In the Middle Ages, there was also a special profession called coating. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 ｉｎｆｏ

No, the coating is not precise, maybe they should be called compradors?

Again, this is a bit biased.

In short, it is not easy to clearly describe this profession in Chinese. For, in the first place, those who engaged in this profession were free men, not slaves, and therefore could not be called coating; They are not people without status, on the contrary, most businessmen have to curry favor with them in order to do business safely; In the end, they are not doing business for the outside lords, like the compradors, in fact, it is precisely because they are authorized by the local lords that they have such great rights.

Franchise.

Oh, and come to think of it, to use a more modern term, you could call them 'brokers'.

The relative of this Parisian merchant, the steward of the iron mine, was one of the brokers of the Lorraine aristocracy.

To be precise, he was the agent of a baron under the Count of Lorraine.

The baron's family was lucky, the original fiefdom was only a barren land, but it turned out to dig up iron ore and became a relatively wealthy local family in one leap.

Next, how the Baron used his wits to defeat his enemies who spied on his belongings, and how he kept his fiefdom from his lords...... These are irrelevant to the main purpose of this article and will not be discussed in detail.

But Philip understood.

The Parisian merchant had such a mind in mind from the very beginning when he approached him.

Question, what kind of person can act as an agent of a nobleman?

Of course, the bold and dark-skinned, businessman.

In a field that they are not familiar with, it is the right thing in the world to choose a talent management with professional knowledge, anyway, the aristocrats eat a fixed amount, and their agents have to hand over a fixed amount of huge taxes to them every month, as long as the money is collected, the aristocrats are too lazy to care about how the brokers do.

With the help of such unique conditions, some brokers quickly turned 'franchise' into 'monopoly'.

Without their consent, no merchant would want to open a single shop in the nobles' domain.

It can really be said that the fox and the fake tiger are powerful to the extreme.

And if you want to buy off a broker, you need money.

Lots of money.

This kind of money is absolutely impossible for a traveling merchant who has always been poor to come up with, and it often takes two or even three generations of hard work to buy a shop.

However, there is a big injustice right now.

Philip didn't know where he had revealed his flaws, or the Parisian merchant in front of him simply wanted to gamble, betting that Philip was a triumphant, and as long as he coaxed a little, he could willingly pay for it.

But.

Philip had to admit that he did have an interest.

Iron is a precious and scarce strategic resource.

As mentioned above, in order to prevent the rise of the Capetian family, the French aristocracy spared no effort to suppress it in almost all aspects, and the iron weapons that represented force and wealth were naturally the top priority.

The iron tools that could now be used in Paris and Orleans were small, such as civilian, and could be piggybacked by traveling merchants, and large and military ones could only be purchased with the help of two allies.

And in order to prevent the filling from being exposed, you can't buy too much at once.

Now a great opportunity fell in front of Philip, a Parisian merchant, who said that he had a relative who was a broker - Philip assumed that he was telling the truth, and that he had better pray that what he said was true, and that if this was true, then Philip would have added a new way to buy iron.

Although the number may not be too much, it is better to be hidden, and it is long-lasting

Flow.

"In this way, he still has some use value."

Philip thought so, and then, with the greedy and innocent smile that is characteristic of a fledgling merchant, he began to negotiate with the Parisian merchant.

However, on this side, I don't know who is the hunter and who is the prey, and since I talked about the agent, I can't help but introduce the current situation in Brittany.

In Brittany, where Magnus controls, there is no such profession as an agent.

This is not because Brittany is special, but because ...... Magnus had no idea that such a profession existed.

Magnus, after conquering Brittany, expelled all the barons.

This was a significant and far-reaching event, which caused Magnus to suffer the remnants of the hatred of all the other nobles of Brittany, but at the same time, it also caused Magnus to gain a large amount of land.

Of these lands, all but forty villages were set aside as knightly fiefdoms.

Villages, in the Middle Ages, even the richest villages were no more than a hundred households, and it was overkill to set up brokers; And to do the business of the whole duke, to tell the truth, these merchants gathered in Brittany, they are not qualified.

In addition, don't forget that Magnus also has a pronoun of 'brutal and bloodthirsty', he doesn't say it, and the people around him who don't have enough status don't even dare to mention it, just for fear that Magnus will have a bad temper, and pull out to cut off his head and sacrifice the flag.

Since he didn't know it, and no one around him dared to mention it, he took over all the work of these agents, and Magnus was often busy at night, but some of it was explained here.

But exhaustion always pays off.

What the Parisian merchant did not mention, the reason why out-of-town merchants liked to come to Brittany to do business was because they had made money, paid their taxes, and had to take part of it, sometimes even most, to the insatiable brokers.

However, the Parisian merchant was not wrong about one thing, and that was that Magnus did need iron, and it was in large quantities.

Iron is the backbone of modern society, something that Magnus could only realize in the Middle Ages.

Because what is too easy to get will not be cherished, and only after losing it will it feel precious.

As mentioned earlier, in the Middle Ages, the way farmers cultivated their crops was inconceivably 'sprinkling them in the sky'.

At that time, Magnus had no other ideas except puzzlement, and now he understands that this is actually a helpless move by the farmers.

Because the peasants did not have iron hoes.

Farming requires digging pits.

Without an iron hoe, the peasants could only use a wooden hoe, and the wooden hoe was easy to break, so they could only use a hand buckle; Imagine what it is like to dig a hole by hand.

Children know that even digging soft sand can cause hand pain if you dig too much, let alone hard clods.

Besides, if it's just pain, it's okay, in order to survive, pain is not something that cannot be tolerated, the key is that digging with your hands will break your fingers and even cause infection.

Infection, followed by tetanus, was an incurable disease in the Middle Ages.

In order to survive, the result was to die, and it is no wonder that those farmers began to sprinkle in the sky. This behavior has been passed down from generation to generation and has become a tradition, but the peasants still do not have a single hoe in their hands.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.