The prosperity of the Arab world was indeed the envy of Europa's merchants, but the Europa merchants who had the privilege of visiting the empire itself were not only envious, but Europeans who had read the Oriental Stories written by Marco Polo, a super-comprador who could award medals of the Friends of the Empire, did not believe the description of the life of the people of the empire.

Europe has been more deeply affected by this outbreak of indirect trade in the Arab region. Because Europe did not have all the high-value crops and native products of the tropics, it was always at a disadvantage in trade with the East. The trade deficit that lasted for thousands of years, starting from the time of the Roman Empire, was never reduced. A large part of the fall of the Roman Empire was due to the loss of too much precious metal money to the trade deficit in the East, which led to severe inflation (deflation was caused by the decrease in money, but the emperors mixed base metals in their coins in order to maintain tax revenues and maintain military spending, and the real purchasing power of minted money plummeted). Without paper money, the Imperial Government certainly could not print money to issue money indiscriminately, but it had its way of reducing the quality of gold and silver coins. In 150 A.D., the Roman Empire's currency contained only 2/10000 of the gold content of Caesar's time, and by 300 A.D., it was only 1/60 million. The imperial government minted more and more money with less and less gold and silver, and the money naturally became less and less valuable, and at about the same time, the price of wheat, the ration of the common people, rose by a factor of two hundred. Various currency-related speculations have also emerged. Wages were unstable, prices were skyrocketing, the Roman Empire was almost cut off from the outside world, the exchange of goods at home almost regressed to a state of barter, merchants returned to their rural homes, and the cities were depressed.

Medieval Europe's trade deficit with the East could not be solved by the pitiful local gold and silver mines, and it was only possible to export large quantities of cheap timber, wine, cattle and sheep, pig iron, and even serfs in exchange for a small amount of spices, dyes, luxury goods, and other goods from the Near and Middle East, which were only consumed by the aristocracy (this trade pattern is much like the exchange of raw materials for luxury goods in modern Africa to Europe and the United States). When a large group of yellow-skinned Chinese who bypassed the southern tip of Africa and came from the southwest sea brought countless high-quality and cheap goods to the port cities along the river coast of Europe, the European merchants were completely strong.

The military feudal aristocracy, which was no different from illiterate, was not good at management, and could only set up checkpoints and collect a variety of exorbitant taxes in different ways, and brutally oppressed the peasants and merchants together with the church. When the wealthy diplomats of the Chinese Empire took fleets, mercenaries, checks, and large quantities of spices and luxury goods around the castles of various nobles, merchants and guild representatives from all over Europe flocked to buy houses and land around the residential areas where the Chinese Empire's embassies, military bases, chambers of commerce, and mines were stationed, and applied for naturalization to receive imperial protection and various preferential policies, and then the economic structure of Europe was turned upside down.

Countless capitalist farms and mines were contracted by merchants from feudal lords and became cash cows that provided vast amounts of wealth. In the past, under the hard work of yeoman farmers and tenant farmers, they could only produce 'miserable' and poor harvests, which were hit by cheap wheat and beans imported from China, and could only be used as fodder for horses.

As a joke, in the early Middle Ages in Europe, there was a bizarre record of harvesting two grains of wheat from one seed. This 1:35 to 40 seed-to-harvest ratio compared to the intensively cultivated rice of the Empire's staple food is a bitter joke. Spurred on by the news that the yield of the three-garden estates, which had been changed to wheat-bean rotation after the introduction of heavy ploughs and horse yokes, had increased by a factor of five to ten, all the nobles had to turn to the Empire. All the goods produced by the handicraft workshops cannot be sold without the trademark of imported goods, and no locally produced consumer goods can compete with the price and quality of Chinese goods that have come from far and wide. After a few years, Europe's homegrown artisanal manufacturing industry disappeared, and a large number of workshop owners became minority shareholders and retailers in the Chinese Empire's joint ventures to build factories locally. Countless tax collectors and big businessmen who have obtained the monopoly of a certain kind of goods territory of the aristocracy have lost all their money (the tax collectors cannot tax the cities that have paid the ransom of the autonomy rights, and the taxes in the countryside cannot make a few dollars at all, and the monopoly rights are also worthless because the urban markets are like the surrounding villages smuggling and dumping cheap goods, and no peasants will buy the goods of the higher quality and lower quality of the monopoly).

In medieval Europe, cities had a tradition of self-government. Most cities evolved from regular village fairs, where merchants paid a large tax to the landowner's aristocracy to redeem their legal and governing rights, and then became members of the city council, becoming the non-mainstream rulers who ran the city and ran the city (the mainstream rulers were feudal privileges and obligatory duties, military aristocrats, and high bishops of the church). (To be continued.) )u