As long as the Harvest Church added theology and morality to the required curriculum, Franz would be a living saint.
Besides compulsory education, the bandits in the Transylvanian mountains were a real nuisance.
At this time, the cost of sending troops into the mountains to suppress bandits was too high. Transylvania was full of mountains, and wiping out a band of a few hundred bandits often required tens of thousands of troops. Once you factored in the economic losses caused by blocking roads through the forests, the price was astronomical.
Simply put, it wasn't worth it. A few hundred bandits could do only limited damage, while the cost of deploying tens of thousands of regular troops far exceeded the losses those bandits could inflict.
(Thanks to the influence of certain sensational TV dramas, quite a few people believed that bandits lived by robbery and spent every day in a whirl of blades and blood. In reality, robbing merchant caravans and plundering villages were rare.
Most of the time, bandits in this era made their living through the relatively safe "business" of kidnapping for ransom, extortion, and collecting protection money. Some even farmed, hunted, and traded with merchant caravans.
Some threw in their lot with local nobles and gentry, acting as their enforcers. Others were simply hired thugs.)
By then, under the Austrian Empire's military campaign, the number of bandits in Transylvania had fallen by more than 50 percent, and incidents of looting had dropped by 98 percent. Bandits had vanished entirely from the Hungarian Plain.
Some people suggested that it might be time to stop and devote their money and energy to more meaningful pursuits. After all, Austria was in the midst of an all-out building boom, and money and manpower were needed everywhere.
Some had long been unhappy that