“Just as trade is the lifeblood of nations, so are certain ingredients the lifeblood of people. While it often differs from race to race, there is one ingredient that every living creature, be they people or animal, have a need of in order to live. The humble salt is this ingredient, and this, class, is why many wars have been fought in the past over the thing you flavor your food everyday with.” - From a lecture by Garth Wainwrought, Dean of the Levain Institute of Higher Learning, Circa 694 FP.
“Tell me, girls, you know that the Caliphate is the hegemon of the northern region nowadays, and you probably have learned bits of its history in your lessons, but did you know what actually brought about their rise to power back then?” Aideen asked during breakfast the next morning, which they had in the same room as the previous night, this time only with Farouq and the patriarch eating with them. “I’ll give you a hint. It’s related to why the trading houses of the Caliphate are the richest and most influential around the north.”
“Hmm, if you say that it’s related to the trading houses, then it has to be some sort of tradable resource,” noted Eilonwy, as she knew that the question was directed to her and Kino in particular. One of the duties of the veteran members supervising the younger ones was to educate them on various things during their journey. “Can’t be glasswork. Pretty sure that only started becoming a thing after the Caliphate already came to power, and besides I can’t see them building up that power just by selling fine glassware.”
“Shouldn’t be crops either. I know that the Caliphate is more than self-sufficient and even exports their crops all over nowadays, but that should not be the case when they were new to this land. People didn’t want to inhabit this region for a reason,” Kino added as she thought about the question as well. “Can’t be weapons and armor, could it? I know dwarves are great blacksmiths but I think they would need it for their own use that early on in the Caliphate’s history.”
“Milady is correct about the crop situation back then,” replied Patriarch Abdul-Hamid with a fatherly tone of voice. “We struggled to grow enough food for ourselves and even lost a good third of our people to famine in our first decade in this land, until we secured enough wealth to import food regularly back then. It took us centuries to develop the strain of crops that we grow on this barren land and underneath it nowadays, which led to our present self-sufficiency.”
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“So not those either… with the sparse desert around here… did you happen to find some gold mine? Or maybe a vein of gemstones?” asked Eilonwy in turn. “Those are probably the only things that come to my mind that could turn the situation around that quickly.”
“Whatever it is, it has to be something in high demand, though. I’m not certain the states around them at the time were so wealthy that they would import such things in large quantities, and even if they would, thy could have driven the prices far lower since they were in a position of power anyway,” argued Kino to the hypothesis. “That said, I’m drawing a blank as well, to be honest.”
“The answer to the question posed by Milady deVreys is actually something far simpler and humble, something that most people nowadays probably did not pay much mind on, even, with how long it has been readily available,” said the Patriarch as he reached over to a glass container set on the table and poured some of its contents on his hand. “It is just this right here. Salt. It was what our ancestors found in great quantities in these barren lands.”
“The Caliphate is the largest exporter of salt to most nations in the central, western, and southern regions of the north these days,” explained Aideen. “They discovered many underground salt deposits that would last a very long time and continually harvest from there. Nowadays we might take salt for granted, and to be fair, we never really had a lack of it in the Lichdom, but in the past it was often hard to get enough of it unless you happen to live by the sea.”
“Purifying seawater to turn it into salt is also a laborious process that takes skill. The Caracanese are good at it, but they could not produce the quantities our mines could provide with ease,” added the patriarch with a grin on his face. “The east still mostly buys from the Caracanese as they are closer, and the north mostly borders the oceans so they can handle their own salt situations at the least, but we in the Caliphate hold control over most of the salt trade of the region.”
“It’s not just something you season your food with to make it taste better. People cannot live without salt for too long, so it is a more crucial part of life than most realize. We also use it a lot in preservation of food, amongst others, so its importance is an apparent, if understated one,” said Aideen in addition. “I guess unliving like you and I are exceptions to this, Kino, but for most, salt is something wars have been fought over, especially when it was scarce.”
“Salt lakes and salt mines aren’t too common in this region either, and the salt deposits we discovered underground were quite deep, something that the others were unlikely to discover even if they were to settle down here,” said Farouq. “It is only because our dwarven ancestors have a habit of digging deep below the ground to see what they could find that they even ran into the salt deposits at all, and even then it was over a decade before those were found.
“Sometimes, Miladies, the most precious thing in the world, could be some very mundane, everyday thing. All that differs was whether it was something people needed or not.”