Swiss Arms-Chapter 143

Swiss Arms-Chapter 143

Swiss Arms
Chapter 143
-VB-
Hans von Fluelaberg
It was now the year of lord 1307.
The start of 1306's winter began with … a lot of great things. It was a slow life that I always wanted to have, if with a lot of responsibilities.
The fall harvest also brought in a bounty of crops. Davos and Fluelaberg both experienced a bumper crop, and we had the really good fertilizers to thank for that.
The situation outside of the valley, however, was not so good.
The Compact experienced a famine.
I'd been so busy with preparing and prosecuting a war that I haven't had the time to do a tour of the Compact this year, and it was showing.
Villages directly connected to my county were better off; when I found out about the food shortage, I was quick to lower the prices of grain and sell them directly to the affected villages. The only village not affected by the famine (or affected least) was Davos and Maienfeld. Toggenburg was also less affected, but John had to use up a lot of silver and gold to buy grain and livestock at higher prices.
Chur also suffered. The town of Chur itself didn't suffer, having been close not only to the trade routes but also Rheintal and Maienfeld's bountiful farms, but all of the areas outside of the town's immediate area were struck hard, especially valleys outside the road network. Zernez, my once enemy, and Zuoz, which sat further up from Zernez in the same valley, lost almost a quarter of their crops. There was a very good chance that the towns and villages in Upper Engandin Valley will not be able to feed themselves past the spring. And I only knew this along with Maienfeld, Chur, and Toggenburg's situation because that's what they told me.
And that was the second problem I was facing.
It was March now.
The snow hadn't melted.
March was very important to the mountain folks because it was when barley would be planted.
But it can't be sown if the ground was still frozen
.
It was too cold. Colder than I ever remembered March being.
I kicked at the ground just outside Fluelaberg. This area, something like thirty acres, had been used by my town's people as a communal farm for the poorer residents, including many of the minorities, including recent migrants. Actually, Romansch speakers were now in the minority; the German speakers have taken over.
I let out a sigh, and my breath immediately fogged up.
Yeah.
Too cold.
If the snow didn't start melting in the next week or so, then this was going to add to the food problem further down the road, especially since the snow beets
also
couldn't be harvested without causing them too much damage. Any delayed harvest was going to affect their quality, too.
'Food problem is becoming bigger the longer I look at it,' I thought with a grimace.
Merely changing how I did things within Fluelaberg-Rheintal wasn't going to cut it. If I ignored the rest of the Compact, then half of them were going to starve. I needed to bring the Compact's representatives together to find a solution not just to the food problem but the unwieldy decentralized nature.
Perhaps… Perhaps it was time for smaller members to lose their votes or get consolidated into bigger blocs, not just in how they were voting right now.
This was going to be super unpopular.
-VB-
Prince-Bishop Gion of Chur
It was … bad.
"How many granaries are still full?" Gion asked the deacon who had been put in charge of the storages.
The deacon grimaced. "After your order to redistribute them to the worst affected villages in the Upper Engandin Valley and elsewhere, we have just four granaries that are three-quarters full, Your Grace."
Four granaries that weren't even full. Or just two full granaries worth of grains.
That couldn't feed Chur through the rest of spring, never mind summer.
Chur currently housed just over two thousand people, including the few men-at-arms, guards, and clergy who lived in and around the town. One person consumed anywhere from half a
pfund
* to one and a half
pfunds
a day in just grains, never mind vegetables and meat. A single granary held just enough grains to feed five hundred people for one month!
"Deacon… what are the prices of grains in the town?" he asked slowly. Hesitantly.
"It's … one pfund bread has been selling for eighteen pfennigs, Your Grace."
Gion nearly stroke right there and then.
Eighteen?!
"It was sixteen just yesterday!" he hissed out.
Eighteen pfennigs was … two days worth of work for farmhands around Chur!
"It was, Your Grace, but people have been getting antsy about the grains. People who have them don't want to sell them, and people who want to eat but do not have their own stores at home are willing to pay more to not be hungry."
This was a disaster. It was obvious that he wouldn't be able to refill the granaries if the price of a single loaf of bread was over eighteen pfennigs! That was ridiculous!
"Quick," Gion grunted as he pulled out a pulp paper sheet, dabbed his quill pen in ink, and began to write on it hastily but with precision. "Get me the quickest rider and the quickest horse. This letter must get to the Count of Fluelaberg as quickly as possible!"
The deacon bowed quickly and ran out.
'... have less than two weeks worth of food,' he repeated mentally as he wrote those words out. 'Bread prices have shot up in Chur, and I do not have a solution to this. Please, I need your help, my friend. Send word and help quickly.'
-VB-
Count John of Toggenburg
John sighed.
Hans did warn him.
It seemed like more and more everyday that his time spent training in martial arts decreased in lieu of spending more time administering his county. Even with a steward to help him, John put in his own work, because, as Hans once told him, he needed to be able to see and know the state of his people at a glance.
And it was not a good state that they were in right now.
Last year's harvest had been a bad one, and the peasants couldn't harvest the winter crop because a lot of the ground was still frozen over. Snow hadn't melted in large parts of the valley.
"Thank God I listened to Hans," John muttered as he stared at the on grain prices collected across his territory while also looking at the number of wheat, oat, and barley bushels he had stored up and bought last year.
Each of his granaries could hold three hundred bushels, or roughly fifteen thousand pfunds. More if it was a wheat storage and less if it was an oat storage. Since he had more barley and wheat than oats, he was barely sure that he could calculate with fifteen thousand pfunds in mind, because a single person ate about one pfund worth of grain per day. With twenty granaries, he had just enough grains to feed everyone in Toggenburg and the immediately surrounding villages.
And the county's situation was only this bad because he
bought
five granaries worth of additional grains last year before the first snow fell. And the purchase wasn't even for his own grain storage, though he did separately purchase grain from Zurich for his castle's own stores.
This meant he needed to tell the village chiefs and mayors to ration the grain as much as possible until the spring harvest came in.
But what then afterwards? What if the harvest this year was as bad as last year?
He needed help, but he couldn't afford to keep buying more grain for the commoners. Not only would that beggar him, he wouldn't be able to do that forever, especially if the tax grain he collected couldn't restore the lost stores.
The problem was that his subjects hadn't been as wise despite his and Count Hans' warnings. Looking at the numbers, he expected to redistribute at least half of the grains in the public storage.
Knock knock
.
He looked up. "Come in."
The door opened and his mother walked in.
"Ah, mother. What brings you here?" he asked her.
She looked troubled.
"John, your grandfather sent me a letter."
"Oh, did something happen or…?"
"He's asking for help. Last year's harvest was bad."
… Uh oh. "Mother, I don't think I have any grain to spare…"
"Don't we have twenty granaries that are full?"
"Our own people need them!"
Mother remained adamant that he helped his grandfather, however, and eventually, he relented to sending one granary's worth of grains and a pair of old oxen.
-VB-
Terms:
Pfund(s):
pound. Multiple different pfunds existed at the same time, including Vienna Pound (561 g) to Cologne Mark (234 g). The reason why I keep listing how much a single person eats is because 1 pfund there is different from 1 pfund here, but regardless of where you live, you eat a similar amount of bread.
Note: no infrastructure within the HRE was standardized. This means one granary can hold more or less than another granary. This varies from village to village, state to state, and region to region. The definition of a bushel also differed from state to state and region to region.

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Chapter 143