Swiss Arms
Chapter 133

Swiss Arms

Chapter 133

-VB-

Hans von Fluelaberg

The death of the King of Romans and Germans, Emperor Albert I von Habsburg, led to a brief manhunt before the Electoral Colleges were called up.

And, as I expected, Duke Henry got called up as the King of Bohemia. Technically, he was the consort king since it was his wife who was the heir and thus the inheritor of the Bohemian Crown…

But this was Medieval Europe, not modern Great Britain. The man had power, and the only time that might not work was if the woman had half a political brain and powerbase to put her own claim to use.

From what I read, the young woman currently married to my cousin-in-law was not yet such a woman.

You never knew how the future might change, just like how it had changed for me.

I pushed down toward the ground, taking note to make sure that my naked chest got as close as it could to touching but not quite there yet. I grunted and shifted my weight as I felt the weight on my back shift with my movement, and pushed back up slowly.

'These days, exercising is more about ingenuity than actual work,' I thought to myself.

Deep underneath Fort Fluelaberg, I exercised by myself before the sun dawned over the mountain peaks. The cold stone floor was matted to prevent unnecessary injury and I had thick lead slabs tied onto my back. Weighing in at roughly five hundred pounds and waxed to ensure no one would touch its poisonous surface, it was just heavy enough for me to feel the strain of exercising without being too big.

Soon, I was going to have to build a machine specifically for my exercises. The kind that might get converted into a hydraulic press or something with a bit of tweaks here and there.

But even as I exercised, my mind was moving onto something else: development. Specifically, I thought a lot about future development of not the Barony of Fluelaberg and the County of Rheintal but also the wider Compact.

Or as the Gamer system put it…

The Food Shortage (soon™).

[County of Fluelaberg]

Official Name:

County of Rheintal=Fluelaberg

Government Type: Hereditary Monarchy

Liege Lord: King of the Germans

Member Nation: Holy Roman Empire

Military Power:

Major Regional

Economic Power: Major Regional

Political Power:

Major Regional

Influence: Major Regional

Technological Power: Regional

First

Stability: B+

Cohesion: A-

After the so-called "Upper Bavarian-Tyrol War" was over, this was the result I got. A lot of my county's standing went up from minor to major. But the two most important changes, in my opinion, was the deranking of Stability from A+ to B+ and the upranking of Technological Power from Major Regional to Regional First.

The latter told me that there was no one more advanced than my County in the two regions that my county was part of. The first region was the Southern Holy Roman Empire, or just Swabia. This region ranged from as far south as the Lordship of Sax directly south of the Compact to all the way up in the Zabert in Alsace and Nordlingen right at the Swabia-Bavaria regional border. It had to have at least four million people in it. Bavaria, Austria, and all of Henry's lands was technically southern but the Gamer system classified it as "Southeastern Holy Roman Empire," which made sense.

The second region was the Alps. Just the Alps.

It felt good to be first in something.

But it was the Stability deranking that concerned me.

Because it was one thing to go from A+ to A, it was something else entirely to go from A+ to B+. That was a whole letter grade or 10% numerically.

So I looked into the stability factors.

[Stability] County.FluelabergStabilityDataFactorsOutlier

Agriculture Efficiency: C-

Agriculture Land Use: C-

…

Bureaucracy: B+

Centralization: A+

…

Food Reserve: C

Food Import Reliance: D+

…

Inflation: B-

…

Population Growth: A+

(30+)

Yeah. Those weren't good letters right there.

From top to bottom:

Agriculture Efficiency. This wasn't something I could do much about. There are only so many technological breakthroughs I can push onto the farmers without jeopardizing harvest.

Agriculture Land Use: The county was composed of three parts right now: the Barony of Fluelaberg, the Town of Breganz, and the Bailiwick of Rheintal. Out of those three, only Rheintal had sufficient farmland. Breganz was a town with a lake to one side, river to the other, and what confined space that was left outside of the town proper was indeed used for farmland but nowhere enough to support itself. So a low grade here made sense, even if it wasn't my fault.

Bureaucracy. It fell from A- to B+ and I had a good guess as to why. A whole ass town got added to the equation without any of the bureaucratic infrastructure I painstakingly built up in the rest of my fief and the Compact. Of course, the average was going to fall. I'm surprised it didn't fall even lower.

Centralization. From S- to A+. Same reason as bureaucracy.

And then the most damning four factors…

Food Reserve. C-. That basically meant it was a toss-up whether or not my lands and its people could survive a year of famine without breaking.

Food Import Reliance. D+. Yeah, I know. I was relying too much on food imports from basically everywhere.

Inflation. B-. It wasn't bad… but by my napkin math calculation, a B- was equivalent to that of somewhere between 3% to 5% inflation. Good in a modern economy. Horrible in a medieval one. Why? Because I had to pay my soldiers, rangers, and bureaucrats. I always paid on time and correctly. However, that also meant that my people had more gold, silver, and copper than there were goods. On top of that, some of the fake coins eventually did leak into my own economy. Not as much as I feared and certainly more than I hoped (hope being that none would have made it into my border).

And finally, population growth. A+. When there's a lot of food, this would be great. However, my Food Reserve and import reliance was abysmal, so this was bad.

All of these factors also then affected each other. Higher inflation meant higher food cost, which meant stability loss. Higher food cost meant farmers and merchants were more likely to sell food than store them in this time of plenty, which meant lower food reserve. More food being bought and sold meant more food being eaten and thus more food needed to be imported, which meant even greater food import reliance.

Hell, I'm surprised that the Cohesion remained the same as before!

… Regardless of small graces here and there, I had a problem.

Food.

I could try to solve it myself, but that would just make me the bottleneck for my people's food needs, which I didn't want to do. Aside from making myself the single point of failure, I didn't want to sit in caves all day planting, weeding, and harvesting crops from hydroponics.

Which I could build. But I won't.

So how was I supposed to solve this issue…?

Food import was also fickle. This era not being modernity meant that food import wasn't even available all year round. Food import was the greatest late spring and mid-fall, coinciding with late spring harvest and fall harvest respectively. Even then, early spring harvest - carrots, garlic, lettuces, onions, peas, radish, turnips, and peas - didn't have foods that can be stored for long.

And fall harvest, while great for everyone, didn't bring in enough food. There was also a limit to how far we could import from.

Ugh.

I needed help.

I grunted one final time before tilting sideways and letting the weight drop onto the floor.

… Two hundred push-ups with five hundred pound weight on my back and I'm not even sweating. Damn it.

-VB-

Isabella von Fluelaberg

"Food?"

"Yeah," Hans sighed as he rummaged through the papers on his desk with a "pen" in one hand. "There's more people being born and growing, not enough dying. But our food reserve is stubbornly slow to grow."

She hummed.

She didn't think about that as being problematic right now, but if Hans wanted to solve that, then she would help where she could.

"How do you feel about fish?" she asked him.

"Fish?" he frowned. "Nothing against it, why?"

"Well, if you want, then I can send letters to the Italian coastal cities to see if any of them are willing to sell us salted fish."

He looked blank for a second. "But that would be expensive."

"Not if we offer them the chance to buy our salt. We have hit a deposit of it, haven't we?"

He hummed. "We did," he said as he shifted through the papers and brought out one tilted at the top as "Salt Production."

She knew that there was more than just one in the Barony of Fluelaberg, all of which were owned by her husband on paper but owned and operated by the people, who made sure that the condition of the mines was the best it could be for their own income and safety.

She looked down at it, and he shifted it around so that she could see the numbers and the chart.

Salt production has gone up, yes, but it was nowhere near enough for their use.

"So not enough."

"No," he shook his head as he shifted the paper away once she finished reading it.

She thought about it a little longer.

"Ah."

"Yes, dear?"

"What about the Patriarchate of Aquileia? You have a good understanding of each other, don't you?" she asked him.

He paused. "... It's been a while since we exchanged any correspondence, but I suppose it's better than what we have with our northern neighbors."

She nodded.

Aside from Lindau, most of the Compact's northern neighbors have been so far … cold. Ever since House Montfort joined the Compact as a new member during the war, the rest of their neighbors around northern Lake Constance have been quiet. And she understood why. They must be fearing that they must be the next in line for "conquest," even if there had been no war for Montfort to join the Compact.

Even trade across the lake had fallen recently.

Among the north, only the imperial city of Constance was willing to continue to work with them, and that was because the barony made the Fluelaberg Blue dye.

And their neighbor to the south… Milan was gearing up for war as well. So much so that independent but weak towns like Locarno, Lungao, Sondrio, and Tirano have all but begged to join the Compact.

"... Yeah, we should contact the patriarch," he said after a while, pushing himself off of the desk and leaning back against his chair. "It won't harm us to see what the prices are, right? " Then he paused. "Hell, why don't we contact our dear friend Duke Rudolf while we're at it? His finances has to be hurting right now, so not offer a food trade deal with him, too?"

"But not Henry?"

He shook his head. "Henry's centers of agricultural production are too far from our lands," he replied. "They're in Carinthia and Carniola, aren't they? His Tyrolian lands are probably in the same situation as ours."

She didn't know much about that, but she agreed that the Henry's valleys were in the same situation as theirs. Sure, he had the Inns River running through his biggest Tyrolian settlements, but she doubted that there was enough fish in the river to feed his entire people.

"... well, if we're thinking about fish, then we have other people to thinkin about, don't we?" she asked.

"Who?"

"The towns to our south."

"... Oh! The ones worried about Milan?"

"Yes, them. Locarno in particular is right next to a lake that is bigger than Walensee. What if we make giving us their fishing right for the entire Compact as the joining condition…?"

Their talk about the future of the Compact lasted throughout the day.

It was a good day.

-VB-

A/N: come join me on Ko-Fi or Patreon for early access to chapters and vote on what gets updated each week!

/c/user?u=26677387

https://ko-fi.com/vandalvagabond