Rise of Rurik

Saying goodbye to the huge expeditionary force, King Ross is still strong?

Rurik is not worried about the decline of his strength at all. On the contrary, the strength of the kingdom is increasing every day.

When the giant ship Monarch of the Seas is launched, it means not only that a cutting-edge ship enters service, but also that Ross's shipbuilding technology has reached a new stage. She still needed a lot of sea trials to demonstrate her excellent seaworthiness, and there was plenty of time for sea trials in 842.

In New Roseburg, the capital of the Kingdom, everything seemed to be calm.

After bidding farewell to the expeditionary force and staying in the capital for a while, Rurik, the queen, the prince and the second cavalry team walked leisurely back to the vibrant Novgorod along the traditional road by Lake Ladoga.

Grass is growing wildly, cattle, sheep and reindeer are grazing freely, and it is another year of vigorous livestock reproduction.

Of all livestock, his greatest concern was not the increase of cattle and sheep, but the size of the horse herd.

The shoulder height of the grassland horse imported from Pecheneg is not ideal, even if it has strong endurance, it was indeed inferior to the Frankish horses in some aspects in past wars.

Most of the mares were seized in the war, and a few stallions became treasures.

Since the spring of 841, the Frankish stallions captured in the War of 840 have been bred for Rose's prairie horses. According to the theory of hybrid superiority, the new offspring can inherit the endurance of the female parent and the impact of the male parent. Its body shape may be inferior to that of the male parent, but no matter how you think about it, it must be much better than the female parent, at least the shoulder height can increase significantly.

What about the new generation of horses?

In the spring and summer of 842, after almost a full year of gestation, a large number of foals began to be born.

"What a horse! They all have long legs!"

The Pecheneg soldiers in the army dealt with horses every day when they were in their hometown. The quality of a horse can be seen from the time of its birth. Being able to express such emotion seems to verify that the Ross people have matched a higher quality horse.

"Well, if this is the case, the efforts of the Frankish army stallion are not in vain."

Rurik couldn't help feeling not only about the war horse, but also about himself in a humorous way.

Those girls whose fathers chose for themselves more than ten years ago have not only become the mothers of their children, they are still very old, and now is the age of combining maternal love and feminine charm.

Now that life has stabilized, perhaps the most important thing for the monarch at this stage is to rule by doing nothing.

The so-called inaction does not mean that the monarch turns a blind eye to everything or even deliberately indulges. In his opinion, life is going well now. The area around Lake Yinlmen with the highest level of agriculture centered on Novgorod gives farmers a stable farming life. As long as the weather doesn't go wrong, their wealth is growing steadily, and that's enough.

Rurik did not issue any policies that claimed to be good for agriculture. He did not need to personally supervise work such as encouraging land reclamation, clearing weeds, and irrigation, and the general public would take care of their own affairs.

The Slavs were busy "claiming land from the forest", one big tree after another was felled and sawed down, and often thirty people went into battle together, pulling out the roots of the big trees with cables. The thick tree roots were not wasted in the end, they were chopped and smashed into huge planks, which were finally made into heavy wooden tables.

The trunk is more useful. The bark is peeled off and sold directly to the national papermaking workshop in the city. The remaining part is planed into canoes with iron hoes to meet the cheapest boating and fishing needs of ordinary farmers. Cutting down those books is very particular, and some trees are considered to be under the principle of not being cut down unless necessary, and they are even planted by the people spontaneously.

The great city of Novgorod was expanded on a large scale on the basis of the White Tree Manor, and its scale is still expanding rapidly with the expansion of the population.

There are more and more double-storey buildings in the capital of the Ross Kingdom in this era. If the house is built to three floors, it will not be amazing.

The number of double-storey wooden houses in Novgorod gradually increased, and most of them were expanded on the basis of old wooden houses. The most common is still a single-family wooden house, where a family usually lives, and it is equipped with a courtyard surrounded by fences. Some people even dig a shallow well on the ground, and pile the well wall with fired clay bricks.

All small families are willing to deal with their houses in this way, and the city has to radiate and expand outwards in a way of spreading the pie.

The nearby forests are seeing a lot. What remains unchanged is that the birch forest that gave the name of White Tree Manor has expanded its range of trees.

Cut down a birch tree and replant two or three small saplings. It is a huge treasure, and the sweet birch sap is a deliberately harvested drink in spring, and it is for this reason that Whitetree Manor has remarkably created a dense birch grove. In order to make the most suitable writing paper, the material is locked in the birch bark by Rurik. In order to avoid exhaustion, the birch forest needs to be expanded.

Another spring, beekeeping in tree holes around the lake is thriving again, and endless bees are flying in the wild grass by the lake full of daisies.

Farmers cultivated on their own land, and because iron tools began to be used on a large scale, everything went well in the new year's spring plowing. The farmers of the White Tree Manor who were hired by Rurik took a reward to complete the sowing work for Wang Tian, ​​and they were responsible for the harvest. This is a fat job, and the laborers can take away the substantial income in kind, and the most important thing they have to do is to complete the spring planting and autumn harvest.

Such a fat difference can only benefit the farmers who were first born in Longyougong's Baishu Manor.

If a piece of land is continuously planted with high intensity for many years, the soil fertility will be exhausted by the crops.

Rurik has been trying his best to popularize the importance of fertilizers and food for a long time, and straightforwardly popularize the science of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium to the general public. It would be better to post a notice to describe that - manure and other filth can fertilize the field.

This is actually a very new concept. The general public, especially the "forest people" who were forcibly immigrated from the forest area to the lakeside area by force, have no concept of fertilizer at all. Only when the land is barren due to frequent planting After that, they spontaneously used crop rotation to alleviate this terrible barrenness.

They don't even know the root cause of crop rotation and fallow. They only know that when one field is too poor, they go to another field. After the field was barren again, I turned back and went to work with the mentality of giving it a try, and found that the fertility of the land had returned.

It's all about experience, and now they are more and more accepting of the idea of ​​a field of shit. But where to get a lot of shit?

There is no condition to give a lot of manure to their own fields. They collect their own and livestock manure, and finally mix it with soil and bury it in the yard where they grow peas.

The war brought not only destruction, but also a new life of war. The war of 840 was the collision of two worlds in Europe. The peas harvested by Rurik from Utrecht were successfully planted in Novgorod in 841.

At first, Queen Svetlana was in charge of this kind of task, and she was named after the final successful result. The so-called queen brings peas to the people, and the first to enjoy the pea dividend is the queen's natal family—the farmers of White Tree Manor.

Every household was given some new pea seeds, and they opened up small vegetable gardens, sowing seeds in the spring season of 842 with the mentality of trying it out. As a result, in just two months, the pea seedlings have grown to about knee height.

This is the first time they have seen this kind of crop. They only know that after the pods are formed, the green spherical fruit inside can be eaten as a meal, and the taste is soft, waxy, fresh and delicious.

Then at the beginning of June, peas bloomed on a large scale, and then pods formed. When they bloom on a large scale, it will undoubtedly directly cause a carnival of bees, followed by efficient pollination, so that each plant has dense and numerous seed pods.

Peas imported from Utrecht often take eighty days from sowing to harvesting. At present, there is no technology support to create early-maturing peas. After all, Utrecht at the mouth of the Rhine River is warmer, and the pea growth season is quite satisfactory. In Novgorod, which is much colder, the entire growth cycle of peas is extended by two weeks. Not unusual.

In July, the warmest month in Eastern Europe, the pea harvest begins on a large scale.

Grilling pea pods has become a job suitable for all ages. The small vegetable garden in my family harvested a huge amount of beans abruptly, and these harvests alone are enough for the family to live for a period of time. What's more, boiled peas are delicious, and then mashed into a paste and served with salt, it is an extremely delicious dish.

In fact, what the public does not know at all is that peas, a member of the legume family, have a strong ability to fix nitrogen. If you want local wheat, oats and rye to grow vigorously and harvest a substantial increase in production, the most important thing is to find a way to fix nitrogen. Using a small amount of farmyard manure is just extra, and it is even more wasteful to use fertilizer for peas that do not lack nitrogen fertilizer.

It is no wonder that the people are ignorant. These Slavs living on the shores of Yinlmen Lake are still the first to come into contact with beans such as peas. It will take some years to figure out its habits and accept it as a staple food.

Rurik knows that it has nitrogen-fixing value, but the big problem now is how to expand the pea field. The problem is not that there is a lack of land, but that the absolute number of fruits is too small. The kingdom does not have enough seeds. Fortunately, the value-added of seeds increases exponentially. In 842, the timing was not ripe. land for large-scale planting.

Rurik thought of a trick: I divided the field into two parts, planted wheat on the left and peas on the right, and reversed the next year.

If this doesn't work well, divide the land into three parts for crop rotation.

The people who were forcibly relocated from the forest area were forcibly classified into 20 collective farms, and all villages were appointed as a boyar, and they were responsible to the governor of Novgorod.

It has been six years since the first large immigration, and the forest people have already adapted to the stable life by the river. Every year, they use iron plows to reclaim new wasteland by the lake, and they continue to ask the forest for living space with axes.

They not only enjoyed the initial two-year tax-free period after the Great Immigration, but also paid the first tax in the third year, and began a three-year war dividend franchise tax exemption from the fourth year.

The eleventh tax can be described as a heavy tax, but the tax burden is only collected from the actually cultivated land.

More and more scribes were trained by Rurik. These people received higher education, and they were assigned to various farms after they completed their studies.

They are responsible to Ella, the supreme scribe and historian, and as a concubine of Rurik, she is directly responsible to the monarch.

How many acres does a village have, how much is being cultivated, how many people are there in the whole village, and how many of the most critical males are between 12 and 50 years old? These are written on paper with a quill pen by a clerk, and finally the government office in Novgorod The offices conduct summary statistics.

In this way, Rurik was able to know more detailed population data of this area, or the limit of the militia that the kingdom could recruit from the area around the lake during the war.

Breakthrough 300,000 people! This staggering number of recorded male and female Slavic peasants (with newborn babies)! And with the collective relocation of small farms that still hide in dense forests, this number is still slowly increasing.

And in the southeast of Novgorod City, Mstisk and Youth City, two old Rus cities, not only have a population of more than 20,000, but are also one step away from reaching 30,000.

The Ross population here is extremely young, and most families added new ones in the spring and summer of 842, and this population growth will continue to accelerate in the foreseeable future.

A large number of children are born every day, and the most important thing is that all families have enough food to feed them.

It's just that the value-added of the materials used to make clothes has been unable to keep up with the growth rate of babies born to the ground.

More and more newly cleared wasteland was planted with flax in 842. The demand for plant fibers forces people to peel off the bark of kudzu vines and linden trees, so as to obtain fibers and forcibly weave coarse cloth to meet the minimum cover-up needs.

Fortunately, in the warm season now, there are a lot of naked and naive children running around indifferently. They are not ashamed at such a young age but their children are older. Parents will give their children a set of clothes no matter what.

Planting flax is not the only solution. As northern immigrants, the Ross people prefer to use leather and wool products based on traditional thinking.

It is impossible for the Kingdom of Ross to guarantee that the ever-expanding population has a piece of clothing to wear in a short period of time. Besides, people’s desires have almost no end. Everyone desires more clothes for replacement. It is also necessary to dye wool and linen to make more gorgeous clothes. The costumes compete with each other.

In 842, the focus of Rurik's governance was to stabilize the rear, so he personally supervised the production in the area around Lake Yinlmen in the agricultural center. Facing a few very specific problems, he couldn't help but glance at New Aosta at the southernmost end of the Great Lakes. pull city.

The dark green lakeside grassland is crowded with white sheep, and the black and brown cattle gather together to comfort the grass. There are horsemen holding long whips to guard these huge livestock herds.

After the spring plowing, it is the season of sheep shearing, and then another round of wool can be harvested in the autumn harvest. Sheep are like a mobile field with life, which can be multiplied as much as possible to meet the kingdom's growing textile needs.

However, wool is made into felt, or drawn into wool and then hand-spun. No matter how it is processed, wool products always have a sharp texture, which is forced to wear on the body and scratches all over the body. In the end, soft linen is still needed for the skin. Tailors A cozy wool sweater for next-to-skin protection.

The mainstay of the economy of the Principality of Ostara in the south of the Great Lake is the wool and leather industry, which is developing as always.

】

However, this year, Duchess Carlota has a bigger task - to send troops to stabilize and continue to build the Veliky Luki and Vitebsk strongholds, and to completely control the agricultural population of the Polotsk community.

The vanguard of expansion in the vast Valdai Heights is the Duchess, one of Rurik's nominal sisters and wives.

The Duchess and her son Karl marched south this year when the temperature got warmer. The Ostara cavalry held up two flags: the King Ross's flag and the bull's head flag of the headquarters.

Almost all the Ostara cavalry were of Slavic origin. In name, this force is still an immigrant from Sweden, at least with the soul and bones of Sweden, but the flesh and blood are already Slavic.

This does not mean that the combat effectiveness of the army is necessarily reduced.

The excessive young population in the area around the lake was intentionally evacuated to the surrounding new settlements, which relieved the population pressure in the elite area of ​​the land reclamation area around the lake and stabilized the new settlements.

The twelve-year-old Slavic boys and girls continued to grow up, and they were forced to immigrate and settled in the big Luki town just south of the Yinlmen Lake in the name of the Ostara people. They suddenly became nomads, living like the Pechenegs of the steppe.

Their riding instructors are a group of steppe people, so they are completely different from the Frankish cavalry. Both the Ross cavalry and the Ostara cavalry have the spiritual core of the steppe cavalry, but the army of the Principality of Aostara has to go in this regard. take longer.

The more inland the area is, the less water is available for ships to sail efficiently~www.readwn.com~The most advantageous long boats for the northerners can only be found on rivers such as the West Dvina River, the Lovati River, the Msti River and the Dnieper River. Do high mobility.

Just as sheep are a very special kind of farmland, horses are a very special kind of longboat.

The Principality of Ostara is based on the preferences of the Duchess, and the spiritual core of the Principality has not been lost. She wants to emphasize the faction's characteristic of grazing cattle and sheep, which is even reflected in the warrior's unique iron helmet.

The helmets of Ross cavalrymen must have blue goose feathers or white goose feathers, and the decorations of Ostara cavalry helmets are polished and inlaid horns.

This was just an unintentional move. When Rurik personally led the cavalry to the south of the Great Lake, he saw that the armed horsemen wandering here seemed to have horns growing out of their heads, and they had upgraded from small-scale behaviors to collective characteristics.

"Carlotta, in the past winter and spring, were your people messing with these things? Horns in the helmet. If you expand too fast, outsiders will misunderstand that we Vikings are navigators with horns. Really interesting…"