Behind the bounty
For more than twenty years of publication, readers had no idea what Dracule Mihawk was worth. He did have a bounty: before the title he was known as the Marine Hunter, and according to the Vivre Card he is the only Warlord whose original frozen bounty has never been shown. The greatest swordsman alive, a Warlord from before the story even started, he lived for years alone in a ruined castle on Kuraigana, out of the Navy's reach: a Warlord's bounty is suspended for as long as he holds the title.
The Levely ended the arrangement. When the World Government dissolved the system, every former Warlord's bounty was back in force overnight, and a Marine fleet came to lay siege to Kuraigana. Mihawk was delighted at first to be a wanted man again, then tired of the constant attacks and took Crocodile up on his offer. The amount that follows, 3,590,000,000 berries, was revealed in the same breath as the founding of Cross Guild.
That figure puts him above every other ex-Warlord except Blackbeard, above any Supernova, and above two of the four Emperors. Until Cross Guild, he had no crew, no territory and no fleet behind him.
The irony is hard to miss. Among Cross Guild's top three, Mihawk carries the heaviest bounty, yet it's Buggy — at 3,189,000,000 — whom the Government elevated to Emperor and treated as the face of the operation. The world's strongest swordsman is, on paper, taking orders from a clown who only half understands what he's running.
For Roronoa Zoro the figure does something more concrete: it measures the gap. Zoro's own 1,111,000,000 doesn't reach a third of it — and it was Mihawk himself who, on Kuraigana during the two-year timeskip, taught him to coat his blades in Haki.
