Chapter 159: Habsburg Treasury
Exactly one month had passed... The peaks of the Tyrolean Alps had stood for millennia as an impassable fortress of stone and ice, serving as the ancestral, beating heart of the Habsburg southern economy.
For generations, the local miners had extracted the deep-vein coal and raw iron ore from the earth using the agonizingly slow methods of pickaxes and wooden wheelbarrows.
It was a stagnant, brutal existence, dictated entirely by the archaic feudal quotas of the Holy Roman Empire...
However, the stagnant isolation of the Alpine passes was violently shattered on this crisp autumn morning.
The ground itself began to tremble.
Winding its way up the treacherous, winding mountain paths was a massive, unprecedented train.
It was not a traditional merchant caravan of flimsy wooden carts and exhausted donkeys...
Dozens of transport wagons, heavily clad in riveted Swabian steel and pulled by teams of draft horses, dominated the mountain roads. Their axles were machined to absolute tolerances, allowing them to carry payloads of raw material that would instantly shatter the primitive carts used by the Emperor’s logistics officers.
Flanking the wagons marched two entire battalions of the elite Ironstorm Jaegers.
Furthermore, guarding the vital intersections of the caravan were six of Konrad’s proprietary Gatling carts, their heavy canvas tarps pulled back just enough to reveal the lethal, multiple rotating barrels of steel.
When the convoy finally rolled into the sprawling central mining camps of Tyrol, the entire local workforce ground to a stunned halt.
The Tyrolean miners, men who had spent their lives choking on black dust and bowing to arrogant Austrian aristocrats, stared in absolute awe at the Alemannian military presence.
They had never seen soldiers who marched in perfect unison, nor had they ever witnessed wagons capable of hauling such obscene volumes of cargo...
Stepping down from the lead transport wagon was Quartiermeister Klaus, a hardened logistics officer who had been hand-selected by Grand Marshal Eckhard.
Klaus marched toward the center of the camp, flanked by four rifle-bearing Jaegers.
He sought out the local foreman, a grizzled bearded Tyrolean man named Hans, who stood frozen in the shadow of the Swabian steel convoy.
"Cease your gawking and assemble your foremen!" Klaus commanded. "The Kingdom of Alemannia is here to collect the new industrial quotas. I want the silos opened and the extraction piles readied for immediate transport."
Hans, terrified but incredibly protective of his territory’s output, stepped forward, gripping his iron pickaxe.
"Quotas? What quotas? We answer to the Archduke Ferdinand and the Holy Roman Emperor!"
"You are Alemannians. You have no legal jurisdiction in the Alpine mines. The coal belongs to the Habsburg treasury!"
Klaus merely offered a smirk. The Quartiermeister slowly opened his ledger, pulling a folded parchment from between its pages.
The document was weighed down by a wax seal bearing the dual crests of the Holy Roman Emperor and the Sovereign King of Alemannia.
"Load the wagons according to the Sovereign’s macroeconomic blueprints. We are seizing exactly half of the total coal output."
Hans’s jaw practically detached from his skull. "Half?! You demand half of the entire Tyrolean yield? That is tens of thousands of tons of coal! Where in God’s name is all this fuel going?"
Klaus tapped his finger against the ruled columns of his ledger.
"The division of labor and resources has been flawlessly gamified by the Sovereign,"
"Half of this massive extraction is to be heavily guarded and routed directly to the northern manufacturing hubs of our newly integrated Bavarian territories, as well as the highly lucrative Swiss trade routes. The velocity of selling that coal will generate a river of silver florins to fund our standing armies."
Klaus turned his gaze toward the west.
"The other half," Klaus continued, "goes directly to Augsburg, to the Lord Konrad himself. It will feed the subterranean blast forges and power the high-pressure steam boilers of the new iron dragons currently being assembled on our rail networks."
The surrounding miners, who had gathered in a large, dirty circle to listen to the exchange, began to murmur in profound confusion and rising panic.
They simply could not comprehend the reality unfolding before their eyes...
"By what right?" Hans finally sputtered. "How can your Swabian King simply march into imperial territory and demand half our wealth? The Emperor Charles V would never agree to such extortion! He would declare war!"
"The Emperor Charles V is currently fighting a war, old man, and he is losing it badly," Klaus corrected, rolling up the parchment with a snap of his wrist. "Our Sovereign recognized that His Imperial Majesty was standing on the precipice of absolute annihilation. The Ottoman Empire’s Janissaries and Sipahi cavalry are currently marching on Hungary, threatening to burn Vienna to ash."
Klaus took a step forward. "King Konrad made a legally binding contract with the Emperor," Klaus explained. "Our Sovereign agreed to march his professional armies and deploy our solid-cast artillery to the eastern front to halt the Ottoman hordes. But our King does not fight wars for free. He demanded a permanent extraction treaty. For the next five years, fifty percent of all coal produced in Tyrol legally belongs to the Kingdom of Alemannia. The Emperor signed it himself."
"But that is not all," Klaus added, pulling a secondary document from his ledger. "In addition to the mineral wealth, King Konrad required men from the Emperor. We are levying five thousand able-bodied Tyrolean and Austrian peasants to march as auxiliary forces alongside the Ironstorm Jaegers."
Hans looked at his fellow miners, horrified. "You are marching untrained peasants against the Ottomans? They will be slaughtered in seconds!"
"..." Klaus sighed. "They are fighting under the banner of Alemannia now. The Sovereign has decreed that he will arm every single levied man with our standardized weaponry. They will be equipped with our precision-engineered grooved rifles and our impenetrable steel cuirasses. They will be trained to fire in synchronized volleys."
The Quartiermeister turned his back on the stunned foreman, gesturing for the Ironstorm Jaegers to secure the loading zones.
"Get your shovels, Tyroleans," Klaus ordered over his shoulder.
As the loading process began, Hans retreated to a high rocky outcropping, standing beside a few of the older, veteran miners.
They watched in silence as the Alemannian soldiers seamlessly directed the flow of thousands of tons of coal.
Hans wiped the sweat and black soot from his brow, his eyes locked onto the banners fluttering in the Alpine wind.
He tried to reconcile the reality before him with the history he knew... Just a few short years ago, Konrad von Frundsberg had been nothing more than a minor noble, a Swabian youth living in the shadow of the powerful Duke of Bavaria.
Now, his armies dictated the survival of the Holy Roman Empire...
"Three years," Hans whispered to himself, the words barely escaping his lips as he watched the coal pour into the wagons.
He shook his head slowly. "How in God’s holy name did this kid rise to this... in just a matter of three years?"