G: Gamomania & Gabelle: Unlikely marriages and taxes in the Free City of Jubulon

Gamomania: Noun. An obsession with issuing odd marriage proposals.
Gabelle. Noun. A tax on salt.

Taxes (as well as being an unavoidable part of life) have had many effects on economy, life and history as large. It also seems to have played a strange effect on people’s private lives in the Free City of Jubylon with families . At a certain point shortly after the founding, the City sought to protect it’s export gains of sea salt by taxing the sale of salt with an increase of an additional quarter to the price of any salt above one cup sold within the city per week. The same tax applied in a sense to the seller, who had to return a quarter of the profit to the City.

As the Free City (supposedly) faced the ocean, salt was fairly easy to produce, but the City wanted as close as possible to a monopoly on the sale and export of salt. For one reason that remains lost to history, that tax did not apply to married couples, who only had to pay the tax for every pound of salt. Which meant that suddenly, being married was a clear economic prospect for fishers, boatmakers and other people who lived near the harbour and for whom salt making was not only a second job, but often also what made it possible for them to put money aside for savings. That means that certain families were founded due to that salt tax. At one point, when the export of salt was the easiest form of upward social mobility, there was a explosion of marriage proposals and marriages of (more or less) convenience because to the new couples, they could both sell salt for export and make a significant amount of extra money for not a lot of work.

A lot of these marriages obviously ended in divorces later on (some after two weeks). But what this also means, is that we (again supposedly) have later famous families like Bootmann-Matroos (where the original couple’s great-grand son found fame as one of the impromptu leaders of the defence of the City. Including using unorthodox means like the chemical weapon Cobra), Handler-Zeehond (a name carried by a great deal of the librarians in the Great Library of Jubylon) and most famously Fischer-Marinkår. Their marriage was originally described as one of ultimate convenience, when Eliza Fischer and Johannes Marinkår found that what they lacked in romance, they made up for in economic partnership. They used their original profit from the sale of salt, invested it in stocks, sold them and then brought land that turned out to be rich in copper, with a fair amount of iron and a few gold ores. They increased their profits to several hundreds times more at the course of their lives. According to our records, they often said more or less jokingly that every of their four children was born nine months after a particular good deal was made, because that was when they had time and energy to celebrate! They retired early, left the business to their oldest to run and brought a manor. In the lobby was supposed hung a tablet of solid gold, carrying the full legal text of the salt tax, an intentionally vulgar symbol of making the most of what you have.