Let's Live Kindly
The most fundamental building block of the medieval feudal system has always been land.
In an age when the bulk of economic activity consisted of sowing seed, tending crops, and reaping the harvest, no property mattered more than the soil on which that activity took place. And if you held enough deeds, you need not sweat in the fields yourself — you could lease the land out and collect rent instead. Those too poor to own any deeds, on the other hand, had no choice but to farm someone else's earth. Landlords and tenant farmers, respectively. The value of the real estate a person owned determined the shape of that person's life.
And it has always been far easier — and far faster — for the already rich to make still more money than for the poor to become rich. A landlord takes the rents wrung from his tenants, buys still more land, takes on still more tenants, and grows into a great landowner. But great wealth always invites the envy of others, and in a world where bandit gangs can spring up at the slightest opportunity, a rich man without armed force is nothing more than a well-fattened head of livestock. So the landlords peeled off a portion of their holdings and handed it to skilled swordsmen, hiring them as bodyguards to protect both their property and their persons. Thus was born a quasi-noble class that served in exchange for real estate — in other words, the knight.
"This is a map of France's administrative districts, redrawn a few years ago. There are a few sections that need updating, but on the whole it's a reliable source."
If I meant to drag members of that quasi-noble class into this game, I needed to study their ecology with care. Grandfather Pates brought over a grimy map and spread it across the library desk. It was a shoddy scrap of a thing — the shapes a mess, the lines jagged and uneven, a product of the era's limitations — but it was enough to tell roughly which fief sat where.
"Right. I figured it would look something like this."
And that alone was sufficient. The map's contents matched my expectations exactly. France, the nation of nobles and knights, had been torn into hundreds — thousands — of fragments by the deals struck among the high and mighty. It was a harbinger that the feudal system was approaching its limits, and clear evidence of overpopulation.
"This empty space here is Paris, and the ones above it are the northern nobles?"
"Yes. The domains of the Count of Metz and the Count of Épinal, who hold the border against Deutschland."
"Huh... those two are going to go bankrupt before long."
The innate limitation of the knightly class was that the real estate available for grant was not infinite. A knight, armed with a spirited warhorse and heavy plate, was an expensive profession by nature, and the cost of feeding the soldiers under his command was no small matter either. On top of that, a knight was a full member of a stratified society, and so was obliged to maintain a standard of living befitting his rank. In short, there were a great many places for money to go. And in a medieval agrarian society, the most common method of scraping that money together was the exploitation of serfs. A knight therefore needed a manor of his own, and serfs to till the fields for him. Put the other way around: a man without a manor could not become a knight.
"Pardon? The marcher counts are going to collapse?"
"Look at the state of their split-up domains. The count's own demesne is about the size of a fat barony right now, and even as we speak the number of aspiring knights keeps growing."
Of course, a lack of real estate did not mean there was no path to knighthood at all. You could swear fealty to an extremely wealthy lord and receive regular stipends of gold in place of land, or a crusade might break out and demand the mustering of a great army, at which point raw personal ability alone could get you a foothold in high society. Both, however, were thoroughly exceptional cases. In the end, the essential element of this age was land, and owning none of it meant you had no foundation at all.
But even a lord who held vast tracts of land had his limits, and the day always came when there was no longer enough soil to grant in exchange for loyalty. You could block the lower classes from rising and have the knightly houses close ranks to keep competitors from appearing — but so long as they kept having children, the exhaustion of land was inevitable. If that rankled, you would have to risk the extinction of your line and produce only one or two offspring. Of course, no effective method of contraception existed in this era.
"Children born to knights aren't going to be content quietly farming for a living, and most of them will have learned swordsmanship or something of the sort—"
"Ordinarily they become wandering knights or mercenaries... though some take a wrong turn and end up as bandits or thugs."
"Exactly. There are too many knights in this country. Demand stays the same while supply keeps rising — the market is oversaturated."
The unemployed who resulted usually scraped by hunting for work that required muscle. All they had ever learned was how to swing a blade, so they made their living with that. Grandfather Pates had politely sorted their career paths into no fewer than four categories, but in truth those four were not cleanly distinct concepts. This was a neighborhood where a mercenary of thug origins who introduced himself as a wandering knight might turn bandit overnight without anyone batting an eye. Call them swordsmen and you would be close enough.
"So if we look carefully, we should be able to dig up one or two useful talents."
Those swordsmen were precisely the ones we needed to target. From among the failures who never made it to knighthood, the day-to-day survivors who lived by the blade, we would unearth raw ore and forge it into a hero. We would make everyone praise his courage and his nobility. So that, if it came to it, he could crack the loan shark king over the head and open up his belly.
"Let's go to Avignon. A future legend will be waiting for us there."
I needed a swordsman who would move according to my will.
The year 1298, in the County of Avignon, Oxyca Region, southern France.
Arturo, eldest son of the proud knightly house of Baron Paleheart, had recently found himself facing the crisis of a lifetime. The Count of Avignon, to whom his father had sworn fealty, had one day suddenly fallen under the thrall of a heretical cult, lost his mind, and thoroughly ruined the agriculture of his own domain. The Count of Avignon had taken to dousing the fields within his lands with seawater in the name of praying for abundance, and the moment he saw perfectly healthy crops wither and die, he blamed the serfs for a lack of faith. The serfs, their harvest destroyed and insult heaped on top of injury, rose in immediate revolt, and even the Count's second son turned against him — until the cult-addled Count was driven from his seat.
Up to that point, there had been no real problem. The damage had been concentrated on the Count of Avignon's personal demesne, and the peasant rebellion was gradually being suppressed. Of course the damage was not nonexistent — this year's ledgers would show a hideous deficit — but it was the sort of shortfall that could be managed by trimming expenditures a little. The ones who had to worry about their livelihoods over something like this were commoners with nothing to their names, not landlords like them. A little thrift and a little patience, and the problem would resolve itself soon enough.
"Damn it. Father..."
The trouble came after that. The head of House Paleheart, unable to endure the sight of his own coffers shrinking, declared a tax increase. How little patience the man must have possessed to make such a decision was anyone's guess, but the tenant farmers, of course, rioted on the spot. And at that very moment, the unextinguished embers of peasant revolt were flaring up sporadically across the Avignon region. The mob, joined by serfs from neighboring domains, stormed the lord's castle in the dead of night, cut off the head of the wicked lord who had dared raise taxes in such times, and stuck it on a pike.
Arturo had not dared stand in their way. The people of House Paleheart's lands had always cherished him like a son of their own. He was a coward without equal under heaven. Watching the very people he had sworn to protect with his life butcher his father through tears of blood, unable to take either side, he chose the craven path of flight.
"Brother. Are you crying again?"
"Hm? No. I'm not crying. A properly invested knight doesn't cry."
And so his house fell. It had never been a particularly grand house to begin with, so there was nothing strange about it. The lands they had ruled passed to Baron Schmidt, who arrived to put down the rebellion, and the family's entire fortune was plundered without a scrap left behind. His father was beheaded and mounted on a pike; his mother and the rest of his siblings either took their own lives or were slaughtered by the mob. All that remained were two people: Arturo himself, and his youngest sister, Arisa.
"That's a relief. I thought you were crying again."
"I told you, I never cried in the first place..."
And even the one remaining blood relative had been caught in the riot and lost both her eyes, so the weight of responsibility settled on his shoulders was truly crushing.
"Stay home and keep quiet. Big brother will go earn some money."
"Yes. Come back safe."
Stepping out of the shabby hut, Arturo clenched his teeth and wiped away his tears. He was still young, a youth far too soft-hearted to overcome the loss of his family. But the world had stripped him of everything he had enjoyed and cast it into the flames, and even the one person he had barely managed to save would die alone somewhere if he failed to protect her. Sitting down and giving up was not an option. If his blind little sister was to live a life worthy of a human being, he would have to scrape together money by any means necessary, no matter how ruthless.
"Ah. Found him."
It was a few days later that a girl with a suspiciously large amount of money came looking for him.