Chapter 109: The Scholars and Officials Who Are Not Able to Make a Difference
On the third day after the city gates were breached, all the pyramids fell into Dany's hands. Excluding the strange pyramid with a round dome like the Temple of Grace, there were a total of 18 pyramids.
The tallest one belonged to the great slave owner Grazdan, which was 100 meters high, and the shortest one was less than 50 meters. Eight of them were exterminated, and only a few children under the age of five were left in the other four. Three more families lost all adults, and only minors under the age of 14 survived. The last three families were not executed because of the intervention of the Green Saint.
It took another week for the entire city to be cleaned up by the Unsullied. Whether it was the new free people or the original civilians of Ghis, there were a total of more than 123,000 people.
Well, the 18 pyramids and the attached Colosseum contributed tens of thousands of slaves.
The ratio of free people who were transformed from slaves to civilians of Ghis was close to 20:1, and Astapor was completely under Dany's control.
When the clerks registered the free people, they divided them into five classes: "soldiers, soldiers, farmers, workers, and merchants."
In simple terms, skilled craftsmen are workers, or they can choose to start their own business like textile worker Lisa and become a small businessman.
For honest people who are unskilled and illiterate, or those who have family ties, Dany will allocate dozens of acres of fertile land to them and let them work as farmers in the Worm River Plain outside the city. Those who are unskilled but dishonest, such as the original slave soldiers and gladiators, are incorporated into the militia by Dany, and Knight Jorah is responsible for training them into regular troops.
Well, this will also be an elimination process. The elite militia will be drawn out and incorporated into another team, and those who are unqualified will become local guards like police and constables.
At present, the Unsullied still serve as police officers to maintain order in the city, but their best use is in the field legion war, and it is too wasteful to put them in the city as guards.
People who have read books and are literate are considered "scholars", but the scholars under Dany are completely different concepts from the literati.
The real power is in the hands of the nobles who hold the knife handle and can cut and kill people. In this world, there will never be literati.
Because the social structure of this world is open, it is impossible to live a small life behind closed doors like the Chinese Xia Dynasty.
There is no doubt that the literati are conducive to maintaining the royal rule.
If you want to centralize power and become a truly powerful emperor, the literati are the best helpers of the emperor.
But in the same way, no matter which dynasty, when the literati are in power, the national strength will inevitably decline.
It is easy for a warrior to rule the country, but the military strength is really strong.
In a relatively closed environment like the Celestial Empire, a unified dynasty is stronger than the nearby barbarian countries even if it declines. As long as the officials are clean and honest, most of the time you can still be a big brother comfortably.
But this world is open, if you have weak military strength, you can't survive at all.
Therefore, the Westeros Academy has appeared for thousands of years, and almost every noble family has a bachelor tutoring. The knowledge and insights of the bachelor are several times or dozens of times higher than those of the literati in the Celestial Empire, but the bachelor still failed to become a strong literati class.
Well, I really don't mean to belittle the ancient literati in the Celestial Empire or to raise the status of the bachelor.
The maesters in "A Song of Ice and Fire" are super awesome. Art, literature, arithmetic, and agriculture are just basic skills. Philosophy, archaeology, astrology, medicine, anatomy, magic, mysticism, etc. must be dabbled in.
Moreover, maesters are not just dead books. The birth of each maester is extremely strict, and their ability to act is extremely strong. They can be used as doctors, teachers of children, staff, secretaries, and housekeepers of noble lords. If there is a war, they can also be used as military advisors. As long as you can think of a profession, they can do it.
Maesters are not afraid of death and often go around the world to explore new knowledge, such as Maester Marwyn, the teacher of Mirri Witch.
A Westeros man actually went to the shadow land tens of thousands of miles away to "study abroad."
Anyone who can read and know how to count is classified as a "maester" by Dany.
Well, the "maester" of the maester serves others.
She herself established a staff of 200 people, all of whom are slave scholars who do not want to become free people.
Dany didn't treat them too badly. She still let them live in the Great Pyramid, with two maids serving them. Their meals were only one or two levels lower than Dany's.
Well, maids were not slaves. They signed labor contracts, had wages, pensions, and medical insurance - the kind of real medical insurance that was completely free.
Even so, it was cheaper than hiring scholars as clerks.
If those scholars got rid of their slave status and signed labor contracts with Dany, the salary they received would be much higher than the cost of Dany to support them.
"I really don't know what they are thinking." Dany complained to Whitebeard.
But Whitebeard told her that this was normal. In Westeros, the maesters were almost the same as these scholars. They didn't take wages and served their lords for free for a lifetime, and the nobles were responsible for supporting them for a lifetime. Well, they had to let the maesters live a decent life according to their ability.
If the nobles dared to insult, abuse, oppress, or dismiss their maesters without reason, the Citadel would also stand up for those maesters. In addition to threatening to stop providing maesters to noble families, they could also advise the king to punish the other party through the Grand Maester of King's Landing.
Without the maester, there is no one to manage the messenger crows, and the nobles can't even communicate with the outside world.
As one of the ministers of state, the Grand Maester is qualified to participate in the royal meeting.
Although Dany has artificially demarcated five major classes, these new social classes are very unbalanced.
Including the service industry, workers account for more than half, more than 50,000 people, mostly women; there are 30,000 soldiers, the oldest are in their 50s and 60s, and the youngest are only 8 or 9 years old; the only few thousand Gis people left all choose to be "merchants", although they have almost no business and stores.
There are too few people who choose to farm, almost all of them are "cowardly" farming people such as Laza and Nas.
These days, except for the Gis people who have families and businesses, the new free people in the city are all supported by Dany. Although there are sufficient supplies in the pyramid, this kind of big pot meal cannot last long.
Therefore, she must restore normal city order as soon as possible.
The first priority of the new society under the new system is to clarify the laws and regulations.
The tenth day after the capture of Astapor.
The mist in the early morning dissipated like a phantom, and the bright red sun was like an egg yolk. Before it rose to the top of the Great Pyramid, the red brick square had begun to heat up slightly.
"Woo-woo-"
A long and low horn sounded from the top of the Great Pyramid, and the whole city quickly woke up under the strange power. In the ten days when the Mother of Dragons ruled Astapor, similar situations occurred several times. Citizens knew that she was summoning city residents to gather in the People's Square.
"I heard that this is the sound of the Dragon Horn? The Dragon Horn can control the dragon." A new freeman whispered to his companion as he walked.
He was a skinny middle-aged black man from the Summer Islands, less than 1.5 meters tall, with a skinny body and flexible hands and feet. He used to be an acrobat kept by the good master, and now he is considered a technician.
"Maybe." The acrobat's companion was a freed scholar, a white man in his forties, of medium build, not very educated, not good at writing, not the kind of high-class slaves who lived a comfortable life.
However, he was more knowledgeable than the acrobat's companion, and said worriedly: "I hope it's not the slave owners of Kaiyuan City who are attacking."
"What are you afraid of? Not counting the newly formed 30,000 guards, Her Majesty the Queen still has more than 10,000 Unsullied! I would like to join the Queen's Guard, so that I can have a chance to take revenge on the slave traders! Even if I become Her Majesty the Queen's trumpeter, it will be fine." The skinny monkey said.
"You don't understand. The slave owners of Kaiyuan don't need to defeat the Unsullied. If they burn the manors outside the city first, the livelihoods of more than 100,000 people in the city may become a big problem." The free scholar said.
No city can be completely self-sufficient. It must have agriculture and animal husbandry in the suburbs to maintain daily supplies. Astapor is no exception. In addition to the more than 100,000 people in the city, there are densely packed slave owners' manors on the plains of the Worm River Basin outside the city, with at least 200,000 people.
Among the more than 200,000 people, there were about 30,000 Ghis people. Before she had time to deal with the manor owners, Dany also sent the centaurs to the village to post a notice of the "Four Prohibitions":
If you dare to kill your own slaves on a large scale, your entire family will be wiped out; if you dare to burn granaries, wheat fields and olive trees, or kill cattle and sheep on a large scale and let them rot and breed maggots, your entire family will be wiped out; if you dare to poison the wells, or directly block the wells, or even destroy the canals and farmland infrastructure, your entire family will be wiped out; if you dare to connect with each other and form an army to kill the centaurs patrolling the villages and towns, your entire family will be wiped out. Of course, Dany is not blindly tyrannical.
Behind the four prohibitions, there is also a "Letter to the Ghis" to appease the people: Queen Daenerys solemnly promises that any manor owner who does not violate the above four prohibitions will have his family and children guaranteed to be safe, and their respective property will be guaranteed to be inviolable to a limited extent, including fields and warehouses.
The free scholar and the skinny monkey acrobat did not know this, let alone that more than 20 manor slave owners had been wiped out in the past ten days.
If slave owners can be scared by a few notices, they are not evil slave owners.
Some smart guys deliberately set fire to granaries and olive groves, hoping to attract the patrol of the centaurs, and then they will wait and catch them all.
Unfortunately, the ideal is vivid and full, but the reality is cruel.
The work of handling "household registration" for the new free people is indeed complicated, but it is all done by the clerical team. Dany herself is still quite free. While practicing swords with Whitebeard and receiving a few citizens, she doesn't know how easy and comfortable her life is.
So, she has time to be a scout for the centaurs.
Before each operation, the big black will fly over the troubled manor, and the situation of the Gis people can be seen clearly. The black dragon will even land on the ground and draw a defense map of the manor with its claws.
The next step is simple. A thousand Unsullied will rush up, and two hundred centaurs will ride and shoot outside. Almost all the rebellious manors will be attacked in one wave.
Then the heads of the slave owners who were causing trouble were put on spears by the centaurs and run around the village. The rest of the people became obedient.
Well, Dany's so-called extermination did not mean the whole family was wiped out. Only adults were still killed. Children under 14 were temporarily locked up and dealt with after she was done with this period.
There are two reasons why the Unsullied were not sent directly to flatten the manor: first, they were afraid that the manor owners would be desperate and frantically destroy food and means of production; second, the casualties were too high.
With the help of Dahei, 18 Unsullied and 22 centaurs died in quelling the unrest in more than 20 manors, while the other side only suffered casualties of more than 1,000 Gis farmers.
The idea is not "1,000 Unsullied + 200 centaurs" vs. "more than 1,000 ordinary Gis". Only half of the more than 1,700 Gis were men, and they were distributed in more than 20 manors.
Every time they fought with the 1,000 Unsullied, there were only less than 100 Gis and 300 to 400 wavering slave farmers.
The main reason is that the complex environment of the manor is not suitable for siege warfare. Each manor is almost a small castle, which is easy to defend but difficult to attack.
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