Rise of Rurik - Chapter 790

[Chapter 791]

The flame tower burned for three days and three nights until the first day of 838 AD in the Julian calendar.

The four giant trees supporting the main structure of the entire wooden tower finally collapsed, leaving a pool of burnt bluish-white ashes at the ruins of the fire tower. The central area is still smoldering at high temperature, and the heat is enough to burn the mud into pottery.

The aftertaste of the festival has not yet faded, and the ashes are still hot on the beach.

Thanks to the huge fire tower, the changing generals around him have indeed undergone tremendous changes.

It is like an artificial sun, a scorching lighthouse, which has steamed the snow in a large area, and even the area facing the fire tower in New Roseburg has returned to a snow-free appearance, and the snow on the wall in this area has been lost.

After the fire tower disappears, the sledge cannot be operated in such an area, and it will bring a little bit of trouble to the people instead.

Kagan especially remembers how the people downloaded songs and danced in the tower when the fire tower burst into flames.

For three consecutive nights, the whole city was bright and warm. He had never experienced such an experience in his hometown, and now his life in the royal city of the Ross people was like a dream.

Once upon a time, in his world view, the world existed around a grassland, with the forest in the north and the sea in the south.

The forest is the territory of the Slavs, the sea is controlled by the Romans, and the vast grasslands are full of strong players. The Pecheneg Alliance is not weak, but it cannot become strong.

Unexpectedly, the people in the forest still have a world of ice and snow, with a frozen ocean.

The people here lead another wonderful life, and what surprised him most was the abundance of ironware and the low price.

With the mouth of the Neva River as the center, there is no iron ore in a radius of 100 kilometers, and there are not even mountains.

Geographically, the nearest overland quarry is somewhere in the Karelian Isthmus, nearly 200 kilometers away. That area has not even been touched by the hunters of the principality, and even the Finns have never discovered it.

Theoretically, the Principality of Ross conquered all of the “Land of the East”, and its territory expanded to the coast of the Arctic Ocean.

Regarding what is in the territory, everyone is seriously lacking in understanding, and the huge area needs to be explored urgently, but this bitter cold place naturally rejects explorers.

If possible, the Ross people are more willing to go south to find land that is more suitable for farming and warm hunting grounds.

It is this rotten place where a small group of people chasing reindeer tracks always stand alone.

All the deer breeders have completely become the people under the rule of the principality in terms of law. The registered deer breeders pay tribute every autumn. Buckskins bought iron and salt on the spot for a special currency.

If the necessities of life can be purchased peacefully, the scattered deer-breeding clans completely gave up resistance.

They don’t have any concerns about their home and country. They graze reindeer carefree in the vast tundra and forests. When they are attacked by strong people, they run away at home, knowing that they find that they have no escape.

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Even the clan of deer breeders who ran to the Kola Peninsula is moving westward. As long as they pay taxes, they can get a small flag. With this Ross flag, they have the right to trade, and in principle, all Ross hunters dare to attack them According to the regulations, Ross hunters who committed crimes in law were severely punished for the crime of murdering their clansmen.

According to the general reasoning, wild and unruly hunters are all blond and strong, and they look down on a group of nomadic dwarfs at all.

Unexpectedly, attacking these nomadic clans is now a felony, which was not the case before!

The history books of the principality clearly record that the ancestors of Ross who immigrated wiped out the deer breeders who lived in the fjords, thus establishing Roseburg.

Why do princes ask the people to be kind?

Is it just because of the origin of the high priest?

It is not.

As a monarch, which monarch would kill his own tax source groups without trouble?

What’s more, the Principality sells ironware to free deer farmers, and the price is far higher than the market price in the Principality. The industrial and agricultural scissors here are frantically exploiting a group of free people in a matrilineal clan society.

The rise of the Principality of Ross is certainly due to its own efforts, but it also lies in the huge dividends of a long-term bet on the national destiny-style war.

The principality has already seen the first signs of industry, and the sensitive Rurik has noticed the rise of industrial capital in the principality.

Of course, there are his exemplary policies in this regard. Even if he does not intervene, industrial capital will inevitably rise.

The emergence of the Hanseatic League is a historical necessity. The business groups in cities around the Baltic Sea are not really second-hand businessmen. Most of them are also doers.

Even if the Novosibirsk at the mouth of the Neva River needs ore but there is no ore, it is not suitable for the development of the metallurgical industry in theory.

But there are inexhaustible timber resources here, and it sits on a decent northern port. It is the hub of the east and west regions of the principality. Raise income and improve life.

In an open space in the city of New Roseburg, some special factory buildings have been erected long ago.

When stone and cement began to be put into urban construction, the factory buildings in this area immediately began to “renovate stone materials”.

Because the workmanship here is quite special, it is more alert to the possibility of fire than other buildings.

The great ironworks at Fort New Rose is here, and it does not smelt ore but makes steel.

There is not a single clay blast furnace here, but there are 20 furnaces based on traditional improvements in a ostentatious matrix.

The refractory bricks fired with mixed iron ore make the inside of the furnace stronger and the service life is greatly improved.

Because, relying solely on the two large iron works in Fort Allen and Roseburg Blast Furnace Town, they simply cannot digest their own pig iron.

Both of the two large iron works are adjacent to the mine. With the application of blast furnace technology, molten iron is smelted every day, and a batch of pig iron bones are cast.

If you just cast axes, hammers and shovels, you can cast them and put them into production.

However, they can only be used as production tools, and the quality is not high, so the price cannot be high.

As long as they are processed into steel, the price can skyrocket!

A large number of pig iron ingots cannot be digested by the large iron factories in the north, unless there are more laborers in the local area, but a large number of people rush to the south. The lack of labor force and more output form a stark contradiction.

Then it became very necessary to transport pig iron ingots to the new large iron works in the south for finishing.

The shipyards in Roseburg’s hometown are fully producing light and standard cargo ships, and they are frantically transporting pig iron ingots to New Roseburg during the warm period.

In line with the principle of maximizing profits, the two large iron factories in the north are smelting iron ore with all their strength. The so-called labor force responsible for steelmaking is mainly used for mining ore.

When the sea froze, the Great Northern Iron Works changed its strategy and took care of mining, molten iron smelting and steel smelting.

There are currently three large iron works in the Principality, legally they are the assets of the Principality, and they are also the assets of Rurik himself as the monarch.

After all, he built the workshop with his own money, and he trained a group of workers because the blacksmith alliance in the Principality signed the contract.

The family of blacksmiths in the entire Principality is a complete alliance with the prince’s family, so the heads of major iron factories in various places must unconditionally obey the prince’s production capacity decline.

Therefore, the labor force of the two major iron factories in the north supported their families through labor remuneration, and their consumption also drove the lives of other people in the two settlements.

In the “post-immigrant era” after the Principality moved its capital, Roseburg and Eronburg found their new key position – the big iron factory.

Roseburg is more complicated, it is also the center of the northern leather trade and the northern shipyard.

Elronburg also has its own characteristics. It guards two northern rivers. It is the herring fishing center of the principality, the activity center of northern hunters and registered deer breeders, and even the largest land route with Narvik Port in the north. station.

The pig iron ingots from the north come in all kinds of shapes, and they are piled up into mountains and placed outdoors indifferently, so that the surface is definitely rusted and turned red.

Rust is not a problem at all, these irons with excessive carbon content were smashed into pieces by strong men, and they were stir-fried in the furnace.

The Principality fully uses the steel frying method to smelt iron ingots into low-carbon steel. Based on the craftsman’s intuitive feeling, try to reduce the carbon content of the semi-finished product to a certain range, and then continue processing.

A boy who thought he was young and rather strong became the director of the great ironworks in New Roseburg.

He is none other than poor Kamne, whose parents were killed by the bear.

Those painful things are long gone, and now this kid not only has a successful career but also won a wife, and even just became a father.

There are traces of young boys everywhere in the New Roseburg Iron Works. They are the first batch of small blacksmiths trained by Rurik. Their identities are generally Slavic, and most of them come from Novgorod. Needless to say.

Kamne, who has grown into a strong man and looks like a Viking, is most pleased with the prince’s personal visit. This time, he personally acts as a tour guide to introduce the current production capacity of the big iron factory to the prince.

Although it is a large iron factory, there are only twenty furnaces here.

The furnace can naturally be expanded, but based on the current supply of iron ingots, twenty furnaces that work all year round can completely eat them.

Although from the perspective of ordinary people and professional blacksmiths, the pig iron produced by the Principality every year can be called huge!

But the precise calculation does not even have five tons.

Is this also worthy of claiming to have a huge production capacity?

!

According to the per capita iron production, the data of the Principality of Ross is indeed approaching the per capita peak of the Western Han Dynasty. Of course, even the smelting process of the Ross people is imitated from the Western Han Dynasty. Perhaps this is the limit that this process can achieve.

In this worse European world, the principality of Ross, with a nominal population of 100,000, can produce 5 tons of iron per year, which is already comparable to the entire huge and infighting Frankish kingdom.

At least the Principality of Ross could not afford to consume so much iron production. Selling ironware to the outside world was a major way to make money. Therefore, the King of Denmark destroyed the local Ross shops, which was tantamount to stabbing the Ross people’s arteries with a knife.

Realistically speaking, if it weren’t for the Ross people guarding the best iron ore veins in Northern Europe, as well as the extremely high iron content in the ore, and even the blast furnace technology, they would not be able to do this at all.

A large amount of iron exists in the city in the form of cast iron tools, such as a large number of cast iron pots and pans for daily life, including iron woks and frying pans in princely families and wealthy merchants.

Only a portion of pig iron is finished into steel, but the latter accounts for only 20% of total capacity.

In fact, even if steelmaking is made by frying steel, it cannot change the reality that steelmaking is time-consuming and laborious.

Ross man-made steel is almost used in weapons, such as forged swords, forged spears, forged steel armor-piercing arrows, forged steel axes, and forged crossbow arms.

Even some special tools, such as damping reeds for special carriages, curved plows, and even elastic reeds for woodworking lathes.

The steelworks of all the great ironworks are dedicated to these tasks, but the great ironworks at New Roseburg are at present only engaged in the processing of iron ingots into steel.

The factory area maintains the sound of ding ding dong dong all year round, and even at night there are craftsmen beating.

The young craftsmen were deeply favored by the emperor. They were ordinary and poor peasant children. In principle, they were now the private iron slaves of princes and princes, but they lived a happy life that they never dared to imagine in the past.

The brothers eat well, dress well and sleep well on weekdays. After long hours of exercising, each of them has trained their arms to be thicker than their legs and covered with tendons.

It is because there are bonuses for working harder, which drives them to squeeze out as much time as possible to forge steel weapons.

This time the prince came again.

Kamne grew a beard and wore a coarse and loose jacket with the sleeves rolled up, not afraid of the cold outdoors.

Indeed, even with the windows open for ventilation in the entire blacksmithing workshop, twenty furnaces were arranged in a matrix to form a huge staff. Rurik even saw some blacksmiths working barebacked.

“Your Majesty, you must have important arrangements for your visit…” Kamne said with a silly smile.

“clever.”

After finishing speaking, Rurik signaled his subordinates to bring cloth bags, and took out one of them.

“What is this?” Kamner was a little puzzled.

“This one? It’s the horse’s shoe.”

“Horse’s iron shoes? Very strange.”

“No surprise.” Rurik resolutely handed it over to Kamne: “You copy it immediately according to my arrangement. I know your strength, and now I need 500, and you must finish it quickly.”

“Huh?!” Kamner was taken aback.

“What? You’re not happy?”

“I don’t dare. My lord, I don’t see how it fits on the hooves of horses…horses.”

“That’s natural. It’s going to be nailed to the horseshoe.”

“Ah?! That way the horse won’t hurt to death. That’s your horse, your cavalry.”

Only then did Rurik realize that his little brother doesn’t know about horseshoes?

He hastily explained the whole story, and only then did the clever Kamne barely understand.

Smashing a horseshoe into a horse’s hoof with a nail, even so, the horse doesn’t feel pain?

Doing so is said to prevent wear and tear on the hooves.

As for the horseshoe that Rurik took out, it was taken from a horse’s hoof.

It is made of wrought iron by the Pechenegs, and its quality is naturally inferior to the steel parts of the Russians. Because it is too damaged, it just took advantage of the opportunity of the cavalry assembly and New Rose Fort. The Russians just completed the imitation of the horseshoe, and quickly made it Install it on all horses.

Rurik issued a death order: “Suspend all smelting orders, and all the weapon forging tasks I issued will be postponed for seven days. You and your brothers will try their best to imitate horseshoes, and take out 500 horseshoes in seven days. After completing the task, you will all Get paid handsomely.”

Kamne readily agreed, and looking at the iron in his hand, he inadvertently showed a trace of contempt.

He is not very old, and he has been working as a blacksmith for many years, and it is rare to take a break after a year of work. The high-intensity work makes him rich in experience.

“Who made this kind of ironware? The quality is really bad. It’s my turn to imitate. Naturally, they are all excellent steel. The horseshoe will be completely flat.”

“Who else is there? Our Pecheneg friend.” Rurik shrugged and pointed out: “Don’t be absolutely flat, the side that touches the ground has some dents, I want to increase the grip. You understand the mechanics knowledge given to you.”

“Okay, I’ll organize a meeting for the brothers…”

[End of this Chapter]