Pavlos enters the Diet with a disgruntled look on his face.

Senators of the Roman Empire!

I am not a great speaker and I usuall don't speak in front of you, but I have to speak up against the falsehoods laid against me by Megas Ksanthopoulos in his last report.

First, my army is bloody well not made up entirely of mercenaries. There are some Saracen bastards, that's true, and some Armenian rabble that thinks it can shoot a bow and I have opted to give Ioannsi Kantakouzinos the company of Armenian cavalry to travel through enemy territory. But the rest of my army is in fact made up of true Roman soldiers!

Secondly, I have offered the Megas the same thing you can now find in my Orders thread during the last season. You can see for yourself that the recruitment cost for those men I asked for would be lower than the wages I have to pay the mercenaries every year! So the Megas had my permission to supply me with a cheaper army but chose not to.

It was his decision and not mine that I still have those mercenaries under my command! Don't accuse me of things I haven't done!