The financial administration of the government offered few complications, because the obligations on the state in the way of expenses were most limited. The chief item in the imperial budget, which preserved the personal and household character of the Merovingian period, was for the maintenance of the royal palaces, for the presents made by the king to churches, to foreign princes, or to the great officers of the Empire. Direct taxes were of the capitation type, graded according to the position of the individual taxed. The ordinary fiscal resources were made up from the income of the King from his own estates, from tributes paid by vassal nations, from war booty, obligatory annual gifts, and indirect taxes. The revenue from the royal estates, which were excellently managed, was considerable, and there must have been a large sum credited to the account of booty from the various successful wars. The “benevolences,” to use a term familiar in the constitutional and financial history of England, were not fixed, and the records speak in an indefinite way of the contribution offered by faithful subjects of the Empire in the annual assemblies. But it is plain that these so-called gifts included precious stones and valuable fabrics, as well as gold and silver. The principal indirect taxes were in the form of personal service, rather than in money payments. Local taxation meant special work on roads, bridges, and making dikes. For the great bridge at Mainz, labor was called for from many localities, because it was an imperial work, intended for the common benefit of the whole Empire. Transportation dues are frequently mentioned in the Carolingian laws, as well as the right of “lodging,” by which the inhabitants of a community were obliged to lodge and entertain the King and his officials on their travels, and to receive the representatives of foreign powers and others, to whom the royal privilege was given. A bishop, for example, had the right to receive forty loaves a day, three lambs, three measures of ale, a gallon of milk, three chickens, fifteen eggs, and four measures of feed for his horses. The greatest difficulties of the government were not financial, but military, for the state of warfare was almost continuous, especially along the Alps, the Pyrenees, and from the Eider to the lower Danube. The summons for calling together the units of the military forces was either carried by means of direct envoys or by letters sent to the counts, bishops, and abbots, and sometimes by the “missi.” These officials had to see that all those who were liable to service should be prepared to take their places when the call to arms was given. One of the “missi” writes: “let all be so prepared that, if the order to leave comes in the evening, they will leave without delay for Italy on the morning of the next day, but if it comes in the morning, in the evening of the same day.”