Swiss Arms 101 (Patreon)

Swiss Arms

Chapter 101

-VB-

Simon Zahringen, Count of Heiligenberg

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he stared out of the window of his solar. The heavy rain outside was like a mirror to his inner turmoil and the state of his fief’s finances. 

Eight years ago, his father left home to throw his lot into becoming the King of the Germans. 

He came back in a casket. 

His mother, who was not the best when it came to finances, spent away all of the fortune his father and grandfather had gathered over the course of half a century. Though he wanted to be upset with her, none of it had been squandered, merely used for all things that were, at the time, necessary. 

When he took over as the Count of Heiligenberg five years ago, he found himself with a crisis on his hand. 

His line of Zahringens possessed two fiefdoms: the County of Heiligenberg and the County of Rheintal on the other side of the Constance Lake. While Rheintal was definitely the richer domain, Heiligenberg and its surrounding lands were his ancestral lands and also where he got the majority of his levies from in the event of conflict. Rheintal, though, was a land of petty knights; majority of the smaller villages there were all given to knights, and only  Rinegg and Altstatten paid their taxes directly to him.

But right now, he wasn’t sure if he could keep them both. His house was severely in debt. 

“Milord?”

He looked around to see Clerk John waiting by the open door, and not stepping into his solar without permission. 

John of Lindau was a clerk he borrowed from the Mayor of Imperial City of Lindau. The mayor, Frederick, was a good friend of his from his childhood, and probably why he let him borrow a clerk indefinitely without any fee except to the clerk. He was famous for some silver counting, but he couldn’t be that famous if Frederick lent him out. 

“Come in,” he sighed. 

John did… with a stack of parchment, which were all sure to hold some sort of report.

“How was the tax collection?” 

John looked a little troubled. “There has been … issues with the harvest, milord.”

“I know. You were there when some of the commoners came to ask me for leniency on future tax.”

On top of his house’s debt, this year’s harvest had been bad for some inexplicable reason. 

In his county, there were eleven villages: Altheim, Hattenweiler, Unterrehna, Wintersulgen, Betenbrunn, Beuren, Leustetten, Markdorf, Immenstaad, Strass, and Weildorf. This was excluding the castle town and the seat of his county Heiligenberg itself. There were other villages, but most of those were either the fief of his knights or barons. Elven villages were those who paid him their tax directly. And of those eleven villages, ten village chiefs came to ask for tax leniency. 

Ten! The villages that hadn’t come to ask for leniency was Immenstaad, and that’s because they fished a lot of their food. They paid their tax with salted fish, but the volume of it was low because they counted the salt used in salting the fish as part of the tax. Bastards.

“Just … tell me how bad the damage is,” he sighed. 

“Very well, milord. As you know, milord, the County of Heiligenberg has a total of 11,000 acres and Rheinstal has 14,000 acres for a total of 25,000 acres to your name. In a normal year, you would have received approximately 14,000 bushels of wheat, 20,000 bushels of barley, 100 ells of linen cloth, 800 tubs of butter, and 1,900 silver pfennigs.

“This year, we were only able to collect 9,550 bushels of wheat, 12,092 bushels of barley, 47 ells of linen cloth, 688 tubs of butter, 1,100 pfennigs, and … 300 and a half salted fish.”

… A fifth? He lost a fifth of the tax?! Even if he was generous and considered the 300 (and a half) salted fish to be worth 500 pfennigs, that didn’t change the calculations at all! 

The upkeep of his one hundred thirty men-at-arms for the year alone would be 5,000 pfennigs! If he sold all of the fish at exactly 1,200 pfennigs, then he would still be behind 300 pfennigs in coins! Selling all of the linen ells wouldn’t net him 200 pfennigs, so he would have to sell at least a tenth of the butter.

Just to pay off the men-at-arms.

And then there was the servant upkeep, clerk pay, “late fees” for his loans, loan payment… 

He didn’t have enough. Or if he did, then he couldn’t tell.

Simon felt his shoulders droop.

He wanted to cry. He really … really wanted to cry. 

“Ludwig,” he called for the guard who should be outside his door. 

Ludwig stepped into the doorway and bowed. “Present, milord.”

“Please call the retinue captain. I must speak with him in private.”

“Yes, milord.”

And then he was off.

“Give me the reports,” he said as he extended his hand and gestured to John to hand over the parchments. John did, and Simon placed them in front of him. 

And he began to look through the clerk’s barely acceptable handwriting. He had an extra rag on the side that he was counting with, and he smear charcoal for each thousand bushels of wheat and barley and for each one hundred pfennigs. 

When he stopped and checked…

He wanted to cry. 

The clerk had done his job a little badly, so he had an extra 200 pfennigs to spare… but that was less than a tenth of the principle needed to be paid off this year alone, never mind whatever else he needed to pay.

He … he couldn’t. He was barely hanging on last year. This? This will ruin his house if he didn’t solve it somehow. 

But he already used every single trick he knew and then some more he learned from John here. 

“Milord…”

He looked up and saw the guard captain standing next to John. From the unease that he saw on the man’s face, the captain knew that something was about to drop.

With a trembling sigh, he dropped his head. “Captain Ruprecht, please relieve thirty of the worst performing men-at-arms from my service.”

“... Yes, milord.”

And then he was gone, leaving him alone with John again. 

“Milord, do you have a plan for the … deficiencies?” he asked with a dark undertone asking if he was planning on extra means of taxation. 

“This isn’t something extra taxing would solve,” he grumbled. With how small his fief was, he might be able to collect maybe 1,000 pfennigs, but that would also mean that tax gathered next year and beyond would be smaller. If the harvest for barley was a nearly a third less than what it should have been, then his peasants surely didn’t have enough to eat, especially since they would have to set aside 1 to 2 bushels back into each acre plot next year to grow more barley.

If he collected 12,100 bushels, then that meant that the peasants had 105,000 or so bushels. Assuming roughly a third of his land was used to plant the much more productive barley, then another 15,000 bushels needed to be kept as seed for next planting season, leaving 90,000 bushels for the peasants to use. Assuming that most of it was used as animal feed, he would see a decrease in butter and barley tax next year. If his peasants got scalped by the tax collectors and both barley and wheat were overreported, then there will be less people able to pay their taxes next year, either through fleeing the land or death by starvation. 

So extra taxation might solve this year’s deficiencies but it would compound and make the next year worse.

“...” He wasn’t even going to bother checking Altstatten and Rinegg***. Any and all tax that came from those cities always seemed to get swallowed up in some need one way or another. If it’s not the roads that needed to be fixed because of a flood, then it was something else. Never mind the fact that it took half a day of walking just to get there from Heiligenberg. 

He stared at the numbers before frowning. “John.”

“Yes, milord?” 

“Do you … know any lord who are rich?”

“... I know only one with that description, milord.”

“You do?”

“Yes. A lord who is rich and someone that I know.”

“Who?”

“Baron Hans von Fluelaberg, milord.”

Simon looked at his clerk with eyes. 

“The rumored battlefield monster?” he asked, aghast. 

“Yes, milord. I do not know much about the baron’s battlefield prowess, but he is someone to learn from. From what I remember, he will not be hostile or wary of you just because you are a noble.”

“Truly? Then all of those rumors…?”

A man who rose from among the commoners to become a baron by violent means. A butcher on the battlefield. An ignormaous of the noble customs and deeds -.

“I know not, milord. But why do you ask?”

“... Help me prepare a letter for him.”

-VB-

Hans von Fluelaberg

It took me a month to get a dye factory started by buying land on the southern end of Davos and a little bit removed from the village anyway. The reason why we did this was because that was the direction in which the water flowed. The Albula River, which Davos sat on top of, was one of the tributaries that flowed into the Rhine. The Albula flowed into the Hinterrhein which then flowed into the Rhine which then flowed into Lake Constance and back out against as the Rhine River. 

A dye factory would obviously use a lot of water and have waste water as well, even if the volume of waste water would be nothing compared to post-20th century’s waste volume. Even if the waste water would contain nothing that wasn’t natural, it still would be unhealthy to introduce that into drinking water supply, which was why I bought land that was down river of the village. 

The factory wasn’t built yet; it was still in the planning phase. I needed to find a steady supply of the dye materials, equipment to help turn the materials into rock, and etc etc. 

If the dye factory succeeded at making the dyes and dyeing the fabrics we could provide here, then I planned to sell it not to Venice but Free Imperial Cities to the north. Specifically, I was very interested in Kempten and Memmingen.

Kempten was the center of the Allgau region, which meant that sale of dyed fabric there could easily spread throughout a region and generate demand faster than starting at a border town or city with a market and trying to expand from one end to the other. 

Memmingen, on the other hand, was at the center of a burgeoning salt road between Lindau and Bohemia, the very same salt road that had its origins in the salt mines developed by Duke Henry’s sister and my wife Isabella’s cousin, Empress Elizabeth of Carinthia. 

While selling at Kempten would allow me to dominate the luxury fabric market there, Bohemia was the richer and far better investment. Unfortunately, any investment in Bohemia would take years to mature compared to a faster return from Kempten. Kempten, on the other hand, was a very limited market compared to the growing salt road that cut through not just eastern Swabia but also through northern Bavaria. More specifically, the very same salt road cut through all three Wittelsbach duchies of Bavaria: Munich, Landshut, and Straubing. 

This could be the unexpected but another viable source of influence and power within the Duchy of Upper Bavaria (Munich) which I could use to weaken Duke Louis’s hold of the duchy. 

I still freshly remembered the discussion all of us conspirators last year. 

“So you agree?” Henry asked Rudolf, and the slightly slimmer man grimaced as he nodded. 

“Fine. You can have the rest of the Valley of En you don’t own as long as you get me my duchy back and my brother out of it,” Rudolf grumbled. 

The empress cleared her throat lightly. 

“And I’ll reduce the tax on salt trade to a minimum,” he said as his shoulders drooped. 

We bullied him rather harshly, but then again, I didn’t feel much sympathy for a man who tried to destroy the town I built with my own two hands. Literally. The original wooden walls to the east and west (now center) of Fluelaberg were still the original wooden walls I built. Actually, the walls and houses were secondary to the people who I came to appreciate and respect. I would be livid if Albert or Alvia died. I would be apopletic if Kraft got killed. 

I would probably burn Munich to the ground if Isabella had died. 

I hummed as I got back to writing down the formulas for all of the dye recipes when someone knocked my door. 

I paused and looked up. “Come in.”

My eyes widened when one of my rare, non-ranger men-at-arms opened the door and showed in a noble messenger. 

The messenger stepped right in front of the opened door in the corridor and bowed. 

“Greetings, Y. I am a messenger from the Count of Heiligenberg. I havea message from the count addressed to you.”

“Come in, come in,” I gestured for him to enter. ‘Where even was Heiligenberg?’ I asked myself. 

The messenger cleared his throat and pulled out a parchment scroll. He handed it to me with two hands in a respectful gesture, and I took it. I broke the seal and unfurled the scroll, which crinkled loudly as I did so.

And I began reading. 

And reading.

My eyebrows gathered together above my nose bridge as I continued reading. 

And then I looked at the seal.

“And where is … Heiligenberg? Please forgive me if I am ignorant of my peers and betters outside of my immediate region.”

“My lord’s domain lies in two parts: his main domain laies between the lands of the Bishopric of Konstanz and the Habsburg lands on the north side of Obersee* and his lesser domain of Rheintal lies right at your border, County of Montfort, Abbey of St. Gallen, and County of Werdenburg.”

I blinked. 

Huh. That must be frustrating for him, but wasn’t that kind of normal in the empire? A lot of inheritances through marriage meant that sometimes you found yourself with land that wasn’t connected to your land and/or in an ideal position for your strategy. 

“And this Rheintal…”

“Runs along the Upper Rhine River from Chobiwalt* to Rinegg for a total of 3 and a quarter meiles*** of the Rhine to the Obersee.”

That was a substantial amount of land, even if it was just the slip of land between the river and the valley foothills. 

“I see.”

I don’t know what kind of problem this count was having, but in this letter, he offered to sell the Barony of Rheintal and wanted to meet to negotiate the price.

… Yeah, this was going to be interesting. 

-VB-

*Obersee: Lake Constance

**Chobiwalt: old name for Oberriet

***Rinegg is older name for Rheineck.

****Meile was different depending on where you were. The most relevant one, in my opinion, was the wegstunde, or one hour’s worth of travel. 0.5 meile = 2.31 US mile. 

A/N: 

Do you guys remember John of Lindau? The guy who took Double Bookkeeping and claimed it as his? Yeah, he’s now working here because even if his book was published, the mayor found out that it really wasn’t his. So he pseudo-exiled him so that he wouldn’t be implicated if Hans found out and reacts … violently. Not that he would or even care, but the mayor doesn’t know that. 

I did a very rough estimate of County of Heiligenberg and Rheinstal on Google Maps using Karte_Werdenberger.png from wikipedia. While the total combined area was around 180 square kilometers, a good fifth of that land was either mountain/forests or village areas and one-fifth of the four-fourths would have been left fallow, leaving only three-fifths of the land for arable cultivation. The result was only around 28,000 acres. And then I started taking roads into account and calculations started going weird so I just cut down another 3k and called it 25,000 acres. 

The definition of bushel changed all throughout the years… I hate it.

And then I tried to find a reputable source for how much bushels of wheat, barley, and other crops/livestock could be grown on each acre. And dear God, life was shit back then. A good harvest was 6 bushels of wheat per acre? That’s less than a sixth of what we harvest in commercial farms around the world per acre!

Ell: medieval northwestern european word for arm from tip of finger to elbow. And also how wide a cloth roll usually was, apparently. 

I also learned that in Tirol (you know the same Tirol that our Henry comes from) interest rate could be as high as 87% for loans. (Tiroler Landesarchiv, Innsbruck). Speaking of Tyrol, the County of Tyrol didn’t include all of modern Tyrol but stopped around Jenbach, which left the lower valley (from Jenbach to Oberaudorf) to the Duchy of Upper Bavaria (Duchy of Munich in the not too distant future).

This will be discussed in future chapters, but the reason why Hans didn’t even mention selling to Konstanz or any of the cities to the west was because Konstanz itself was a city famous for its linen production. As such, competition would be fierce there as well as underhanded moves to keep our linen out of their market. 

Never let it be said that my stories (or at least the AN’s) aren’t educational!