King Pedro of Portugal

These are very interesting posts - thank you for sharing.

I can't add much to Portugal-specific comments, but might be able to add something on national treasuries and the problems of raising money.

Nations were short of cash for several reasons, not least the difficulty of assessing and collecting tax and losses due to corruption or tax monopolies. Improvements came more from spending the money better (reducing embezzlement, e.g. Pepys and the English Navy) than raising more. A good book to try is A Popular History of Taxation by James Coffield (ISBN 0-582-10411-4), published 1970 it is still useful as an introduction. It tries to give a general treatment starting in Ancient Rome, but it mainly focusses on England with a few chapters on the US. England benefitted by various reforms in the late 1600s which made it easier to raise money to pay taxes, not least the Bank of England.

Elsewhere on the continent of Europe things were far worse. Most larger nations (Spain, France) had regional parliaments or assemblies which jealously guarded their historical privileges. The nobility saw themselves as collectors of tax, but avoided changes to their privileges so they would have to pay tax. To get around that monarchs had to be very inventive and made tax codes complicated. In France the inability to reform the tax system was a major cause of Louis XV's problems and directly led to the revolution. Louis XIV's minister Colbert, did manage to push through some reforms, but tax riots were still common, particularly over the hated gabelle (salt tax) which was particularly regressive. The situation was no better in most German states, despite their smaller size. After Franche-Comte became part of France its local assembly at Besancon still clung on to serfdom until just before the revolution.

There was a lot of wealth around, but the first challenge was agreeing in principle how it could be taxed. For an economy primarily based on agriculture it is very difficult (it isn't much easier today). Consider the case of a sheep farmer: typical problem - a sheep farmer should look to maximise the number of sheep he has in his flock so that over time his flock grows; he 'reinvests' in his flock by only killing the minimum number he has to, and of course there is a problem selling part of a sheep to raise cash unless it is dead. Then there are the administrative issues: if he decided to eat one of his own sheep, then should he be taxed on the value of that sheep? Not in 1700. Neither could he be taxed on the number of new lambs born - as he didn't have the cash available to pay any tax and the lambs might suddenly die of natural causes just before the date of assessment. If he was taxed on the sale of lambs at market, then was he able to offset the cost of lambs which had died? How did he calculated the cost of feeding the lambs when they grazed on land he owned? Of course, nobles did have income which could be taxed, but this came from tenants paying rent rather than from farming the land directly. Thus the irony that instead of building their flocks up, tenants were forced to sell their own lambs to receive cash to pay the nobles rent (a more easily taxed source of income) who could then subsidize their own flocks and avoid paying tax over to the government.

The problem of taxing sheep is an old one. See www.bahs.org.uk/02n1a3.pdf for an idea of the debate in England (1549); in the end they went through various ideas including a poll tax on sheep (big problems counting the sheep at a time when they couldn't even agree on how many people were in a parish), a tax based on acreage (various objections to grazing density and sheep which wandered about), before deciding it was easier to stick with a tax on wool sales instead. It is a good read if you are interested in that kind of thing.

I don't know how the great complexity of the tax system of the time could be replicated in the game, and I for one am quite relieved that I don't have to dream up new forms of tax to inflict on the people.

I find the history of taxation very illuminating - the same questions of principle keep coming up today!

It isn't difficult to imagine the rich landowners in Parliament deciding that they could offset the tax on sheep against the tax on goods (thereby subsidising their own tax payments), then running into difficulty with implementation. Page 18 about resistance in the North Riding of Yorkshire rings particularly true: "If the North Riding returns represent what the parish priest and the honest men of the vllage found that midsummer, they must have been men who did not know a sheep when they saw one. Only 4 or 5 villages in each wapentake were represented at all, and in these the flocks consisted of 100 sheep or less". Poor parish priest - didn't he have enough to do? These same men who were prepared to go to war over 'religion', were unwilling (surely not unable) to identify a sheep. Also, when the tax was finally declared unworkable and monies ordered to be returned they seemed to have difficulty doing this as well! In the end the tax refunded was greater than collected (p20/22). Finally we are reminded that the first successful census of people wasn't until 1801, and of sheep 1866. Where would we be in LGDR without a population census?

Before being too hard on the nobility, though, perhaps we should remember that at the time they were responsible for looking after the poor in parishes themselves without any aid from the state, so I suppose that up to a point they could have felt justified in resisting new taxes.