Pope Augustus

After dealing with Dracula, Augustus returned to the Pope's residence, only to see that everything unloaded from the carriage had already been placed in a corner of the residence.

The vast Pope's residence, even with all the brought items placed, only occupied a small corner. Several attendants stood by, awaiting further instructions.

"Alright, this is fine here, you may go about your business."

After dismissing the attendants, Augustus began to methodically categorize the items. While categorizing, he carefully checked for any hidden objects, but found none.

Among these items, the most useful were the letters.

Augustus carried a large stack of letters to the table and quickly scanned the senders of all the letters, placing letters from the same sender together.

After the letters were divided into many stacks, there were still three relatively tall stacks, with the senders being Faol, Karl, and Duke , respectively.

It took Augustus several hours to read through all these letters.

Based on the letters, Augustus could confirm that his previous judgment of Faol was largely correct. Moreover, Augustus had severely underestimated Faol's capabilities.

From the content of the letters, Faol was very capable and insightful, especially in financial matters. Many things mentioned in the letters made Caesar feel awestruck.

It also revealed that Claude was a financial idiot like himself, and many financial problems he encountered were resolved only with Faol's help.

Without a doubt, Faol was an excellent candidate for Pope's Chamberlain.

Karl was a mid-level military officer from Austria, extremely confident in his abilities. As he said, the current high-ranking officials in Austria were all hereditary, incompetent good-for-nothings who occupied their positions without contributing.

He believed that with his ability, he should not be in his current position, but he came from a common background, and those corrupt great nobles had completely blocked all avenues of promotion, engaging in nepotism and making the Austrian army a mess.

The letter mentioned many of Karl's proud and glorious battle achievements, as well as the great nobles' indifference to his life-and-death struggles, and some recent developments in the ongoing war with the Ottoman Empire.

Karl was also a very principled person. No matter how cynical or dissatisfied he was with the higher-ups, he did not reveal any Austrian state secrets to him.

However, discussing these things in his letters to him either meant their relationship was very good, or his emotional intelligence was truly low. Or perhaps both, in which case, it was perfectly normal for those great nobles to treat him coldly.

Dukao was a squad leader of a Spanish mercenary legion, currently commanding about a thousand men.

Augustus himself held a strong prejudice against mercenaries. If they were merely profit-driven, that would be one thing, but there were also many mercenaries who took money and did not deliver.

In fact, it was no wonder; no mercenary truly wanted money more than their life. If, for a single reward, they fought tooth and nail on the battlefield, suffering heavy casualties, that would truly be an anomaly. Most mercenary battles were fought with extreme caution; preserving strength was clearly more important than making money.

When the mercenaries hired by both warring parties were of equal strength, an extremely comical scene might occur, where the fighting was practically like acting. On the surface, they were fighting, sometimes without any fatalities, eventually turning into a contest of financial power, where the side whose employer was financially exhausted first lost.

What was even more critical was that the vast majority of mercenaries had extremely poor discipline, engaging in rampant burning, killing, and looting wherever they went, often causing widespread public resentment. However, the victims dared not speak out, and the mess ultimately had to be cleaned up by the employers themselves.

Moreover, it was easy to invite a god but difficult to send him away. Before receiving their next job, mercenaries would often squat at their former employer's home and refuse to leave. Most employers were helpless; if they could easily defeat them, they wouldn't have needed to hire them in the first place.

There were also cases where mercenaries switched sides mid-battle because the opposing side offered more, or killed their employer and looted everything because the employer couldn't pay enough, or took the money and fled when they couldn't defeat the enemy.

However, in an era where the conscription system was very imperfect, many countries had no choice but to rely on mercenaries. Even if mercenaries were terrible, they were still professional soldiers, and when fighting against temporarily conscripted peasant soldiers, they could be devastating.

Although there were a very few mercenary legions with excellent reputations, you get what you pay for. High-quality mercenary groups were not affordable for everyone, which only fueled the arrogance of those mercenary groups.

Duke was definitely an anomaly among mercenaries. Although his background was far from noble, he possessed a strong knightly spirit. Few genuine nobles fell to become mercenaries. Even if there were nobles, they were fallen nobles, and nobles who descended to such a state were often more rogue than actual rogues.

Duke could not influence the decisions of his superiors, so he could only strive to be loyal to every employer, leading from the front in battle and having a very effective method of training his troops. His troops were well-disciplined and extremely powerful in combat.

Many employers of their mercenary legion came specifically because of his reputation. However, in one bloody battle after another, his unit, which was originally the largest in terms of numbers among the various squads, became the smallest, its influence gradually declined, and it had less and less say.

He utterly despised the other squad leaders for slacking off in battle and oppressing civilians, and those squad leaders, in turn, disdained him. Everyone was a mercenary, so who was to look down on whom? Knightly spirit was something for nobles to show off their superiority; what did a mercenary need it for? Over time, their relationships became very strained, and they each went their separate ways.

The other letters also gave Caesar a good understanding of his current identity.

Although he belonged to the Medici Family, a prominent family in the Italian region and even throughout Europe, he was from a very distant collateral branch, never even invited to family dinners. The only contact between them was symbolic letter exchanges of mutual well wishes during holidays, and nothing more.

From the letters, Augustus also learned that he had an extremely wide circle of acquaintances, ranging from emperors and generals to peddlers and commoners, all of whom he corresponded with.

However, it was almost certain that all these people were mere acquaintances. All the letters were filled with humble and respectful terms, as well as many seemingly superfluous modifiers like 'dear,' 'respected,' 'noble,' 'wise,' and 'kind,' which made one's scalp tingle.

Even Karl and Duke, who corresponded with him frequently, might not have met him many times. Frequent correspondence should only have been out of appreciation for their abilities and character, and sympathy for their plight, rather than a truly close relationship.

Therefore, to further understand his own situation, there was currently only one person who could help him, and that was Faol.