The self-proclaimed nobles of the Solomonic people paid the price for their arrogance.

For the first time, the princes of the steppe people tasted the pleasure of plunder.

For the first time, the Assies learned that in addition to selling the pitiful cattle of their tribe and selling the blood of Solomon's nobles on the battlefield, they could also make a fortune by plundering.

And they fell in love with it the first time.

The Solomonic people were a race that excelled in wealth and production. Their wealth has long been beyond the imagination of the steppe people.

In a small town of no more than 500 people, seven princes plundered a fortune that they had not been able to earn for thirty years of grazing.

Mountains of grain, goods from the East and West, and countless gold and silver ornaments, ceramic clay pots.

And the most exciting thing for them is the arsenal of weapons in their city.

That's a huge income that they can't imagine.

Crates of iron swords, bundles of iron spears, bows and arrows hanging from a wall, and dozens of pairs of iron armor.

Although no one knew how to use these weapons for a long time, the blacksmiths in their town kept them in excellent condition.

After all, this also represents a period of history in which the Solomonic people once heroically lived, and it is naturally a little unwilling for them to give up out of thin air.

But these things ended up being cheaper for the steppe people.

They quickly armed some of the bravest members of the tribe with these weapons, and gave them the title of "warriors".

With supplies from the Solomonic Empire, it is entirely possible for the steppe people to draw out some of these males and exist in their tribes as professional warriors.

It has to be said that the special system between the steppe princes and princes, which was originally intended to squeeze as much wealth as possible from the tribesmen, quickly evolved into a powerful model of military organization.

When they invaded Solomon, they often took as many men as they had in the tribe.

However, several families in the Solomon Empire only regarded these steppe people as small bandits who did not have a climate, and adopted an ostrich policy of "turning a blind eye" to them.

There are also scholars who have come up with research results.

"The rise of the steppe people is simply not enough of a civilizational core, as long as it passes through a very short period of time, it is likely that after the end of the life of a generation of princely leaders, their rule will come to an end. ”

Under the promotion of this doctrine, there were merchants in the Solomonic Empire who were willing to pay back the gold and silver goods taken by the steppe people after they sacked the city-state, which did not benefit the development of the Assimian tribe living in the steppe, but was still hard currency among Solomon's city-states.

Almost all the citizens don't mind exchanging their surplus handicrafts, food, and other products for some ornaments to decorate the halls of their courtyards and make them look more magnificent.

Even the craftsmen who process gold and silverware are buying these goods, and they have the potential to be second-class dealers, as long as they find the grassland people, buy the gold and silver jewelry in their hands, take care of it a little, and put it on their own platforms, they can easily earn more than double the profit.

According to the analysis of economists at Solomon University, as long as there is an industry with more than 20% profits, then the industry will have the potential to gather funds.

Thus, for a long time, the steppe people who invaded the city states of Solomon were not "punished" by any of the Solomon Empires, but obtained more of the goods they needed in a more advantageous trading position.

Moreover, whenever mercenaries were needed within these city-states, the Assimians were still their first choice, but because the Assimians now had more money and material resources than before, the merchants of Solomon even took the initiative to raise the price of hiring them, and even reduced the amount of non-payment of wages.

This is nothing short of a disguised encouragement of their banditry.

The first seven princes who chose to plunder were actually the kind of actions they made with the intention of dying, but they did not expect that what they were waiting for was not the retaliation of the Solomons, but a more favorable political position.

The Prairie people may not have learned the business acumen of the Solomon for the time being, but they at least know how to seek advantage and avoid disadvantage.

The seven princes began to form the first political and military alliances, plundering the small cities on the frontier together, and instead of killing everyone in the city as they had done at the beginning, they dispersed all the civilians who did not participate in the resistance from the cities.

Even merchants and nobles who lived in the target cities they raided were "gifted" to a large city of the Solomons, for which they paid a commission.

Supported by a long period of "common interests", the alliance of seven princes eventually formed a formal organization that had a co-governance relationship similar to that between the nobles of Solomon City, and a system of vassalage between slaves and slave owners.

That is, the seven princes form a princely assembly, and in the princely assembly there is an alliance leader, and this alliance leader has the right to directly command the remaining six princes, as well as the later princes who are added to their organization in the future, and have a new type of vassal relationship.

Although these late princes did not have the same "alliance leader" power as the seven first princes, they still recognized their special status as "nobles", allowing them to continue to keep their slaves and continue to hold command of the army on the battlefield.

The mutual in-law relationship between the princes avoided, at least for a short time, what Solomon scholars called the "dynastic phenomenon".

In the end, these steppe people learned a lot of interesting and good things from Solomon's country.

Eventually, the power of the steppe people rose like a snowball that grew bigger and bigger, and suddenly rose on the borders of the Solomons.

And the "crusading army" sent by the three Solomonic families was finally declared bankrupt due to various internal contradictions.

The steppes could arm three warriors with the equipment of one soldier of Solomon's army.

But in the poor alliance of the Solomonians, every time one person is lost on the battlefield, it is a great loss for the city-state.

You must know that a citizen's work in the Solomon Empire can produce more than twenty times the output of an Assie slave in one year, and as long as the adult men of the Assimon tribe do not die, the loss of every soldier in the Solomon Empire on the battlefield is twenty times that of the Assians.

Before the urban and local peasant cooperatives were in disarray, they were armed with relatively cheap peasants who could be recruited, which would have reduced their losses.

However, the long-standing mercantile policy of the council of the urban aristocracy even treated the villages as their economic colonies, and these peasants, who had also eaten up the unequal trade of the city-states, were naturally reluctant to support the urban aristocracy in this situation, and many of them were not even true Solomonic people in the first place, but barbarians who were dependent on the Solomonic Empire in the early days.

Rather than telling them to sink with Solomon's wrecked ship, they should join the invading gang of the Maharaja of Assy and provide valuable siege experience to the steppes who lacked siege experience.

Unable to continue supporting the war, Solomon's city-state had to send envoys to negotiate peace with the Assians, and each time they made peace, their goods multiplied.

Originally, a prince could not earn a year's industrial output of a city nobleman in his life, but now it has become a city nobleman who cannot earn the indemnity that a prince enjoys in a year.

And such tug-of-war lasted for decades.

The Solomonic Empire lost more than two-thirds of its territory, and the Assimians finally waited for the "split" that the Solomonic people had hoped for.

The Seven Princes became the most important rulers of the steppe people.

They divided the newly conquered and the old territories into small pieces, each of which occupied a piece of land according to the contribution and power he had made in the war, and had a number of minor princes under his jurisdiction, as well as a large number of slaves of various tribes.

The former "leader" of the League occupied the fattest and largest land, and the largest population, but even so, he only had the highest political power in form, and did not have the authority to directly rule and administer the other great princes.

Solomon's western neighbor eventually grew into a relatively unified feudal empire with strong military power on the surface.

The noble knights were brave, the legions of commoners were good at war, and most importantly, their country was also a "civilized nation" in the eyes of the Solomons, and they could be supported.

Since the old imperial system can no longer protect them from "making a fortune", it is not an option for them to join a new empire and regain lost territory, and then remove the threat of the steppe people.

In fact, after losing the support of the rural and eastern steppe people, the Solomon merchants who once spread throughout the continent of Dilistine had no commercial fulcrum to the north and east, and they had long since been left with the empire as a golden trade route.

It's a pity that their first emperor was not a belligerent king, but for merchants, the country was opened to the whole country, and the unified taxation was done, and for those diplomatic envoys from the city, most of them adopted a diplomatic strategy of "respecting and staying away".

The few remaining cities of the Solomon Confederation raised a lot of money several times, but failed to get the support of His Majesty Nordin.

His Majesty Pelis, who had just taken office, was a little too belligerent, so that the Solomon did not even have time to send messengers, and he embarked on the Northern Expedition.

Soon after the war began, the Solomon people had already sent a large number of spies to participate in it, quietly observing the course of the war, and had already prepared to "add fuel to the fire" if necessary.

They didn't care how many warriors the Great Pruss Empire would lose, as long as the Pruss Empire could be pulled out of the abyss of the North Sea swamp as soon as possible, they wouldn't mind paying a little price, not to mention that they didn't need to pay for the money.

As Sword and his legion crossed the wooded swamp and into the Thorsen Wetlands, they finally spread the war to the heart of the North Sea Alliance, and that was their bottom line.

The Legion of Great Pruus, accustomed to tailwind battles and Armageddons, faced their first crisis since entering the swamp.

That's the ubiquitous Wiegand man.

The greatest difficulty in marching through the wooded swamps was the natural environment, and the war in the Soerson wetlands taught them what it meant to be an "away battle".

The Weegand men seemed to have come out of a hole, and Sword even wondered if there was a Wiegand man waiting for them with a spear in every inch of land on their march.

They often only bothered the soldiers of the Empire for a moment, and then quickly disappeared without a trace.

Because it is a wetland, it is mostly a river, and it is the wettest land of the eight swamps, and even in the coldest winters, there are always small areas that are not frozen and solid, so Sword could not send his knights to fight back, but could only watch them flee.

On the first day of entering the swamp, more than 100 soldiers were killed and 100 were missing.

And those soldiers who have disappeared often return to the army the next day.

It's just in a completely new way.

Their leather armor had been stripped of all of them, and only the striped bodies hung from the trunks on either side, as if to make an inexplicable mockery of the Empire.

Fortunately, in this kind of away battle, the Imperial army is not without experience.

At least in the book "Documentary of the Red Lion Expedition", there is a detailed way to record it.

"When marching in areas of quicksand where the enemy is widely active, the Amaxians often set up ambushes to attack expeditionary armies. The emperor ordered a number of knights to be sent to dismount and lead the infantry to clear the way for his army. ”

Sword was considered to have received a military education, so he painted the scoop according to the gourd, and also arranged for some nobles from the Northland to lead their troops to open the way for the army.

It's not a good solution, but at least it's not a no-brainer.

The small army led by the little count and the baron was indeed more flexible than the nearly 10,000 army led by the emperor himself.

Unleashing these troops reduced the bloat of the legion itself, and as if a spike was sticking out, the Imperial army went from a passively beaten bull to a thorny hedgehog.

The Wiegand ambush often turned into a string of bloody gourds before they had even bitten the fattest part.

Although they still have a certain chance of success, they often do not have enough time to retreat.

On a frontal battlefield, a squad of a few hunters is no match for hundreds of organized soldiers.

Often, if they injure one or two of them, they have to pay for three or four lives.

Everyone