Captain Hog's Career as a Maritime Merchant

As the Crusaders moved into Alexandria, the forces of Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox Church rapidly filled the ecological niche left vacant by Zoroastrianism. The Catholic forces were ordinary enough, while the Eastern Orthodox faction had been sent from Constantinople.

Both sides brought large numbers of clerks with them, and Lothar unceremoniously requisitioned them all, such as the former church scribe serving as Andreas's attendant.

The fledgling Egyptian Crusader Kingdom lacked a great many administrative talents. It was not only Lothar who lacked them; even the Eastern Empire, the only state in medieval Europe that had once possessed a centralized bureaucratic system, lacked them. With the theme system collapsing and being replaced by the mutated fief system of Pronia, the Eastern Empire's original system for training and selecting bureaucrats was also difficult to rebuild.

This was also why so many free cities emerged in Europe later on. The lords simply had no idea how to govern a city, so they might as well issue a charter to merchants, hand over the city's administration, and sit back to reap the rewards.

Once the urban upper classes steadily grew stronger, they would kick out their original lords and become so-called free cities.

Therefore, Lothar would never entrust the three crucial coastal cities of Alexandria, Damietta, and Semannud to others. Even if he faced countless difficulties, he had to bring them under direct rule.

Alexandria was especially crucial. By now, all four of its districts had set up rudimentary public security offices, each staffed with as many as a hundred mounted constables and even more local militia responsible for maintaining order.

At the local level, the heads of each neighborhood were also registered with the security offices. On one hand, they were granted some authority over local security and ordered to form "mutual