Cold War
In an age when beasts casually dragged people off and bandit packs smashed houses to splinters, living inside city walls was an enormous privilege all by itself.
First, you were shielded from the physical threats that ran rampant outside the walls. Compared to the countryside you had access to a wider range of facilities and services, and with industries clustered together the chances of handling real money were far higher. Free cities, moreover, were relatively free from the motherless exploitation of feudal lords, so next to the countryside that suffered whenever it got bored they were practically paradise.
Of course that was only relative. From a modern person's point of view either side would make you sigh without even trying. The cities of this era could hold only a handful of people to begin with, and the protection of the walls did not automatically make anyone happy, so the peasants who made up the overwhelming majority of the population did not particularly envy urban life. People who had spent their entire lives plowing fields and tending crops were never going to adapt to the cutthroat existence of a city. Unless you jumped centuries ahead and built indoor vertical farms, the only work available was miscellaneous grunt labor, and even that was already taken by the day laborers and street kids who had grown up there. A reckless move to the city was therefore a shortcut to unemployment and poverty, while a quiet rural life was the royal road to peace and stability…
Except Montpellier was different.
After the fall of Paris it had become the largest city in France, the heart of the south, the logistics hub of the western Mediterranean linking the Iberian and Italian peninsulas. It was also the stronghold of Count Montpellier, who was actively leading a rebellion in real time, and the city already designated as the capital of the new kingdom—a land of opportunity. It would have been stranger if people were not pouring in. Asty would have sworn on her parents' graves: the moment the southern army took the Duke of Orléans's head and raised Count Montpellier as king, Montpellier would burst at the seams with people desperate to live in the capital.
So redevelopment had to start now. If they did not systematically expand housing while they still had breathing room, they would watch shantytowns sprout like mushrooms from a medieval housing crisis. By then Asty herself would be up in the Low Countries far to the north, but it would do no one any good if the city destined to become the capital of the new Kingdom of France was shaken by a housing shortage. And if she did not improve conditions now, far more than one or two people would suffer.
"I have committed a capital offense! To dare treat Your Holiness with such disrespect—"
"Everything been all right? I'm planning a survey of the city's destitute population. Would you mind helping if you're free?"
Driving out the people already living there just to build new houses would be putting the cart before the horse. Asty had Pates measure the area of the shantytowns inside the city and used the network of poor districts built during the last round of charity work to count the homeless. Then she dangled investment capital scraped together from every corner as bait, summoned the city's guilds, and placed bulk orders for cheap furniture and basic household goods—firing the starting gun for a construction boom.
"What? You're saying the number of people sleeping rough or living in temporary shacks is only eight thousand?"
"…Isn't that an enormous number? It would fill an ordinary city and still leave people over."
"Ah. Right. This is the Middle Ages."
Well, they called it a construction boom, but in reality it was smaller than a single modern apartment complex. In an age when both population and economy were modest, even this counted as a boom.
"We'll hang blueprints of the houses all over the encampments. I'll also give the commanders a live demonstration of the construction methods, so memorize them carefully and teach your men."
"What? We have to build them ourselves?"
"Would you rather spend the rest of winter in tents?"
All that remained was to reclass their brave and peerless holy knights into brave and peerless combat engineers. Asty freely abused her authority as Saintess and drafted the soldiers camped outside the city into the construction work. She felt a twinge of guilt making men who had come to swing swords do hard labor, but on second thought it was all experience that would become blood and flesh. What she was teaching them was cutting-edge construction technique from a full eight centuries in the future. Handing over technology more than seven hundred twenty years more advanced for free meant she ought to be receiving gratitude, not feeling sorry.
Besides, the soldiers themselves had nowhere to stay inside the city and were camping outside the walls. The houses they were about to build would serve as their own billets until winter ended, so if they wanted to survive the late-winter cold they would have no choice but to burn with motivation whether they liked it or not.
"I offer my sincere thanks that our brothers in the faith have joined us for this meaningful occasion. From this moment we will undertake the task of providing shelter for children and adults who have nowhere to go, and of preparing ground where families can take root."
One small mercy was that they did not need to insist on building inside the walls. Under ordinary circumstances a residential district outside the walls was easy prey for bandits or a target for lords' requisitions, but Montpellier was the sacred city chosen as capital of the new Kingdom of France. Its scale would soon be far too vast for mere bandits to eye, and as a capital it would not be dragged into petty noble feuds. Nobles raiding one another's lands and smashing gates was just a particularly rough real-estate dispute; doing the same thing in the capital was open treason with no possible excuse. So they could build outside the walls with a clear conscience. Once Count Montpellier seized the throne he would massively reinforce the capital's defenses anyway, and the houses built now would come under the protection of the expanded walls.
"First we need to secure building materials. See that dense forest over there? I've already obtained permission from Count Montpellier, so fell every mature tree and bring it in."
The material was, of course, wood. Timber could suffer from pests and was vulnerable to fire, so it was hardly an ideal material, but when it was the only usable thing on hand, what choice did they have? Working stone or firing bricks took far too long, and concrete required production facilities they did not possess. In an age that lacked even enough iron for farm tools, high-rises of reinforced concrete were out of the question. In the end they had no option but to cut a great many trees of suitable size and stamp out identical log cabins by the score—rendering all the modern architectural knowledge she had learned in her previous life almost pointless.
"And if we just charge into the forest in a disorderly mob, accidents are guaranteed, so for safer and more efficient work we will divide into teams. Commanders of each unit, group your soldiers into teams of no more than one hundred."
But the cunning she had honed since her previous life shone in any situation. Using efficiency as the excuse, she reorganized the units drafted for construction into company-sized formations. She forced a uniform structure on the coalition army that had been split by origin and affiliation, raising cohesion and unifying a command system that had been pure chaos.
"Even if it is the Saintess's order, that will be difficult."
"If we scatter soldiers who trained together left and right, combat effectiveness will suffer serious disruption!"
"Hmm. I was planning to reward the team that posts the best results each day, along with the commander of the unit it belongs to. But if you really dislike the idea…"
"…Is it not the spirit of chivalry to accomplish even an impossible task for the sake of justice!"
"On second thought, unifying unit organization seems to have more advantages than disadvantages!"
Of course the commanders had howled when told to break up their forces under the pretext of construction work, but a suitable carrot plus a clear signal that she was not trying to strip them of command itself quieted them at once. They too knew a war could not be fought with this slapdash system; once they confirmed she was not some clueless child ignorant of the world, they were content to step back. Or perhaps the mere words "the Saintess's reward" had simply flipped their eyes white.
Ugh. My conscience is twinging for some reason.
Sorry, but no such rewards actually existed. She was willing to buy them some decent sweets from a city bakery, yet the sacred blessings they were no doubt expecting were completely beyond her. It was not for any deep reason; she simply did not know how to use those complicated techniques. In this damn Order mastering a single holy art was harder than earning a professional license.
"Hey, didn't you look at the plans? You have to cut them square and fit them together!"
"If we don't finish today you'll be sleeping in tents again! One last push!"
"You—the bastard who made this door, get out here. If you cut the corners like that, how is it supposed to keep the wind out?"
Naturally no one was brave enough to grumble while the Saintess herself was running around the site. Asty bustled from place to place supervising the work, and every time she appeared the soldiers convulsed with renewed zeal to finish ahead of schedule. The whole thing ended up looking less like a faith-driven volunteer project and more like a division commander personally inspecting a civil-support operation, but process did not matter as long as the results were good.
Fueled by advanced construction methods from the future and forcibly injected motivation, the residential districts ringing Montpellier began to multiply at an unnatural speed. It was the moment the ragtag multinational coalition finally became a proper army.