Lothar had no intention of condemning all Latin merchants alike. That would be picking a fight with his own wallet.
Without Latin merchants, Saracen, Jewish, Copt, and Syrian merchants would merely fill the niche they left behind. Unless the problem was solved at its root, dragon slayers would one day become dragons themselves.
"Think back to then. Without the help of the Latin merchants, the First Crusade would never have succeeded. Even if it had, the Kingdom of Jerusalem would have fallen long ago."
Lothar laughed at himself. It might have been a case of burning the bridge after crossing it, but this bridge had to be burned.
If one traced things back, had Alexios not made an agreement with the Venetians, perhaps the Norman pirates of the Hauteville family would already have planted their banner atop the walls of Constantinople.
Yet it was precisely that poison-drinking bargain that had plunged the empire into irreversible ruin.
"A philosopher once said that given a hundred percent profit, capitalists would trample every law in the world. The profits these Latin merchants make from a single Mediterranean voyage are worth far more than that, aren't they? What you did was right."
Lavinia came from the early twentieth century and had seen plenty of ruthless capitalists' tricks.
People were still people. They would not change merely because the era had changed.
"Forget it. Let's not talk about this anymore."
Lothar was clearly in a good mood. These Latin merchants had grown accustomed to throwing their weight around, and even Baldwin IV had endured no small amount of their insolence. But trying to get the better of Lothar was out of the question.
His foundation was not merely the Kingdom of Jerusalem's narrow stretch of coastline, unable even to sustain itself in grain and military