Chapter 9: A Popes Domain (1889-1891)
The introduction of the remaining Italian States into the Papal State and thereby the creation of The Kingdom of God meant that the population of the Popes domain had increased by 34% and was now 7 million workers. This was ten times more than in 1836.
The Pope used this to lower the taxes to the possible minimum, while still keeping control of the factories through state capitalism. At the same time the tariffs were reversed and now encouraged the inhabitants to buy from the Papal factories.
Let us go back to a few months before The Kingdom of God had been created. Here the first nationalistic and imperialistic thoughts began to appear in the heads of the inhabitants of the Papal State. During the months up to the creation of the new country the ideas matured and went into bloom as the declaration of The Kingdom of God was made.
Among the ideas were the thought of excavating the old Egyptian tombs. Soon after the permit to start the excavations was given, the Pope threatened the Egyptian officials to grant his divine Kingdom monopoly. With the monopoly established the Archaeologists could now get the peace they needed to discover great things for The Kingdom of God.
Around the same time as the formation of The Kingdom of God the Pope enacted trinket pensions as the people were getting more and more discontent. He also passed a trinket healthcare reform in the confusion surrounding the creating of the new country.
This led to a birth boom, the Pope seeing what trinket healthcare could do wanted to pass better reforms in this area. Sadly the Upper House did not have the will to do this, which greatly angered the Pope. Unfortunately he could not do anything about this, even though he wanted to make the members of the Upper House regret their stance greatly. The Pope decided to turn his frustration into a working frenzy. He spent days, weeks in his study. Just as his advisors started to get worried the Pope came out from his study once again to join his less divine fellow believers. With him, the Pope had a batch of orders that were to be carried out immediately.
An order was sent to increase the recruitment of new soldiers. New armies were to be assembled and their structure was to resemble the current. These counted 15.000 men consisting of 4 infantry regiments and a single artillery regiment. Some of the armies had 2 regiments of cavalry attached to strengthen them further.
The Papal wharfs were also ordered to reassume work, a major expansion of the navy was under way. The few admirals in the navy were pressing for more warships, as these were almost nonexistent in the Papal Navy. The Pope however wanted it different.
Nearly all of the new ships were transports, clearly the Pope had thought out some new godly plan.
The first part of the plan became clear on November 4th 1889 when the Pope decided to gift away the state of Papal Nice and Savoie both with factories running deficits.
To just gift away land to a fellow great power was not something seen before, so the world looked at the Popes actions with great disbelief. But it led to increased goodwill from the nations of the world and the Pope thought this would be of greater importance to the success of his plan, than two minor states.
The industry got a small setback from the loss of the two states but it took no lasting damage. New factory expansions were under way and the increased amount of consumers meant that there was still great potential.
The factories in the new states, Piemonte, Sardegna, Toscana and the remaning areas of Emilia still tried to get established in the Papal industry. It did not help that many of the workers from these states had been out celebrating the creation of The Kingdom of God regularly for nearly half a year. It had to end so the Pope sent some of his personal advisors to get the whole ordeal sorted out and the workers back into the factories. At the same time factories to supply the army was under construction due to a new Papal decree demanding selfsufficiency.
When the construction had finished, the new factories started to fill the warehouses in the major ports with supplies. Soon the Papal Army was gathered too, something was about to happen.
During the final months of 1890 the Papal Navy once again set out to sea. Where were they going? What godly plans had been made, is the Pope once again Popeing around?
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Notes:
September 29th 1890: Social Science was discovered as it is needed to pass women's suffrage.
The Popes new Italian domain with large but friendly nations to the north and rebel infested nations as Mediterranean neighbors.