Seeing Li Xuanying's appearance, Guo Kang felt helpless.
"Since you asked me, of course I personally still have to give you the most realistic answer." He said in a deep voice: "Just from those words just now, I can hear a lot of problems. You already understand these, so you don't find it strange. Or have you never considered the issues inside at all?”
"What's the problem?" Li Xuanying asked hurriedly.
"Does she have a bad relationship with her mother?" Guo Kang asked.
"The relationship between them..." Li Xuanying hesitated, thought for a moment, and then said: "It's really not too close...how could you tell?"
"She introduced her own experience, and ended up talking about the playwright for a long time." Guo Kang pointed out: "And I have always found it strange, how did their theater troupe inherit its heritage?"
"What do you mean?" Li Xuanying didn't understand.
"The uncles tried to squeeze out their mother and daughter and occupy the entire troupe. This story is very reasonable. But through whom did her mother fight back successfully?" Guo Kang asked: "Did the government rule to help her get justice?"
"It seems not." Li Xuanying thought for a moment and said, "I heard her talk about this. The government made a ruling, but it was still useless after the ruling. She also complained that the government had no enforcement power and was just empty-handed."
"But this is normal. Most of them are not ordinary cities. I'm not surprised that they can't be managed."
"That's true." Guo Kang nodded.
Cities in these days can be roughly divided into two categories: one can be represented by the cities of Rome and Seris. In the earliest times, these cities were often purely military strongholds and administrative centers, and their location and transportation were It is just a means to serve military purposes.
It is also because of this situation that the city is the node and center of governance. There are important facilities such as government offices, weapons workshops, and warehouses in the city. The court's ability to control the city is generally stronger than that of the vast countryside.
Another type of city can refer to the various new towns that appeared in Europe after the end of Rome. During this period, managers in most areas did not have the ability to build and operate cities. These cities originated as market towns and were based entirely on commercial purposes from the time they emerged.
To the lord, it was like a naturally grown but very rare and precious flower. If you can't control it, you might as well let it go and just collect protection fees regularly. This has resulted in many cities being independent or semi-independent, with less control than their rural territories.
These two situations lead to basically opposite results, and there are reasons for this.
The cities of the Purple Horde Khanate were basically similar to the first type.
In most areas, especially Romania, no large cities exist to begin with. Occasionally, some central towns have suffered serious losses in successive years of war. Therefore, almost all the cities of the Purple Horde Khanate were built by themselves.
These places are more handicraft estates than cities. The biggest difference between them and the Legion Manor is that the people inside are mainly engaged in handicraft production rather than farming.
Everything in the city is entirely for farming and war: the smelting workshop provides agricultural tools and weapons, the textile workshop is responsible for producing soldiers' clothes, and the carpenter workshop produces various ordnance and accessories... Basically, it is simply a gathering of craftsmen. , find the most convenient place and start work there. The products produced in the city are almost never sold, but are distributed directly to various manors and armies. Later, the Greek officials of the Khan's court simply called this place the "War Workshop".
In the city, the most important thing is not even the management organization: because when the Khanate was established, there was not even a fixed official agency. Basically, each prince had a piece of land, and he brought his own shogunate with him on the territory and the nomadic royal court. Same itinerant management.
——To put it simply, the eldest brother Boyan Timur is the big khan, and the brothers are the little khan in their respective Uluses. There is a fixed management organization, which is the result of Guo Gai's hard work for twenty years.
Even after that, due to the frequent wars and reclamation activities, the consumption of materials was huge; the production capacity of these workshop areas, which were almost started from scratch, was chronically insufficient, resulting in insufficient products.
This also put the cities of the Purple Horde Khanate in a strange situation for a long time. On the one hand, Zizhang's trade is very developed and is an important source of wealth; on the other hand, most areas in the city are not closely related to commerce. They almost only continue to buy the raw materials they need and do not participate in other commercial activities.
From a staffing point of view, at that time, most of the industries and personnel in the Gongfang District belonged to the army, and the cities, like the villages, were within the sphere of influence of the legions. After Queen Mother Helena's reforms, most of these workshops were placed under the jurisdiction of local provinces, but they were still not run by merchants. Even they had no jurisdictional relationship with the institutions within the Purple Horde that specialized in commercial activities.
Each workshop, like the farm, is almost all under military management. The craftsmen in the city are basically citizens. This result makes the management of these cities much more convenient.
In addition, almost all the cities within the Khanate were newly built. Occasionally, there is an old city, but due to planning issues, the Khan's court often chooses to rebuild a new city in another location.
These cities are almost all designed according to the same standards, with tightly guarded arsenals and huge squares next to the arsenals where troops can be trained in peacetime and weapons can be distributed in wartime. Each workshop is neatly arranged, and outside the workshop and the attached residential area, there is a wall specially prepared for street fighting. Between the districts, there are wide and straight streets specially set aside for transportation convenience. The style of the entire city is also very different from that of its European counterparts, whose streets are muddy and winding, and the urban areas lack effective planning and management.
Metropolis is one of the only exceptions.
The city was once carefully maintained and planned in detail, and Roman engineers and architects used their talents to build many buildings that have stood for thousands of years. But when the Purple Horde Khanate took over here, the city was already in serious decline.
The population in the city is only one-tenth of its original size, and this is already the result of the officials forcibly gathering manpower and bringing people from the Thracian region outside the city into the city to increase their strength.
Large areas are completely deserted.
In 1203, in order to quickly defeat the citizens who resisted them in street fighting, the Crusaders set fire to the city. The fire destroyed 50 hectares of the city at one time.
A month later, the Crusaders, whose progress was still unfavorable, changed their attack location and attacked the gathering place of Tianfang believers in the city. However, the residents of Tianfang Sect also resisted firmly and called other Roman citizens to support them. The Crusaders became angry and set fires everywhere again. This time the fire raged for eight days, burning 185 hectares of the city.
In 1204, after the Crusaders invaded the city, they set fire to it again. However, the first two fires were so fierce that the wooden building areas in the city were basically completely destroyed. This time there was even nothing left to burn. After sporadic arson, the Crusaders could only return in despair and camped on the ruins.
At the beginning of the 14th century, the Greek Emperor Andronikos III married his daughter to Yuejibie Khan of the Golden Horde in order to fight the civil war. However, after that, the princess couldn't get used to living in the Khan's court and asked to take the child back to her parents' home instead of staying in the grassland. Yue Jibie Khan actually agreed and arranged for someone to escort her.
At that time, Yue Jibie had already begun to intervene in Bulgaria, and even launched an expedition against Serbia, but it was too far away and failed to succeed. Therefore, Boyant Timur and others who were active in this frontline area also participated in this mission, and finally followed the escort team into Constantinople and witnessed the situation here with their own eyes.
Boyan Timur did not leave a detailed record, but among the people traveling with them was Patriarch Zhang - a friend of Zhang Imam at that time, a well-known traveler in the world of Tianfang Sect, Ibn Baitu. Thai. According to his records, at least half of the city was completely uninhabited, and the city walls were also filled with gardens and farmland, making it very "spacious." Because no one wanted the abandoned land, a monastery actually occupied an area equivalent to 15 hectares.
This situation made Boyan Timur, who came to the city for the first time, very emotional.
Later, when everyone got together to drink grape juice, he complained to everyone that before in Bulgaria, he had heard people boasting about the culture of the Greeks and the prestige of the Roman Empire every day, but he did not expect this to happen. Originally, he thought that the Roman Emperor could only be appointed by the gods, but now he saw that it was nothing more than that.
Later, many historians took this anecdote as the beginning of the strategic goal of establishing the Purple Horde Khanate. Regardless of whether this judgment is credible or not, the decline of the city at that time is evident.
After the Purple Horde Khanate occupied the city for the second time, order was finally stabilized. At that time, what everyone valued more was the strategic value of guarding the Black Sea and controlling land and sea trade routes. Even Guo Gai didn't think too much about the management of the city itself at the beginning.
Initially, the Khan's plan was to copy the previous ideas. There is a large amount of idle land in the city, which can be used to build districts and corresponding management systems from scratch. When everything starts to operate normally, on this basis, the Greek residents in the city who are willing to abide by the law will gradually be included in this system, and those who cause sabotage will be dealt with according to the law. If you get used to it slowly, it shouldn't be too difficult.
But no one expected that the situation would change so quickly, and that the source of the change was themselves.
The income from trade here is astonishingly high, but Greek officials have repeatedly granted privileges to the Italians, causing almost all of this money to flow into the hands of Italian businessmen who control waterways and tax privileges. The Purple Horde Khanate could not bear this, so it sent troops to scare away the Genoese stationed here.
In order to isolate them and prevent Italian merchants with powerful maritime power from uniting, they blocked the shipping routes and announced a reduction in taxes, even lower than the tolls collected by the Genoese themselves.
This action immediately received strong support from other city-states, and the Venetians even came many times to ask if they wanted to send troops to help. Afterwards, representatives from various commercial city-states, merchants from chambers of commerce, and speculators from other countries who followed suit poured into the city.
They built their own business stores and supporting handicraft workshops to store and initially process goods. These demands have attracted a large number of people to work here. Since most of the Black Sea coast was under the control of the Purple Horde Khanate and the trade routes were smooth, the size of these commercial populations increased very rapidly, even exceeding the Khan's own expectations.
Later, Queen Mother Helena persuaded Guo, Zhang and others to send troops to recover the entire Greek Peninsula. A large number of Greeks got rid of the control of the Western European lords, and many people also fled to the capital, bringing a second peak of population increase.
By this time, the original plan of the Purple Horde Khanate had been basically destroyed by these people.
The Khan lacked the corresponding experience and did not know how to manage these sudden increases in business and service personnel. For example, the theater troupe here now is completely different from the legion farms and war workshops that the Khan's court had previously managed.
The Khan's caravans are engaged in fixed industries and long-distance bulk trade with huge profits all year round, such as precious goods from the East, specialties from the Rus region, or fine wines from the Crimea. They cannot take care of these numerous and small needs.
The surge in occupations and the large immigrant population have plunged urban areas into disorderly growth. The Khan's court couldn't cope with it, and was reluctant to expel them, fearing that it would damage the huge income here. As a result, Dadu became probably the most chaotic city in the Khanate itself.
It is so normal to not be able to control a troupe. At the height of the trouble, the entire city might actually be out of control of the Khan's court. The residents built houses and workshops as they pleased. Even if the Khan came to forcibly demolish them, they would soon rebuild them.
The city is filled with conflicts between newcomers and original residents, newcomers and newer newcomers, and conflicts between different industries and organizations arise one after another. Various overt or covert guilds have sprung up like mushrooms after a spring rain, and they are divided according to various reasonable and unreasonable methods. The thug organizations and gang forces affiliated with the guilds are also running rampant everywhere.
Faced with this situation, Queen Mother Helena once envisioned an overall repair of the city. However, she was in a serious confrontation stage with her ministers at the time and could not mobilize troops at all. Later, Basil III reestablished the "Night Watch" regiment, which was specifically used to maintain order in the city and capture prisoners, and then began to fill the management vacancy.
After the Khan's court recovered from the turmoil and gained enough strength, the capital finally underwent a rectification. With the support of Basil and others, Guo Di began to carry out large-scale reconstruction work in the city on the grounds of repairing churches and maintaining public facilities. He also established new institutions. With the help of the army, he used force deterrence and conflicts between various forces to intervene in various urban areas and gradually intervene in the management functions originally monopolized by guilds.
After that, the rectification work lasted for ten years. Although Dadu now still makes Guo Kang feel confused, compared with the "vibrant" scene back then, it is even pretty good.
(End of chapter)
