be strangled to death.

In this time and space, they discovered in advance the tying method that would only appear in Europe in the 3rd to 4th century. The reins were tied at the position of the horse's shoulder blades, which at least did not compress breathing.

Orville made some modifications on this basis, so that the driving method that should have appeared in a later period appears in the present.