15th June 1574"I"m going to come clean before you guys and you, my lord."
Taking a deep breath, the carpentry plant manager whose name I recently learned to be Frank, cleaned his attire from the non-existent dust before picking up his sentence.
"I never dreamed that those houses would be so luxurious!"
Hearing those words, I couldn"t help but smile. While something as simple as toilet bowl would have to wait normally about two hundred years to be invented, the basic plumbing system for severs already existed. There was even one anecdote I remembered about Henry, that he was pleasantly surprised that contrary to French palaces, on the royal castle of Wawel, there were designated spots for one"s basic needs!
Yet it came without saying that maybe outside the richest magnates in the country, this house that was nearing its finish was the very first, commonly accessible property with a fully-fledged toilet!
But that wasn"t all. Thanks to the fact that the water could be brought to the entire city with ease thanks to the several atmospheric steam horses constantly pumping it from the river, as soon as the heating station would be finished, all the houses in this pioneering neighbourhood would get access to both cold and hot water as well!
"That"s the intention. To be completely honest, I don"t think any of our workers will get to buy this house anytime soon. Outside of the managers and the first batch of supervisors, I think most of these houses will be just a bait for the merchants to raise the worth of the merit papers!"
Even though I was already moving the resources around and limiting how much concrete and wood would be flowing upstream the Vistula river, it would still take a while for any shop to be opened. While creating the building itself wasn"t any problem, the question was, what could we sell?
The Carpentry plant was already moving at its full efficiency only to provide for the ongoing projects of mine. Even though the works on the second cutting and a.s.sembly line were ongoing, by the time it would be finished, not only would the local transit port on the White river be done already, but the chances were that the major trading port on the Dunaj River would reach its conclusion as well!
That"s why, rather than finding a way to produce something unique to my industrial investments, I decided that finalizing the project of the city was a far better idea. Not only would that give a real, tangible backing for all the merit papers, but it would be a great place to locate the first stock market, where merchants would kill each other just for a chance of obtaining a single merit paper!
"But while I can see the worth behind those houses, especially if we fill them up with the locally produced furniture, I still see some problems. First, where will the workers live? If we tell them that they can buy those houses only to sell them all to the merchants, won"t they feel cheated? While something like that could be easy to settle with serfs, after making them used to the fact that their work brings them benefits, I"m worried they won"t accept that fact so easily. As for the second matter… Are we even allowed to settle a new city?"
Just like in any other country of that time, for the city to be recognised as an urban area, the King himself had to decide what set of laws out of the possible ones would work in it before allowing said place to even be named or considered a city. This was one of the reasons why despite several n.o.bles capable of building one city a year, this process never reached the scale of any of the colonial nations or even western countries!
"For the workers, they won"t protests. I aim to create two big markets in the city. One, where our products will be sold for the merit papers, and the second one where all sorts of common wares will be traded with the normal coins. The general idea is to not rob the workers out of their merit papers, but allow them to sell it to the merchants through our stock market in order to obtain way more gold than we would otherwise be able to pay them!"
Moving the various sets of papers on the desk, I took my time looking for an ordinary-looking piece of paper, different from the others only with how dense the writing on it was.
"As for the location rights… We won"t ask for them. It doesn"t matter whether this place will be considered a city or not. As it will be entirely my own, private land and buildings, I can set any laws in it as I want. That"s why, even if someone buys the house, the land on which the house is built, will still belong to the city council!"
Bringing everyone"s attention to the piece of paper that I brought, I traced my finger through the set of rules that I came up with while travelling to this place.
"Additionally, I think I have all the reasons to believe, that it will be the King himself who will come with the proposition to turn this place into an official city. After all, I can"t imagine any ruler willing to just let such a juicy piece of possible taxation pa.s.s unattended!"
Even though allowing the country to officially acknowledge this place as the city would mean quite a draconic taxes for someone who didn"t have to pay a dime so far, this was a fair trade-off for providing security and keeping the good relations with both the distant n.o.bles and the local ones. If I were to willingly allow the king to paint a huge target on this place, then all my efforts to keep it safe and growing would be in nought!
"As for the other part of the market…"
Since the topic of the town itself was already exhausted, I decided that there was no point wasting any more time debating over it. What we could do ourselves was already decided, and it was entirely up to the Henry whether he would bother to visit this place or even send anyone to inspect it, when his mind was most likely fully occupied with making the choice between staying in Commonwealth or running away to France!
"I think I know how we can deal with the problem of distributing the TRUST and RENT papers. Rather than giving them out in form of some kind of deal that could be forged, we will just keep the record ourselves while giving the potential buyers just a simple slip that will contain all the data necessary for them to pick their products up. As long as they show up with the slip, recite a specific number and give us their name, we will be able to check if the slip matches the records in our books and finalise the transaction. All that"s left for us to do right now…"
Taking a short break to catch a breath, I looked past the hole in the wall that would soon be turned into a window.
"Is to invite potential buyers!"