Chapter 236: Weights And Measures
Caesar was also helpless.
Whether Jerusalem or Jaffa, or even Damascus, or even the more distant Acre, any situation regarding weights and measures could only be described as chaotic.
Later generations might find it hard to imagine that the vast Mediterranean region did not even have a unified unit of weight or unit of length.
Although as early as Ancient Egypt there were the most rudimentary measurement units and the decimal calculation methods that came with them—for the convenience of people and to further deify the Pharaoh who claimed to be the descendant of Ra, the Egyptians used the Pharaoh’s fingertip, palm, elbow to foot as standards, from unit of length to name, and then this method was adopted by the Ancient Romans.
You might say that since it was a unit of length passed down from Ancient Egypt, there shouldn’t be much difference, but regrettably, there was, and it was huge.
Even the average length of an adult male’s foot today is only twenty-five to twenty-seven centimeters. But if you measure the “King’s Foot” of the ancient Egyptian foot, you will find everything from thirty centimeters to thirty-five centimeters, even forty centimeters.
This was not merchants deliberately causing trouble, but in the laws and actual implementation of various nations, it was intentionally set this way to exaggerate the king’s authority.
Simply put, when one merchant pulls out a cloth strip and claims the king’s foot is this size, another merchant pulls out a longer cloth strip, thinking that a king, such a prominent figure, could not possibly have feet as long as an ordinary person—surely they must be a bit longer. Thus, they naturally and seamlessly take that longer unit of length as the new measurement unit.
Similarly known are units of weight. When Caesar first heard of this, he could hardly believe it.
First, a question: an ounce of cotton and an ounce of gold—which is heavier?
Surely some have already quickly given the answer: of course they weigh the same.
But for the people of this era, this answer is wrong. The correct answer is gold is heavier, because the ounce used for gold is the troy ounce, while the ounce for cotton is the avoirdupois ounce. The former is about thirty-two grams, the latter about twenty-eight grams.
The reason is damnable—gold is more precious than other things…
If even such universally recognized units of weight have such huge discrepancies, not to mention others—even without leaving a nation, a province, a village, the weights and measures between one village and another might differ.
And this arbitrary practice is very prone to big problems.
When Heraclius was teaching, he told them that in England’s farms, people often refused the “foot” unit, so what did they use as a unit of length? A stick.
This was inherited from the Ancient Romans. Among the Ancient Romans, a rod was about three meters long, but England’s rod was much shorter, and damn it, they varied everywhere.
They used this stick to measure the dimensions of fields, the length of ditches, the height of fruit trees. This stick might be used for many years until it broke from wear, but no one could guarantee that a new stick, or a stick from elsewhere, would be the same length. The various disputes arising from this were endless.
Besides these, there were some strange weighing units, such as the wedding tax that serfs had to pay when marrying, which was to contribute to the lord an iron pot large enough for his new wife to sit in.
When reading this, Caesar thought to himself that those big-boned women must be very unlucky—they might never be able to marry in their lifetime.
Of course, when he was still just a young attendant, he could only grumble inwardly. A nine-year-old child was just a pretty little dog to ministers and knights; they would pat his head, give him a few pieces of bread, but never allow him to speak casually on serious matters.
He also learned to calculate goods by a share, a handful, or a scoop, rather than by weight and length.
After he became a Knight of Bethlehem, because of this small city’s special status, whether in economy, commerce, politics, or religious significance, he had no intention of interfering too much in its operations.
But the significance of Cyprus was completely different; this was truly his territory. Even facing the Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller, he had no intention of handing over the territory—even just a small part. And the various ideas he had been accumulating for a long time seemed to be implementable here.
He had not thought of changing this cruel and absurd world overnight, but at least now it seemed he finally had a not-bad beginning. The people were not as ignorant as imagined, the nobles not all despicable. When he wanted to move toward the light, there would always be followers behind him.
However, even the loftiest ideal needs a solid foundation in reality to support it, and the most unavoidable among them is money. Even the King of Ayyarasa Road would have headaches over money, and the Lord of Cyprus was no exception.
And many of the things he envisioned required strong economic support. Where did the money a lord could obtain—the biggest golden apple—come from?
Undoubtedly, tax revenue.
Initially, Caesar planned to first integrate and analyze Cyprus’s tax situation, but he soon discovered that to control the taxes, he could not avoid the issue of weights and measures.
No wonder most lords and Lords preferred to package all the taxation in their territories to the Isaacites. Even someone like Caesar, who was good at mathematics, felt dizzy when seeing those intricate statistical data and units.
The Byzantine Empire originally had unified weights and measures regulated in the Market, but with the empire’s decline, each province began to use different measurement units. They might have done so just for greater interests, but it now caused the biggest problem Caesar faced.
Unless he was willing, like previous governors, to hand over the most important taxes to the Isaacites—after all, the Isaacites could always get the amount the governor wanted.
It was not that Caesar distrusted the Isaacites. In fact, he never tested human nature. Anyone with unchecked power over others and huge benefits from it—wanting not to fall would require them to be a saint by nature.
“You are not planning to hand over tax collection to the Isaacites?” Dandolo asked.
Venetians only engaged in fishing and farming in the first dozen or so years after migrating to the island, but soon they found that sailing ships back and forth and trading suited them better, so in this city-state, merchants were the most numerous.
And any merchant would know numbers and calculations, and be versed in conditions everywhere—including but not limited to weights and measures.
In other words, what the Isaacites could do, they could do too, so there was no need for the Isaacites to interfere.
“Cyprus now has about twenty-seven kinds of taxes—I mean, on ordinary people,” Caesar said. “I cannot hand them over to the Isaacites.”
The tax most familiar to people of this era was the tithe. In fact, the tithe was not invented by the Church; it was originally the province tax that provinces of the Roman Empire paid to the center, and because this tax was exactly one-tenth of each province’s output, it was called the tithe.
Taxes have evolved to today into land tax, commerce tax, and poll tax.
Land tax, further divided into land tax, Livestock Tax, Supplementary Tax, and Miscellaneous Taxes. Among them, land tax is divided into three levels according to the fertility of the land, and Livestock Tax is based on the type and number of livestock raised, with the amount roughly one-twelfth of the livestock’s value.
Supplementary Tax and Miscellaneous Taxes are general terms.
Generally, when the lord needs to wage war, there is war tax; when rebuilding a castle, there is castle tax; even when forging armor, there is armor tax.
As for commerce tax… it targets passing merchants: trade tax, transit tax, entry tax, turnover tax, etc. One of the most hated by merchants is the landing tax—all goods landing on the lord’s land belong to the lord, that’s one hundred percent.
As for poll tax—among them, there is one tax everyone knows—usually called poll tax.
There is also public property use tax. In Ancient Rome, this tax was used to build libraries, baths, and amphitheaters, but now it has become usage fees for various public facilities.
Such as mills, farm tools, bread ovens, or the lord’s cattle, forests, rivers, and so on…
Caesar estimated that these taxes already encompassed forty percent of ordinary people’s income, which could be said to be approaching the bottom line. If he handed them over to the Isaacites to save time and effort, the Isaacites would definitely add to this figure, and not just a little.
Sometimes Caesar wondered, didn’t these Isaacites know that their utmost exploitation would ultimately yield nothing?
If their involvement in finance was forced by Church and guild pressure… then why were they so insatiably greedy as tax collectors—when everyone knew that whether convicted or not, property could not be taken out of the city.
Caesar was not the kind of person who could watch indifferently while knowing the people were suffering torment and destruction. Previously, he lacked the power and qualification; now that he could do something, he certainly would not choose the Isaacites.
He invited Dandolo to discuss this not only because he was his wife’s grandfather, but also because Venetians had long had a quite standardized set of weights and measures.
Moreover, they required foreign merchants trading with them to use this same set of measurement units, so in the Mediterranean region, there were not a few who mastered Venetian-style weights and measures.
Or rather, Venetians were not too greedy; even if foreigners were unfamiliar with their measurement units, they would not casually alter the size, weight, or length of the units to gain maximum profit.
“I will not use Isaacites. I plan to establish a permanent taxation agency, so I need a large number of tax personnel—if you are willing, I can recruit these officials from Venice, as long as they pass the exam. At the same time, I will provide some new weights and measures units—possibly also some coinage matters… needing their participation.”
Dandolo, upon hearing this, felt a surge of wild joy amid his surprise.
Although he was in the final stage of life, clinging on only for revenge, he was still a Venetian after all. Otherwise, when Manuel I expelled the Venetians, he would not have insisted on seeking an audience with this unpredictable emperor, bringing disaster upon himself.
Making all of Cyprus use Venetian weights and measures—even if the lord had his own ideas, what did that mean?
When they captured Acre and handed it to the Crusaders, one of the conditions was merely to implement Venetian weights and measures in Acre.
Now, by saying this, Caesar was equivalent to establishing a law in all of Cyprus and among Mediterranean merchants using Cyprus as a transit or trading place, one that honored the Venetians.
For Venetians, this was of course an unimaginable boon. He was almost certain that neither the Council of Ten nor the Doge of Venice would object.
But he was ultimately a cunning old fox; his emotion lasted only an instant before he regained his previous calm: “What do you need us to do?”
“I need many people, very many, possibly hundreds, and once the agency is established, they must train a batch of students for me.”
Dandolo smiled; he was a merchant and knew, of course, that free things were the most expensive. Moreover, Caesar was the Lord of Cyprus, and even though his granddaughter had become his wife, in the alliance between the two, the Venetians were undoubtedly the weaker party.
Besides, he did not only rely on Caesar to intimidate the Council of Ten to secure the position of Doge of Venice for himself or his favored heir; he had even deeper ambitions…
If Caesar had only thrown out a rich bait and handed such huge benefits to the Venetians or the Dandolo family, he would be terrified.
Now that Caesar had stated conditions, he felt relieved instead, though this was reasonable. To govern a place, one could not rely only on knights and soldiers; more were those who could read, calculate, and tally—originally priests and monks of the Church bore this responsibility, later the Isaacites, but now some monarchs were beginning to promote people around them.
The former was due to the struggle between royal and ecclesiastical power; the latter, well, Caesar was not the only one who saw the drawbacks of tax farming.
The problem was that Caesar lacked such people around him, and although his teacher was Patriarch Heraclius, if he sent large numbers of priests, the Cypriots might feel uneasy.
“These matters may require me to return to Venice, hold a meeting, discuss with others, and then decide,” Dandolo said cautiously. These were no longer something the Dandolo family alone could provide; it would scrape clean the vital forces of several great families—and if done as Caesar said, Venetian trade activities might continue to shrink in the coming years.
But if Venetians could truly gain a foothold in the court of Cyprus… just think, this was an unprecedented sight; their offspring would no longer be merchants, but ministers, nobles, even lords…
