Rise of Rurik

After bidding farewell to the huge expeditionary force, is King Rus still strong?

Rurik is not worried about his own strength declining at all. On the contrary, the kingdom's strength is increasing every day.

When the giant ship Sea Monarch is launched, it means not only that a cutting-edge ship has entered 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 enough time to carry out sea trials in 842.

In New Roseburg, the capital of the kingdom, everything seemed to have returned to calm.

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

The pastures are growing wildly, and the cattle, sheep, and reindeer are freely gnawing on the grass. It is another peak period of the year for livestock reproduction.

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

The shoulder height of the steppe horse imported from Pecheneg is not ideal. Even though it has strong endurance, it was indeed inferior to the Franks' war horses in some aspects in past wars.

Most of the horses captured during the war were mares, and a few stallions became treasures.

Beginning in the spring of 841, the Frankish stallions captured in the War of 840 began to be bred with Ross's steppe horses. Taking advantage of the theory of hybrid advantage, 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 it must be much better than the female parent, at least the shoulder height can be significantly increased.

What exactly is the new generation of horses like?

In the spring and summer of 842, after almost a whole 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 in their hometown. The quality of the horses can be seen from the time of their birth. Being able to express such emotion seems to verify that the Russians have bred a higher quality horse.

"Well, if this is the case, the hard work of the Frank Army Stallion will be in vain."

Rurik couldn't help but sigh with emotion, not only for the war horse, but also for his humorous self-expression.

Those girls that their fathers selected for themselves more than ten years ago have not only become the mothers of their children, they are still very young, and they are now in the prime of life that combines maternal love and feminine charm.

Now that life has stabilized, perhaps the most important thing for the monarch to do at this stage is to govern 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, everything is going well in life now. The area around Yin Ermen Lake with Novgorod as the center, which has the highest level of agriculture, gives farmers a stable farming life. As long as the climate does not cause major problems, their wealth will grow steadily, and that is enough.

Rurik did not issue any more policies that he claimed were beneficial to agriculture. He did not need to personally supervise work such as encouraging land reclamation, clearing weeds, and implementing irrigation. The general public would take care of their own affairs.

The Slavs were busy "demanding land from the forest", and one big tree after another was cut down and sawed down. Often thirty people went into battle together and used cables to forcibly pull out the roots of the big trees. The thick tree roots were not wasted in the end. They were chopped and smashed into huge wooden boards, which were eventually made into heavy wooden tables.

The trunks are even more useful. The bark is peeled off and sold directly to the state-owned paper mills in the city. The remaining parts are carved into canoes with iron hoes to meet the low-cost boating and fishing needs of ordinary farmers. Cutting down those books is very particular, and some trees are considered to have the principle of not cutting down unless necessary, and they are even planted by the people voluntarily.

The large city of Novgorod is a large-scale expansion based on the White Tree Manor, and its scale is still expanding rapidly with the expansion of the population.

In this era, there are more and more double-storey buildings in the capital of the Kingdom of Rus. If the house is built to three floors, it will not be impressive.

The number of double-storey wooden houses in Novgorod is gradually increasing, and most of them are extensions of old wooden houses. The most common type is still a single-family wooden house, which usually houses one family, and is equipped with a fenced courtyard. Some thoughtful people even dig a shallow well at the base and pile the walls with fired clay bricks.

All small families are willing to deal with their houses in this way, and the city has to expand outward by spreading the pie.

The nearby forest is becoming more and more visible, and what remains unchanged is that the birch forest that gave White Tree Manor its name has expanded in scope.

For every birch tree cut down, two or three saplings will be replanted. It is a huge treasure, the sweet birch sap in spring is a deliberately collected drink, and it is for this reason that White Tree Estate has remarkably created a dense birch forest. In order to create the most suitable writing paper, Rurik locked the material in birch bark. In order to avoid depleting the lake, the birch forest needed to be expanded.

It's spring again, and beekeeping in tree holes around the lake is booming again. Endless bees are flying in the grassland beside the lake full of daisies.

Farmers were cultivating their own land. Since iron tools began to be used on a large scale, everything went smoothly in the new year's spring plowing. The farmers of the White Tree Manor who were hired by Rurik received a reward to complete the sowing work for Wang Tian, ​​and they were still responsible for the harvest. This is a fat difference. Workers can take away substantial physical benefits, and the most critical thing they have to do is to complete spring planting and autumn harvest.

Such a fat difference can only benefit the earliest farmers who came from Long Yougong's Baishu Manor.

If a piece of land is cultivated intensively for many years, the soil fertility will be exhausted by the crops.

Rurik has long been trying his best to popularize the importance of fertilizers and food, and straightforwardly educate the public on what nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are. It would be better to just post a notice describing it - feces and other filth can fertilize the fields.

This is actually a very new concept. The majority of people, especially the "forest people" who were forcibly immigrated from forest areas to settle in lakeside areas, have no concept of fertilizer at all. Only when the land is depleted by frequent planting will it become infertile. Later, crop rotation was adopted to alleviate this terrible barrenness.

They can't even figure out the root cause of crop rotation and fallow. They only know that after one field is too barren, they go to another field to cultivate. After the field became barren again, I went back and planted it with the mentality of giving it a try, and found that the fertility of the land had returned.

Everything is based on experience, and now they increasingly accept the idea that excrement fertilizes fields. But where to get a lot of poop?

There are no conditions for giving large amounts of manure to their own fields. They collect their own and livestock manure, and finally mix it with soil and bury it in their yard where they grow peas.

War brings not only destruction, but also the rebirth of war. The war in 840 was the collision of two worlds in Europe. The peas gathered by Rurik from Utrecht were successfully planted in Novgorod in 841.

At first it was Queen Svetlana who took the lead in this fitting mission, and she took the title of the final successful result. It is said that the queen brought peas to the people, and it was the queen's natal family, the farmers of White Tree Manor, who were the first to enjoy the pea dividend.

Each household was given some brand-new pea seeds. They opened small vegetable gardens one by one and started sowing seeds in the spring plowing season of 842 with the mentality of giving it a try. As a result, in just two months, the pea seedlings had grown to about knee height.

This was the first time they had seen this kind of crop. They only knew that after the pods finally formed, the green spherical fruits inside could be eaten as food and had a soft, waxy, fresh and delicious texture.

Then in early June, peas bloomed on a large scale and then formed pods. When they bloom on a large scale, they undoubtedly directly cause a carnival of bees, which then leads to efficient pollination, so that each plant has densely packed seed pods.

For peas imported from Utrecht, it often takes eighty days from sowing to harvesting. There is no technological support to create early-maturing varieties of peas. After all, Utrecht at the mouth of the Rhine River is warmer, and the pea growing period is quite satisfactory. In Novgorod, which is much colder, the entire growth cycle of peas has been extended by two weeks. Not surprising.

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

Picking pea pods has become a job suitable for all ages. The family's small vegetable garden harvests a huge amount of beans, and these harvests are enough for the family to live for a period of time. What's more, boiled peas are delicious, and then pounded into pulp and served with salt, it becomes an extremely delicious Huhu dish.

In fact, what people don’t know at all is that peas, a member of the legume family, have extremely strong nitrogen-fixing abilities. If you want local wheat, oats, and rye to grow vigorously and harvest significantly, the most critical thing is to find ways to fix nitrogen. Using a small amount of farmyard manure is just adding fertilizer, and using fertilizer on peas that are already not deficient in nitrogen fertilizer is even more wasteful.

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

Rurik knew that it had nitrogen-fixing value, but the big problem now was how to expand pea fields. The problem is not the lack of fields, but that the absolute number of fruits is too small. The kingdom does not yet have enough seeds. Fortunately, the value of seeds increases at an exponential level. The time is not ripe in 842, but by 843 they can be distributed in the royal fields. Land was cleared for large-scale planting.

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

If this doesn't work, divide the field into three parts and rotate crops.

The people who were forcibly moved from the forest area were forcibly divided into twenty collective farms. Each village was assigned a boyar and was responsible to the governor of Novgorod.

It has been six years since the initial great migration, and the forest people have already adapted to the stable life by the river. Every year they use iron plows to reclaim new lakeside wasteland, and carry axes to continuously demand living space from the forest.

Not only did they enjoy the initial two-year tax holiday after the Great Immigration, but after paying the first tax in the third year, they began to enjoy a three-year tax exemption on war dividends starting from the fourth year.

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

Rurik trained more and more scribes, and these people received more advanced education. After completing their studies, they were assigned to various farms.

They were responsible to Ella, the top scribe and historian, and as one of Rurik's concubines, she was directly responsible to the monarch.

How many acres of land a village has, how many are being cultivated, how many people there are in the village, and how many of the most critical males between the ages of 12 and 50 are written on the paper through the quill pen of the scribe, and finally by the Novgorod-based offices to conduct summary statistics.

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

Breaking through 300,000 people! This is an astonishing number of recorded Slavic peasants of both sexes (along with newborn babies)! And this number is slowly increasing as small farms still hidden in dense forests are relocated en masse.

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

The population of the Rus here is extremely young, and most families added new members in the spring and summer of 842. 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 value of the materials used to make clothes can no longer keep up with the growth rate of babies born.

More and more newly opened wasteland was simply planted with flax in 842. The demand for plant fiber forced people to peel off the bark of kudzu and linden trees to obtain fiber and forcibly weave coarse cloth to meet the minimum need for shame.

Thanks to the warm season now, a lot of naked children are running around carelessly. They are still young and have no shame, but when their children are older, their parents will buy them a set of clothes no matter what.

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

It is impossible for the Kingdom of Rus to ensure that the ever-expanding population has one piece of clothing to wear in a short period of time. Besides, human desires are almost limitless. Everyone desires more clothes for replacement. Wool and linen threads also need to be dyed to make more gorgeous clothes. The costumes are spectacular.

The focus of Rurik's governance in 842 was to stabilize the rear, so he personally supervised production in the agricultural center around Lake Ermen. Faced with several very specific problems, he couldn't help but look at New Aosta, the southernmost tip of the Great Lakes. Lacheng.

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

After the spring plowing, it is the sheep shearing season, and then it is time to wait until the autumn harvest for another round of shearing. The sheep were like a mobile, living field that could be multiplied as much as possible to meet the kingdom's growing textile needs.

However, no matter how the wool is made into felt, or stretched into wool and then hand-woven, the wool products will always have a sharp texture, which will cause scratches all over the body when worn forcibly. In the end, soft linen cloth is still needed for the covering. Tailors A comfortable woolen sweater designed to protect you from the cold.

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

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

The pioneer of expansion in the huge Valdai Highlands was the duchess, one of Rurik's nominal sisters and wives.

The Duchess and her son Karl raised their troops to go south when the temperature got warmer this year. The Ostara cavalry held two flags high: the King of Ross's flag and the bull's head flag of the headquarters.

Almost all the Ostara cavalry are of Slavic origin. In name, this force is still immigrants from Sweden. At least they have the soul and bones of Sweden, but their flesh and blood are already Slavic.

This does not mean that the military's combat effectiveness will inevitably decrease.

The excessive young population in the area around the lake was intentionally evacuated to new settlements around it, which relieved the population pressure in the core areas of the agricultural reclamation area around the lake and stabilized the new settlements.

Slavic boys and girls who were only twelve years old continued to grow up, and they were forced to immigrate and settled in large numbers in the town of Velikiy Luki just south of Lake Yinrmen in the name of Ostara people. They suddenly became nomads, living like the Pechenegs of the steppe.

Their riding coaches are a group of prairie people, so they are completely different from the Frank cavalry. Both the Ross cavalry and the Ostara cavalry have the spiritual core of the prairie cavalry, but the army of the Principality of Ostara has to go a step further in this regard. More long-term.

The further inland the water available for efficient navigation by ships decreases, the northerners' most advantageous long boats can achieve high maneuverability on rivers such as the West Dvina, Lovati, Msti and Dnieper rivers.

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 wanted to emphasize the characteristics of herding cattle and sheep of this force, which is even reflected in the unique iron helmets of the warriors.

The helmets of the Russian cavalry must be decorated with blue-dyed goose flight feathers or white goose flight feathers. The decoration on the helmets of the Ostara cavalry is 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 the armed horsemen wandering here, their heads seemed to have horns, and they actually upgraded from a small-scale behavior to a collective characteristic.

"Carlotta, were your people doing these things in the past winter and spring? Helmets with horns. If you expand too fast, in the future, outsiders will misunderstand that we Vikings are voyagers with horns. It's really interesting……"