Volume 3 Chapter 164 - Traffic jam (1/2)

When leaving the City Lord Manor, it was already close to noon.

Xu Yi looked at the sky and thought that since he had just come back, he had to go back to the Falling Star Manor today to enjoy lunch with Still. Since he didn’t have time to visit anyone, he got into his horse carriage and headed to the Falling Star Manor.

As he swayed with the horse carriage on the road, Xu Yi thought about the answer Seveni had just given him.

In theory, there were no limits to a noble’s private army because the parliament and the Royal Parliament didn’t put any limitations on this.

Because if one carefully analyzed the structure of the Lampuri Kingdom, they would find that the entire Lampuri Kingdom was just a group of large nobles.

As for the royal family, they were just the strongest noble family.

The army that the royal family had was the strongest in the kingdom, so the royal family controlled the largest influence in the kingdom and the head of the royal family was the one who was king.

If one day the royal family couldn’t keep this superiority, it was very likely they would be replaced by another large noble family and the ruler would change.

This wasn’t that different from the history of earth, but it wasn’t as open as it was in the Lampuri Kingdom.

On the Sines Continent, other than some small duchies and small countries, all the other countries, including the Candra and Marlow Empires all had this same system. So Xu Yi’s problem didn’t seem to be a problem for Seveni.

Of course, this only existed in theory.

First, the most important issue was cost.

To build an army, it wasn’t as simple as bringing men together to create a private army.

This army would be a motley crew without any strength.

If one wanted strength, they needed soldiers of a certain quality.

The Lampuri Kingdom didn’t have a high population and the living conditions have never been good, so there weren’t enough people physically capable of being soldiers, decreasing the quality of the Lampuri Kingdom’s armies. Even the strongest northern army had no more than thirty thousand people.

Second, there had to be enough supplies.

A single soldier other than their personal quality needed equipment to increase their battle strength.

To guarantee that a soldier always had this, one had to give corresponding supplies and at least let the soldier eat their fill.

The investment in this would be without a doubt very terrifying.

The Lampuri Kingdom’s royal army had less than fifty thousand people, but they spent over three hundred thousand gold coins in military expenses each year.

This investment was already considered very low.

Not only could it compare to the Sack Kingdom, it was even worse than the smaller countries like the Drake Duchy.

There was no other way since the Lampuri Kingdom was poor before.

So that meant that to have a limitless army, you had to have limitless funds to invest.

Of course this was impossible. So for the second strongest Stagg Family after the royal family, they only had three thousand people in their private army.

Of course, how many soldiers the Stagg Family really had was not an accurate answer.

But if one was bold with their calculations, it would be at most five thousand people.

Because even if the Stagg Family is willing to invest, there was another important question other than the costs which was suppression from the royal family.

Since the Lampuri Kingdom’s political system decided that the strongest family was the royal family, the royal family had to strictly limit the private armies of the other nobles.

Although through the unwritten rules among nobles and the customs of the Sines Continent, the royal family couldn’t force the Royal Parliament to make a decision and limit the amount of troops a noble had, as the family that had the most power in the kingdom, the royal family naturally had countless methods to achieve this.

For example, Lampuri Thirteenth once gave a decree on the grounds of protecting the kingdom that the large nobles had to send a certain amount of their private armies to the northern army, to defend against the Sack Kingdom.

The northern army had a high casualty rate, so if they sent a portion of their army, the bigger the private army, the higher the loss of the nobles.

So with the other methods of the royal family, the armies of the nobles in the Lampuri Kingdom were gradually stabilized.

For an army like the Stagg Family’s that had three thousand soldiers, it was already the kingdom’s highest standard.

The other nobles of the kingdom had around two thousand soldiers.

For a trivial viscount like Xu Yi……

Want to own a private army? Are you crazy?