Rise of Rurik

Novgorod and Novgorod were thriving, and according to Rurik's theory, the people would become rich because of the new way of life.

The two cities represented the eastern ruling core of the principality, and they were essentially huge villages first and foremost, with activities such as commerce adding to agricultural activities.

Farming crops, fishing and animal husbandry, the three rural areas are the foundation of people's lives. However, if the general public spends their time on this, they should not think about further improving their living standards.

Once the busy season of spring ploughing and autumn harvest is over, the Rus people and other Viking people must fish and hunt to increase their income.

As for the majority of Slavs, of course they do work such as weaving and chopping wood, but their traditional slack season is really idle. It's not that they are born lazy, but they really lack opportunities for further development, so they can only gather together in classic Slavic squatting at the entrance of the village to talk about mountains.

Now everything has changed.

If the agricultural society wants to develop further, it must engage in industry. Based on the geographical conditions of the East, metallurgy is impossible. Any economic activity must be adapted to local conditions. s population. The human resources of the duchy are at odds with the grand vision of the Maharaja Rurik as a whole, but the human resources in this area are higher. Anyone who is idle should use it to develop handicrafts to increase people's income. Through the scissors difference, they can also increase the tax revenue of the duchy, and then subsidize the three large iron factories in Blast Furnace Town, Roseburg and Elronburg in the north of the duchy.

Industry is a process in which capital has been empowered. If the principality did not launch an invasion war to plunder the resources of others, it could only plunder the resources of the peasants.

However, the Russ group with Rurik as the core represents the strongest productivity in Northern Europe. By expanding the scale of the cake, the lives of the vast Slavic farmer families are rapidly improving macroscopically.

Just look at these Slavic women!

As a very cheap labor force, they were collectively bound in the house, and ten people formed a group to make finished clothes for Rurik.

Tailoring makes clothes. This kind of work requires very little cultural knowledge and does not require much manual skills. Rurik did not intend for the women to embroider beautiful chrysanthemum patterns on the cloth, or more complicated structures.

The fifty slaves whose ownership rights were transferred all entered as team leaders. Such production teams suddenly became fifty, and if a group of auxiliary personnel were added, the labor force of the "Principality Garment Factory" would reach six hundred!

Each group has its own division of labor,

Some tanned raw animal hides, some cut leather and cloth, some only sewed, and so on.

They work from early morning to evening, and they are paid three meals a day. The high-quality meals attract them. Cash remuneration was also available, but Rurik planned to give laborers four silver coins each on the first day of the month in the Julian calendar.

The director of the garment factory was the same Verdgen, who had nothing to say about Rurik's way of hiring and remuneration. The prince seems to be very kind, but considering the daily workload of the laborers, it seems that the prince is also very mean. It is precisely because of this that Fo Degen feels that he has no right to speak, because he and the prince have the same attitude, who doesn't want to make a lot of money? As for himself, as long as the town superintendent is enough, he likes to raise two pounds of silver every month.

According to Rurik's plan, the garment factory is making a robe to keep out the cold. Its lining is soft linen, the middle layer is slightly fluffy hard linen, the cold layer is up to 20 pieces of leather sewing of big red squirrels, and the collar is a string of squirrel tail hair stitched together, as for the most layer, it becomes wear-resistant. burlap. This four-layer structure coat is not comparable to the cold resistance of wool, but it is very suitable for the current situation of the Principality of Ross according to local conditions.

Don't look at the fact that the clothes are layered inside and outside. At the current market price, the comprehensive material cost of a ready-made garment is at most three silver coins.

In this way, the monthly cash remuneration of the workers is enough to buy a garment?

Or how about the difference between industrial and agricultural scissors? The price set by Rurik was 20 silver coins. In another way of counting, a worker could buy a piece of clothing made by himself by using the labor remuneration during the warm climate during the non-farm busy period.

Of course, things shouldn't be counted like this. Even if they all work on stools or cross-legged leather cushions, they still have to put in a lot of effort due to the high workload each year. Claim your losses. The free meal for each worker is at least one pound of dried wheat and one fish, and boiled vegetable soup is not included in the statistics.

Ten pounds of dry wheat is worth a silver coin, and twenty fish is worth a silver coin. They worked six days a week, an average of twenty-five days a month, and Rurik paid four silver coins a month for each of them.

The employment cost of an ordinary mercenary is a meal plus ten silver coins. The employment cost of these women is converted, and 600 workers are equivalent to more than 200 mercenaries.

The cost of wages and food for the laborers, as well as the remuneration paid to the factory manager Fodgen, the monthly cost of the garment factory's helpers reached the level of 5,000 silver coins, which is 50 pounds of silver.

As for the cost of raw materials, three silver coins per garment are added to the selling price.

A garment is priced at 20 silver coins or 200 pounds of wheat, so only if the monthly production capacity reaches 300 pieces, the output value of the output can only be reduced.

How could so many of them produce ten pieces a day at a rapid rate? Twenty of the fifty groups are responsible for the final "final assembly", and other groups' rough-processed fabrics and leathers are shipped here to be made into ready-made garments. Two hundred women make clothes in a workshop-style process. Each of them must sew a robe every day. In practice, they can complete the task.

They must complete their respective tasks. If they fail, they will be hungry for the first time, and if they fail again, they will be fired.

No way, Rurik is really not doing charity this time. Food and drink are provided for labor for profit. The guy who "chows the wool" must be expelled. After all, there are many women who are eager to work in the garment factory.

In theory, a garment factory can produce 5,000 pieces of clothing in 25 jobs per month, provided that the supply of raw materials is stable.

As far as the current situation is concerned, linen, a very important raw material, can be supplied for three months, and as for the squirrel skin, it is really an inexhaustible resource in the current era.

The garment factory is a benefit that only Novgorod enjoys, and the women who enter the factory are almost all women from White Tree Manor. Other farms also get a piece of the pie, but the job of those farms is to provide raw materials.

The food problem has been solved, as the people of the Principality have a glut of fish on top of their wheat. Fish is naturally a food with a very short shelf life, with the exception of winter. In the old days of the vast Slavs, based on poor technology, they could not catch many fish. The arrival of the Rus brought new technology of trawling, which made the catch soar. The severe winter is a big refrigerator, and the catch is piled up into a wall. The change of direction increases food reserves throughout the year.

To solve the problem of food, the focus now is on the problem of clothing.

The existence of garment factories objectively stimulates the entire downstream industry. Flax cultivation expanded, and hunters increased, both Russ and Slavs. The production capacity of raw materials has increased significantly, causing the state purchase price to plummet. At least they still have some money to make. In order to get more benefits, the people who used to slack off from farming continue to work shirtless. For example, they cut wood to get land from the forest. Even if they can't grow wheat for the first year, they will plant flax instead.

The farms chose to weave indiscriminately, and even if the purchase price of the principality was low, it was better to make a profit than to do nothing on weekdays.

Small boats carry a wide variety of raw materials to Novgorod, because there are not only garment factories here, but also paper factories. Even if the farms can’t get too much flax, they can cut down the trees and strip the bark arbitrarily, wield their sickles to cut reeds and rushes, and transport these materials to the paper mill in small boats, and then leave the goods and receive the wheat reward on the spot.

The farms around Lake Ilmen are responsible for the supply of raw materials for various handicrafts, and the factory in Novgorod completes the processing and production of finished products. Part of the finished product is digested in the Principality, and the other part is shipped to Sweden, where the price is doubled.

In the summer of 1986, a set of handicraft industry chains in the Principality had completed the ecological closed loop, and the idlers during the slack farming period were mobilized on a large scale.

A benign system has begun to operate. Of course, there are flaws that need to be improved. It does not hide its advantages. Rurik found that he no longer needed to intervene.

In many cases, the invisible hand will adjust, and he reserves the right to directly intervene when necessary. And the control of salt, iron, and granaries, which are related to the lifeline of the country, was tightly held in Rurik's hands.

What does Rurik himself focus on now?

As soon as I heard that the prince sent people to educate the children and even take care of the meals, and it didn't matter whether boys or girls, the entire Novgorod city sent out children of school age. There are even five-year-old cubs who were brought by their parents and asked to receive education just because they seemed to be of age.

How could they have such a high level of consciousness, it's just that the prince's stewardship means less expenses for their own family.

The school-age children completed the comprehensive education of culture, physical fitness and labor in the style of the prince, women were attracted to be handicraft laborers, and men took up jobs such as logging, burning charcoal, and making pottery to provide raw materials for the industrial chain, and even work in shipbuilding workshops. Young children can only be thrown into the care of the elderly. The use of labor in Novgorod has reached its limit, and new wealth other than agriculture has begun to be created.

There are as many as 2,000 school-age children from Novgorod, Novgorod and Mstisk, a number far beyond Rurik's imagination. Now that all the children have been sent, he, as a prince, can only take them in. At this moment, the census he did last year when he was counting the fields came in handy.

Each child is made an identity file, clearly written as a roster, in a sense, this is the child's written school status.

The school's teaching buildings were completed, and faced with a large number of children, Rurik had no choice but to be a teacher himself to deal with the embarrassment of a shortage of teachers.

How to manage this group of children, how to make them understand basic discipline?

It's not a hassle.

Whether it is the Rus, the Slavs, or even the Suomis, all ethnic groups under the rule of the Principality adhere to a principle that there is no absolute freedom for each individual of the so-called tribe, and men and women have a major obligation to defend the tribe. War, anyone who can afford a weapon goes to war.

Now this habit is regarded as the system of the principality, and looking at these children, once they reach the age of twelve, they are obliged to be warriors, and it doesn't matter their gender, they must master fighting skills at the right age. In this case, it is even more appropriate to carry out management that tends to be militarized at a young age.

If a child is naughty and mischievous, he will be punished by standing and slapping the palm of his hand.

Rurik is developing a compulsory education system similar to that of the Kingdom of Prussia, but due to the many problems faced by the Duchy of Rus, its development needs to be conservative.

Because he simply cooks for 2,000 children every day, Rurik has to hire as many as fifty cooks. In order to ensure the children have three meals a day, the cooks are really busy from morning to night.

The most amazing thing is that 2,000 children have a huge appetite when they get together. The monthly consumption of wheat can reach 60,000 pounds. The key is that these inputs are not produced for several years. Even if they are asked to do voluntary labor, the fruits of labor will be It is also difficult to make up for losses.

The Principality has already invested a lot in education. According to accurate statistics, in a five-month warm period, the food consumption of only 2,000 children and those cooks is at least 300,000 pounds.

The duchy collected four million pounds of wheat last year, and one million pounds was bought and plundered from other places. Taking into account the wear and tear that poor storage had to face, Rurik estimated that there must be no less than four hundred and fifty. million pounds of wheat.

Using this rough calculation, my investment in education this year is as high as 8% of last year's agricultural tax. If the classrooms and teaching aids are counted, the investment can only be more.

As for the revenue of the Principality last year, it certainly far exceeded the so-called five million pounds of real wheat.

However, because of the expedition to Karelia in winter, the war consumed a lot of food. Although a huge number of reindeer were plundered, the deer could not be killed and eaten casually, and the food was consumed every day. The existing grain in the treasury must be supplied to all the people who eat the king's wealth. Of course, a major premise is that the Principality completely temporarily kills soldiers.

Rurik is the prince and the largest controller of industrial capital in the duchy. The sharing agreement with the Blacksmiths' Union has always been in effect. As a result, he not only enjoys a 10% to 20% share of operating profits, but also charges a high commercial tax once a year. . In addition, the Gould family is a big taxpayer, and those small businessmen have no reason not to pay taxes.

Rurik holds the economic lifeline of the Principality, and has also made some statistics. He is the person who knows the state of the country best in the entire Principality. The duchy is actually very rich, or Rurik, as a prince, is very rich, and the crisis also exists, that is, the growing internal consumption.

Part of the reason why the duchy can get higher taxes relative to the limited population naturally comes from the direct courage of Rurik, who is both wise and handsome, and another major reason comes from war plunder. It was first tested in 827 AD, and from 828 to 833, the duchy was betting on a war of the national fortune, and also fought a war in the next two years. Fortunately, the Principality has all won the fierce battle. With the unprecedented capture and the very safe external state, there is a chance to stay in the East and North and make a fortune this year.

But Ross did not really give up war and plunder because of this.

Rurik would personally go into battle to educate his children during the day. It was the first time that ordinary people had seen such a scene of the prince educating himself. The people felt that this was a sign of the nobles being close to the people, but in fact, from Rurik's standpoint, it was a serious shortage of teaching staff.

At night, he had to organize all his wives and concubines, and even the young teachers who had been busy all day, he continued to do some training and summed up the situation encountered by the educated boys. After all, I have to leave those with good math skills to do economic calculations with me.

"I should train more scribes, I have to find out all the mathematicians in the cubs, and I have to establish a proper civil service system! Otherwise, the great country will gradually lose its ability! I don't want to live as Emperor Yongzheng. exhausted."

Originally, when Rurik arrived in the real capital of Novorossberg, the Ilmen Lake area where Novgorod is located showed its strong economic strength. This is the main grain producing area, which can provide 80% of the main grain and 90% of the principality. of linen. She actually became an economic capital, and therefore a core area for handicrafts and education. Economic geography determines this outcome, unless Novgorod's commercial capabilities really add value beyond Novgorod.

The governors of various places will govern the territory, the shipping traffic between the settlements has been stable, and as long as the lake and two large bays are fished by the ships of the Duchy of Rus, the so-called East and North Baltic Sea and its land areas, the duchy. People are actively engaged in economic activities.

Rurik even ignored the privateer and the explorer Speuter, and as a result the Salmon Chief was dragged by a paddle boat and went retrograde on the Volkhov River. The privateer is back! Seeing that she needed as many as four longboats to be towed by oars, and the apparently amazing draft, Rurik arrived at the pier after hearing the news, and just glanced at the draft position of the big boat and made a judgment with a smile: "Okay, Speuter. Looks like you've got a boatload of treasures to deliver."