King of German Mercenaries

It took almost a month for Marin to get the whole family used to bathing with difficulty. And this is July, the hottest time of the year. If everyone doesn't take a bath, God knows what kind of smell will come out.

According to Marin's estimation, Charles VIII will not enter Italy until the end of August, and the news reaches Vienna, and it will take September. Then, the imperial parliament quarrelled for a while before they sluggishly agreed to increase the tax, or simply failed. And when the first tranche of taxes comes in, at least until November. At that time, Maximilian I, who had money, had the confidence to recruit mercenaries again.

However, Marin, who has read history, is more optimistic that the emperor can receive taxes from Austria and Burgundy under his control. In other areas, it is too difficult to receive taxes. But even if the tax was received in these two places, it was enough for the emperor to expand his army on a small scale.

So, taking advantage of these few months, Marin intends to tidy up Hoffman Manor. Because, once the emperor began to recruit mercenaries, he would definitely go to Vienna to make a name for himself, and he would have no time to care about the Hoffman Manor.

Time was limited, so Marin seized the time and carried out drastic reforms in the manor. And the reason for his reform is the advanced knowledge that his non-existent great teacher, Einstein, learned from the very developed Eastern Empire.

Because of the previous success, although they still can't believe Marin 100%, the Hoffmans also believed in the great knowledge Marin learned by seven or eight points. So, with the mentality of trying it out, they let Marin let go of the reform experiment in the manor.

After promoting the bathing problem, it is natural to have a matching change of clothes. So, what Marin promoted next was to wash and change clothes frequently.

The reason given by Marin is also very strong - taking a bath and changing clothes frequently can prevent the breeding of diseases to a large extent. This theory, in fact, has been regarded as a modern health theory. However, the reason of eliminating disease greatly deterred other people. So the whole family is very supportive. Anyway, as far as the Hoffman family is concerned, they don't do the laundry by themselves, they can just hire a serf woman in the manor, and they don't need to spend any money, just enjoy the food. Before that, Mrs. Mary actually changed her clothes frequently. Only old men such as Old Hoffman and Adler did not change clothes frequently. Therefore, this scheme has no resistance to promotion.

Then, Marin asked the whole family to wash their hands before and after eating, so as not to eat dirty things in their mouths and carry them on their bodies. In this regard, Mrs. Mary, who loves cleanliness herself, expressed her support. So, the plan was passed.

The previous bathing, changing clothes and washing hands, in fact, are all personal hygiene. After addressing personal hygiene, Marin moved on to addressing environmental hygiene. The main environmental sanitation problems are actually the concentration of feces, the stacking of garbage, and the cleaning of residential areas.

Medieval Europeans were very sloppy. Don't look at the human-like and dog-like clothes worn by later Europeans, a pair of pretentious looks. But in the Middle Ages, Europeans were called a slob.

Europeans in the Middle Ages, except for the educated aristocracy, most of the common people had the bad habit of urinating everywhere. This also makes the stench of feces floating around in medieval European cities. The main road is fine, and local officials will organize people to clean it up. And in those remote small streets and alleys, there are many people who defecate everywhere. So, as long as you leave the main street and enter the remote areas of the city, you can smell the stench for sure. And these feces everywhere can also breed flies and mosquitoes, which will bring terrifying infectious diseases.

Marin couldn't control it in the city, but when he was wandering in the manor the day before yesterday, he accidentally stepped on a big dung, which made him sick for a long time. Therefore, concentrated use of the toilet and the prohibition of defecation everywhere has become a big problem that Marin urgently needs to solve.

When Marin proposed a plan to concentrate on going to the toilet and forbid defecation everywhere, no one in the family objected.

Men don't care, they go to the toilet anyway, and Mrs. Mary is more welcoming. After all, she is also disgusted with the feces that are everywhere.

It's easy to promote this one in the Hoffman family, but when Marin called the serfs in the manor to announce the promotion, it was protested by many serfs:

Master Malin, why are you being so serious about such trivial matters? Everyone is like this...

Yes, yes, other manors are like this, and people in the city can solve it anywhere...

...

Marin is very hot, is it reasonable to co-author with you to defecate anywhere? So he promulgated coercive measures—

In the future, if you find someone who urinates anywhere in the manor residential area, catch it once, hit a board, and fine it a Finney!

This measure made the sloppy serfs lamented. The punishment for hitting a board is nothing to them. After all, the serfs were accustomed to being oppressed. But fine a penny, that's awesome. At this time in the German region, ordinary helpers, working in the city, only got 2 pfennig a day. And the serfs in the countryside could only earn one pfennig a day. Therefore, a fine of one pfennig is basically to let them do a day's work in vain!

Despite their dissatisfaction, they could not resist. After all, this is an era of nobility. The status of the serfs was slightly better than that of the slaves. Basically, they had no right to speak, and could only passively accept the rule.

If it was a free citizen with a high status (most of the uprisings and revolutions in Europe are made by the citizens), they may resist fiercely, but the serfs have no confidence to resist. So, the plan was successfully implemented.

In order to cooperate with this plan, Marin organized manpower to build several public toilets in the serf settlement area, all of which were divided into male and female. As for your own home, you don't have to. Although knights are the lowest class of nobles, their living habits are still close to those of nobles. There is a toilet in the house, so there is no need to repair it.

After that, Marin planned the garbage dump area, and arranged for people to clean the main house of the Hoffman family every day, and put the garbage in the garbage dump area. Then, he also set up a garbage dumping area in the serf settlement area, and asked the serfs to pile up the garbage in a centralized manner instead of dumping it everywhere.

What's more, Marin demanded that the manpower to manage the barn should eradicate the cow dung and horse dung every day, pile them up in a centralized manner, and go down into the pit together with the human dung.

As for why he did this, it was a question of gunpowder that Marin suddenly thought of. Gunpowder requires saltpeter, and saltpeter is the most important ingredient in gunpowder.

But there are no saltpeter mines in Europe. Europeans want saltpeter. In this era, they either imported it from the Middle East or collected it from the cesspool...

However, with the rise of Ottoman Turkey, the land trade channel with the East was blocked. Therefore, from this moment on, Europeans had to go to the pit to find soil nitrate to boil saltpeter.

Marin had heard of boiling soil nitrate and knew some principles, but the specific process was not very clear. But that's not a problem either. Because now there are more people in Europe who know how to boil the soil. Probably, no one in the country like Hoffman Manor understands, but there must be some in some big cities. When the cesspit is ready, Marin plans to pay for craftsmen in the city to give instructions on how to boil the soil.

Now the price of saltpeter is not cheap. As far as Marin knows, the price of a pound of gunpowder is as high as 10 pfennigs. The price of saltpeter, reached 11 pfennig per pound. And the saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal needed for gunpowder, the most expensive is saltpeter. Because the amount of saltpeter that Europeans found in the pit is really limited, the price is very high.

There are more than 100 people in Hoffman Manor, plus dozens of livestock, the daily volume of manure is a lot. Marin dug a number of long cesspools at the remote downwind of the manor, specifically for collecting nitrate. The excrement produced by so many people is used to produce nitrate, and it is estimated that it is also a large amount of income...

After solving the sanitation problem and getting a saltpeter industry out of the way, Marin reformed the farm tools in the manor. First, wooden farm implements were eliminated. Later, Marin introduced the oriental shovel to facilitate the peasants to manually dig and loosen the soil.

Not only that, Marin also vigorously promoted drill and hole planting techniques. Europeans are currently popular is sowing, sowing shallow, uneven seed distribution. Some places were not sown, and the seeds were very sparsely distributed. In some places, too many seeds were sown, and the seeds were too dense. When the seeds germinate, it is easy to cause multiple plants to get too close, competing to absorb soil nutrients. Then, each plant did not grow well. The artificially controlled drill seeding and hole seeding can solve this problem very well. Originally, Marin planned to introduce the Aquilegia car invented in the Han Dynasty in China. However, Marin had never seen Aquilegia, so he didn't know what to do. Therefore, for the time being, he can only promote artificial drilling and hole sowing. If there is a chance to send someone to the East, he will definitely bring in the Aquilegia. Because the seeding efficiency of the columbine is much higher than that of manual on-demand...

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