Even as the international situation shifts and turns in a thousand ways, it has little impact on the common folk of Austria.
Days pass one by one. During the months when cultivation is impossible, farmers must find ways to tend to their land while weathering the bitter cold of winter.
Every year at this time, the fences between strip fields are removed. The arable land, much like the wilderness surrounding the villages, becomes "common land" for grazing and gathering firewood.
Obtaining fuel in this era is undoubtedly difficult; how to ensure one does not freeze to death in winter is a problem worth serious discussion.
In the areas surrounding Vienna alone, the situation is relatively better.
To the west of the city lies a massive forest covering over a thousand square kilometers, more than enough to supply the consumption of the entire Vienna Basin. This is supplemented by Hungarian timber transported along the Danube.
A significant portion of this forest belongs to the House of Habsburg according to the provisions of the Privilegium Maius. Consequently, several hereditary families of foresters have emerged in Vienna, and the number of people appointed to such positions continues to rise.
They shoulder many responsibilities, with their primary task being the prevention of poaching and illegal logging in the royal woodlands.
However, the Emperor has loosened some restrictions, granting commoners—especially freemen—certain basic rights. Meanwhile, the profits from logging camps among the various royal industries have consistently remained at the top.
As the most important fuel before the dawn of the coal age, and the most common building material, the demand for timber has always been staggering.
As for the use of coal, some areas in Tyrol and Bohemia with outcropping coal mines often use it for metallurgy. Regarding its entry into the market for commercial trade, there is currently neither sufficient output nor an established market.
In contrast, charcoal merchants are a frequent sight in villages everywhere.
After barely managing to meet their heating needs, the farmers must continue to labor in the fields.
Shepherds drive their well-fed cattle, sheep, horses, and pigs into the autumn-sown fields so they can deposit manure, thereby increasing crop yields—a piece of knowledge the farmers have well-mastered.
However, fertilization often involves transactions between villagers. When someone wants the herds to stay a bit longer on their specific plot, they often have to pay a small sum to the livestock owners.
The same applies to human manure. Farmers often mix their household waste with roots dug from the ground, dead leaves from the yard, hearth ashes, and other debris to complete the composting process. They then use various means to spread this "rubbish" across the fields, followed by plowing to thoroughly mix the soil with the green manure.
It is worth noting that the use of human manure in this era is quite conservative and often overlooked.
The nobility believe that only the waste produced by their own households constitutes "healthy fertilizer." If someone were to spread "filth" on the lord's demesne, they would be fined.
Thus, they do not trade in manure like the farmers do, nor do they specifically hire people to collect and transport waste from densely populated cities for use as fertilizer.
Firstly, they despise the excrement of commoners; secondly, the cost of doing so is actually quite high. With grain prices continuously sluggish, the labor and transport costs alone would be enough to drive a manor into bankruptcy through year-on-year losses.
Laszlo, however, has no such qualms. First, he does not disdain crops irrigated with fertilizers derived from farmers or anyone else. Second, he uses various means to control costs, achieving impressive results.
He began by hiring people to collect manure and various household wastes from the Hofburg Palace and surrounding urban areas, then transported them via boat to royal manors along the Danube or sold them directly to villages on the outskirts of Vienna.
The new farming methods require a much higher volume of fertilizer than the extensive management of the past. Thus, an industry chain—entirely foreign to Europeans—gradually began to take shape.
As for a sewage system for the city of Vienna, after as many as twenty meetings of repeated debate by the Vienna City Council, it was ultimately determined that such a move would be extremely uneconomical. It would not only cause financial problems for Vienna but would almost certainly burden the state.
However, at the Emperor's request, they eventually proposed a compromise.
Drainage channels would be planned and built in the areas of the royal palaces and neighboring aristocratic quarters to centrally manage sewage and waste. Professional engineers hired by the Emperor would undertake these projects.
On the other hand, the City Council is currently drafting a simple urban sanitation law. It prohibits residents from indiscriminately dumping human and animal waste and other garbage into streets and rivers, though it allows for temporary, separated piles by household along the roadsides.
The councilors also proposed a plan to increase the number of city cleaners to handle the refuse, and there are even plans to establish quarantine checkpoints at the Danube docks.
This matter has caused much discussion in Vienna in recent days. Municipal councilors and bailiffs have begun taking to the streets to preach the importance of hygiene to the people.
Their primary tactics are the threat of fines and the threat of plague outbreaks. The former is backed by the Emperor, while the latter is by no means alarmist.
Last year's outbreak of the Black Death in Provence is a classic example. After being devastated by the plague, Marseille was stormed by Imperial forces, leaving it almost a dead city.
Even if the actual situation is not as dire as the politicians describe, they are more than willing to embellish their speeches to stir up fear among the citizens, ensuring they voluntarily comply with the new decrees.
The citizens are clearly susceptible to this, mainly because the fine of up to 10 Groschen is truly terrifying—getting caught could mean losing nearly half a month's wages.
The citizens of Vienna, after all, are not like those of Paris; they won't rely on uprisings and riots to storm the Hofburg and force the Emperor to rescind his decrees.
Years ago, when the King of France forbade Parisians from throwing trash out of their windows onto the street, the decree was eventually amended after a fierce struggle to allow it—provided one shouted three times first. That decree remains unchanged to this day.
Compared to Paris, Vienna could truly be described as having "honest and simple folk"; for the most part, everyone respects and loves the Emperor.
This is despite their past precedent of expelling the Prince Regent, which drove the Imperial Uncle, Frederick, to leave in a huff and build "Wiener Neustadt" several dozen kilometers south of Vienna.
Now, the Guards Regiment is stationed in Wiener Neustadt. At a fast pace, they could reach Vienna within two days. By then, let alone resisting, those who are slow to beg for mercy might meet the same fate as the recently purged citizens of Paris.
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As for how to handle the waste that would not spontaneously vanish after the ban, the municipal government finally decided to follow the Emperor's advanced example.
Just as the palace hires people to collect and transport those "filthy things," the city government decided to increase personnel to use carts and ceramic jars to collect various refuse from the Old Town along the Danube and from citizens living on the urban fringes. This occurs twice a week, while other districts are serviced once a week.
The reason for such clear boundaries is, in the end, that same goal: saving money.
The city is indeed wealthy; as the heart of the Empire, Vienna could easily provide loans of 100,000 to 200,000 Florins without issue. However, fiscal revenue does not blow in on the wind; while investing in public works, a balance between income and expenditure must be maintained.
Handling the waste of these specific areas is an excellent way to save costs.
In recent years, the Emperor's agricultural innovations have begun to bear fruit, gradually expanding from the initial model manors to numerous villages and estates around Vienna.
Among these innovative methods, the composting and use of fertilizer are just as important as the application of heavy plows.
With the yields of winter-sown wheat and spring-sown barley visibly increasing—and thanks to the Emperor's tireless promotion of these successes—village managers have significantly increased their valuation of manure.
The villages surrounding Vienna are perfectly situated to consume the massive amounts of manure and waste produced on the city's periphery.
Since farmers in this era are generally poor, the cost of manure used as fertilizer skyrockets once transport distances increase slightly—to the point where farmers would rather not fertilize at all than buy expensive "rubbish."
Waste that exceeds demand is inevitably dumped into the Danube, allowing the citizens of Buda and Belgrade to get a "taste" of the Viennese lifestyle.
This plan quickly received Laszlo's approval. As for subsequent measures to divide and outsource street sanitation via subcontracting, that was left to the Vienna municipal government to complete.
Actually, there is quite a bit of profit to be made here. Night-soil men receive a small fee from the government and can also charge citizens a fixed price to remove waste. If the market is good, they can haul it outside the city to sell; if not, they simply find a place to dispose of it.
The "gray area" within this is quite substantial. If operated correctly into a monopoly, one might even blackmail the entire city. This was enough to pique the interest of Ulrich Fugger, the Austrian Finance Minister, after he heard the Emperor's complaints.
However, creating a monopoly under the Emperor's nose is clearly unrealistic. If there is a monopoly to be had, the Emperor would be the first to hold it; merchants like them can, at most, play the role of intermediaries or investors.
Yet the Emperor clearly has no interest in draining Austria's precious fiscal revenue to prop up this new system, so he chose to leave the potential profits to the wealthy capital owners.
As the controllers of the greatest capital in Austria, the Fugger family had to lead by example.
As long as the Fuggers participate in the government bidding, people will naturally believe there is a profit to be made. After all, the Fugger family, following in the footsteps of Habsburg expansion, has never been rumored to suffer a loss.
In early March, with the approval of the central government in Vienna, the Vienna City Council began formal preparations to implement the decree.
The city was divided into various zones. Some zones were managed by government-hired personnel, while the rest were outsourced to wealthy citizens interested in the venture.
The contractors could then recruit their own laborers to complete the work; if someone wanted to save money, it wasn't ruled out that they might do the work themselves.
In addition to outsourcing the rights to collect waste, the city government even intends to lease out the scattered public toilets in the city. By collecting rent, they would transfer the responsibility for maintenance and the power of management to private investors.
However, this plan has not been implemented yet because a significant portion of the city's public toilets were donated and built by the Emperor and the Church, making it difficult for the municipal government to dispose of them easily.
The plan to clean up urban sanitation is being pushed forward slowly and methodically. Perhaps in a few more months, the streets of Vienna will no longer be covered in manure and trash.
Trash will still appear in piles by the roadside, and it will still make the city reek, but the overall hygiene will eventually see some improvement.
As it turns out, the citizens do care about their living environment; otherwise, there wouldn't be so many brawls triggered by littering.
Long ago, there was even a case where someone's skull was split open by a longsword because they accidentally urinated on someone else's foot by the roadside.
While the councilors of Vienna were sweating profusely, busy easing the city's sanitation problems, the Emperor—the source of the decree's drafting and implementation—simply "patted his buttocks" and slipped away again.
To attend the Imperial Diet held in Augsburg in April, the Emperor left the court of Vienna to Empress Joanna and delegated the responsibility of overseeing the judicial and court examinations to Archbishop Georg.
The professional talents to be selected have many destinations: some will serve in the Imperial Chamber Court in the north, while others will fill vacancies in Bohemia.
As it stands, those truly able to gain significant positions through this path remain quite scarce, but it has at least dealt a blow to the hereditary patronage system prevalent in Austria.
At the very least, compared to the previous year, the number of candidates this year has increased significantly, reaching over two hundred.
At the request of various regions, Laszlo added examination centers in Freiburg and Prague. The examiners for Freiburg were sourced directly from the Imperial Court in Rottweil, while the Vienna government dispatched officials to Prague to manage affairs there.
Laszlo issues certificates to these university students who pass locally, along with travel documents. Whether they can go to Vienna for the court examination depends on the student's family circumstances.
Of course, Christopher, as the Emperor's son, was granted a special charter to organize his own assessments to recruit talent and bolster his small court.
To this end, Christopher specifically wrote a letter expressing his gratitude to his father. The territory he controls already exceeds that of most Imperial Princes, so the pressure to find capable men is immense.
Recently, this young King of the Romans has been learning from his father how to build an effective administrative system.
He certainly does not intend to emulate Louis XI by building a "state within a state" in remote areas to seek independence; he is simply preparing to smoothly take over the Austrian administrative system in the future.
If he cannot shoulder the burden after his father's death, these reforms being pushed today might very well perish with the man who made them, and everything would return to how it was before.
It is likely for the very purpose of grooming him that the Emperor placed the management of the entire West in his hands and gave him immense autonomy.
On this point, Christopher knows his father has high expectations for him, and he does not wish to disappoint.
After arranging Austria's affairs, great and small, Laszlo once again set out with his vast court and accompanying army on the journey to Augsburg.
This time, the meeting place was in Augsburg—practically at his doorstep—and Laszlo finally did not have to endure the torture of a long-distance journey.