1453: Revival of Byzantium

"What is the meaning of this, your Holiness?"

"Oh… Good day, your highness. What has brought you over here, is it the fresh scent of soil, or is it the lively squeaks of the chickens?"

"No, it is just the first time that I have seen any one, any diplomats do this kind of things. Why your holiness? Is it the scent of the flowers that cannot soothe you, so you need to sow your own plants, or is it the chirping of birds unable to appease you, while the squawks of chickens and hens on the other hand soothe your mood better?"

"Of course not, I am intended to stay, your majesty." The Holy Emissary gave his visitor a look, sprinkled some grains on the ground which attracted the peck of chickens to his side while continuing to engage his visitor. "I am going to appeal to his Holiness the Pope to set up a permeant embassy here in order to better communicate between the East and the West, mean while I can live my own cosy life here, with a mini farm and a peck of lovely animals, far far away from the turn moils in the Vatican, it almost sounds like a retired life to me… And I have another plan, actually your majesty, a plan on you, you know what it is?"

"What is it?"

"I want to compose a book, about you, I want to study your efforts about the state you have dreamed. You are the first man I have seen walking up against the big tide of history creating a chapter on the manuscript of antiquity, a lonely reed mixed in a pile of stagnant water, a shrubby rose in the middle of a winter tundra land."

"What do you mean by all the descriptions, your holiness?" The Caesar approached this old man and squatted down beside him with the support of the ground, looking totally unlike the Caesar of the Roman empire, instead looking like a humble farmer who has just finished his chores. "I do not understand what are you talking about since just now, what do you mean that I am going against the tide of history, what do you mean by a lonely reed in the pile of water? What do you mean by a shrubby rose? I don't forsee any thing that can make me wither, are you trying to scare me in to some thing, I know that is a common trick that your people use these days."

"I won't see myself as a diplomat. I am more like a student, a student for life eager to know more things, recognise more people and witness more events. And I can say that you, the Caesar of Romania, is an unique kind of monarch, more unique than any one I have observed before in the past sixty years of my humble life."

Antonius gave a sneer to the words of appeasement. "I don't believe that you have not seen a single monarch that loves his people in the west."

"There are, and quite a lot of them, indeed. But you need to realise your majesty, that there is a difference between the supposed peasant loving monarchs and you. Most of them do it either for show to gain the support of the popular gaining fame to earn a decent title, or doing it purely because of his own compassion and kind heart, or the ones who treat his people in a relatively better manner in order to achieve a balance with the burglars and nobles, with the main purpose of increasing his state's overall war capabilities, but you, are different, your majesty."

"…"

"You are not only just trying to give your people a more modest life by doing what the others do, such as lifting their debts, lowering their taxes, and in the more extreme cases like the ones in Britannia, which is an isle outside Europe, punishing those minor nobles and land lords for abusing his properties because of the huge shortage of man power working in the fields and military after the Great Plague. But you, are different, you are not just doing all of these things I have mentioned, you are returning the right of the lands from the nobles, churches and land lords, a which made you lose their support instantly earning you the honouree title of a tyrant in many states…"

"Oh, then I shall gladly accept the title of a tyrant, indeed they are right, my hands are stained with the blood of those supposed nobles and land lords in the countryside."

Leon Battista Alberti ignored these comments. "And you managed to pin them down with a superior force, that is fine, I suppose. But most importantly you did some thing that I would consider revolutionary, a thing that no ruler has dared to do even for the infidels of Ancient Rome, that is open up education for the mass public, even enforcing it in the laws. You know what you have just done? You have just made another crack on the thousand years long monopoly on knowledge built by the nobles and clergies, you have no idea what kind of thing you have unleashed."

"What have I unleashed? You know, I can accept people criticising my policies and decisions, but please give me your ideas and suggestions."

"I am not against your education policies, for I am not those crook heads who cover their stubbornness and emptiness in their brains under the disguise of their coifs veils, instead I am very supportive of your policies." The old man took a sip of his drink, turned back and ordered his assistant. "Remember to bring some of these drink leaves called chai next time! Anyways, where were we talking about just now? Oh yes, I am supportive of your policies, but do you understand why has the churches and monarchs been so conservative regarding the act of granting the right to be literate to the peasants?"

"I know, of course." Antonius nodded. "For the purpose of stability."

"The chantries are afraid, that if more and more people are equipped with knowledge that they are not supposed to know, they might end up questioning the phenomena and regulations around them, they will start to question the system, they will start to question the faith, they will start to question the church, and then this sense of disbelief shall start to form in to a new form of heretic, which of course needs to be get rid of as they possessed a threat both to the secular states and the religion, and it shall start a war, a war of massive scale and destruction."

Antonius watched this old man elaborate further with out saying any thing, seeing him now as nothing but a clergy man who is trying to give what ever reasons to stop his education policies.

"But still, I know that there is three things that you can use to turn your tide and achieve the next step in to prosperity and development for the population, and your state already has the trend of moving towards it now, as what I have observed. One is called urbanisation, to get the peasants out from the fields of an agrarian society, get them working and living in the cities which in the end makes the expense of governance lower. I have two concepts in mind that can help you to achieve it, one is called city planning and architecture designing, learnt from the pagan Romans thousand years ago, and another one is a new word that I have invented, that is called 'industrialisation'."

"industria? Industrialisation? I have never heard such a word before."

"Because I just invented this concept, with my years spent in Northern Italia and a tour around your state; I have noticed the trend of setting up workshops in various cities and settlements around Thessaloniki, have you noticed this your majesty?"

"Aye I have, Orban did report this to me before, he mentioned to me once that he needs to have more people and workshops involved in upstream and natural resource refining operations to aid him in the production of artilleries." Antonius could not help but to recall that Orban did give him a report saying that they have successfully managed to put some black powders in to cannon balls, giving it the ability to explode when pounded on to the enemies, although the explosives inside are still way too weak to cause a devastation.

"Every where I go in your state, I keep seeing new workshops carrying out different operations being set up, especially with the bigger cities and towns, there are work shops being built or already operational every where, from banks of rivers, to the middle of the streets, and to the bottom of the mountains. I see more and more people giving up their farm lands, or sending their children there as interns and workers, more and more people, more and more resources are being used to serve the purpose of production, I call that process… an early form of Industrialisation."