Herald of Steel

Coming to know of the true health of Alexander’s bank account was certainly a blow for the two regal ladies, especially as they had handled some finances in their time.

So they were able to have some sort of reference to compare the sum with, thus making them appreciate the enormous nature of the quote even more.

It was almost mind boggling.

Now, they of course knew Alexander was very rich- that was hardly the shocker.

One just needed to take a single look at the literal fleets of ships docking at his port every single day or how the roads would sometimes get jammed up with various cargo carts despite how enormously wide they were or how Alexander had constructed three new huge city gates all solely for the movement of his cargo to come to that ’difficult’ conclusion.

It was not hard to tell business was booming.

However, although all these signs proved that Alexander’s business was without doubt very profitable… without concrete production costs and sales volumes, the two royal Queens had no way to reasonably estimate the true size of that profit as well as the size of his treasury.

As for their own speculations on the matter, they certainly had them but frankly, both of the numbers were on the grossly low side, around ’just’ a few hundred million ropals in total.

One was due to the aforementioned reason and also because they believed that it was one thing to earn a lot of money… it was wholly another thing to be able to save that money.

A fact that should have been doubly true in the case of Alexander, who was well known to have enormous expenses.

For instance it was common knowledge among the upper echelon that Alexander almost single handedly ran the city of Zanzan with about ninety percent of the working population relying on him directly for their wages.

We here are talking about all the workshop workers, the various cement, brick, coal, etc. laborers, miners, the slaves, the close to fifteen thousand standing army, every administrator and civil servant, the infrastructure workers building the aqueducts, roads, harbor, sewage system, etc. and even the street sweepers responsible for keeping the city clean…all of them were on Alexander’s payroll directly.

In fact, even the other ’free’ ten percent of the popular in a way worked for him because they all catered to the rest of the people working for him.

From the rich merchants, the fancy restaurant owners, and the various decadent entertainment establishments, to the lowly barbers, shoe polishers and even ’independent’ contractors such as small time mercenaries who protected caravans and travelers… all of them served his ’workers’.

And all this was not even mentioning the largest group of them all, the tenant farmers who worked in Alexander’s fields outside the city for a fixed salary.

Combining all that, just the number of people he employed in Zanzan and its vicinity was so large that not even he knew their exact numbers.

A rough estimation put it to be somewhere around 50,000 to 60,000, which even without much context was huge.

And with context, this was more than enough to surpass the peak number of men in Zanzan during Pasha Muazz’s golden era.

And this number got only bigger when calculating the amount of money he was expected to pay out each month.

Taking an average per capita wage of around 200 ropals per month, because Alexander generally liked to pay his workers well, got him a tidy monthly bill of 12 million or an annual price tag of about 150 million… just to run Zanzan.

If you wanted some context on how absurd this sum was before Alexander took over Zanzan, the entire city made about 10 million ropals in taxes per year!

So Alexander’s expenses for the city were almost 15 times its earnings during Pasha Muazz’s reign.

Or as another example, Pasha Farzah…who was originally thought to be among the richest pasha earned about the same amount of money per year.

And what was worse was that this was not even the end of Alexander’s costs.

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Because remember, Zanzan was not Alexander’s only holding territory.

Places like Thesalie overseen by Lapitus, and Midshire were also his personal property and they also required large amounts of capital to run since they were unable to generate enough tax revenue by themselves.

Then came Cambyses’s city Jabel, and Gelene’s lands which also needed Alexander’s help to get them up to speed, as did a lot of Tibias’s war torn cities in the guise of relief and reconstruction.

So in this way, it would not be wrong to say that almost all the administrators, civil servants, and garrisoned guards across Alexander’s lands were directly paid by him, as well as many of the workers taking part in many of the local infrastructure projects.

And when all these ancillary costs were combined, Alexander’s pocket quickly had a hole of about 300 million ropals a year in just operating expenses.

While taxes during the same time struggled to make up even a tenth of that amount- the roughly 30 million ropals Alexander got from his lands was hardly anything in the whole scheme of things.

In fact, the the amount seemed so low that sometimes he even had the urge to completely abolish the taxes feeling the cost nearly outweighed the prize.

The expenses of employing tax collectors, record keepers, and the necessary logistics almost made it too much of a hassle for the tiny amount generated.

Although of course, this was only a momentary thought as Alexander would never set such a bad, stupid precedent. He very well understood it was all too easy to lower taxes but far harder to raise them.

People would always remember the hike, never the slope/

Plus it was not like the taxes were a total write off, 30 million was at least enough to cover many of the small auxiliary costs, one of which was the cost of employing the tax collectors.

This was a type of fixed cost for him as even if Alexander stopped collecting taxes, he would still have to keep this department open in order to have the capability to collect taxes in the future should he want to do so.

Hence stopping the taxation would only make the hole in his pocket bigger.

…

Now as for the question of why Alexander’s taxes were so low even when he had roughly 400,000 sq km of land… well the good news was that it was not due to corruption or his inability to collect taxes.

The huge deficit was mostly due to three reasons.

Reason number one was a number of Alexander’s policies, which severely limited his tax sources, the most significant one of which was granting the Tibian farmers a three year tax grace.

This was done to help the war torn lands recover as well as boost Alexander’s popularity among the masses.

And fortunately, both of those goals were well on track to be fulfilled.

The unfortunate side effect of this however was that in a land where ninety percent of the population were peasants, their taxes basically made up not just the bulk, but nearly the entire revenue.

So with this policy, Alexander had basically stopped collecting ’rent’ from Tibias for three years, while at the same time spending record sums of money to jump start the economy, wishing to win politically.

The second reason why Alexander’s balance sheet was so in the red was simply because of some clever ’accounting gimmick’!

The figures presented on paper were a lot worse than what it was in reality.

For example regarding the wages Alexander paid his tent farmers for letting them work his fields, however large that amount was, all of it was more than made up for the grains they produced for him in exchange.

Hence Alexander was not really losing money here- he was just converting his cash into goods.

And then when this same grain was brought by the workers under him, using the money they got from Alexander as wages, that good once again got converted into cash.

So in ’accounting’ terms, the value of ’assets’ in his books remained the same, if not increased in value as Alexander naturally sold the grain for more than he paid his workers.

Similar examples could be made for a lot of other goods, so in a way, the money Alexander spent simply circulated back to him.

But due to some clever accounting techniques, this never explicitly showed up in the books- the wages paid were never directly compared with the profits generated from the sale of the produced goods.

Neither was it revealed that despite the fact that little taxes were generated from the sale of the goods, because taxes on most goods were very low in Zanzan, the entirety of the sale actually went into the lord’s treasury and thus could be counted as taxes.

It had to be remembered that at this point in time, no distinction was made between the lord’s personal and state pocket. The entire fief was considered his personal property and he could spend the money generated from it as he liked- be it for personal pleasure or for the defense and betterment of the land.

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