It was a sunny day as I was sitting in my carriage and looked curiously outside. At the first sunshine Gennach presented me with a few presents made by the carpenters of the villa, to make my rehab a little easier: a wheelchair, to get around my floor more easily and a simple palanquin to get down the floors and move about the villa faster. And my uncle used the palanquin to get me out of the villa and to a carriage and now I was observing the people on Salarias streets going about their day.
The streets were proper stone roads, and the houses were mostly either complete out of wood or half-timbered. All of them were painted in white and the corners of the buildings in red at least, the two colours of the duchy. Often you could see paintings on the wall of the houses: depictions of people going on hunts and slaying mythical beasts, foreigners in dazzling clothing coming to the town for trade, miners going into the mountains and extracting iron, copper and gold, smiths making weapons or beautiful jewellery, pirates attacking the trading ships or a romantic love story with an tragic end.
Buildings out of stone were only some administrative buildings, the lonesome building of the university, the ducal castle on the Red Hill, the empyrian villa in which I was living and the two churches of the lower city and the minster of the higher city. And of course the massive 12m high city walls with numerous towers, which separated Salaria from the outside as well an older 9m high wall separating the Higher City from the Lower City of Salaria.
As we travelled through the two cities, the differences became more apparent: while you could see merchants and traders in the Higher City, it was mostly populated by craftsman making weapons, jewellery, locks, metallic instruments for other professions, scholars making research and others. The Lower City was mostly populated by merchants haggling with each other about their goods, and that also in other languages then empyrian or mitalican. The people had other clothes, manners and looks, indicating that they were merchants most likely from very far away for this age and time, even further than the nomadic tribes or the Eastern Draconic Empire. And in contrast to the many workshops and the characteristic noise of craftsman by their work, you could hear the tumult between the merchants trying to outsmart each other, workers taking goods from the warehouses to the ships or the other way as well as see fisherman selling or processing their fresh catch and the dock workers repairing or building new ships.
The Higher City had a population of about 4000, while there lived about 3000 in the Lower. A total of 7000 people lived in Salaria, which made it the biggest city in the Grand Duchy but paled in comparison to the capital city of the kingdom Wiganburg with a population of 22000 souls and was rather on the smaller side for a ducal capital. For example, the capital city of the dukedom of Etrusko, Eronia, had a population of over just 10000 people.
And that indicated the first problem I would face, if I ever ruled over this land: there were only about 300 000 people living in the grand duchy, that was by its size alone the biggest territory belonging to an duke with the lowest population of all.
The second problem was the circumstance, that the two islands had a mountain range in the middle of them, which had large deposits of rare metals and solid stone, both important for the smiths in the cities and the city walls to protect them. But because of the mountains, the islands nearer to the shore were also hilly, which in combination reduced the total land for agriculture and made transportation on land arduous work. That meant that the roads from farms, villages and mines on the islands led straight to a port on the shore, where the goods and people would travel by ship around the island toward their destination. This meant that there were still uncharted and therefore unused regions on the islands and travel by road between the earldoms was almost impossible, as the roads were mostly in a desolate state. That meant an overly dependence on trade by ship, which could be easily stopped if there were pirates or an enemy fleet.
Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.
And the division of Salaria showed the last big two problems of the duchy: the late duke Alexandros, my great grandfather, separated the city into two separate entities. The Lower City of Salaria had a defined territory, adhere to the criminal law of the dukedom and had no right to raise any tolls from any merchants, but was free to write its own economic laws and to govern itself. The cities citizens were part of a Great Assembly, which had some legislative power but primarily nominated the City Counsel and at its head the Mayor. The last two had the full power for their city, minus some exceptions. There were many treaties and laws about the Lower City, but to cut it short it was an experiment of Alexandros to solve his many problems.
Just after the collapse of the New Draconic Empire the five judges of Sarembria, which were like administrative serviceman, took their respective territories under their rule and tried to take out the other judges. But as they were all about the same strong and nobody was trying to conquer them, as the warring imperial households were preoccupied by murdering one another, Sarembria declined over the span of over a century from one of the most prosperous regions of the empire to a den of robbers and pirates.
This went on until the households of the southernmost judges went almost in extinction and the respective heirs of Salaria and Moruna, Konstantin and Theodora married. Their plan was a unification of the two most weak judges and that their first son would inherit all titles of their parents. The union was formed in 676 and the de Aineidas family was founded. Since then, my family consolidated their power and could defeat their other rivals. As to prevent another separation of the earldoms, all other judges were removed completely from power, except the last family of Arborea, whose heir married my grandmother and had still some holdings in the northern part of Sarembria. After that Alexandros bend the knee to the Mitalican king and after his death, Eleonora took the ducal throne and challenged the rule of the Etrusko over the island of Corlantia. After conquering it, she formed the Grand Duchy of the Sarembrian islands.
The rule over Sarembria was after the conquest in the hands of my family, and while only the duke had the right to have a levy and troops, and the guards were paid by the ducal household directly, the duke could not be in all earldoms at the same time. He needed competent representatives. And while the ducal family had some other members, there were to many cities, castles, and other positions to fill. So, he used the common people and mostly local merchants, as they had often the most appropriate education. And to counteract a strengthening of merchant families or the separation of the earldoms from the dukedom, Alexandros monopolized the army, most of the taxes and allowed the only trade with outsiders of the dukedom through the lower city of Salaria.
Now the Lower City became one of the big trading hubs of the Western Great Sea, but that had baited merchants from other countries and especially ones from the Mitalican Kingdom, who had now an interest to get a slice of the pie that was the city and the resource rich mountains.
We travelled further trough the cities as I observed the citizens haggling at the markets, looking at the goods of the craftsman, eating and singing at the taverns. Several decades since the complete conquest of the Sarembrian island its capital became a lively city and trading hub with a bright future for its population. As I was thinking about the circumstances of the dukedom and watched the people around me going about their day, I realised that I have almost forgotten the fact, that I am not native to this world. Nevertheless, its history and possible ways of development intrigued me. As I read more and more about the dukedom, I was even more interested in how things would go from here and I wanted to improve the lives on these islands. And it is not as if I have something better to do.