Since the Accounting: A Chronicle of the Roman Khanate

Chapter 218 City of Crime - Dadu!
Seeing Li Xuanying's appearance, Guo Kang was a little helpless.

"Since you asked me, I personally still want to give you the most realistic answer." He said in a deep voice, "I can hear a lot of problems from what you said just now. You already know these things, so you don't find it strange. Or haven't you thought about it at all?"

"What's the problem?" Li Xuanying asked hastily.

"Does she have a bad relationship with her mother?" Guo Kang asked.

"The relationship between the two of them..." Li Xuanying hesitated for a moment, thought for a while, and then said, "It's really not that close... How did you know that?"

"She introduced her own experience, but she ended up talking about the playwright Mr. Guo Kang for a long time." Guo Kang pointed out: "And I always wondered, how did their troupe pass on?"

"What do you mean?" Li Xuanying didn't understand.

"The story of the uncles trying to squeeze their mother and daughter away and occupy the entire troupe is reasonable. But through whom did her mother fight back successfully?" Guo Kang asked, "Did the government decide to help her to uphold justice?"

"I don't think so." Li Xuanying thought for a while and said, "I heard her talk about it. The government made a ruling, but it was still useless after the ruling was made. She also complained that the government has no enforcement power, it's just empty air."

"But it's normal, most of them are not ordinary cities, and I'm not surprised if they can't handle it."

"That's right." Guo Kang nodded.

The cities of these days can be roughly divided into two categories: one can be represented by the cities of Rome and Seris. In the earliest days, these cities were often purely military strongholds and administrative centers, and their location and transportation, It is only a means to serve military purposes.

It is also because of this situation that the city is the node and center of rule. There are government offices, weapon workshops, warehouses and other important facilities in the city. The imperial court's ability to control the city is generally stronger than the vast countryside.

Another type of city can refer to the various new towns that emerged in Europe after the end of Rome.During this period, managers in most areas were not capable of building and operating cities.These cities originated from market towns and were entirely based on commercial purposes from the very beginning.

To the lord, this is like a kind of flower that grows naturally, but is very rare and precious.If you can't manage it, it's better to let it go, as long as you collect protection fees regularly.This has resulted in many cities being independent or semi-independent, with less control than their rural territories.

These two situations lead to basically opposite results, and there are also reasons.

The cities of the Purple Horde are basically similar to the first type.

In most regions, especially in Romania, there were no large cities to begin with.Occasionally, some central towns have also suffered heavy losses in successive years of war.Therefore, almost all the cities of the Purple Horde were built by themselves.

These places are not so much cities as they are handicraft estates.The biggest difference between them and the Legion Manor is that the people inside are mainly engaged in handicraft production instead of farming.

Everything in the city is entirely for farming and warfare: the smelting workshop provides agricultural tools and weapons, the textile workshop is responsible for producing soldiers' clothes, and the carpenter workshop produces various ordnance and accessories... Basically, it is simply a collection of artisans , find the most convenient place, and then start working on the spot.The products produced in the city are hardly sold, but distributed directly to various manors and various armies.Later, the Greek officials of the Khan court simply called it the "War Workshop".

In the city, the most important thing is not even the management agency: because when the Khanate was established, there was not even a fixed official agency. Same tour management.

——To put it simply, the big brother Boyan Timur is the big sweat, and the brothers are the little sweats in their respective Ulus.There is a fixed management organization, which is the result of Guo Gai's hard work for 20 years.

And even after that, due to frequent wars and reclamation activities, the consumption of materials is huge; these workshop areas, which almost start from scratch, have long-term insufficient production capacity, resulting in insufficient products.

This also puts the cities of the Purple Horde in a strange state for a long time.On the one hand, the trade of purple tents is very developed, which is an important source of income; on the other hand, most areas in the city are not closely related to commerce.They almost just keep buying the raw materials they need, and don't take part in other business activities.

From the perspective of establishment, at that time, most of the industries and personnel in the workshop area belonged to the army, and cities, like villages, were the sphere of influence of the legion.After the reforms of the Queen Mother Helena, most of these workshops were assigned to the local provinces, but they were still not run by businessmen, and even they had no jurisdictional relationship with the institutions that specialized in commercial activities within the Purple Horde Khanate.

The workshops, like the farms, are almost all managed militarily.The craftsmen in the city are basically citizens.This result makes the management of these cities much more convenient.

In addition, almost all the cities inside the Khanate were newly built.Occasionally there is an old city, and because of planning problems, Khan Ting often chooses to change the site to rebuild the new city.

These cities are almost all designed according to the same standard, with tightly guarded arsenals, and huge squares next to the arsenals where you can train troops in peacetime and distribute weapons in wartime.The various workshops are neatly arranged, and outside the workshops and the accompanying living areas are walls specially prepared for street fighting.Between the squares and districts, there are wide and straight streets specially reserved for the convenience of transportation.The style of the whole city is also very different from those of European counterparts whose streets are muddy and twisted, and the urban area lacks effective planning and management.

The Metropolitan City is one of the few exceptions.

At one time, the city was also meticulously maintained and planned in detail, where Roman engineers and architects exerted their talents and built many buildings that have stood for thousands of years.But when the Purple Horde took over here, the city was already in serious decline.

The population of the city is only one-tenth of the original, and this is already the result of the officials forcibly gathering manpower and arresting people from the Thrace area outside the city into the city to enrich their strength.

A large area has been completely deserted.

In 1203, the Crusaders set fire to the city in order to defeat the citizens who resisted them in the street fighting as soon as possible. The fire destroyed 50 hectares of the city at one time.

A month later, the Crusaders, whose progress was still unfavorable, changed their location and attacked the gathering place of Tianfang believers in the city.However, the residents of Tianfang Cult also firmly resisted, and called other Roman citizens to support them.The Crusaders became furious and set fires everywhere again. This time the fire raged for eight days and burned 185 hectares of the urban area.

In 1204, after the Crusaders invaded the city, they set fire to it again.However, the previous two fires were so fierce that the wooden building area in the city basically disappeared completely. This time, there is even nothing to burn.After sporadic arson, the Crusaders could only return angrily and camped on the ruins.

At the beginning of the 14th century, in order to fight the civil war, the Greek emperor Andronica III married his daughter to Yuejibehan of the Golden Horde.However, the princess was not used to living in the Khan court and asked to take the child back to her mother's house instead of staying in the grassland.Yue Jibiehan actually agreed, and even arranged for her to be escorted.

At that time, Yue Jibie had already begun to intervene in Bulgaria, and even launched an expedition against Serbia, but it was too far away to succeed.Therefore, Boyan Timur and others who were active in this frontline area also participated in this mission, and finally followed the escort team into Constantinople and witnessed the situation here with their own eyes.

Boyan Timur did not leave detailed notes, but among those accompanying them was Patriarch Zhang—a friend who was also called Imam Zhang at the time, and Ibn Battu, a well-known traveler in Tianfang. Thai.According to his records, at least half of the city is completely uninhabited, and the city walls are also full of gardens and farmland, which is very "spacious".Because no one wants the deserted land, a monastery actually encloses a site equivalent to 15 hectares.

This situation made Boyan Timur, who was in the city for the first time, very emotional.

Later, when everyone gathered to drink grape juice, he complained to everyone that before in Bulgaria, he heard people say that the Greeks were so educated and the Roman Empire was so famous, but he did not expect this to be the case.Originally, he thought that the Roman emperor could only be done by someone handpicked by the gods, but looking at it now, it was nothing more than that.

Later, many historians took this anecdote as the beginning of the establishment of the strategic goal of the Purple Horde Khanate.Regardless of whether this judgment is credible or not, the decline of the city at that time is evident.

After the Purple Horde occupied the city for the second time, it finally stabilized the order.At that time, what everyone valued was more the strategic value of guarding the Black Sea and controlling sea and land commercial routes.As for the management of the city itself, even Guo Gai didn't think too much about it at the beginning.

Initially, Khan Ting's plan was to copy the previous thinking.There is a large amount of idle land in the city, which is just right to start from scratch and establish a district and a corresponding management system.When everything starts to operate normally, on this basis, the Greek residents in the city who are willing to abide by the law will gradually be included in this system, and those who cause damage will be dealt with according to the law.It shouldn't be too difficult to get used to it slowly.

But no one expected that the situation would change so quickly, and the source of the change was themselves.

The trade income here is astonishingly high, but the Greek officials have repeatedly confiscated privileges to the Italians, causing almost all of the money to flow into the hands of Italian businessmen who control the privileges of waterways and taxation.The Purple Horde couldn't bear this, so it sent troops to scare away the Genoese stationed here.

In order to isolate them and prevent Italian merchants with powerful maritime forces from uniting to block the route, they announced a reduction in taxes, even lower than the tolls charged by the Genoese themselves.

Therefore, this action immediately received strong support from other city-states, and the Venetians even came to ask many times whether they should send troops to help.Afterwards, representatives of various commercial city-states, merchants from chambers of commerce, and other speculators from various countries who followed suit poured into the city.

They built their own commercial warehouses, as well as supporting handicraft workshops, which were used to store and initially process commodities.These needs have attracted a large number of people to work here.Since most of the coast of the Black Sea is controlled by the Purple Horde and the commercial routes are smooth, the size of these commercial populations has increased very rapidly, even exceeding the Khan Ting's own expectations.

Later, Queen Mother Helena persuaded Guo, Zhang and others to send troops to recover the entire Greek peninsula.A large number of Greeks got rid of the control of Western European lords, and many people also fled to the capital, which brought the second peak of population increase.

By this time, the original plan of the Purple Horde Khanate had been basically overwhelmed by these people.

Khanting lacked the experience to manage the sudden increase in business and service personnel.For example, the theater troupe here is completely different from the legion farms and war workshops that Khan Ting managed before.

The Khan court caravan operates fixed industries with huge profits and long-distance bulk trade all year round, such as precious goods from the East, special products from the Ross region, or fine wines from Crimea.They can't take care of these numerous and small needs.

The surge of occupations and the large number of migrants have caused the urban area to fall into disorderly growth.Khan Ting couldn't handle it, and he was reluctant to expel them, fearing that it would damage the huge income here.As a result, Dadu became the most chaotic city in the Khanate itself.

It's too normal to be unable to control a troupe.At the most troubling times, entire districts may be effectively out of Khan Ting's control.Residents build houses and set up workshops as they please, and even if the Khan court comes to forcibly demolish them, they will rebuild them soon.

The city is full of contradictions between newcomers and original residents, newcomers and newer newcomers, and conflicts between different industries and different organizations are one after another.All kinds of explicit or covert guilds have sprung up like mushrooms after a spring rain, and they are distinguished according to various reasonable and unreasonable ways, and the thug organizations and gangster forces attached to the guilds are also rampant everywhere.

Faced with this situation, the Empress Dowager Helena once envisioned an overall renovation of the city, but she was in a stage of serious confrontation with the ministers at that time, and she could not mobilize troops at all.Later, Basil III rebuilt the "Night Watchman" war group, which was specially used to maintain order and arrest criminals in the city, and then began to fill the vacancy in management.

After Han Ting recovered from the turmoil and gained enough strength, the capital city finally ushered in a rectification.With the support of Basil and others, Guo Di began to carry out large-scale reconstruction work in the city on the grounds of repairing churches and maintaining public facilities.He also set up a new organization. With the help of the army, he used force deterrence and conflicts between various forces to intervene in various urban areas and gradually intervene in the management functions that were originally monopolized by the guild.

After that, the rectification work lasted for ten years.Although Guo Kang still feels confused in the current metropolis, compared with the "vigorous" scene back then, it is even considered pretty good.

(End of this chapter)