Andrew Janssen wrote: > Well, I looked on the Internet, and couldn't find any information about > medieval government revenues to use as a base for ballparking Sedonia's > total government revenue. I did find, however, a section from Gibbon's > _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ that gave information on early > Roman government revenues. > See http://gd.cnread.net/cnread1/ewjd/g/gibbon/hor/020.htm for the source. I get gd.cnread.net could not be found. > Anyway, I can now set an upper and lower bound for Sedonia's revenues. > Note that this is for all sources, taxes, tarriffs, government > monopolies, etc. I use divide government revenues into taxes, fees, tariffs, and tribute. Taxes are collected from individuals based on what they own. Fees are collected from individuals based on what they do. Tariffs are collected on goods sold, internal tariffs are usually known as government monopolies, but the principle is the same. Tribute is collected from conquered people or foreign governments. > The original estimate of 19.2 million Imperials per year is, as I > suspected, a lowball. Based on the information from Gibbon, Imperial > Rome's revenues were equivalent to between 75 million and 200 million > Imperials per year. Imperial Rome was about 3 times larger in both area > and population than Sedonia. Dividing the Roman numbers by 3, Sedonian > government revenues most likely fall somewhere between a lower limit of > 25 million Imperials and an upper limit of 66 million Imperials. It sounds to me like 20 million is still a good estimate for taxes. I tend to ignore the other three factors because they aren't very important to _individuals_, which is who I run my games for. As a rule of thumb, it looks likes taxes = fees = tariffs = tribute. A handy thing to know. > For simplicity's sake, I'm going to take the mean of 45.5 million > Imperials as being the typical amount of revenue collected by the > Sedonian government per year given normal economic conditions. This > works out to about 2.14 Imperials per capita. > > If Mir, Torphan, Burcancy, and Kaeir were to collect revenues at the > same per capita rate, their total revenues would be: > > | Mir | 5.4 million Imperials | > | Torphan | 74.8 million Imperials | > | Burcancy | 2.0 million Imperials | > | Kaeir | 1.4 million Imperials | > > Torphan's numbers are likely close to accurate, but Mir, Burcancy, and > Kaeir almost certainly collect more revenue per capita than 2.14 > Imperials (especially Mir and Kaeir). ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, send mail to celandra-off@phoenyx.net.
