Muskets for Everyone, Misery for the Church, and a Plot Against the Port
There were plenty of wolves circling, waiting for their chance.
People kept clamoring for guns along with gunpowder, so Daehan eventually reverse-engineered the matchlock and put it on the market.
Here was the problem: Daehan's steel output at this point exceeded half of the entire world's iron production. Even respectable nations found it more sensible to simply buy their weapons from Daehan and, if anything, sell iron ore to scrape together some pocket change.
"Wait, guns are THIS cheap?"
"Gunpowder too! Practically free!"
They were only matchlocks, granted — but with a little diligence, even a farmer could afford one of his very own.
Most nations handed their gold over to Daehan for weapons, and since it seemed a waste to sail home with empty holds, they typically loaded up on iron ore for the return trip.
But the dirt-cheap weapons were about to sow chaos across Europe.
"Those damned churchmen! What tax is this that they're bleeding out of us?"
"And what do they ever give us in return? Even indulgences don't actually work!"
The contrast between the gleaming cathedrals and the lives of the common folk could not have been starker. To peasants who struggled to manage even two meals a day, the opulent churches and the Papacy were simply incomprehensible.
"Abolish the taxes!"
"We can't pay anymore — we're starving!"
As their circumstances grew ever more desperate, the peasants began to protest.
"How dare these wretches — time to teach them their place!"
What came back was brutal suppression and even harsher exploitation.
Life grew harder still, and people fled for their lives or turned to banditry just to survive. Bands of outlaws lying in wait for the tax collectors multiplied with every passing season.
"I hear Daehan's selling guns and powder now?"
"Wouldn't that beat running around with a bow?"
"Time to find out."
More and more bandit bands scored once, twice, and came away with a small fortune — and right on cue, Daehan's affordable weapons started reaching their hands too.
*Bang! Crack!*
"Huh? So this is what a gun is!"
"Incredible!"
These farmers-turned-bandits had fired bows before, of course — but archery demands far more training than one would think, and the bow is a weapon of strength, not finesse.
If your arms are weak, you can't even draw one. And even a decent archer is done after ten shots? Twenty? Arms trembling, unable to loose another.
"This thing takes no effort at all!"
"And if you just aim, it hits every time!"
By the modern era, even the tiniest nation becomes nearly impossible to conquer — precisely because of individual firearms. Once you know the basics, no great skill is required. Crudely speaking, anyone who can lift a stick can become a soldier.
*Bang! Bang!*
"Gahk... khh..."
"Khhgk..."
And the armored knights escorting the convoys — men who had spent their whole lives mastering the sword and the bow — were dying just as easily, felled by a farmer's twitch of a finger at the roadside.
Riding on the winds of the Reformation, Europe had barely entered the early modern age, and already a river of blood was beginning to flow. With guns so easy to obtain, peasant uprisings were erupting at every turn.
* * *
Envoys from every nation of Europe began converging on the Holy See.
"Shouldn't we demand that Daehan stop selling weapons?"
It was Britain — isolated, with little business buying Daehan's arms — that spoke first.
"Not all of it!"
"Absolutely not!"
"Hear, hear!"
Since half of Europe was buying its weapons from Daehan, the proposal crashed headlong into a wall of objections. And truthfully, they couldn't even begin to imagine replicating the staggering quantities of gunpowder Daehan produced.
And they only had more people, that was all...
"Hah. So there's no way, then?"
"What if we demanded they sell only to us?"
"Do you have the gold to buy every last thing they make?"
"Ahem..."
The sheer mountains of cargo those enormous ships hauled in made even the envoys' heads spin. They had only to say the word and Daehan could deliver unheard-of quantities within a month or two — such was their depth.
"Since they produce that much, why not simply refuse to buy? If they lose their markets, they'll be the ones in trouble, won't they?"
"And do you think we could endure that?"
It was no easy decision, not when Daehan's goods had already burrowed deep into every corner of their daily lives. Consider the humble sword: a European blacksmith could hammer away all day and produce one item of quality ten. Daehan churned out ten or twenty items of quality eight or nine, by the dozen.
"What are we to do? How goes the effort to learn their techniques?"
"Ahem!"
"A-hem!"
Learning, they called it — in truth, the Europeans who had come to steal the secrets were working away in plain sight, hardly bothering to hide it.
"How on earth do they make that steel?"
"They say Daehan's population is simply enormous, don't you know..."
"Hah. How enormous?"
"The scholars say it must be tens of times the population of Europe."
That was based on the goods Daehan flooded into Europe and the tales brought back by merchants trading in Asia, of course.
"So that's why they have so many goods..."
In reality it was mostly the power of rapid industrialization — but people were already picturing Daehan many times larger than it truly was.
"And to build ships that size, how enormous would their blast furnace have to be?"
"Hah. Good point, that..."
The conversation was drifting into strange territory. The hulls had been painted, the seams were hard to see, and so they concluded that the ships must have been cast in a single pour of molten metal.
"Have you learned how their scholars manage such feats?"
"We're told the answer lies below the waterline."
"There wasn't much of one..."
These were men who would look at a screw bolted beneath the surface and think, why on earth is it gilded? Or so the rumor went.
"Do you know anything about those steel carriages that run through Mudo?"
"That, too..."
"They say it moves by some power called steam..."
"Steam?"
"Vapor that rises when you boil water, so they claim."
In the long centuries since, the same story could have emerged anywhere — there had certainly been others in antiquity who ran experiments much like Daehan's.
"Pwahaha! They boiled a kettle and now they're rolling a carriage with it?"
"Hahahaha! Haven't laughed like that in ages, I haven't."
"That must be it, surely?"
"Or perhaps they truly did make a pact with the devil — or there's magic we know nothing of."
"Hmm..."
The scholars were speaking with some basis in evidence, but with no one believing them, their research crawled along at a snail's pace.
"We need to learn something — anything — about Daehan if we're to make our move..."
"What did that nation under Daehan's protection call itself again?"
"Qajar, was it?"
"Yes."
To Europe, Qajar was a forbidden word — an object of pure terror. In the days of old Temüjin, no one on earth could halt their advance, and the cruel rulers who came after him were hardly better...
It had all spiraled from that great catastrophe when the Second and Fourth Crusades veered wildly off course and crashed into their lands.
"From what we hear, they only ever say they follow His will, and nothing more."
"Hmm..."
"Haah... how stifling..."
With no answers forthcoming, the envoys finally went to speak with the Pope himself.
"Your Holiness... is there truly nothing to be done?"
"Do you propose we launch another crusade?"
"No, Your Holiness. War at sea cannot solve this."
Unless they could build a ship even resembling that invincible fleet, war was out of the question. The ships with scorch marks from an explosion of unknown origin, moored brazenly at Pyeong-an Naru, looked to the Europeans like an open dare: go ahead, try us.
"If ships are the problem, then simply invade the mainland itself, I say."
"Your Holiness — do you mean via Qajar?"
"Only as a very last resort."
"I object. And what of the Ottomans?"
Even if all of Europe united, it would be a struggle — the Ottomans sat squarely across that corridor. They couldn't handle even the Ottomans alone as it was; strike clumsily, and they'd be knocking on a hornet's nest with the retribution to fear.
"And it would require years of preparation."
"Indeed it would..."
They weren't entirely without thoughts of a united invasion — but Europeans were too busy fighting each other. Could they truly ever unite?
"Then what are we to do?"
"Hah... a marriage alliance would be best..."
"I hear this lord of theirs is quite beautiful?"
"They call her a saint, don't they?"
"A saint?"
At that word, something began to itch pleasantly in the listeners' minds.
"Your Holiness — could she not be a saint sent by God?"
"The Holy See has denied it all this while, calling her a witch and a demon."
They had botched it from the very start. Otherwise, they'd have summoned her to Rome to inspect this 'saint' and tried something — anything.
"That she falsely claims to be an angel and a saint?"
"Her deeds say otherwise..."
She cared for every beggar on the Iberian Peninsula and healed the sick in her hospitals. If the Church smeared her now, the common people might well abandon Christianity altogether.
"Then shall we seize the port in a surprise attack? Surely we'd gain ships that way?"
"Could you cut through the thousands of people in that harbor?"
"Hmm..."
He had a point. Countless people lived at that port, treated at its hospitals and employed in its workshops — the only place in all of Europe where a man ate three full meals a day. And attacking by sea was more hopeless still.
"Hm? What about attacking by ship, then?"
"Break through the invincible fleet — with what, exactly?"
"Why break through at all? They're moored in the harbor anyway. Sail past them and strike straight at the fortress!"
For once, it was a fine idea. However splendid a warship may be, stopped or moored in a harbor it is nothing but fat prey.
It sounded quite plausible, in fact. On a river where hundreds of ships came and went daily, one need only veer slightly and sail headlong into the port.
"Ohh?"
"But where will we find the sailors?"
"Let's use those pirate fellows, shall we?"
"Hmm..."
"And if things go wrong..."
"Who's to trace who gave the order?"
They would never recruit the men themselves, of course. Pass word through one intermediary, then another, handing the job down across a dozen bridges, and nothing would ever stick back to them.
And so, with staggering sums of money, the recruitment of sailors began.
"What? Have you lost your minds?"
"Sail into the port where the invincible fleet lies?"
"Shut your mouth!"
Naturally, at first they were cursed at and refused.
"Just take the fortress! Nobody's asking you to fight a naval battle!"
"Only the fortress?"
"And the invincible ships are moored there — we just sail right past them, no?"
"Hmmm..."
The gold coins pushed persuasively into their hands began turning the eyes of pirates and retired sailors alike.
Merchants ruined in trade who'd turned pirate, sailors forced into retirement after one scandal too many — cut from much the same cloth, all of them.
Men who would do anything for coin. And so the men gathered, and a fleet of small vessels was scraped together. They only needed passage to the target and a way off again — no sense wasting money on large ships.
"Prepare barrels of gunpowder."
"Barrels? Of powder?"
"We'll have to blow the gates open, won't we?"
"Ah!"
The plan was simple: land quickly, pile up the powder barrels, and blast the gates to splinters.
"Good! Understood. Anything else you need?"
"Weapons! The more, the better."
And so a staggering quantity of weapons and gunpowder began pouring out of Daehan's ports — they had thousands of men to arm, after all.
On the day of the great venture, the men gathered on the northern coast of Portugal stood stunned.
The sheer number of them, massed on that shore, was staggering.
"Everyone understands, right? Pull this one job off and you'll never have to work again in your life!"
"You know it! One big score, then we vanish!"
Of course, the money would not reach them all — a fair number of these men were going to die first.
"Our job is to take the lord of that port alive. Got it?"
"Hahahaha!"
"They say she's a real beauty. Any harm in getting a little handsy?"
"With all the nobles courting her, you'll be lucky to touch a fingertip."
"Tch."
Their goals were two: seize Haneul, and steal the ships.
"You hear? They say grab one of the invincible ships and they'll pay you whatever you ask."
"And nobody crowd onto the same target!"
They even worried that too many men would flock to the ship seizure, which only looked like the easier job.
"Just one of the two is a triumph — so stop fretting."
"Me, I still want a look at that wench, heh heh."
It seemed the men would sort themselves by preference: the safe road, or the fun one.
And so, drinking wine bought from Daehan's ports, they whiled away what might be their final night.