Rise of Rurik

The flame tower burned for three days and three nights until the first day of the Julian calendar in 838 AD.

The four giant trees supporting the main structure of the entire wooden tower finally collapsed, leaving behind a pool of bluish-white ashes at the fire tower site.

The festive aftertaste has not faded, and the ashes on the beach are still hot.

Thanks to the huge fire tower, the surrounding exchanges have indeed undergone tremendous changes.

It is like a man-made sun, a scorching lighthouse, which has scorched the snow in a large number of areas, and even the area of ​​New Rose Fort facing the Fire Tower has returned to its snow-free appearance, and the snow on the wall in this area has been lost. When the fire tower disappeared, it was baked into the snow and the mud was frozen again, so the sled could not run in such an area, but it caused a little trouble to the people.

Kagan especially remembers how the people sang and danced in the tower when the fire tower exploded.

For three nights in a row, the whole city was bright and warm. He had never had such an experience in his hometown, and now his life in the royal city of the Rus is like a dream.

Once upon a time, in his worldview, the world revolved around a grassland, the north was the forest, and the south was the sea. The forest is the territory of the Slavs, the sea is controlled by the Romans, and the vast grasslands are all strong.

Unexpectedly, the forest generation also has a world of ice and snow, with a frozen ocean. The people here live another wonderful life, and what amazes him is the abundance of iron and the low prices.

With the Neva River estuary as the center, there is no iron ore in a radius of 100 kilometers, not even mountains. The geographically closest land quarry is somewhere in the Isthmus of Karelia, which is nearly 200 kilometers away from here. That area has not even been covered by hunters in the Principality, and even the Finns have never discovered it.

In theory, the Duchy of Rus conquered all the "Eastern Lands" and expanded its territory to the coast of the Arctic Ocean. There is a serious lack of knowledge about what is in the territory, and the huge area needs to be explored urgently, but this bitter cold land naturally repels explorers. If they can, the Rus are more willing to go south to find more suitable land for farming and warm hunting grounds.

It is this rotten land that a small group of people chasing the tracks of reindeer is always a maverick. Legally, all deer breeders have completely become citizens of the duchy. The deer breeders who are registered deer breeders pay tribute every autumn. They mainly pay taxes mainly on deer skins and live deer to the governor of Elronborg in the extreme north. Buy iron and salt locally with deerskin as a special currency.

If the urgent necessities of life can be purchased peacefully, the scattered deer-raiser clans have completely given up their resistance. They don't care about their home and country. They graze reindeer carefree in the vast tundra and forest, and flee at home when attacked by the strong.

Knowing that they found themselves with no escape.

Even the deer-breeder clans that went to the Kola Peninsula are moving westward, as long as they pay taxes, they can get a small flag. With this Rus flag, they get the right to trade, and in principle, various Rus hunters dare to attack them. , Ross hunters who have committed crimes according to the law will be severely punished for the crime of murdering their tribesmen. According to general principles, wild and unruly hunters are blond and strong men, and they simply look down on a group of nomadic dwarfs in the wilderness. Unexpectedly, attacking these nomadic clans is now a serious crime, which was not the case before!

The history books of the Principality clearly record that the immigrant Ross ancestors annihilated the deer farmers who lived in the fjords, thus establishing Ross Fort.

Why did the prince ask the people to be kind? Is it just because of the high priest's background?

Not so. As a monarch, which monarch would kill his own tax source group for nothing? What's more, the Principality sells iron tools to free deer breeders, and the price is far higher than the market price of the Principality. The industrial and agricultural scissors here are frantically exploiting a group of free people in a matriarchal clan society.

The rise of the Principality of Ross certainly has its own efforts, but also lies in the huge dividends of the extremely long gambling war of the national fortune. The Principality has already seen industrial heralds, and the sensitive Rurik has noticed the rise of industrial capital in the Principality. In this regard, of course, there is his exemplary policy as a prince, and even if he does not intervene, industrial capital will inevitably rise. The emergence of the Hanseatic League is a historical inevitability. The commercial groups in the cities around the Baltic Sea are not real businessmen. Most of them are also doers. For more wealth, they must step up the production of materials and then trade across the ocean.

Even if the Novrosburg at the mouth of the Neva River needs ore, it is theoretically not suitable for the development of the metallurgical industry. However, there are inexhaustible timber resources here, and there is a decent northern port, which is the center of the two regions of the Principality. A large number of people have gathered here, which means that a large number of people have a strong willingness to work. Raise your income and improve your life.

In an open space in the city of New Roseburg, some special factories have long been erected.

When stone and cement began to be put into urban construction, the workshops in this area immediately began to "renovate stone". Because the workmanship here is quite special, it is more alert to the possibility of fire than other buildings.

Here is the great iron factory of New Roseburg, which makes steel without smelting ore. There is not a single earth blast furnace here, but there are twenty furnaces based on traditional improvements in an ostentatious matrix. The refractory bricks fired with mixed iron ore make the interior of the furnace stronger and the service life is greatly improved.

Because the two large iron works in the blast furnace towns of Elronborg and Roseburg alone cannot digest the pig iron they produce. Both of the two large iron plants are adjacent to mines. With the application of blast furnace technology, molten iron smelting is completed every day, and a batch of pig iron is cast. If you just cast axes, hammers and shovels, you can put them into production and life after casting. However, they can only be used as production tools, and the quality is not high, so the price is not high.

Just work them into steel and the price can skyrocket!

A large number of pig iron ingots cannot be digested by the large iron factories in the north, unless there are more local laborers, but a large number of people rushed to the south, and the lack of labor force formed a stark contradiction with more output. Then it became necessary to transport the pig iron ingots to the new large ironworks in the south for finishing.

The shipyards in Roseburg's hometown are full of brisk standard-sized cargo ships, taking advantage of the warm season to frantically deliver pig iron ingots to New Roseburg.

In line with the principle of maximizing profits, the two large iron plants in the north have devoted all their efforts to smelting iron ore. When the sea froze, the big northern iron factory changed its strategy, taking into account the work of mining, molten iron and steel.

There are three large iron factories in the duchy, which are legally the assets of the duchy and Rurik himself as the monarch. After all, it was the factory he built with his own money, and he also took the initiative to train a group of workers, because the blacksmith alliance in the duchy signed the contract. The iron-smithing family in the whole duchy and the prince's family are completely allied, so the heads of the big iron factories in various places must unconditionally obey the prince's production capacity withering.

Therefore, the labor force of the two major iron factories in the north supports their families through labor remuneration, and their consumption also drives the lives of other people in the two settlements.

In the "post-immigration era" after the principality moved the capital, Roseburg and Elronborg found their key new position - the big iron factory.

Roseburg is a bit more complicated, and it is also home to the Northern Leather Trade Center and Northern Shipyard. Elronborg also has its own characteristics. It guards the two northern rivers. It is the herring fishing center of the Principality, the activity center of northern hunters and registered deer breeders, and even the largest land trade route with Narvik Port in the north. post station.

Pig iron ingots from the north come in a variety of shapes. They are piled up in mountains and placed outdoors indifferently, so that the surface is definitely rusted and turned red.

Rusting is not a problem at all, these irons with excessive carbon content are smashed into pieces by the strong man, and they are fried in the stove.

The Principality fully uses the frying method to smelt iron ingots into low-carbon steel. Based on the intuitive feeling of craftsmen, the carbon content of semi-finished products is reduced to a certain range as much as possible, and then the processing is continued.

A boy who thought he was young and quite strong became the director of the New Roseburg Iron Works.

He was none other than poor Kamne, whose parents had been killed by the bear.

Those bitter things are long ago, and now this kid not only has a successful career, but also has a wife, and even just became a father.

There are traces of young boys everywhere. They are the first small blacksmiths trained by Rurik. Their identities are generally of Slavic ethnicity, and most of them are from Novgorod. Loyalty is not necessary. Doubt.

Kamne, who has grown into a strong man and dressed like a Viking, is most pleased with the Maharaja's visit in person. This time, he personally acts as a tour guide to introduce the current production capacity of the iron factory to the Maharaja.

Although it is a large iron factory, there are only twenty furnaces here. The furnace can naturally be expanded, but based on the current supply of iron ingots, twenty furnaces working all year round can completely eat them.

Although from the perspective of ordinary people and professional blacksmiths, the pig iron produced by the Principality every year can be called huge! But the exact calculation is not even five tons.

This is also with the self-proclaimed huge production capacity? ! According to the per capita iron production, the data of the Rus Principality is indeed close to the peak per capita in the Western Han Dynasty. Of course, the Rus people even imitated the smelting process of the Western Han Dynasty. Perhaps this is the limit that this process can achieve.

In this poor European world, the Principality of Rus, with a nominal output of 100,000 people and an annual output of 5 tons of iron, is already comparable to the entire huge and infighting Frankish kingdom. At least the Duchy of Rus is simply unable to consume so much iron production. Selling iron products to the outside world is a major way to make money. Therefore, the King of Denmark destroyed the local Rus shops, which is equivalent to using a knife to stab the Rus people's artery.

Realistically speaking, if it weren't for the Rus people guarding the best iron ore veins in Northern Europe, as well as the extremely high iron content in the ore, and even the blast furnace technology, they would not be able to do this at all.

A large amount of iron exists in the city as tools cast from pig iron, such as heavy cast iron pots and pots for life, including iron frying pans and frying pans in princely families and wealthy merchants.

Only a portion of pig iron is finished into steel, but the latter only accounts for 20% of total capacity.

In fact, even using the frying method to make steel cannot change the fact that the work of making steel is time-consuming and labor-intensive.

Russ man-made steel is almost used in weapons, such as forged swords, forged spears, forged steel armor-piercing arrows, forged steel axes, and forged crossbow arms.

Even some special tools, such as the shock-absorbing reeds of special carriages, curved ploughs, and even the elastic reeds of woodworking lathes.

The steelmaking workshops of all major ironworks are dedicated to these jobs, while the major ironworks in New Roseburg are currently only responsible for processing iron ingots into steel.

The factory area maintains the sound of ding ding dong dong all year round, and there are even craftsmen beating at night.

The young craftsmen are deeply favored by the emperor. They are all ordinary and poor peasant children. In principle, they are now the private iron slaves of the prince, but they live a good life that they could not imagine before. The brothers ate well, dressed well and slept well on weekdays. They worked hard for a long time, and each of them trained so that their arms were thicker than their legs and their bodies were full of tendons. It is because of the bonuses for more work, which drives them to squeeze as much time as possible to forge steel weapons.

This time the prince came again.

Kamne grew a beard and wore a sackcloth blouse that rolled up his sleeves without fear of the cold outside.

Indeed, even though the windows of the entire blacksmithing workshop were open for ventilation, twenty furnaces were arranged in a matrix to form a huge crew, and Rurik even saw some blacksmiths working with their bare backs.

"Your Highness, you must have important arrangements for your visit..." Kamne said with a naive smile.

"clever."

After all, Rurik motioned for his men to bring the cloth bag and took out one of the items.

"What is this?" Kamne was puzzled.

"This? It's the horse's shoe."

"Iron shoes for horses? Strange."

"It's not surprising." Rurik resolutely handed it over to Kamne: "You can copy it immediately according to my arrangement. I know your strength. Now I need 500, and you must build it quickly."

"Huh?!" Kamne was taken aback.

"What? You're not happy?"

"I dare not. Maharaja, how can I not see how it is worn on a horse... a horse's hooves."

"That's natural. It's going to be nailed to the horseshoe."

"Huh?! The horses won't hurt. That's your horse, your cavalry."

Only then did Rurik think that he and his little brother don't know about horseshoes? He hurriedly explained the whole story, which barely made the smart Kamne understand.

Smashing a horseshoe into a horse's hoof with a nail, even so the horse doesn't feel pain? Doing so is said to prevent hoof wear.

As for the horseshoe that Rurik took out, it was taken from a horse's hoof. It is made of wrought iron by the Pecheneg people, and its quality is naturally inferior to the steel parts of the Rus. Because it was too damaged, it just took advantage of the opportunity of the cavalry assembly and the New Rose Fort. The Rus just completed the imitation of the horseshoe, and quickly made it for all the people. Install it on horses.

Rurik issued a death order: "Suspend all smelting orders, and all weapon forging tasks I have given are moved back seven days. You bring your brothers to imitate horseshoes with all your strength, and take out 500 horseshoes in seven days. After completing the task, you will all Get a nice payout."

Kamne readily agreed, and looking at the iron in his hand, he inadvertently showed a trace of contempt. He is not young, he has been a blacksmith for many years, and he rarely rests after a year of work. The high-intensity work makes him rich in experience.

"Who made this iron, the quality is really bad. It's my turn to imitate it. Naturally, it's all excellent steel, and the horseshoe will be completely flat."

"Who else is there, our friend Pecheneg." Rurik shrugged and pointed out: "Don't be an absolute plane, there are some dents on the side that touches the ground, I want to increase the grip. You understand the mechanics given to you."

"As ordered, I will organize a meeting of the brothers..."