Chapter 447: Outsourcing the Bleeding
As Alfred stared at the inquisitive young prince, his mind scrambled to parse the logic of their sovereign’s grand design.
The boy’s assessment was, in fact, accurate...
Ragnar could have marched his musketeers into Vannes, ordered the execution of Salomon and Rudolf, burned their banners, and installed his own English lords to rule the territory directly.
That was the traditional method of conquest... That was how empires were forged in the blood-soaked history of this era.
Yet, Ragnar had chosen the path of vassalage.
Why?
The Lord of Winchester and the Lord of Exeter subtly exchanged a brief glance. In their minds, they were equally as stumped as the Breton prince.
The sheer disparity in intellect between the Iron King and his highest-ranking subordinates was a chasm too wide to bridge.
In truth, these men were not confidants to Ragnar’s ultimate master plan; they were merely highly efficient cogs in a massive machine they did not fully comprehend.
Alfred thought back to his limited interactions with the sovereign. Despite being the highest-ranking native lord of the British Isles, his direct contact with Ragnar was shockingly minimal.
He had only been in the King’s presence roughly seven times since his own subjugation.
The Lord of Winchester and the Lord of Exeter had seen the sovereign perhaps four times at most...
Their most vivid shared memory was the grand coronation in Titan, an event that had taken place nearly a year or more prior.
It was a day etched into their permanent memories with the force of a branding iron.
They remembered standing in the rain, stripped of their former royal dignities, watching as Ragnar Ulfsson placed a crown upon his own head.
To question the logistical reasoning of the Iron King was to invite one’s own immediate obsolescence.
They simply received their drafted blueprints, their production quotas and they executed them...
But now, confronted by the sharp inquiry of a medieval adolescent, Alfred was forced to construct a rational hypothesis to maintain the Iron Kingdom’s dominance over the vassals.
As his mind raced, Alfred quickly assembled the puzzle pieces based on his understanding of Ragnar’s nature.
The answer, he realized, lay in the logistics of geography and resource management.
England was an island. It was a self-contained, geographically isolated landmass.
Under Ragnar’s rule, the English Channel and the North Sea had become an impenetrable moat.
The sprawling fleet of steam-powered ironclads tirelessly patrolled the waters, their heavy cannons capable of shredding any wooden armada foolish enough to attempt a crossing.
Defending an island required only a dominant navy and a secure coastline.
If Ragnar had annexed Brittany and Burgundy directly, replacing the local banners with the banner of Titan, the borders of the Iron Kingdom would have suddenly expanded across hundreds of miles of open, indefensible continental plains.
The Frankish hordes, the Germanic tribes, the Umayyads to the south... every primitive, bloodthirsty faction in Europe would view the wealthy territories as a prime target for raiding.
To defend such massive, open borders directly, Ragnar would have been forced to permanently deploy tens of thousands of his most elite, professional soldiers across the sea.
He would have to stretch his supply lines of black powder, refined steel, and provisions to their absolute breaking point.
It would have drained the massive treasury of Titan and severely delayed the domestic industrialization of the homeland.
By taking Salomon and Rudolf as vassals, Ragnar had outsourced the bleeding...
Brittany and Burgundy were nothing more than highly lucrative buffer states. Ragnar gave them the blueprints, the muskets, and the agricultural reforms, turning them into a heavily armed wall against the Franks.
But crucially, it was Breton and Burgundian blood that stained the battlefields, not the blood of the Iron Kingdom.
The vassals paid for the privilege of being Ragnar’s meat shield. They managed their own unruly peasant populations, they funded their own militias using the wealth generated by the new technologies, and they funneled a massive percentage of their raw resources straight back into the ports of Titan.
Why conquer a land and assume the heavy burden of its defense, when you could simply uplift the native rulers just enough to make them defend it for you, while reaping all the benefits?
Alfred finally broke the silence. He looked down at Prince Charles.
"You have read the histories of dead empires, young prince," Alfred began. "The Romans stretched their legions across the known world to plant their banners in the mud, and in doing so, they bled themselves dry trying to defend lands that did not belong to them."
Alfred continued. "Our sovereign’s seat of power is an island, surrounded by the sea, protected by vessels of iron that cannot be sunk by the weapons of this age. His borders are utterly impenetrable. He has no desire to stretch his own supply lines across the war-torn plains of the continent merely to paint a map with his colors."
"You manage your own lands, you police your own people, and you defend your own borders against the Frankish savages using the tools we provide. You serve as the outer wall of our empire, and in return, you are allowed to bathe in the excess of our wealth."
The explanation was honest, yet it carried an underlying threat that immediately silenced any further questions.
It justified the Iron Kingdom’s strategy while reminding the Breton and Burgundian kings of their disposability.
They were just a wall, and walls could easily be replaced if they crumbled...
Salomon and Rudolf exchanged a deeply humbled look.
Alfred turned away from the boy, as he walked back to his seat beside the Lord of Winchester and the Lord of Exeter, a shadow of doubt crept into the back of his mind.
His explanation was perfect... But deep down, as he remembered the visage of Ragnar Ulfsson standing beneath the skies of Titan, Alfred knew the truth.
He had merely guessed... After all, in his long life among the highborn and the warlords of Europe, Alfred had never witnessed a king who ruled like this.