Chapter 212: The Birth of the Elector of Solomon

Marco Polo had written a great deal of travelogues and essays detailing the Chinese Empire and the Oriental world, and he had embarked on the path of restoration that all Jews dreamed of.

He had long been arranged by the Crossing Masses to engage in the business of dumping agents and international arms dealers in Jerusalem, and he gave full play to the Jews' expertise in business, and mixed well with many forces and the illiterate aristocracy of Europe.

A large amount of money and goods were wholesaled by the empire at very low prices to this one-man who was good at business and exchange. Let's take borrowing as an example. The interest rate of short-term borrowing is always 20% lower than that of Chenji Bank, a commercial bank lent by the central bank to domestic partners, and the interest on long-term borrowing funds is at least half lower than that of the same period last year. Most of the goods and industrial goods exported to the Middle East were basically procured by the cash-rich Marco Polo group.

The European and Arab merchants who did not have the dragon dollar cash had to wait for the cash-rich Jews to get their goods and bid for them. Inferior Western gold and silver coins, which were exchanged for unlimited Imperial dragon dollars in Jewish-owned banks, were subject to huge fire losses and acceptance losses. Often, cash-short merchants had to borrow a lot of money from the Jews at high interest rates overnight to buy wholesale goods.

Collateral such as large amounts of mortgaged property, land, tax-inclusive privileges, and passes had only one way to become Jewish assets. The Jews, especially Marco Polo's Solomonical clique, monopolized almost all the mainstream commerce in the Middle East, such as spices, jewelry, high-end printed and dyed textiles, leather goods, glass products, paper, and precious metal products, and occupied at least 90% of the membership of the slave traders' association.

The insatiable side of the pursuit of land is even more prominent, and the Salomon Group, as the largest imperial agent and import-export trader in the Middle East, has grown more land than the group's assets every year. These additional growth rates were the result of donations and capital injections from wealthy Yiqiye within the empire, as well as capital from the emigration of large numbers of European Jews.

How could Europe's meagre industrial capacity produce enough to balance the import of a large number of consumer goods, only a steady stream of grain, leather, wool, timber, ore, gold and silver produced everywhere to Haifa in exchange for imported porcelain, metalwork and textiles.

The goods that filled the huge Arab and European trade deficits with the empire were the only goods they had surplus - slaves. It can be said that the Solomon Group has been the world's largest slave trader in the Middle East until it became a political axe. Large numbers of bankrupt European farmers and uninherited second sons were actively or passively sold to the empire to work as coolies in the new cities around the Arabian Sea, while Berbers and tall black slaves from Black Africa worked as builders in Ghaznavid or coastal cities on the west coast of India.

Marco Polo became a wholly owned owner of Salomon Real Estate after land swaps and share capital swaps for thousands of estates and farmsteads and large mining hills. This privatized large real estate company became the legal basis for self-reliance, providing Marco Polo with the economic basis of his feudal lordship. And the superstructure is just a national identity.

In feudal society, especially in the West, as long as a powerful person owns a large piece of real estate, he can naturally become a vassal of a high-ranking feudal lord, and as long as a simple set of canonization ceremonies can obtain titles such as viscounts and barons and privileges limited to their own fiefdoms.

In the West, there were a large number of bourgeois new aristocrats who were canonized by the heads of state such as kings and archdukes with titles such as lords and barons by virtue of their merits and property.

Although Marco Polo, as a man who believed in God, was born in the highly centralized Chinese Empire, which had long since abolished feudalism, his understanding of Western feudal lords was no less than that of the imperial university's authority on Western institutions. A large number of public relations tactics were used to obtain real estate and estates of small and medium-sized feudal lords in all the Crusader states, and accurate imperial mapping techniques and personnel also helped Marco Polo to encroach on a lot of land. Black-hearted loot valuations, 20% off war bond underwriting and foreclosures that bully a large number of illiterate lords who do not understand the terms of bond and collateral redemptions.

In order to obtain a large amount of land, Marco Polo also obtained the right of first refusal to purchase the newly occupied land of the entire Crusader countries through direct agreement with the Holy See, and directly encircled the land from the newly occupied areas of the army through monopoly arms supply, and the ownership of these lands by the original landlords and Arab feudal lords naturally transferred to the new masters with the war.

Marco Polo started out as a baron under Balwin I, but as his estate snowballed, his title was upgraded from baron to marquis. When the time came for the Papal States to become the nominal suzerainty of all the Crusader states, Jerusalem had become an extremely prosperous city of 100,000 people, and Marco Polo had reached an alliance agreement with the Duchy of Antioch, the Count of Tripoli, the Edessa Principality, and the Principality of Armenia to form the Holy United Kingdom of Jerusalem.

The new kingdom of Jerusalem resembles the Holy Roman Empire in structure, but it is not at all the same in its bones. The Holy Roman Empire was essentially a vassal of the Papal States at this time, and a large number of divided feudal princes were constantly drained of blood because they were unable to resist the Holy See, and almost became a dairy farm for the Holy See.

And the United Kingdom, with its extremely powerful armed forces, is almost entirely a bloc of the Lords of Solomon. Including the former Kingdom of Jerusalem, which had the largest territory, all the Crusader states were debtors and mercenaries of the Lords of Solomon. The Crusader feudal lords, united by interests and debts, had no choice but to obey Marco Polo's orders.

According to the rules of the elector, Balwin I of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, who was supposed to have the largest number of troops, was supposed to be the king of the United Kingdom, but the debt-ridden Balwin I and several other electors gave up the opportunity to compete for the throne of the United Kingdom in front of Marco Polo, the holder of the huge debt, and voted unanimously for Marco Polo.

The Pope also had no way to take this wealthy Jew, not even the confidence to borrow the traditional anti-Semitic forces from all over Europe, and all Europeans and the feudal lords of the Islamic world knew about Marco Polo's great name and the strength of the Chinese Empire standing behind it.

When Marco Polo stood on the steps of the newly built temple and proclaimed the United Kingdom, he used all his strength to declare that the Jews had their own country and that they had stood up from now on, just as some great man had declared that the people had stood up from now on. What followed was the announcement that all Jews were automatically entitled to United Kingdom citizenship and the establishment of a policy of freedom of religion and so on no longer mattered.

In this way, an unprecedented empire emerged in the Middle East, the powder keg of the world, and the United Kingdom was transformed from a country dominated by Latin-speaking peoples in a rapid wave of Jewish immigration to a multi-ethnic state dominated by Hebrew and Chinese as the official languages.

A Jewish merchant who had been deprived of almost all his possessions emigrated to Haifa on a cargo ship from Tuscany, Italy, and worked as an accountant for a year, saving up the cost of 100 Jewish relatives to emigrate to their new homeland. Marco Polo, who had deep pockets, brandished cheques and spice bills of lading (medieval spices were the equivalent of currency) to establish close trade relations and customs unions in various countries, along with which he also promoted and established a modern diplomatic system learned from the Chinese Empire in Europa. The first priority of the first appointed diplomats was to recruit local Jews, to grant visas to these miserable compatriots, and to provide them with all the facilities to help them emigrate to their new homeland, where there was a shortage of highly qualified labor. (I don't know how much higher the per capita quality of Jews is compared to the pathetic literacy rate in Europe at this time, at least 100% of Jews can count from 1 to 100.)

Marco Polo, who holds the titles of King of the United Kingdom, Elector of Solomon, and Earl of Mount Jonah (originally derived from the first title of Balwyn I), also retains the title of CEO and Chairman of the Solomon Group and its largest shareholder, Salomon Real Estate, holding 20% of the shares of the Salomon Group and 100% of Salomon Real Estate. The total market value of his property is at least 8 figures, and he is such a wealthy comprador, and he is still a comprador. Once the empire abandons him, everything he has will become someone else's.

Most of the debts and equity of the subsidiaries and properties he manages belong to the Huaxia Imperial Western Investment Company and the Chenji Group, which hold 80% of the shares of the Salomon Group. With a single board meeting, his aura was stripped of him, and all his shares in real estate companies were pledged to the banks of the empire in order to gain money and trust; As long as the people want to be replaced, Marco Polo's net worth will be immediately over-mortgaged and liquidated in various banks in the imperial banking system. (To be continued.) )