This is the second part (I, IIa) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are recruited, raised, equipped and paid. While I hope this will be of great interest to the history nerds out there, I’ve opted to structure this specifically as a service for the worldbuilders out there, making useful rules of thumb for imagining fantastical societies.
Last week, we laid out some basic groundwork questions for our underlying society and then discussed what I’ve called recruitment principles – the social justifications for military service. And as we saw, some of those principles are going to fit some societies a lot better than others: a society’s recruitment principles (remember, they may use different principles for different groups!) are generally going to map fairly directly onto the society’s own peacetime organization.
That said while those principles provide the justification to get and keep fighters under arms, what they do not do is actually organize the process – what we might call the mobilization process. Mobilization processes are often a step in the road to war that are glided over in relative silence in both historical treatments of real events and speculative fiction about made up wars, but it turns out that the process of getting thousands of men from their homes to a muster point, organized and ready to fight is a very complex one. And, as we’ll see the recruitment principle often heavily impacts the mobilization method and both are tied deeply into underlying social structures.
So that’s what we’re going to look at today: how do you get these men from their homes to the army, sort them into units and make sure they have the equipment they need to fight. As we’ll see, the primary problem pre-modern polities (states and non-states alike) face in doing this is managing such a complex process with such a limited administrative apparatus.
Now for both length and time (this post alone is swiftly approaching 6,000 words) I’ve had to split this up, so this week we’re going to look at the shape of the problem and the two most minimalistic approaches to the problem: ‘self-recruitment’ (entitlement-based recruitment where most of the burden is shifted to the men serving) and retinue-of-retinue systems (where recruit is done by Big Men in a non-state system). The next week we’ll look at the three other models I have in mind: brigading households together to provide recruits, shifting the adminsitrative burden onto military contractors and finally professional soldiers of both the volunteer and compelled varieties.
But first, as always, recruiting and maintaining large pre-modern armies is expensive! Much like many of those pre-modern armies, this project is supported by devolving the costs of my ruinous book-buying habit on to recruits readers. You can help by spreading the word to new readers and by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
(Bibliography Note: What I am presenting here is a series of models, which is to say simplified classifications of more complex systems. For each model then, I do generally have one or two specific core systems (that is, specific historical mobilization systems) in mind, with the idea that the model in turn encompasses more systems than just those. Nevertheless, I want the reader to recognize the generalization going on here! The ‘core’ systems for each model and some further reading on them are as follows. For the ‘self-recruitment’ model, my core systems here are the Middle Roman Republic and classical Greek poleis armies ; I also reference the late medieval town militias of the low countries and their Schuttersgilde, on which see L. Crombie, Archery and Crossbow Guilds in Medieval Flanders, 1300-1500 (2016). For Big-Men based recruitment, my core models are pre-Roman Gaul and post-Carolingian France (on the latter, see J.F. Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages (1954) and C. Rogers, Soldiers’ Lives Through History: The Middle Ages (2007); note also for England D. Simpkin, The English Aristocracy at War: From the Welsh Wars of Edward I to the Battle of Bannockburn (2008). For the brigaded-households-and-local-officials model, I was thinking especially in terms of the Anglo-Saxon fyrd and the Carolingian levy system; on the latter see B. Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare: Prelude to Empire (2001) and G. Halsall, Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West 450-900 (2003). For the ‘contractors’ model, I was thinking very much of early modern European armies, on which see inter alia G. Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567-1659: The Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries’ Wars (1972, 2nd ed. 2004) and L. Staiano-Daniels’ The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War (2024). For ‘professionals and prisoners’ as a model I was thinking in terms of the Roman army of the early and high imperial period and (especially for the prisoners bit) the army of the Song Dynasty; on the latter see E. Alyagon, Inked: Tattooed Soldiers and the Song Empire’s Penal Military Complex (2023).
I encourage worldbuilders using this series, once they’ve figured out what sort of system their fictional society is likely to have, to read one or more books focused on the details of specific systems in that category to get a sense of how they function at more detail than the generalizations here.)
The Shape of the Problem
I want to start by getting a sense of the shape and scale of the coordination problem here. Pre-modern field armies vary in size but they typically start in the high single-digit thousands (e.g. ~8,000 English at Agincourt) and quickly move into the low tens of thousands. At least in the broader Mediterranean world, logistical limits tend to cause armies to ‘cap out’ between 80,000 and 100,000, though such large armies cannot be maintained in once place for very long without riverine or sea-based logistics. And that’s the number of combat effectives; we ought to assume at least something like 1 non-combatant per every 4 combatants (often more). A standard Roman field army in the Middle Republic was right around 20,000 soldiers, with probably 5,000 (or more) non-combatants) and something like 10,000 animals split more-or-less evenly between mules and horses.
Now in a history textbook, the process of gathering such an army is often just glossed over with, ‘so and so raised an army.’ And fair enough – our sources generally treat the raising of an army like that too. Livy, for instance, writing about the years from 218 to 167, generally glosses over the annual raising of Rome’s armies in just a few sentences, noting the total Roman dispositions for that year (though interestingly, Polybius, writing for a non-Roman audience, describes the process in depth). Our sources do this because they assume their readers largely know what the process of raising an army looks like because these societies do that regularly.
Fictional works often do the same: the war begins and the king dramatically declares, “raise the army!” or “call the banners!” and then it mostly just happens. Maybe there is something in there about sending messages.
But consider the complexity of the operation here: you need tens of thousands of men who are currently living in their homes (without access to any kind of modern rapid or mass communication) to find out they have been selected (remember, many of them may not be able to read and you do not have a postal system anyway), then to transit to a muster point, acquire their arms, armor and other equipment (which they may not already have!), divide into workable units for command and organization, have leaders selected and then pitch the army’s first camp.
If you have ever organized so much as a small sports club, MMO guild or RPG group, I imagine you are right now breaking into a cold sweat at the idea of trying to coordinate tens of thousands of people for something like that. Crucially many of whom probably do not want to be there and will thus look for any excuse to be absent or late.
As noted, a lot of speculative fiction just sort of lets this process work ‘off screen’ so to speak. After that, the next most common assumption is to have the process work the way a modern administrative state would do mobilization: either by mass hiring volunteer professionals (we’ll get to how a pre-modern state does that below) or with mass conscription. So you have figures that resemble recruiting officers walking into villages with lists of names of fellows that are to be conscripted, implying – among other things – that the kingdom is keeping a full and accurate name-by-name census of the entire male population. Very few pre-modern states were capable of this – the fact that Rome did this for much of Italy during the Republic was legitimately impressive to later rulers! – and obviously non-state polities (including vassalage based ones) aren’t going to be able to do this. The parish registers that represent the very beginnings of modern European census systems mostly date to the early modern period (though there were older systems, as we’ll see below, that replicated parts of this approach).
That scenario also assumes the state is maintaining conscription officers. As we’ll see, there might be people in that role (though sometimes not!), but large numbers of full-time recruiters distributed evenly across a large kingdom was typically a bureaucratic demand most pre-modern societies simply could not meet. Remember, in societies where upwards of 90% of the population is engaged in subsistence, the supply of highly literate bureaucrats is very limited. Instead pre-modern societies have to use the social structures and officials they have to facilitate mobilization – unlike a modern state, they generally cannot afford to create a parallel bureaucracy for the purpose.
Finally and crucially centralized conscription assumes the state is supplying the weapons. I think many modern readers finds this surprising, but it is worth stressing: it is quite unusual for pre-modern states to directly supply arms and armor for most of their armies. We’ll loop back around to this problem from another direction next week when we talk about paying for all of this, but the financial and more importantly administrative demands of full state supply of equipment exceeds the capability of most pre-modern states (and functionally all pre-modern non-state polities).
Consider, for instance, what it would mean to manage state issue for an army of 40,000 men: 40,000 shields, spears, and swords, along with cuirasses and helmets, the latter two complicated by the fact that they have to fit the fellows in question. Taking something like the Macedonian phalangite’s kit (on the low-end of labor intensity for a heavy infantryman), that’s probably a couple thousand hours of labor time per man (so c. 80 million labor-hours total),1 which then needs to be stored. The sarisae (or if you prefer a smaller weapon, spears) if lined up standing upright in racks might run in a single row some 2000 meters, side to side. In short you’d need enormous centralized storage and production facilities which would need to be built, maintained and guarded. Someone would need to regularly inventory all of that.
It’s clear that some pre-modern states did some of that! During the Imperial period, some Roman equipment was state issued and it seems like Carthage’s North African and citizen troops may have been equipped out of state-run armories. Wealthy European medieval rulers might likewise display their wealth by equipping their retinue in their own livery out of a personal armory, though most soldiers were not so equipped. But such centralized systems tend to be both rare and relatively limited. By and large the only way most pre-modern polities could handle the administrative and financial strain of equipping their armies was to devolve the costs, either to individual soldiers or local communities or smaller aristocrats. They simply lacked either the revenues of the administration to do this centrally.
In short, the kind of full bureaucratic centralization of this process is rarely possible, especially for large states covering a lot of territory. Instead, as we’ll see, the key to effective recruitment is almost always some kind of devolution or fragmentation, pushing the demands of organization and bureaucracy downward away from the central government, where the scope of the problem is more manageable.
So let’s look at some ‘model’ versions of historical systems and see how they work. I should stress these are models, which is to say idealized and simplified. Any kind of ‘general history’ of the sort I am doing here incurs that cost and so I want to note that up front. Now these models are based on something – in each case I typically have a system I know at least reasonably well in mind as the ‘core’ of the conceptual model with a mind towards other systems that also fit. Nevertheless, each of those systems would demand a monograph treatment to fully discuss and the model covers multiple systems. So please keep in mind if you want to understand these systems in full detail, you need to read on them (bibliography above).
At the same time, also note how different models seem to fit more easily into different recruitment principles which in turn fit differently into different kinds of societies and you start to get a sense of how the structure of the underlying society in a lot of cases is going to dictate – or at least heavily influence – what systems are used to raise armies.
In practice, each of these systems is providing an answer to who handles the administrative demands of assembling and equipping large numbers of men: do you have the recruits do it themselves? Do you have local aristocrats do it? Do you have local officials do it? Or do you employ private contractors?
Self-Mobilization
We can start with perhaps the easiest model: what if our soldiers recruited themselves?
We’ve actually discussed one of these sorts of systems in depth: the Roman dilectus. On the one hand, military conscription in the Roman Republic was legally mandatory, with severe punishments for draft dodging. On the other hand, there was very little enforcement capacity and Roman citizens were expected to navigate the system themselves. Readers are invited to read the linked post above for the details, but in short the process went thusly: near the start of every year the Republic raised new armies and refilled old ones (this could also be done mid-year on an emergency basis). Citizens of military age were required to present themselves in Rome for the selection process (called the dilectus), where officials (the military tribunes) would call up each of Rome’s voting tribes one by one and then call out the names of the recruits who would then take the military oath.
Then recruits were told to assemble on another day to be split into units before being sent home to get the weapons their assignment demanded, before finally being expected to present themselves one last time on the appointed muster date when the army pitches its first camp and fully organizes as an army. And that process is based on the Roman census (which lists, by tribe, everyone eligible for service and their age and property (which determines how they serve)), which is self-reported.
So the system largely relies on individual Romans doing most of the world: self-reporting for the census, then proactively showing up to the dilectus, then attending the division into units, then getting their own equipment, then showing up at the final muster.
The Roman census worked functionally on the honor system. What encouraged Romans not to under-report their wealth was the strong social status tied to wealth holding and property: to under-report your property to try to dodge military service meant accepting the shame of being poor in front of friends and neighbors and it also meant diminished political voice.
The Roman system is hardly the only one to work like this: the impression we get, for instance, of polis hoplite armies is that they are relatively similar: when the assembly votes for war, the citizenry (who are both the assembly and the hoplites) are expected to arm themselves, gather by census unit (sometimes tribe (phyle) or neighborhood (deme)) and join the muster largely on their own initiative. In both cases there are draconian penalties for failure to join the muster, but often with very limited enforcement mechanisms: the system can enforce penalties against one or two shirkers, but not against a coordinated wave of draft resistance among the citizenry. That’s what makes the vote in the assembly so important: by having a majority of the citizenry decide for war in the first place, it ensures ample public support for the self-recruitment that needs to follow.
Now naturally, this is a great system if you can use it: minimal bureaucratic overhead, easy to administer (because it administers itself) and you have a lot of flexibility in how to structure the units you recruit, being able to either split them up by neighborhoods to put neighbors next to each other for greater cohesion (the typical Greek approach) or splitting them into units of regular size for tactical convenience (the Roman, but also Macedonian and Spartan approach).
What I want to note of course is that most societies cannot raise armies this way. I focus here of course on Greek and Roman armies raised in this manner, but you also see this sort of self-recruitment in the armies of medieval town and Italian communes. You may immediately notice some commonalities: these are urban societies, generally structured around a single major city center. They’re also relatively small (except for the Roman Republic, which is exceptional in pulling off this kind of system at scale).
That small size matters because this system relies – because it lacks lots of enforcement officers – on social peer pressure to get recruits to show up. Men show up to the muster because they would be ashamed not to, which only works if they know their friends, family and neighbors will notice their absence and that only works in a fairly small community. The larger the community, the less those ties work.
Finally, these fellows can arm themselves, which means they have a certain amount of personal property, wealth and income. Now it isn’t surprising that aristocrats might be able to do that, but we’re talking about recruitment below the level of the aristocracy – aristocrats alone are generally not enough to build an army around. So these societies also need to have a large propertied class below the aristocracy who nevertheless can defend their wealth (defend in the sense that they can keep from having it all taxed away, extracted with rents and so on – they have enough political power to resist the encroachment by the elite). That can mean a large body of freeholding farmers (the bulk of the citizens of the Roman Republic, or Greek poleis), or it can mean an urban population of skilled workers and artisans (the burghers of many medieval towns and communes) or some mix of the two.
But perhaps most importantly these are all entitlement principle recruitment systems. Systems of self-recruitment like this work because military service is tightly bound to membership in the community which comes with political rights one of which is some kind of right to decide on if the community goes to war or not (that may be a counted vote, but it may also be a collective affirmation, the sort of thing where the sources will say, “and then the men of [town] said with one voice, “Yes!”). As you may imagine in many political systems, the authorities (like a king) are not going to be willing to devolve that kind of political power, even if it lets them raise armies really efficiently.
Notice how political power plays two roles here: it provides the entitlement principle incentive to get these guys into the army but it is also how they ‘defend’ their wealth from the aristocrats which gives them the spare surplus income to afford weapons and armor. In short, in these entitlement system regimes, the ‘middle’ of society (it isn’t quite right to call them a middle class) has enough political power to limit extraction which both enables them to serve (because they can afford the gear, typically heavy infantry gear) but also incentivizes service because military service is bound up with that political power: they fight because they vote and they vote because they fight.
It’s worth noting, societies with these forms of militaries generally have few ‘full time’ soldiers hanging around. MMORPGs and fantasy worlds alike love their ‘local village guards,’ but these societies are calling up the citizen-militia to deal with specific problems on an ad hoc basis. There may be some sort of permanent order-keeping force (Classical Athens had its enslaved Scythian bowmen) or part-time volunteer city watch (one of the roles of the Schuttersgilde in the towns of the Low Countries), but for the most part a lot of the ‘law and order’ functions we’d expect police to perform here are going to be performed by the citizens, who after all can become the army at pretty short notice.
So when we’re thinking self-recruitment, we’re thinking generally entitlement based systems which are typically city-states (or the Roman Republic) which can rely on peer pressure to get men to show up to the muster because of their small, tight-knit citizen bodies (or small tight-knit sub-units, like those demes or – for the Romans – the tribes (tribus)) and which devolve a fair amount of political power to the infantry class that makes up the bulk of their armies (which is to say, to the freeholding farmer class below the aristocracy) who are thus able to preserve enough personal wealth to arm themselves. The small community element also makes the necessary record keeping – keeping track of who is a full member of the community and required to serve – more manageable.
Needless to say, these sorts of citizen communities are not the most common type and tend to remain small. The Roman Republic is astoundingly unusual in being a super-duper-jumbo version of this kind of community and there is a whole chapter in Of Arms and Men (forthcoming) on how exactly they managed that. For the most part, this sort of self-organizing system tends to be limited to small, fairly tight-knit urban communities that either have states or are fairly close to developing them.
Aristocrats, Clients and Retinues
Another option, particularly for non-state societies – we may include here ‘tribal’ agrarian polities, vassalage-based polities and nomadic pastoralists, inter alia – is to channel recruitment through local aristocrats via their clients and retinues. We’ve discussed forms of this recruitment, both ancient and medieval, in more depth before as well.
The key structure here are the big men. For pastoral societies, someone (or at least, some family) generally owns the largest herds of animals and thus wields outsized wealth and influence in the community. For agrarian societies, the Big Man is a ubiquitous fixture of the countryside – the large landowner with the big farms upon whom the smaller farmers rely for access to farming capital and for assistance in bad years (and who in turn often exploits those small farmers). These big men can organize local production (through taxes and rents), they can enforce laws and social order, they can provide a buffer for local subsistence and – crucially for us – they can wield armed force. In short the Big Man can more or less do many of the things a state would do, on a smaller scale (albeit they’re going to do these things in their own interest, which may not be the outcome you want!).
Put another way: these polities are defined by the fragmentation of force – by the existence of Big Men who can wield substantial legitimate military force on their own – and so are both encouraged and often compelled to raise force through those Big Men. However for a ruler or ruling institution (like an aristocratic council) that lacks a bureaucracy or much administrative capacity, these Big Men offer a substantial advantage in that they are few enough for that central institution to have personal relationships with all of them. In essence, it is possible (and indeed important) for the king or tribal war chief to personally know all of the biggest Big Men in the kingdom and so to be able to call upon them personally in the event that he needs an army. For large polities, that system can nest: the king has his vassals, who have their own vassals, who have their own vassals – essentially the Biggest Man knows all of the Bigger Men who each know their own troupe of Big Men.
In these sorts of societies, the Big Man’s status as a Big Man is in part predicated on his independent ability to wield force – note that Big Men in state societies are generally shorn of this and are often more political-economic figures than military ones – and so he maintains his personal supply of force on his own initiative, making it available to that central ruling institution at minimal cost (which is good, because not being a state, they also have minimal centralized resources).
In practice that personal supply of force likely comes in two parts: retainers and clients (of some form). The Big Man himself is generally a vocational principle warrior, a member of a warrior aristocracy for whom being a warrior is a core part of his identity. In order to function as a Big Man in this kind of society, he often needs to maintain some more-or-less permanent supply of force, his regular retinue. These retainers represent a smaller ‘full time’ force, often a mix of other smaller aristocrats and blue-collar military professionals. Thus in peacetime a Big Man might keep younger members of his family – who will have trained as warrior aristocrats too, since that was the class they were born into – in his household to serve as retainers. Equally, he might take in young men from other aristocratic households in the same capacity (pages, squires, etc), often as means of maintaining horizontal bonds between aristocratic families.
Often alongside these warrior aristocrats of varying levels of ‘bigness,’ there are non-aristocratic warriors maintained on an employment principle – though because non-state societies generally aren’t heavily monetized, these fellows are typically ‘paid’ in status (including valuable prestige goods) and maintenance (food, board, equipment, etc) rather than strictly in money. Because they are non-noble, these fellows tend to be ‘left out’ or rendered somewhat invisible in many sources – for instance, they clearly exist in the retinues of Iberian, Celtiberian and Gallic Big Men but only rarely do our Greek and Roman sources note their presence explicitly, preferring to focus on the aristocrats. In a medieval European aristocrats retinue, these fellows are variously termed sergeants, men-at-arms (though this phrase can includes nobles or knights), coutiliers and so on. Because they’re not aristocrats, in addition to being trained combatants, they can also be made to do non-aristocratic things: breaking down the camp, tending animals, handling food, standing guard and so on (although in some cases these fellows can get fancy enough to have their own servants to do some of that).2
The retinue of a Big Man is often enough for small-scale warfare, but military pressures tend over time to push beyond the ability of the Big Man to match simply with retainers. I’d argue that the 6th through the 4th centuries in much of the western and central Mediterranean, for instance, we can see these pressures rippling through, forcing societies to reach beyond a small warrior aristocrat class and find ways to mobilize broader populations. For the early part of the Middle Ages in much of Europe the process went the other way, moving from mass conscription systems (see below) towards more Big Man oriented systems, yet large-scale warfare still demanded more men than a retinue could supply and so nobles had to reach outside of their households for troops.
We thus shift principle to assemble the rest of the Big Man’s army: no longer recruiting other aristocrats or work-a-day warriors, he now levies his clients, via the clientage principle. For a pastoralist society, these many be the poorer members of the Big Man’s tribe or clan, while for agrarian societies, these are the peasants. In both cases, these decidedly ‘little’ men rely in peacetime on the Big Man for protection (often military, economic and legal protection), in exchange for some kinds of service to the Big Man. That relationship is sometimes formalized (as with serfdom or debt peonage) and sometimes simply a structure of strong social expectations (as with clientage, narrowly construed) but it often includes an expectation that the Big Man can call upon his clients (/serfs/clansmen/tenants, etc) for military service, not as a ‘full time’ occupation (these folks need to be farming and herding, after all), but either on a rolling, time-limited basis or more often for specific ‘big campaigns.’
In terms of the process for all of this, it can generally work quite directly through personal relationships: the king decides to raise an army and so calls up his Big Man vassals (who, as clients to the king (as Biggest Man), owe him a duty of service). Those Big Men in turn set out with their household retinue (who are in pretty much daily contact with them anyway) and if necessary raise up a levy of their clients or peasants from the local villages which they administer and extract from. The system thus ripples through a series of personal peacetime relationships: the king to his Big Man friends to their slightly-smaller Big Man friends to the members of their household and the Big Man’s tenants, serfs and clients (who all interact with the Big Man in socially subordinate ways – perhaps through a steward or other member of the Big Man’s household – on the regular anyway).
In terms of supply equipment, because the prestige and power of the Big Man is often dependent on the effectively of his retinue, he might opt to pay himself for the equipment of his permanent retainers, if he has the resources, though equally having the gear may the ‘price of entry’ for being a retainer in the first place. What the Big Man almost certainly is not doing is maintaining an armory large enough to fully equip his clients: they’re expected to bring their own gear. However, these tend to be the kinds of societies where those ‘little men’ clients do not have the kind of political heft to protect their production and wealth from the Big Man’s extraction – that’s why they’re so subordinate in the first place3 – and so the gear they’re likely to be able to afford is going to be cheap. This can produce kind of a feedback loop where client levies are badly equipped and perform poorly, so the Big Men magnates focus on their more aristocratic retinues by extracting more heavily from the peasants, which further reduces the quality of their client levies.
The army form that results from all of this is what I’ve termed repeatedly a retinue of retinues (a term I did not invent). The advantage of this kind of a system is that it involved very low administrative overhead or direct cost for the king, chieftain or other ruling institution (though equally it does require having a lot of resources soaked up by the Big Man class).
But the disadvantages are numerous: armies recruited this way tend to be of very disparate quality, with enormous gaps between the best-equipped aristocrats and very poorly equipped client-peasant-levymen. Without much in the way of state institutions, it’s quite hard to enforce a meaningful ‘floor’ on levy quality and in some cases the levy gets so poor that it becomes basically useless, leading rulers scrambling to find other (generally more expensive) ways to ‘bulk out’ their armies. Equally, because the army arrives as a series of units structures around a Big Man, his retinue and his client-levy, it is structured as a series of irregular units which cannot be easily recombined or restructured. After all, these peasant spearmen here and those knightly cavalry there are both in this army because of their personal relationship to this specific Big Man, Baron Owns-Some-Land. You cannot simply flip them into the unit of Count Owns-Some-Different-Land, they don’t owe that guy anything. Equally, both Baron Owns-Some-Land and Count Owns-Some-Different-Land are arriving with their private armies and so they expect to lead those units in battle and to exercise some real discretion over how they are used. All of that makes central command by the king, chieftain or whomever an excercise in herding cats: charismatic leaders (William of Normandy, Chinggis Khan, etc) can wield these sorts of armies very adroitly, managing the personalities as they go but less forceful individuals (King Edward II, for instance) struggle fiercely to control their chiefs, counts, earls, barons and so on.
Note the contrast between the riders at the top – those are the aristocrats and their retinues – who have fine metal helmets with large metal decorations and wear what seem to be mail shirts, riding their horses and on the other hand the infantrymen at the bottom, who carry shields and spears but appear to have only textile coverings for their heads and little, if any body armor (possibly just some kind of textile armor or perhaps just clothing).
The aristocrats above are some of the best equipped men on their iron age battlefield; their clients below are some of the worst equipped.
Likewise, militaries formed on this basis tend to have fairly limited peacetime force and what they have is gathered around the household of the Big Man, not scattered like local police through the villages. MMORPGs and fantasy worlds alike love their ‘local village guards,’ but these societies cannot afford many full-time soldiers and the ones they can afford tend to be guarding things like castles and towns (or just, you know, hanging around the Big Man’s person), not villages. The people who will arrest you for robbing the village are the villagers (who, remember, make up the levy in an emergency anyway).
Naturally, as noted, this tends to be the system for non-state polities where power is wielded not centrally, but by the Big Man. It is a substantial and frequent mistake to give such polities more state-based army forms, which they can rarely sustain. By contrast, the process of state formation by definition diminishes these sorts of household armies, merging them into a single military system under the authority of the state.
Now we’ll pause there for now. Next week we’ll start looking at some more adminstratively and overhead intensive approaches (although as we’ll see in some cases the trick is still getting someone else to supply that administrative overhead).
- This is an extremely rough back-of-the-envelope estimate which assumes a tube-and-yoke textile cuirass for the body armor and then quite simple versions of basically everything else. This amount of labor time could go way up for heavier or more complex panoplies – a mail hauberk alone would probably demand this much labor time to assemble.
- As an aside, I thought Kingdom Come: Deliverance II did a really good job of exhibiting these fellows, as the main character – Henry – is for most of the game exactly such a fellow and he interacts with a lot more. A lot of the game is spent around relatively small local nobles with small castles and interacting with their retainers – warriors, maintained in their household and equipped with the lord’s livery, but very clearly not knights in terms of status.
- Note for instance Caesar’s apparent shock at just how subordinate the peasantry was in Gallic society as compared to Rome’s freeholding farmers; Caesar describes the position of the Gallic peasantry compared to their aristocratic Big Men as being like that of slaves to slave-owners, Caes. B.G. 6.13
“Likewise, militaries formed on this basis tend to have fairly limited peacetime force and what they have is gathered around the household of the Big Man”
This reminds me of the kingdom of Lancre in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. The standing army of Lancre consisted of Shawn Ogg.
You get something similar in Pryddain with Flewdder Fflam’s pocket kingdom. We don’t get a headcount for how many people he ‘rules’ but he does seem to know them all personally and the kingdom’s army is himself.
Except when he is lying down!
“This reminds me of the kingdom of Lancre in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. The standing army of Lancre consisted of Shawn Ogg.”
Someone beat me to the “except when he was lying down” line but it should also be noted that this put Lancre above all of their neighbours in that they could afford to have any kind of standing army. Or bureaucracy, for that matter (which is also Shawn Ogg).
Possibly also worth noting that Lancre does not really have to worry about any kind of military hostility from its neighbors for no less than three reasons:
1) An incredibly forbidding mountainous geography
2) The strong influence of the “Pax Morporkia”, a geopolitical state of affairs imposed by a superpower city-state with an extreme and unusual amount of financialized economic influence:
“Thousands of years ago the old empire had enforced the Pax Morporkia, which had said to the world: “Do not fight, or we will kill you.” The Pax had arisen again, but this time it said: “If you fight, we’ll call in your mortgages. And incidentally, that’s my pike you’re pointing at me. I paid for that shield you’re holding. And take my helmet off when you speak to me, you horrible little debtor.”‘
3) The presence of several of the world’s wisest and most powerful magic users, who very much would not appreciate such goings on. Notably the head witch has a commensurate reputation, being known by the trolls as “She Who Must Be Avoided” and the dwarfs as “Go Around The Other Side Of The Mountain”.
“And incidentally, that’s my pike you’re pointing at me.”
Always wondered how much that mattered. Possession of the pike is generally more important than possession of its ownership rights. Which is not to say you cannot gain a certain influence that way.
The statement functions as a joke because it is in the context of a humorous novel. When similar statements function as threats in real-world contexts, it is because the person making the statement is highlighting that the possessor of the pike *does not make pikes* but the threatener *does.* All weapon systems, even a sling-and-loincloth, are kinds of ships of Theseus.
Ankh-Morpork doesn’t have much in the way of a standing army, but it DOES have bill collectors. Such as G.B. (“Grievous Bodily”) Harmon.
It’s not useful to try and parse Pratchett for a realistic depiction of warfare or interstate politics. The worldbuilding always has to take the back seat to the satire, and that means it very quickly ends up inconsistent.
Right, having a lot of debt might even be a strong motivation to go to war. That’s how Crusader Kings explains the frequent expulsions of the Jews. Instead of paying back what you owe, as king, you can decide to expel the jews – keeping their immovables and zeroing your debts to them.
Conspiracy theory: the witches prevent the wars and personal-union-producing marriages which would otherwise consolidate Lancre with its neighboring polities not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they like being more powerful collectively than any of the local rulers.
One question here on the kind of self-enlistment soldier society. You’ve mentioned before that castles are very useful for blocking enemy forces because a small force, especially of cavalry, is able to disrupt supply and control of the countryside if not blocked themselves. In a society without these aristocratic cavalry based military, or the castles dotted around by lesser aristocrats, what keeps invading forces from being more able to exploit the countryside? Is it just a weakness of the system, or does the fact there are all these free holding farmers or the like provide more robust defence from such raiding and foraging?
I doubt armed freeholding farmers could effectively damage a raiding party because the raiding party has more concentrated force. (In the logistics series on this blog it was stated that raiding parties are pretty large, for the Romans for example a whole legion.) You need walls to compensate for the numbers. In more urbanized regions there will be a walled town nearby, less urbanized regions might have refuge forts that are not permanently occupied. But since they won’t have much cavalry they can do little to disrupt the army foraging, merely save their own lives or with enough advanced warning store the food or other lootables behind the walls, denying them to the enemy.
This changes a bit with firearms and as firearms get better, because you can attack from a concealed position or from cover at a distance. (Though the period in which this matters was relatively brief, before the railroad made armies independent of local supplies.)
Firearms and artillery could only reach a short distance beyond the fortifications they were mounted on, though, and the raiding army could often choose to bypass those forts by marching outside the guns’ effective range. It’s more significant to note that firearms became common in major centres of civilisation like China, India, and Europe _after_ those places had developed effective cavalry, and often around the same time that kingdoms/empires/principalities benefiting from those firearms were building up road infrastructure to speed up the response time of their infantry too.
Such societies don’t have castles. When they have fortifications they tend to be based around strategic locations such as the Cilician gates (fortified for basically as long as states existed) or cities.
If you have a separate fortified location in a polity, the people who live there are aristocrats. They may not have formal titles, but give it time. The military and economic position having a separate, guarded home gives them forces the social relationship. So the existence of these small fortifications means there’s a local horse borne aristocracy.
In societies based around a fortified city the population could generally marshall sufficient resources to equip cavalry to oppose raiders, often backed by a large enough militia to overcome some minor insufficiency in the quality of their cavalry. There was usually a well enough off class that you could recruit horsemen from them, even if they weren’t so well off to maintain a separate fortified home. These were the equites in Rome, literally the horse class, probably most accurately translated as “knights” in terms of social class, except they still lived in the city, not in castles. These guys could go chase the raiders off and pin them down long enough for the general population to marshall, tactically and operationally.
Hence the Romans were plenty capable of finding off horse nomads with their professional armies, as were the Han Chinese, both of which generally didn’t have fortified castles but whom absolutely had fortified cities.
However in cases where a society with horsemen encountered a society without them the capacity of the horsemen to raid generally proved decisive, as long as the terrain wasn’t utterly prohibitive for horses.
In particular we see this happen several times in Asia and Africa, where there are a few environments where horses can survive but not thrive and are thus very expensive. In Asia this is typically because horses do not do well in the jungle and thus need careful stewardship to forage and avoid overheating, which means they generally only exist there while a major centralized state is present. In Africa this is disease forced; several tropical parasites and other pathogens, in particular the Tsetse fly, are extremely lethal to them. This means you have to either set up breeding outside the tropics and accept occasional outbreaks or continuously import new stock; however historically maintaining a cavalry force was absolutely dominant in the sub saharan African region, with successive empires maintaining large cavalry forces as their dominant military arm.
As you imagine, the operational and tactical advantages of cavalry against horseless societies were telling even against fortified towns precisely because you could simply raid the surrounding region and cripple the local political and economic structures.
A similar story happened in the new world, except that the Americas have very large horse friendly terrains, and once horses were introduced natives could easily set up their own breeding and capture programs.Those that did often successfully resisted European takeover for centuries, and often conquered their neighbors. The Great plains were still settling into a new uneasy political equilibrium involving lots of tribal conflicts when the US began invading, with most tribes that didn’t develop horsemanship traditions either subjugated or undergoing subjugation.
As an aside, the Great plains are perfect for horses. In fact they are so perfect that horses are *from there*; they emigrated to to Eurasia, before going locally extinct in their homeland when humans arrived in the Americas the first time. Which is almost certainly not a coincidence.
@Terry,
This is a really good summary, and I think you capture quite well the role that horses played in Sahelian Africa, on the one hand, and in South Asia on the other. You definitely wouldn’t be eating them like they did in Central Asia or using them for hard labor like people did in Western Europe, they were too expensive and fragile for that, but at the same time they were too useful *not* to use in warfare. It wasn’t till I read about that that I realized why the trade routes across the Sahara, in the first place, and across Afghanistan in the second had been so important historically to Africa and South Asia, the whole political and military systems depended on a regular influx of horses.
One thing I would just note is that it does seem like some African societies were intensely interested in trying to develop their own, native, disease resistant breeds so that they didn’t have to rely on foreign trade. There do seem to have been some instances where they succeeded, e.g. this one from north central Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poney_du_Logone
It seems to have taken a while though, and the Logone horses were substantially smaller than the imported ones, so there might have been a tradeoff between disease resistance and effectiveness in warfare.
oh yea, going down a rabbit hole of looking up weight limits, the Logone Ponies look like they would have been useless in warfare- they would have struggled to carry a 100 pound rider, never mind armor and weapons.
Reintroduce chariots? 😀
@Michael Hutson,
Maybe! I was thinking they might have recruited Pygmy peoples as mercenaries. The regions where the Pygmies live, in southern Cameroon / CAR, are not *that* far from the areas where the Logone ponies were used (looks to be about 900 miles from Lake Chad, and 450 miles from the southern edge of where the Fulani political sphere of influence ended). There are very few Pygmies today but i think that’s an effect of geographic and economic marginalization, if they had become well paid mercenaries and resettled further north, presumably they would have increased in numbers.
That wouldn’t have worked though either- looks like an adult Pygmy man on the short side of average height, and with a BMI of say 19, would still weigh about 85 lbs, and even that’s too much for these ponies (especially if he was wearing armor and weapons).
More realistically, maybe they could have done something like “chariots”- given that we’re talking about the early modern era, probably fortified wagons drawn by ponies from which you could fire guns. Kind of like a pre-mechanized “technical”, i guess. Or maybe they would have eventually crossbred the ponies with bigger imported stock to try to get a horse that combined disease resistance with adequate size. It seems like they didn’t have enough time to optimize the system before modernity arrived in the form of the French, German and British colonial armies to end the whole thing.
Pygmies tend to be 1.4 – 1.5 meters on average. A BMI of 19 makes you thin but not unhealthily thin.
Recruit young women. This opens it’s own socio political discussion, but that’s the obvious solution-that or recruiting extremely young men, framing the horse warfare age as being a rite of passage before joining the infantry. This already shows up in horse racing, female jockeys are as effective as male jockeys and steadily growing as a percentage of the competition.
There have also been errant female horse warriors historically; while size, musculature, and weight are critical to warfare in an infantry line or in drawing back s warbow, they matter less when you have the added weight of a horse. And the west African region developed a couple female warrior traditions.
However there are bigger tsetes fly tolerant breeds, like the Dongola horse which has an east African origin, or Malian breeds.
The bigger limit here is simple time. There are horse breeds in the process of developing resistance to the fly borne sleeping sickness, but they’re newer and the resistance is partial at best. Horsemanship traditions themselves are relatively new in West Africa, arriving probably around 800 a.d. giving breeders about a millennium to work on the problem.
Given that most breeds start with basically zero resistance breeding tolerance was exceedingly hard, as maintaining a stable population to begin with was extremely difficult. There just hasn’t been time, so the best we’ve got is partially tolerant breeds, some quite small.
Modern techniques involving genetic engineering could tackle the problem, but modern researchers have targeted the flies to suppress the parasite before it reaches livestock instead of the livestock itself. Also even that approach is only a decade old; this isn’t a problem with money behind it apparently.
I want to point out that 16- and 17-year olds are nearly as tall as they will ever be. The growth spurt during puberty typically peaks around 12 for girls and around 14 for boys. Pygmies usually don’t undergo such a growth spurt which is part of the explanation for them being so short. Anyway, Pygmies tend to be poor at digesting starches as they have historically lived on meat and fish with some fruit. For this reason they would likely be too expensive to use as cavalry.
Anyway, Pygmies tend to be poor at digesting starches as they have historically lived on meat and fish with some fruit
Lena,
I think you’re correct about the growth hormones thing keeping Pygmies small. Can I have a cite on this specific claim though? Because my understanding is that Pygmies have been in a trading symbiosis (well, not quite “symbiosis”, it’s some degree of exploitative, but still) with settled agricultural peoples certainly for centuries and probably a couple of millenia (ever since agriculture arrived in Central Africa).
They’re more like commercial hunter gatherers than subsistence hunter gatherers- they exchange high value forest products like meat, honey, mediccinal plants etc. for agricultural products from the settled peoples. So, starchy foods do seem to form a major componet of their diet.
There does seem to be one group of Pygmies that adopted an agricultural economy in their own right, and it looks like they’re doing fine, although they do eat more meat etc. than most settled agricultural peoples elsewhere in Africa would.
Sorry, I don’t remember where I read it. It was likely in my native Swedish anyway.
I suspected it was in a book named “Vikten av Gener” (“The Weight of Genes” – the pun works in Swedish). This turned out to be the case. However, tending to be poor at digesting starch specifically applied to the groups calling themselves Baaka and Bambuti. Not Pygmies in general as I misremembered it. The authors (two Swedish women) refereed to a study in English:
Perry et al 2007. “Diet and evolution of human amylase gene copy number variation.” Nature Genetics 30(10):1256–1260. Epub 2007 Sep 9.
They also mention that Hazda tend to be good at digesting starch since they have traditionally eaten a lot of tubers. Unsurprisingly, this applies to Japanese and European Americans too. That is contrasted with the Yakuts which tend to be poor at this. The Yakuts or Sakha as they call themselves have historically lived from herding, hunting and fishing. Consequentially, they tend to be poor at digesting starches.
Every time indigenous cavalry in Sub-Saharan Africa is mentioned I get something like this image inside my head:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rytter_fra_Bagirmi.jpg
In medieval France or the border areas of England/Wales/Scotland there tends to be a castle/hill refuge/walled village every few miles. So there are a lot of refuges. Plus a lot of countryside is marsh or forest. The villagers run off with their cattle, the raiders cannot disperse too much, so they do a quick loot and burn and move on. This was the classic chevauchee of the Hundred Years War, or the ‘lay waste the countryside’ of innumerable medieval chronicles. The Vikings or Avars/Magyars/Saracens would target churches and any lesser defended places, looking both for treasure and people to sell, herd the captives off to their main force and move on.
The defence would try to limit the area raided, ambush small parties and often gather and try a battle against the raiders when they were retreating laden with spoils.
Yeah, part of the answer is that you don’t stop the raiders from raiding you, though if you are lucky you give them a bloody nose when they attack too strong defenders. When you stop them is *after* they have raped and pillaged and are returning home slowly with their loot (and you’ve had a chance to gather your forces). If you are good enough at part B, they stop doing part A, but you can’t really stop them doing part A.
And that’s what the great wall of China was for. It’s not going to keep anybody out. It’s way too big to garrison properly for that. But it could be patrolled so you’d know when and where it had been crossed, could maybe warn some of the people in the raiders’ path, and could gather a force to intercept them when they try to go back.
I have heard it was built to make it harder for horses to cross China’s northern border. How efficient it was for this purpose depends on how steep and well-built it was. The parts they use to show to tourists today were built during the Ming.
It’s a lot like more conventional crime that happens within a society in time of peace. From the point of view of a state or proto-state, there are three broad ways to prevent crime:
1) Eliminate the means or motive to commit the crime, preventing it from ever being attempted.
2) Disrupt the opportunity to commit the crime by intercepting a would-be criminal as they are moving to act.
3) Capture and punish criminals afterwards, hopefully disrupting the ‘motive’ of anyone who wants to try to commit that crime again in future.
(1) is usually the province of broader strategy. It is not something the police or military can do directly when facing an immediate short term crisis. A government can take steps to reduce poverty and desperation and, say, lead poisoning, and as a direct result reduce incidence of thefts and assaults. A government that has a lot of force can launch a counter-invasion to punish raiders. But in practice this requires a lot of state organization to implement even if it can work very well indeed. Often, historically, states have lacked the will or capacity to implement such strategies.
(2) works very well IF you have the force to guard the location the criminal is after. But this is not sustainable at a society-wide level. You can have an armed guard at every bank, but not an armed guard at every convenience store. You can have a few dozen heavy cavalrymen readily available to repel a shipload of Vikings at the palace of the king himself, but you can’t have several dozen cavalrymen in every peasant village.
(3) is, in general, a lot easier than (2), and often easier than (1) even if less effective. Which is why people rely on it so often at every level despite it being not-ideal in that it still causes the population to suffer the crimes.
I think the Nordic countries are so peaceful today because rational reasons to use violence have been largely eliminated.
Nomadic raids into Eastern Slavic lands show that both parties are extremely constrained by the geography and means of communication available to them. I’ll use Crimean Tatars and Muscovy/Russian Tsardom as reference points.
For the Tatars, it’s the rivers that posed the biggest problem. They relied on speed, and the fastest route would be the one with the fewest obstacles. The forest-steppe looks like a wide-open area easy to maneuver in, but in reality, there are only a handful of routes an invading army can take: you mostly have to follow the drainage divide, give or take a few fords.
For the Russians, it’s the speed with which they can muster the army and where to look for the raiding party. The raiders move at a sustainable pace, your sentries can move faster, but if the final messenger arrives to Moscow in five days with the news that the khan is going to Kaluga, it’s too late to send your army there because it also has to move at a sustainable pace. The khan will have five days to plunder the villages around the town.
This means each raid is a guessing game.
The Tatars try to leave Crimea without letting any Moscow-bound merchants learn when exactly their raid will take place, cross Russian patrol routes in the steppe right after the sentries have left, and maintain tactical ambiguity as long as possible.
The Russians are trying to constrain the options available to the Tatars by constructing and maintaining abatisses, funneling the raiders into fewer routes that are easier to monitor and force them to take more time to reach their targets. Later, they will even build and maintain forward forts to stop the raiders on the way back.
An interesting wrinkle on chevauchees is that small castles that would garrison something on the order of 10 to 50 men are functionally indefensible to the royal sized (say 5000 and up) armies of the period. It was a common French order to lesser vassals to abandon their small fortifications to join up to larger fortresses and towns, and those that disobeyed tended to get run over by quick assaults. In general the trend in the HYW was that castles aren’t that hard to take, but fortified large towns and cities require long sieges that often fail.
At least in Rome’s case the northern Italian communities kept getting raided by the Cisalpine Gauls. The only real answer was organized punitive expeditions by the Roman armies to punish or destroy the Gauls as deeply as the Roman’s power projection would allow.
Castles worked that way mostly because the raiding forces were also usually quite small, numbering in the low hundreds at most. A cavalry force numbering in the dozens could present a serious threat to the raiders’ scouting and foraging parties, and without those parties the main body itself would be vulnerable to ambushes and surprise raids.
When the forces involved get larger, the dynamics change. If it’s the raiders who could muster forces in the thousands or even low tens or thousands, they’d find that the logistical advantage that allows them to do that might also allow them to besiege and take one or two of the defenders’ castles in each raiding season, leading to the raid turning into a creeping invasion and the defenders being slowly pushed back (which was often what happened with the grands chevauchées by whichever side was winning the Hundred Years’ War at the moment). Alternatively the defending side could hold through scorched earth, not rebuilding the raided zone and letting it become a desolate buffer where the raiders would have little or no ability to resupply so that each raid would involve a gamble of having to cross that zone twice on the way out and back, as well as facing a time delay that might let the defenders muster larger forces to attack the raiders. There is, however, the obvious cost of letting productive land go to waste, and we see both the strengths and weaknesses of this approach in the Eastern Roman defence of southern and central Anatolia against a succession of Muslim raids and invasions from the 8th to the 10th centuries CE.
If the dynamic goes the other way around and it’s the defenders who can muster larger forces (let’s say the Romans after the Samnite Wars), the calculus often becomes rather funny. On the one hand, a large field army was actually an even better deterrent to a raiding force than small fortifications like castles; assuming the mobile army could be sustained in the field, it’s much more effective at shadowing the raiders, preventing them from sending their scouts and foragers to any significant distance, and threatening to overwhelm part of the raiding forces whenever it was split up in river crossings and the like. Castles were an economy-of-force measure to allow smaller (especially cavalry) forces to do the same within a certain radius of action, but the raiders could move outside that radius while a field army could just stick with them and keep the raiders within its threat zone. Building enough castles to have the same effect as a large field army would end up being as laborious and expensive as building the field army itself, and also dilutes the field army’s strength by dispersing them into small garrisons; if the defenders could afford it, bulking up the mobile army was usually the more effective choice of the two. And a strong field army also opens up the possibility of punitive raids against the raiders’ homeland, which was basically the Roman modus operandi during and after the Samnite Wars.
If you’re asking about situations like the Greek poleis, the smaller towns with fortified cores (especially if they had acropoleis) functioned rather like castles, though somewhat more passively (more as refuges and less as platforms for harassing the raiders). And this _did_ get them in trouble against larger raiding forces — look at what kind of damage the Celts did in their rampage through Greece and Anatolia prior to settling in Galatia.
Two thoughts:
First, I would be really interested in hearing your thoughts on how this dynamic changes in fantasy societies with a much higher delta of personal power. For example, in Dungeons and Dragons the Gallic aristocrat or medieval knight would be the equivalent of a low-level fighter. His better equipment and combat training still give him a significant edge against the levy troops (badly equipped Commoners), but a high-level fighter (let alone more powerful classes like paladins or sorcerers) would still be able to defeat an entire squadron of these low-level fighters on the battlefield. My own assumption would be that settings like these would naturally lend themselves to more of a vassalage-based system, because just like medieval kings had to manage lords who themselves commanded armies, so in a fantasy setting of this sort power comes from commanding the personal loyalty or friendship of a relatively small number of high-level adventurers (or cultivators, or whatever).
Second thought, it occurs to me that the entitlement principle leads to another advantage in recruiting. Taking the example of the Roman dilectus, if Rome goes to war then it is because the Roman assembly voted for war, and therefore a majority (or at least a significant percentage) of the Roman population think that war is a good idea (whether because they believe themselves under threat or because they expect to get rich rewards out of it). Therefore, you can assume that a significant percentage of your recruits would show up for the muster simply because they decided to fight of their own free will, even before you take the shame of draft-dodging into account. And this probably also applies (to a lesser degree) to the retinue system as well: a king is not likely to go to war unless at least some of his Big Men consider the war to be either necessary self-defense or likely to profit them.
It depends on what kinds of “classes” are in your D&D-esque setting and how common that level of power difference ends up being – a setting where you could pull a 4e Warlord and be such a superlative leader of men that unit of raw recruits under your command have the skill and cohesion of battle-hardened veterans is going to be very different from one where the only martial skill you can improve to superhuman extents is your own personal capacity for violence.
To add to your second thought… the Roman Republic is also famous for responding to devastating losses by mustering another army of comparable quality to throw at the problem. I’m don’t think they would have had anywhere near that level of strategic resilience if they weren’t entitlement based.
Honestly that delta is super important because the logistics needs of a 20th level fighter aren’t any higher than any other warrior with plate and a horse but that 20th lvl guy packs the power of an entire unit of 1st level fighters into a single man. While not all fantasy settings have this discrepancy with physical combat most settings with magic have this discrepancy with magic users. Heck monsters aren’t half as destructive to the logistics of raising and moving armies than high level humans because a giant or a troll or a dragon eats more than a man relatively proportionally to their increased power.
I do think dnd in specific is a really unstable millieu because wizards are a vocation that theoretically anyone has the ability to pick up with access to time, literacy, and good tutors – advance the timeline on dnd 100 years and the world should be dominated by states with strong education systems because dnd allows investing in research/literacy/even the arts to also be military investment. Because wizards can solve problems both practical and military there is immense incentive to any state to have as many loyal wizards as possible.
A setting with sorcerers or warlocks (as dnd defines them) can stay in its medieval stasis state for a while, but powerful wizards (and even worse artificers) are going to arcane industrial revolution your society over a number of human generations you can count on one hand.
This presumes states would exist that can monopolize wizardly talent in their borders. A decidedly more dystopian reading is that the wizards would establish themselves as lords and priests, using their powers to gatekeep the transmission of further knowledge to the population. Even benevolent wizards might do so; a book of evocation magic is a formula for building explosives out of scrap. This would likely morph into states, but with wizard kings.
Regardless a post wizard society does not resemble a traditional feudal society; it’s effectively a high tech one, except the technology is hidden as magic. It might superficially resemble one, but this can only ever be skin deep. The political and social dynamics are too different. They more closely resemble industrial society, if anything.
Of course most dnd worlds with widespread magic don’t resemble medieval worlds on any level except the aesthetic. The forgotten realms certainly doesn’t, Eberron is barely aesthetically tied to medieval Europe and has long transitioned into early modern history, dark sun takes my premise and runs it into dust, etc. but basically every setting has had a period where wizards made themselves kings and godlings, which typically resulted in some apocalypse of varying degrees (in the forgotten realms it was akin to Rome collapsing, in Dark Sun it was akin to *a full out nuclear war*).
I am playing around with a history of witch kings in my current setting. Witch kings are thought to be more tyrannical than non-witch kings because they are harder to hold to account.
The era is defined by a church that both teaches sanctioned magic (mostly healing, protection, and quality of life stuff) and regulates the sorts of magic that give people immense power over others (harmful spells, enchantments). The difference between ‘good’ churchly magic (arcana dexter) and ‘dark’ magic (arcana sinister) is entirely social and constructed based off what spells are thought to be harmful to society if not controlled. Learning how to cast a single arcana sinister spell gets you put on a list and you must report your movement to the local witchfinders at all times – you get a lot of respect but also fear and surveillance.
The two most commonly learned spells in setting are a spell that revives the recently deceased that is *mostly* oriented around deaths in childbirth but can be used with extreme unreliability in other cases and a spell that spins fabric. These spells combined let me have slightly more egalitarian gender politics in an otherwise low fantasy milieu.
@Rosalind Chapman,
Is this a novel you’re working on? Because it sounds really fascinating, I would read it!
I especially like that you work a degree of unreliability into the spell to bring back the dead (and limit it to the recently deceased), I’ve had ideas for a fantasy novel for a long time (haven’t ever got around to writing though), and those are both directions where my thought processes went as well. It didn’t occur to me to orient it towards childbirth though.
I also like your distinctione between “Sanctioned” and “sinister” arcana.
@Hector
A TTRPG/wargame thing. Its taking a while.
The revive thing funny enough started as a game mechanic because I felt like a revive that has a less than half chance of working would feel really good when it works but you wouldn’t mentally feel owed a revive so you wouldn’t be too upset if it didn’t. But I do think it also works for drama, people like having witches around because if you can get a 1-in-3 chance to not die when you otherwise would you take it but it still frames revive as miraculous and lucky not par for the course.
A big part of the social differences between sanctioned and unsanctioned magic is that church witches aren’t dnd priests. Gods are real in this setting but the spells cast by church witches are all the same type of magic and the church is just the best institution for teaching a skill that biases towards literate scholars.
I’d like to read it. I started from gender equality and worked back (first an RPG, then stories). Magic as equaliser – mostly utilitarian. Policed by being widespread. Putting someone in another body if they refuse to move on after death (and a spare body is available) is unusual but not extraordinary.
@Rosalind Chapman,
Yea, I feel like the idea that magic always involves playing the probabilities and taking risks, it’s never a sure thing, is an important thing that people often miss. In the various supernatural and religious traditions around the world, magic seems like it’s usually conceived of in terms of interacting with forces that are in some sense personal, or at least sentient (whether you think of these as gods, angels, devils, elemental spirits, semi-personal natural forces, something equivalent to various types of animals, etc.). And of course, when you’re dealing with entities that are even in a limited sense personal or sentient, you can never be totally sure how they’re going to react.
Witch Hat Atelier does some interesting things with that, though the particulars of magic and the particulars of how the system came to be created some interesting social quirks.
See Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series. A previous mage-civilization ended by producing the Dhorisha Plains: a five-hundred mile wide perfectly circular grassland that marked the site of a blast crater.
They must have used magic to make a weapon of mass destruction working too well.
Long story short, a satanically evil sorcerer was on the verge of conquering the world (and yes we’re talking a ‘Sauron regains the One Ring’ level of evil here). A good sorcerer decided that the least evil option left was to launch the magical equivalent of a nuclear exchange.
The big difference from industrial (or post-industrial) society is just how personalistic it ends up.
To some degree these societies resemble the situation where Elon Musk is actually the personally transformative genius he thinks he is.
“society is just how personalistic it ends up.”
Which is a pretty darn big difference between modern/industrial society and pre-industrial one.
I think Elon Musk is an asshole because he really does not understand much of other’s points of view. Having grown up in Apartheid South Africa likely matters in this context.
Regarding the Forgotten Realms, your wizard aristocracy sounds like the Red Wizards of Thay.
The red wizards are, in fact, merely the most recent mageocracy. Netheril was the prototypical one in the west, and Imaskar its eastern counterpart. Thay itself directly descends from Imaskar, as us seceded from Mulhorad, whose eastern desert borders are testament to this history, following the teachings of Thayd the last student of Imaskar. In addition to that two of its neighbors are mageocracies of independent origin, iirc.
If you include nations ruled by naturally magical being, like Calimshar, mageocracies were the most common human governing principle in the past; the current faerun political landscape is a reaction to this past.
That depends entirerly on how reproducable the magic is. Many worldbuilders make magic systems that are effectively science-but-sparkly, but some worldbuilders create softer systems where industralisation is not a possible outcome because of how unreliable the use of magic is.
“wizards are a vocation that theoretically anyone has the ability to pick up with access to time, literacy, and good tutors”
This would suggest a Harry Potter like society in which essentially everyone had some magical knowledge, but rising returns to ability mean that the smartest students get the best training and tend to end up in positions of power. After all, they are the smartest and most personally formidable – and useful – people.
Note that at the margin farmers and herders are in a zero-sum competition for a scarce resource (land) with their neighbours. Wizards probably are not. It should be much easier for them to ally with each other. (Assuming that magic is good for something other than force and violence.)
Possibly a significant but underexploited power-fantasy: Being able to produce more land.
For example, the history of Westeros in “The World of Ice and Fire” discussing the Rhoynar invasion of Dorne mentions among the reasons of success “Dornish water witches” who were able to make desert bloom.
How would farmers interact with a witch who´s able to create an oasis out of a desert?
The later descriptions of Dorne mention just lords as leaders of military fighting… we do not hear of anyone needing to function as a water witch.
I am fantasising about making poor land in manageable climates arable. Either by covering it in a mix of biochar, compost and crushed ceramics. Or by growing clovers fertilised by human waste every year for a decade or more.
It has been calculated that in colonial America, where land was freely available on the frontier, the population doubled by natural increase every 25 years. That is enough to go from “village on the coast” to “populated subcontinent” in ~ 300 years = 12 doubling periods.
Another way of looking at it is that in 250 years the population will go up thousandfold, in 500 years millionfold, and in a thousand years trillionfold.
So over historic time, this power could have very significant geographic consequences, if you keep having to produce “more land”.
My post-apocalyptic world has near-universal availably of efficient contraception. Combined with it being impossible to entirely reverse social progress this means most societies have a yearly population growth rate of less than one percent. After a major subsistence crisis or war there is some period (a few decades) of higher population growth. Yet it still often keeps bellow one percent population growth per year. Countries expanding into previously completely depopulated areas can have a bit higher birth rate than those which don’t. But the difference within climate zones is not drastic.
The ongoing logistics needs of that 20th level fighter can be somewhat larger than the 1st level one.
No he doesn’t eat any more, but things like healing won’t work as well. The 1st level guy comes back from almost dead to full with one spell that any cleric can cast (or in recent versions his own healing). The 20th level guy that’s almost dead would need a lot more than that to get back to full.
Likewise, any consumable magic that makes a noticeable difference to his fighting ability (potions, scrolls, charged items) are much rarer and more expensive, to the point where the more powerful stuff just can’t be replaced without his going away from the war to raid a dungeon.
The milieu in pretty much any fantasy RPG doesn’t fit with the politics and economics. Most people just don’t think about it too hard.
Which is also why those “village guards” exist. Yes, in a medieval setting they wouldn’t, but in a medieval setting the peasants would be a real threat to a single man with a sword. As opposed to the speed bumps that pretty much any “realistic” village population would be to something like a 5th level fighter, let alone a party.
The village guards exist to keep the party focused on re-equipping in the village and *going back to the adventure*. As opposed to going murder-hobo and pillaging the village as a much softer target.
Is there a specific mechanic for how badly a fighter’s skills degrade when outnumbered? Or is it just that a fighter gets one action per turn and so do the eight opponents piling onto him?
In practice, what usually happens is that the high level fighter (especially if equipped with gear appropriate to the level of their skills, which is to say, high end magical equipment) will have fewer actions than a horde of much weaker fighters, but will be able to hit much harder and much more reliably. Whereas the weaker fighters will struggle to land a blow that gets through the high-end fighter’s protections, and even if they do, the stronger fighter can withstand many blows whereas they may not even be able to withstand one of his.
Though eventually numbers count. I recall a MMORPG where I acquired a pack of 100 trained wolves and sic’ed them on a Paladin 😁
A 5th level fighter will probably only have a 1/4 chance of being hit by a “realistic” band of armed villagers, and even when they do hit him they will be doing chip damage, whereas conversely that same fifth level fighter has a 95% chance of hitting with every attack, will instantly kill any villager he hits, and may have an ability that allows him to attack twice or thrice in a single turn and/or gain a bonus attack every time he kills an enemy. Enough level 1 villagers will eventually wear him down, but a 5th level fighters can easily take down dozens if not hundreds of them with him to the point where he dies more from being crushed by the weight of their corpses than anything else.
For D&D 5th edition specifically it’s mostly that a 20 always hits and does damage. The fighter gets more attacks (not nearly as many as some earlier editions) but his hit points will get worn down with sufficiently many low level fanatical opponents.
If those opponents also have reach or missile weapons it means more hits against the single opponent.
In real fights? Even being outnumbered two to one is pretty hard, especially if they have even a little practice at working together. The lone better fighter needs space to move around and mess up the opponents’ coordination, or it will not end well.
Movie fights are just that, they practice a long time to make that specific sequence of moves.
I’ve been trying to avoid the whole ‘helpless villagers’ thing in my own nascent game/RPG, helped a lot by a fairly realistic treatment of black powder weapons. Muck about too much and you’ll probably get shot. You do not want to get shot. Or hit with an axe for that matter. It’s more Dark Heresy than DnD in terms of player survivability.
Black powder for villagers is about as unrealistic as village guards though. Those weapons still aren’t cheap, they’re not all that accurate and in a fight in a village they’re one-shot weapons because they can’t be reloaded in time.
Sure if you hit, you do lots of damage and almost certainly end the fight. But if you don’t…
I was thinking about how slow Early Modern firearms were to reload too. There is a reason they Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers are mainly using swords despite their profession being named after a firearm.
@Mark In your typical medieval fantasy setting absolutely, but my setting is really not very close to that at all. Or close to DnD either. Though considering I didn’t mention any of that I’m not blaming you for making the assumption!
For starters it’s not particularly attempting to create a realistic depiction of real-world dynamics. Though I do like to at least attempt to ground a fair few aspects in the nitty-gritty to show I’ve done my homework (and lend the whole thing a grittier tone that contrasts nicely against the spiritual elements).
Secondly, the setting is post-apocalyptic. By quite some way so cultures are hovering around the technological capabilities of the early iron age, though with some significant anachronisms (including the guns, as well as stuff like unusually productive agricultural plants). One of the anachronisms is the ready availability of high quality iron/steel from the ruined infrastructure of yesteryear.
There aren’t really any state structures (barring a couple of nascent or relict city-states), with the overwhelming majority of polities being either tribal polities or hunter-fisher-forager bands. And relatively unsophisticated ones at that, trending towards small and fragmented rather than consolidated into large tribal confederations. This limits the size of armies significantly, and also means military force is significantly diffused among the general population (as there’s little monopoly on interpersonal violence). This series has been really useful so far in envisaging how that might play out in terms of who is armed with what.
Considering that the pinnacle of weapons technology is the black powder musket, a fair amount of the blacksmithing capacity of these small societies goes into producing them (especially seeing as armour is relatively rare, on account of not being able to produce anything that’ll reliably stop a roundball). Often ownership of a musket is a pre-requisite for membership in whatever warrior classes they have, or even for adult initiation rites for more militarised societies. Most of them hover around the ‘khyber pass custom’ level of quality. You’re right that they’re inaccurate and slow to reload (and often unreliable in firing, considering the powder is produced in what’s effectively cottage industry rather than in industrial powder mills). That’s one of the justifications for close combat still being a thing. Guns are relatively common (on account of their broad cultural importance), but actually firing them is kinda expensive.
The whole thing adds up to a military environment that’s a bit like the initial colonisation of the Americas (minus the settler-colonials, and plus the widespread ability of Native Americans to produce their own firearms). Small(ish) populations conducting highly-mobile skirmish and raiding warfare using guns as slightly unreliable prestige weapons, but with a significant focus remaining on close combat.
So yeah, bending the rules slightly to create the environment I wanted, but hopefully with enough touchpoints to reality to be believable.
Though really the point I was making is embedding a more realistic treatment of damage. Getting hit with an axe is to be equally avoided if at all possible.
Have you thought about iron and steel rusting? Stainless steel is said not to rust as long as it comes in regular contact with air. But other steel and iron are over time destroyed by rust. On the other hand rust from once extracted iron and steel might be easier to smelt than natural iron ore.
The setting lore for Ironclaw, by Sanguine Games, does some interesting stuff with this, because Ironclaw’s moving out of medieval into the early-modern era, so some of the big innovations getting people excited are pike-and-shot tactics, and printing. And while magic in Ironclaw isn’t as earth-shaking as it is in D&D (basic attack spells are about equivalent to a crossbow in both stopping power and ‘reload’ time), it’s still both an effective weapon, and a skill anybody can learn with literacy and study. So one country that’s currently suffering from economic issues might not be able to equip a conventional army to compete with its neighbors, but *is* starting to consider the idea that printing makes training up a full-on wizard corps *much* easier.
Though the fact that the wizards can also do things like conjure fresh water, communicate at a distance, or heal injuries and cure disease is at least as attractive, if not more, as their destructive power. (They’re probably not mass-producing the healing magic, because the church tries to maintain a monopoly on it – it’s not special divine magic, anybody *could* learn it, but it’s one of the church’s political levers of power.)
“fantasy societies with a much higher delta of personal power.”
I imagine much will depend on where this delta is coming from. Is it inheritable? Trainable? Buyable? Also – does this delta give them the ability to do anything nice for people, or is violence the only thing you can do with it?
If so, society is going to be much more inegalitarian, and most people are going to be slaves.
The Rance series has an depiction of late stage RPG logic. In that system, level caps are determined at birth and very few people can reach a high level.
In Rance Quest, Rance is very unpopular with the locals. He is a known rapist who has violent outbursts and has probably killed one or two people in the middle of town merely for accosting him.
The problem is, this is game eight. By now, Rance has met just about every high level adventurer in the world; they are either former party members or antagonists that have been killed off. So you have this max level protagonist who is killing people in the street, and of the 30-40 people strong enough to object, most are old war buddies or current retinue members.
So it plays out similar to a childish depiction of medieval nobility – where the nobles have 99% dodge rating and zero need to build rapport with commoners or local big men.
I mean yeah high level dnd characters are functionally superheroes so it stands to reason the society they would make would resemble “the boys” more than anything else.
Although the setting of The Boys is the way it is for more reasons than just “naturally people with superheroes are bastards.” The core secret mechanic of the setting, at least in the modern show (not sure about the comic) is that all superpowers come from being dosed with Compound V. There’s an in-world fiction that they occur naturally, but in reality it’s super-steroids all the way down.
So the corporation that makes Compound V (which was founded by a Nazi scientist and is terribly unethical) has a ridiculous amount of influence over who actually has powers, and the first-mover advantage to shape the institutions that govern who uses what powers and in what ways.
Homelander is a horrible psychopath in part because he was specifically raised in a horrible and abusive fashion, for instance. Soldier Boy, who has a comparable formidable powerset but grew up in a merely ordinary abusive childhood, is an asshole but is nowhere near as much of a murderous evil loony.
To get a similar result in a fantasy setting you’d need, I don’t know, for all powers and all characters above 4th level or so to be getting their special abilities from the Devil, so that the world was divided into “people without powers” on the one hand and “people who have powers, but who have either sold their souls to the Devil, or just been someone the Devil thought it would be really funny to give superpowers to.” Either way, it’s unlikely to end well for society at large.
The Boys isn’t just “superheroes exist and then reality ensues.” It makes very specific assumptions about where powers come from, in order to fuel its deconstruction.
Sounds like Homelander habitually don’t care rather than being unable to care.
That special-abilities-from-the-Devil premise is essentially Dishonored! And yes, the end result resembles the old Soviet joke about the Party regularly solving problems not present in any other political systems.
From my limited impression of The Boys, it seems to be totally in service to what I would view as a rather narrow-minded political polemic with little thought to how people would actually act in a society with those social dynamics.
That’s my limited impression as well, though I will grant that if a corporation took superheroes and made them celebrities, it stands to reason they’d act like real-life celebrities with all the narcissism and drama that implies. The trouble is you can’t really say that’s more “realistic” than the Avengers or the Justice League, which are formed under very different circumstances, by supers with diverse sources for their powers and diverse motivations for using them.
I have herd of a study of people simulating in virtual reality they had powers similar to Superman. Most of them chose to use them for good but I don’t know how large it was.
The question you’d have to answer (which DnD does not) is where the energy comes from that allows for this much military power in a single person. A normal human being can’t store enough energy to produce the heat required for a fireball capable of melting away an entire cohort, and if the mage had to actually eat an equivalent amount of calories to cast that spell, they’d hardly be at a logistical advantage, given the carvan of grain wagong that’d have to follow them.
If the answer is just “It’s magic”, then it’s frankly impossible to really predict how it changes society, because if magic can break the Law of Conversation of Energy, then why should any other laws of physics apply?
And if we assume it’s a natural resource tapped by our mage (e.g. the qi absorbed from the environment by a cultivator), then the result is pretty predictable. Warfare will be focused on the acquisition of that resource, and military power will be focused on exploiting it. But, and that’t where we quickly leave medieval fantasy: If we have a natural resource that energy-rich, it can also fuel an industrial revolution. Whatever pre-industrial setting existed, it won’t exist for long.
I would like to object mostly on the grounds that it won’t even be remotely close to what IRL industrial revolution is, and perhaps contains elements that are at odds with IRL concepts of industrial revolution. The only shared definition would be society gaining access to new forms of energy at large scale (whether it be fossil fuels or qi or lay lines). The biggest thing I believe that will keep many things look somewhat like pre-industrial settings would be reproducibility of said personal power. If you can get immense magic power, but this power varies immensely between individuals and often are not replicable (or at least, very difficult to standardize) (think wild magic, or sci-fi superpower where you often just get one person with said power), then “industrializing” and “mass production” becomes impossible. Instead you get bespoke creation of immensely powerful individuals or artifacts that may shape particular regions but don’t really work well with other magic. This makes it so that if that anchor is gone, some society just retreats to pre industrial/low equilibrium states.
> and if the mage had to actually eat an equivalent amount of calories to cast that spell
I once tried to read some smutty fiction that featured this concept.
But couldn’t wizards function more like air conditioners? They use energy to move energy around. A good heat pump has a coefficient of performance around 5, I can output about 150W on an exercise bike. With the same COP, it’s 750J of energy delivered into the target every second. That’s the energy of a .357 Magnum bullet.
This is part of D&D. Energy for things that do not appear to follow the law of conservation is imported from outside the Prime Material Plane in one way or another. There are philosophical planes, elemental planes, an astral plane; infinite arrays of places you can steal minuscule energy from to power your weirdsies.
Occasionally a spell or ability will specify a more local source, but mostly it’s the boundless Outside.
“The question you’d have to answer (which DnD does not) is where the energy comes from that allows for this much military power in a single person.”
What if it comes from the Gods? What if they get it from sacrifice? Suddenly, the population and wealth of human communities matter. The pawns run the chessboard (provided they can figure it out).
So here’s the thing about dnd. High level characters are actually no replacement for numbers. A couple of hundred 1st level fighters with bows can on average kill an ancient creature red dragon in a single turn. 1 20th level fighter can’t. The same surprisingly holds true for spellcasters (if you ignore a couple of exploits like infintite simulacrums). More lower level ones can do more than a handful of high level ones.
Now admittedly, this does depend on how available the high level ones are. 20 20th level characters can obviously beat 40 low level ones. But in my experience, low to high level ratios are wayyyy higher than that.
Same with spells. I checked out all the spells in 5.5 a while back to figure out how many would change society. The low level spells (mending, prestidigitation, arcane lock, plant growth) had way more impact than the high level ones, if you assume that they are more available to people.
In fact, because of bounded accuracy, numbers actually matter more in dnd in comparison to quality. A guy in full plate vs padded armour is not nearly as better protected as they should be for example.
Obviously, high level characters would still be powerful and useful, but they don’t change the nature of warfare if there’s not enough of them.
If were getting edition specific Id expect with dnd 5e+ warfare would be the domain of massed bow/crossbow/gun/cantrip infantry with a small cadre of hyper elite (or monstrous) melee fighters. RAW missile weapons are just too powerful, flyers exist as a threat that needs to be thought about, and also psychologically the only way you are going to get a recruit to engage an ogre or a dragon is from a distance. Melee combatants simply won’t survive and do anything effective unless they have that personal power level to shrug off a few missiles.
The existence of even a few 5th level casters capable of projecting 20ft radius spheres of death would force formations to get really diffuse in a similar pattern to how machine guns and high explosives make modern soldiers not fight within 5 ft of each other. So warping is the effects of fireball and with such diminished returns for further experience point investment I’d kind of suspect a battle wizard academy to end its official curriculum once you get to 5th level.
Even medium sized cadres of 1st level wizards are dangerous, generals would probably not be field generals and any unit’s officer if too flashy is in serious risk of a coordinated assault by four recent wizard school grads magic missiling them with unerring accuracy the second they get into range. No cover protects from it so some sort of magical countermeasure or a danger onion approach becomes necessary.
But the most warping stuff is honestly cantrips – mending just eliminates several professions from the logistics department, firebolt while not powerful is an ammo-less way to engage from a distance and ignites things from a distance. Message makes various commando operations and cross unit coordination possible in a way it just wouldn’t be until hand held radios come along.
And these are just the magical version of small arms. Presumably there would exist a “crew-served magic” category, whereby (let’s say) five wizards (with several of them not required to be high-level) can together (perhaps with some equipment, perhaps with just a magic circle they quickly traced on the ground) can perform a ritual and achieve proportionately greater effects than a single wizard.
Same goes for the other types/sources of magic.
Yeah, this is why I have the view for my games that DnD rules describe how things are for the players, not the universe. So arrows do get less deadly with range, armour is more effective against some damage than others, not everyone is the same speed, etc.
I still have areas magic and stuff changes, but it’s a lot less messy.
That is the better way of running things and in order to avoid the massive worldbuilding implications its generally best to assume casters (or any pc class really) are orders of magnitude rarer than some adventures present them.
Even a single caster capable of casting the cantrip mending can replace dozens of craftspeople (you cant make new things but the need for shoes, clothes, and tools drops precipitously if there’s a guy who can spend one minute and no resources to repair any break. So just make the PCs and the villains some of the only casters around.
“A couple of hundred 1st level fighters with bows can on average kill an ancient creature red dragon in a single turn.”
This is probably true in 5e due to bounded accuracy. In older editions, you’d probably require thousands, if not tens of thousands, and they’d suffer horrific casualties in the process.
“Same with spells. I checked out all the spells in 5.5 a while back to figure out how many would change society. The low level spells (mending, prestidigitation, arcane lock, plant growth) had way more impact than the high level ones, if you assume that they are more available to people.”
I’m going to keep beating my “the most destabilizing spell in D&D from a worldbuilding perspective is goodberry” drum. (I used to think it was plant growth, but plant growth just makes agriculture much more efficient, whereas goodberry makes agriculture obsolete.)
Yeah, and even if you say goodberry doesn’t cover water, create water is also there. The whole need of society is radically different if you treat it all as normal availability
It really depends on how many people you can teach each spell. Goodberry starts really changing military logistics once you get to one goodberry cast per 10 people in your army (2 casts for a 1st level druid, 9 for a 5th level, so about 1 in 20 to 1 in 100 people required), but it changes the peasant life much less* until you get to that proportion of druids in all of society, which seems unlikely to me.
Plant growth doubles farming efficiency per area, at a rate of 0.8 square miles or 2km2 per day (I am assuming one 8 hour cast not two). Over a year a single 5th level druid could easily get 200sq miles or 500km2 done and still have 100 days to go on campaign. That’s enough for one druid to serve 2000 people at low population densities (10/sq mile), and the very service will likely drive higher population densities. At 80 people per square mile, you’d only need 1 druid per 16000 people. Those people might live in bigger, more defensible towns (with a few plots around the town which are better than normal land allowing more people to walk to them from the town), or in nearly identical size hamlets which each are the center of a half-mile circle of fertility, close to a mile apart each. That higher density then again supports larger armies (I think similar to how rice does so in Asia). I think that requires less druids for a larger impact on the average person.
* You might say they at least don’t get foraged anymore, but I am assuming this logistics improvement will be partially eaten up by bringing bigger armies (that travel slower), and that when possible near the enemy the druids would rather have their spell slots available.
Except the problem with that is that druids by their very nature are opposed to maximising agricultural efficiency… if paladins were super efficient at war crimes, that also wouldn’t matter because paladins just don’t DO warcrimes… (at least before paladins stopped being paladins in 5e…)
Goodberry and plant growth are both also ranger spells (albeit you’d need a higher-level ranger), and rangers generally seem to be more common, less secretive, and less opposed to “civilization” than druids. Plus, any 1st-level variant human can just take magic initiate to learn goodberry.
When the 2 “stable equilibria” for a society are “90% of the population spends their lives toiling from dawn to dusk to barely produce enough food to feeds themselves, plus a small number of specialists” vs “5-10% of the population can cast a spell once or twice per day that requires almost no labour, and easily feed the entire population” it’s hard to see how the former can last for long once the latter becomes a possibility.
Not really, Goodberry (at least back when i played…) transmutes existing berries, it doesen’t create new ones. It’s a *massive* multiplier but you still need to grow berries. (also, like Create Food & Water it has stability issues, since it only lasts for 1 day/level)
Since berries occur naturally, it is probably feasible for a large population with a sufficient admixture of Goodberry casters to completely abandon agriculture and subsist on handpicked wildberries, as long as they remember to dry some of the berries for preservation in the off-season.
(Can you cast Goodberry on a raisin?)
(To be clear, my recollection is that this spell lets the caster imbue a modest number of berries with such magical virtue that each berry is a full and nourishing day’s food requirements for one person. Sort of like Tolkein’s lembas bread, but with wildberries instead of bread)
In 5e, it explicitly states that the berries “appear in your hand”, so even that limitation wouldn’t apply.
In the books lembas bread is just a low-tech equivalent of energy bars. Eating five of these crackers a day keeps the hobbits going but not much more than that.
Just berries? That’s going to have an interesting effect on nutrition and digestion.
There is a reason I almost exclusively mention staple crops in my blog posts on the pre-modern development of various continents:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/Africas-biogeographical-disadvantages/#wbb1
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/Eurasias-biogeographical-advantages/#wbb1
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/Australias-infertility/#wbb1
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/The-deficiencies-of-the-Americas/#wbb1
The one exception is the coconut since it is the world’s most useful tree. That is, the tree with the highest number of uses.
Is that a 5.5e thing? Because in older editions, an ancient red dragon can effectively take on an infinite number of 1st level archers because they straight up would not be able to do enough damage to get past their damage reduction, the same way no amount of archers is going to be able to kill a modern day MBT.
You mean they have arrow-proof skin?
An ancient red dragon has DR 20/magic, meaning that if you don’t have a magic weapon and can’t do more than 20 damage (A longbow has a max damage of 8, 12 if it’s fired by a max strength level 1 character), you can’t hurt it at all.
Generally a DR/magic is a really common feature for alot of monsters in DnD because PCs won’t usually have a problem with them, but it neatly sidesteps the question of why don’t they just send 30 town guards to go deal with it instead of hiring the PCs.
For the fantasy magic think, pretty sure one of the biggest determinant of whether vassal/clientage politics would dominate is how magic is gained and kept. If a world’s magic are dnd sorcer style (very personal and lineage based) or like comic super powers, then you would see pre-industrial stasis a lot more. If the magic is knowledge/wealth based then institutions and states can do well. What magic can do is almost secondary beside being very powerful at what it can do. Even if a setting’s entire magic system is based around healing, the magic super healers can probably still build their magic aristocracy given fitting condition.
It will depend heavily on exactly which version of DnD you are playing, as exact wordings of spells will change the settings dramatically.
The worst offender spell here is ‘create food and water’ which is available to all clerics without any of the even weakly enforced complications of druids. In 3/3.5 It is a third level spell, so any fifth level cleric (to anything) should be able to cast it, and it feeds 15 people per casting. For a fifth level cleric. And a single casting. Ignoring high stat bonus spells and domain spells. For a sixth level cleric it would go up to 18 people per casting, and two castings a day. And it only gets worse as levels go up. And this ignores the ability to make wands. Or even worse, “auto resetting traps”.
Why is this problematic? Because it means any society that can reliably churn out medium level clerics has essentially unbounded population, without any farmers at all. Army sizes are unbounded by foraging and feed requirements. The setting is going to have more in common with “post-scarcity” science fiction than any traditional fantasy.
Please note that a (DnD 3.5) 5th level cleric should not be imagined as “common” in grounded fantasy fiction: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/587/roleplaying-games/dd-calibrating-your-expectations-2
I can’t remember but there are actually somewhat breakdowns somewhere, but 5th. level clerics are supposed to be relatively rare. Not *impossible* to find, but certainly not common.
3rd. ed. had a demographics calculator and I believe a large city of 100,000 people would end up with one or two 5th level clerics.
IIRC the rule of thumb is about 1% of the population has class levels.
Create Food and Water also has a limited shelf-life (24 hours, with 24 more if you cast Purify Food and Water) so while it can certainly helps you can’t really stock up on it.
Becoming a 5th-6th level cleric in a D&D society isn’t supposed to be easy. The only reason it’s easy for the player characters is that the entire point of the game is to play as individuals with exceptional powers, so you don’t want a situation where you can’t even play because the DM is saying “your character cannot have acquired the powers that would enable them to participate in play.” Strip away the plot shields that ensure that your aspiring first level cleric doesn’t just get eaten by ogres the first time they wander off into the woods in search of adventure and the XP to level up, and it becomes much less likely that many such clerics will ‘graduate’ to be able to cast Create Food and Water. Certainly very unlikely that there will be enough such clerics to sustain the entire population.
I’m going to reply to myself as this will apply to all the replies so far…
If we focus on the (3.5) mechanics, the “average” stat distribution should be 3d6. Accepting that, roughly 25% of the population will have the wisdom 13 (ignoring the fact that there is a stat increase at level 4) needed to enable casting 3rd level cleric spells.
After that, everything else is training.
Regarding the “only 1% of the population have class levels”, that looks and feels like an artefact of the background material where 90%+ of the population are engaged in subsistence farming, and are so stupid they are unable to learn or grow during their adult lives. Except no society that discovered clerical magic would rely on subsistence farming once they figured out how to train clerics, because mass training clerics is so much more effective.
D&D mechanics do not match “grounded fantasy” ideals in any way shape or form. The reality is D&D mechanics, while they are superficially realistic if you don’t look closely, are game mechanics designed to work for a game where the most powerful characters can literally reshape reality to their will. Any attempt to make them work realistically in a real-world or close to real-world setting is going to fail horribly, and almost all the actual settings are more defined by the romantic views of the flavour source than they are by the realistic consideration of the impact the game mechanics would have.
Weirdly, the older versions, like AD&D and first edition are actually less impacted by this as they avoid the conceit that the character rules apply to all NPCs as well.
“After that, everything else is training.”
For clerics? No. You might argue for wizards, but clerics are divinely appointed representatives who have to live up to certain standards and are granted their power by the gods/nature.
Well actually, {cracks open 3rd Edition DMG}
“Presented below are NPC classes… (*seven pages with charts*) …The NPC classes presented above showcase the differences between PCs and the rest of the world…The variance of ability scores (from 3 to 18 or higher) shows that not all people in the world are created equal, and not all have the same opportunities… (*four pages with charts*) …All PCs and NPCs described in this section are ‘elites,’ a cut above the average…Average characters…roll average abilities (3d6) and don’t get maximum hit points from their first Hit Die…some fighters, wizards, and so on are average people rather than elites… (ten pages with charts*)”
3rd Edition was full of rules for creating settings where things worked realistically, and the premade campaign worlds were all Early Modern settings with the coal and gunpowder and proto-germ-theory stuff replaced by magic.
I’m going to second a lot of people here who point out that if you’re looking at truly radical disparities in physical power between humans, such as “this human can create food and drink out of thin air and most others cannot even begin to do this, that human can throw exploding fireballs that blow up like grenades and most others cannot, that human over there is such a proficient fighter that he can literally kill an elephant with a teaspoon and, obviously, most others cannot…”
Well, the entire social order surrounding the recruitment of armies sort of collapses. The main reason to have an army is because your high-level characters can destroy things very well, but their effort and attention are finite. So you need more pairs of eyes and more individual persons to actually secure a large region, or to physically chase down each of 1000 dudes, or whatever. And also more people to guard the high-level character’s palace so that no low-level rando can eliminate them by sneaking in and cutting their throat in their sleep, or poisoning the chimichangas.
But at that point, the army is basically something you are forced to bring along to serve certain purposes and importantly, being the primary exerter of military force is not that purpose. Whatever you most pressingly need dead, whatever thing that is either a societal threat or the defense keeping the state (or the Demon King, or the necromancer’s legions, or whatever) from accomplishing its goal), it’s not going to be anything like a conventional real world army that gets it out of the way if the power disparities are that steep.
I’ve noticed that a lot of fiction featuring people with awesome magical powers has them mowing down companies of grunts, and wondered why anyone had the grunts in the first place, and who would sign up for the suicide squad.
“… but a high-level fighter (let alone more powerful classes like paladins or sorcerers) would still be able to defeat an entire squadron of these low-level fighters on the battlefield.”
Enough peasants can still wear down the best fighters. Especially if they have tactics and weapons designed to do so.
Th thing is, the other side knows that your Level 12 sorcerer is going to mop the floor with their Level 3 fights, and won’t send Level 3 fighters against a Level 12 sorcerer. Or if they do, they’re going to use tricks and traps and ambushes and the like, not just “run at them screaming to get mowed down” Hollywood tactics. Or they’ll join you as auxiliary forces, and maybe betray you later on. The enemy will respond somehow, and it’s highly unlikely that they respond by rolling over and dying.
The other issue is cost. It took something like 14 years to train a knight (7 as a page, 7 as a squire, though obviously this was highly variable). If that’s low-level, it’s going to take forever to get someone to a high-level fighter status. Same with wizards and clerics and rangers and bards and druids. Sorcerers and paladins have it a bit easier–they basically sell their soul to get power (the difference is, to whom)–but they’re also going to be far more rare. What you’d end up with, realistically, is a handful of super-high-level people as the core of your army, with a bunch of low-level people as the main mass of people.
That, or these high-level people are sent on special missions (ie, quests) that advance the strategic objectives of the group they’re with. Assassinations, investigations, negotiations, that sort of thing. The army would be mostly low- to mid-level folks, because they’re not so focused on skills as they are numbers. Put another way: It’s hard enough to train ten thousand people to be Level 3 fighters. Training ten thousand people to be Level 15 fighters would be impossible.
“There may be some sort of permanent order-keeping force (Classical Athens had its enslaved Scythian bowmen) or part-time volunteer city watch (one of the roles of the Schuttersgilde in the towns of the Low Countries)”
A question for Dr. Deveraux or anyone else who might have an answer- is there a reason that multiple proto-police forces seem to be referred to as archers?
I also noticed in Joel Harrington’s 2013 Book The Faithful Executioner, he lists out the law enforcement mechanisms of 16th century Nuremburg and describes the local town guards as companies of Archers (perhaps that’s the same as the Schuttersgilde)
Also in Umberto Eco’s book The Name of the Rose (which is fiction, but I believe well researched), an inquisitor arrives with a company of “French Archers” who similarly function more as police, rather than a military unit.
The Wikipedia page for the Scythian Bowmen specifically mentions that they more likely used clubs, rather than bows. Bows also seem like not that useful for breaking up disturbances, crowd control, or aprehending criminals alive. Is it just a coincidence? Is there a reason they wouldn’t use a more generic term like troop or soldier in the translation?
I am not an expert on this, so take this with a huge grain of salt, but I think this is likely more a coincidence than an actual preference of ancient societies towards using bowmen as proto-police units. The various units you mentioned might just be especially famous, but there are numerous other examples of units that might have performed similar functions despite not being bowmen (papal guard, various roman imperial guard forces, even roman lictors etc.).
I think an important divide to be made here is between “(foreign) guard forces” (i.e. the scythian bowmen/imperial germanic bodyguards of the roman emperor, scottish guard of the french king) and “local citizen militias” (dutch/german/italian shooting guilds). The former might sometimes have been bowmen simply because there was some value in having a unit of elite bowmen at the ready, as bows require practice and sufficient quality bowmen might not have been available through other recruitment options. Foreigners were probably also useful in controlling a population that they were not related to.
The latter will probably have had a sizeable chunk of their militia trained as archers or crossbowmen simply because that was useful in a siege, or because the cities were required to provide a certain number of archers by their liege (usually the holy roman emperor in the case of the medieval free cities of Netherlands and Germany). They will have acted as police forces not because they had bows but because they were part of the citizen militia. As far as I am aware, in the free cities of the Holy Roman Empire policing was simply the job of the citizens, and if needed, they would have organized through the units they already trained in.
That being said, I think the scythian slave bowmen are quite a curious case, as they were not employed by a ruler to protect himself from his subjects but by the city itself. From wikipedia it appears that our knowledge about them is very incomplete and uncertain though.
Skilled small-game hunters may have been useful as polices for their other associated skills. At least this is my own hypothesis.
> They will have acted as police forces not because they had bows but because they were part of the citizen militia.
Not quite.
Members of shooting guilds had specific rights and privileges over and above most other citizens (who they would share craft guild membership with in most cases). The details vary like town, as everything does in this period, but typical examples would include:
* The right to wear a livery; with the cloth likely provided at town expense.
* The right to bear your guild arms
* An exemption from routine watch service
* The obligation to serve in town expeditionary forces
* The right to be _paid_ for service in the militia
* The obligation to practice with your arms weekly
* Legal immunity from damages caused during practice
Meanwhile standard militia requirements for contemporary towns have very few requirements about training at all. The primary focus is just on equipment – what you need to own based on wealth and status, and how that is verified (to stop tricks like sharing one suit of armour between the street and whoever needs to do watch duty that night showing up in it).
I don’t know the answer, but you can add the Cheshire archers who were the favoured tax collectors for Richard II of England.
I’d guess it’s because archery is a low-status way of fighting that nonetheless requires a lot of practice, so they’re who you have as a professional force who need to be paid and organized as a unit in peacetime, might as well get some actual work out of ’em too.
I think the important thing is not so much “low-status” as “cheap”. Lots of people can afford a bow, and can perhaps be required to learn to use it. So an archer is just a man who cannot afford enough armour to fight at closer quarters.
Low-status is important, I think, because your military aristocrats don’t want to spend their time on policing.
No, “a man who cannot afford enough armor to fight at closer quarters” is a javelineer. Note that many historical armies include bodies of troops armed with the usual omni-spear and large shield but with no body armor or at most textile armor. Someone who avoids going down that route will take a weapon that is relatively easier to use at range.
Both slings and bows require truly extensive practice to use effectively in warfare. Unless your society naturally causes every adult male to learn one or the other as a basic life skill (shepherds and slings are a common example, as are hunters or nomadic horse-riding pastoralists and bows), you will not have random low-income people from that society who have had the spare time to practice and get good with them.
Note that, for instance, English longbowmen were drawn from the yeomanry, that is to say, the independent landowning peasantry who were higher-status than tenant farmers or serfs. That’s because the yeomen were the ones who had the time to spend hours every week on physically tiring archery practice and without such practice you cannot be an effective longbowman.
There was a unit called the Franc-archers during the mid-1400s to early 1500s. They were a military militia organized sort of like the English longbowmen, but they were used more for frontier defense than open battles on account of their poor performance. Given that recognizable police forces were rare at the time, one could easily see the Franc-archers called for such duties (and they often acted as such without actual orders).
Given their poor reputation on and off the battlefield (by nobles for their cowardice and presents for their abuses), the Franc-archers were often spoofed in contemporary literature, so I can see why Eco would have them used as the goons for the inquisitor. However, the actual Franc-archers were founded over a century after the events of The Name of the Rose.
Additionally, while the Franc-archers were originally envisioned as actual archers, they ended up using a variety of weapons. By the time there were disbanded, most of the “archers” were fighting as pikemen and the bows had been replaced with crossbows and firearms.
As someone who has viewed the extreme state concentration of force and the legitimate use of force you see in modern societies with a fair amount of skepticism, this is just a really notable difference between our societies and theirs.
Even if you don’t have modern style police in the Bobby Peel style, the idea of some kind of official law enforcement seems almost synonymous with civilization.
I think most people would have little idea of what to do without it, or they would jump to the conclusion of “vigilante terror”.
Because you formatted this for worldbuilders, a worldbuilder-y comment:
It strikes me that you could get some interesting variations on necromancy by viewing it through the lens of recruiting and mobilizing the dead (who are, after all, still part of society). I have the mental image of a society with self-mobilizing undead where dead citizens receive veneration in exchange for occasional military service, with the expectation that their family pays for everything.
This is an amazing idea, and could easily imply a system where the levy of the dead, once called, would contain lots of recently dead peasant corpses, who are still being mourned by their children and grandchildren but will soon be forgotten, and the long dead skeletons of great heroes, who have been continually venerated for centuries
Which would nicely slot in with the General Levy and Select Levy that has been discussed on the blog before.
This has some interesting parallels to a military of drones.
This seems to raise interesting questions about what the afterlife is like and how you leave it and in what state you do. Although I don’t feel like saying anyone you can converse with is truly dead.
Also, if there is a war in the afterlife, can the living be called upon to fight in it? What happens to them if they do?
Uh, are the dead somehow “expended” in doing so? What maintenance do they need in their respective states (raised vs. not), or what other cost(s) are associated with keeping them around in each state?
Because if there isn’t anything like that, then any society settled in a place for any length of time will accumulate several times more dead than living members, just due to how demographics work. Any with 500 years of settled history would have ~15x (certainly between 10-20x) as many dead as living members. The living would be (in modern terms) senior NCOs commanding a squad of their di manes. Contrariwise, if some Gauls try to settle next door, they can’t very well bring their dead with them (if only because their relatives back home also need those), so for the next …few centuries… the established settlement has a vast mobilization advantage over them, without requiring any edge in living population.
More importantly, why don’t even poor peasants rest, while their dead previous one or two generations work in the field? Or if not rest, work in a less taxing job, since we just shifted most of the farming work off the shoulders of the living (they still need to go into the fields for the harvest …unless they can just temporarily raise more dead). This society should be rich in material goods, what with not ~10% but ~100% of living adults available for jobs other than subsistence farmer. (Yes, yes, subsistence farmers did a lot of manufacturing, starting with cloth.) This would be true even if, despite the larger workforce, they couldn’t produce any more food than a real society, and would thus be food-insecure. (But of course, with so many more hands at work, they absolutely could bring marginal land under cultivation, and invest in more intensive use of good land, as well as improving transportation. Of course, the living population would tend to correspondingly expand — still, they would be extremely rich in services and manufactured goods but not food.)
Even if offensive necromancy can keep the dead off the battlefield (i.e. it is so disproportionately easier for the opposing army’s magicians to {hinder, incapacitate, kill-until-raised, permakill} dead soldiers than their living officers that societies start not bothering fielding them), that wouldn’t solve the second one, of deeply transforming the economic basis of society. Including, erm, generous alms to poor children, because unlike real premodern agricultural societies, it would be worth feeding them until they grow up to be a fit corpse, but contrariwise certainly no help for adult paupers (assuming it’s cheaper to raise them than to keep feeding them).
While a necromantic industrial revolution sounds neat for cultures who don’t view raising corpses for corvee labor as an intolerable act of desecration, I was thinking of something a step further where the dead are self-reanimating out of a sense of obligation rather than some necromantic Big Man getting the right to raise those particular corpses. With that kind of set-up I can see some societies being built around enslaving their own dead, but I can’t see that being the dominant model unless undead labor is qualitatively superior.
As for expending the dead… I was also operating under the necromancy wouldn’t stop bodily decay, so realistically you’re getting a few years out of a body unless the family does expensive maintenance work to keep your preserved. After that, I guess you’d get ghosts until your veneration ends? Which of course raises other worldbuilding questions…
@Marcus,
There are at least some variants on the belief in necromancy that I’ve heard about (specifically, when I lived in Africa on one occasion I was told about magicians who had the power to come back from the dead), in which the necromantic power has defined limits. Like, these magicians supposedly could only return from the dead a certain number of times, not indefinitely.
The fairly common historic solution to this in ancestor-worshipping societies is that the last couple of generations are ‘reachable’ directly, plus some honoured special older ones, while the majority of previous generations fade into a nebulous unspecific ‘the ancestors’ category rather than being specifically identifiable.
Some of these questions are addressed in Tamsyn Muir’s space fantasy The Locked Tomb trilogy. Despite the main characters being necromancers or allies, the effects of necromancy on warfare are mainly addressed directly from the point of view of the counter-necromancy insurgency.
Unfortunately, from the point of view of the present topic how the necromantic Empire staffs its army and space navy is not directly addressed. The core of the Empire consists of nine aristocratic Houses, of which the ones we see most of are basically a university, and a religious sect who are like Gormenghast but with less of the cheery optimism. (The author acknowledges the influence in her notes.) There are two Houses that are specialists in military careers but we don’t see much of their inner workings.
Judging by most cultures’ relationships with the spirits of their dead, I think self-mobilising spirits of the ancestors would be a decidedly double-edged sword. The living seem to survive on a fairly perpetual knife-edge of maintaining the proper reverence to avoid offence.
Again, it probably depends on the temperament of the dead, and the specifics of the necromancy as to how it’ll all play out.
For my part I’ve made two necromancy-heavy societies in different worldbuilding projects. The first are a 40k technobarbarian society that uses servo skulls to preserve the ‘spirits’ of the ancestors, allowing them to contact them for guidance, as well as tethering them to an individual as a sort of ‘guardian spirit’, or in extreme situations by ‘resurrecting’ them by providing the skull with a ‘new’ body.
The second are for a more fantasy world, and are a take on elves being long-lived. This actually being a myth, perpetuated by the ‘grey elves’ using necromancy to resurrect a caste of their ancient leaders as their ruling council, giving the impression of immortality to outsiders.
But yeah, overall it’s fun to create societies that integrate necromantic practices rather than outlaw them. Lots of interesting ground to cover.
Is the elves being immortal or just long-lived a hoax?
I’d say it’s more of an ethnic stereotype, believed in ignorance by folks who hear about elves but rarely interact with them on a day-to-day basis. Though it’s true enough at the level of elite politics, where successive generations of human leaders will end up dealing with one unchanging local undead elf-lord over a period of a couple of hundred years.
They’re not wholly immortal undead. They fade over time, growing less and less interested in the affairs of the living. You can only hold them here for so long, with veneration and ancestor-worship helping to keep them present for longer (as well as things like grudges and spite).
Do they actually live significantly longer than other sentient species in the setting?
Ah, I see. The regular bods no. Or at least not significantly (i.e. within 10 years or so).
The undead leaders…however long their societies can keep them tethered.
Though this article has prompted some interesting thoughts on how local rulers might work in such a society. Would they be resurrected undead bods too, or perhaps more of a temple hierarchy revolving around ancestor veneration. Interesting options.
test post, ignore.
This explains why those societies didn’t extend the vote to women: adult women of military age were mainly spending a lot of time pregnant or breastfeeding, and thus weren’t directly invested in the decision to go to war. (Not to say that women didn’t care about their husbands/brothers/etc, just that it was the men who needed to get themselves to the mustering point).
In my understanding, during the early Republic, the conflict between the plebeians and patricians basically played out as a military strike. Rome is at war, enemy army is roving the countryside. The muster is called, the plebeians form up..and then move to Mons Sacer and refuse to defend the city until the law is written down, or until plebeians are allowed to marry patricians, or whatever. Hard for women to hold the city hostage in that way.
Oh, there’s surviving speech that makes it clear the ancients understood this. When the second triumvirate tries to levy a tax on Romes women Hortensia delivered a speech including, in part, the following.
“Why should we pay taxes when we do not share in the offices, honours, military commands, nor, in short, the government for which you fight between yourselves with such harmful results?”
There’s an obvious correlation of ideas here, the paying of tax is connected to military service, representation, and political power. Ancient women knew what the unspoken norms were and were outraged when they were violated at their expense.
Also, while they may have had limited political power they didn’t have *none*. Hortensia’s speech worked, alongside her willingness to face police brutality delivered by the triumvirs. Arms are not the *only* source of political power, and inspiring people to believe in a cause has always been critical as well.
Mandatory conscription was actually used as argument for (male) universal suffrage in the decades around 1900.
No, they couldn’t even *imagine* extending the vote to women, because these societies were deeply patriarchal. The feeling that women, as a class, were less worthy of respect was foundational to their psychology, something everyone learned from infancy.
“No, they couldn’t even *imagine* extending the vote to women, because these societies were deeply patriarchal.”
They *could* imagine women holding assemblies, voting and passing decrees. “Thesmophoriacuzae”, and “Lysistrate”. But then again, they also could imagine *birds* holding assemblies and founding a city (Cloudcuckooland, in “Birds”). Note that in Lysistrate, men make peace terms under pressure of women… but these do not seem to involve holding *joint* assemblies.
Also note that the one “polis”/”ethne” of women *imagined* by many Greeks and Romans, the Amazons, seem to have been consistently depicted as led by queens – not by assembly, council and elected magistrates and generals.
We don’t really have enough surviving ancient Greek fiction surrounding the Amazons to know whether the Greeks ever imagined the Amazons having a nuanced or complex political structure. Nearly every time we see any ‘foreign’ polity portrayed in a Greek myth, it’s a kingdom of some sort, where the only narratively relevant figures are a monarch and maybe one or two of their children. This is probably a side effect of ancient Greece being a society where stories tended to be shorter than the big fat full-length word processor generated novels we often favor today.
There are a very few surviving Hellenistic blockbusters, featuring lovers re-united after multiple misunderstandings, serial misfortune and much travel. They seem to have been quite popular, and ran to quite a few scrolls.
This seems possibly somewhat just-so-story-ish to me, especially because many significantly patriarchal historical societies have had fairly-substantial-but-situationally-circumscribed honor and power for women.
I can see it being true of the Greeks but not of a fair number of other societies.
The other thing people learned from infancy was, to use a Southern colloquialism, “Respect yo’ mamma!” Women were often tasked with raising kids, up to a certain age, and the idea that you’re going to look down on the person who feeds, cloths, and punishes you is….well, stupid. Maybe once you’ve been in the agoge for a while, or similar male-only spaces, but when you were young you were cared for largely by women (the men were in the fields).
There were also the cases of extreme violence that made sure female rule was burned into everyone’s awareness. Boudica, for example. Women also led pirate fleets. The whole Spanish order of chivalry that consisted entirely of women. Cleopatra. Then there are mythological stories like the Morrigan and Athena, often termed goddesses of war (how people viewed them in fact was complicated; gods often didn’t have specific jobs the way we think of them today). These were female deities that were active in leadership, even military, positions in the stories. There were also female oracles, who advised emperors. Not a small thing.
Please bare in mind I’m not saying these are necessarily common or good examples; what I’m saying is that these are in fact examples, ones which the ancients (for a given value of “ancient” obviously) would have been aware of. If you imagine women in leadership positions ending badly, or can only work if the woman is literally a goddess, you’re still imagining women in leadership positions. So the idea is there.
There’s evidence of profound love and respect for women in history as well. Roman grave markers for their daughters provide many examples of this.
I’m not saying misogyny and patriarchal views didn’t play into it. What I’m saying is that I think those ideas gloss over a tremendous amount of complexity. It’s an easy, seductive answer that does get us part of the way there (how far depends on the society in question), but there’s a LOT more going on that stopping at “Patriarchy!” doesn’t allow us to investigate.
I think the reality is that women spent a large amount of their time pregnant until very recently. A pregnant woman can’t fight the way a non-pregnant woman can, and by the time they’re done being pregnant they’re either too old to fight or dead (death in child birth was common). A woman six months pregnant is not going to have the agility necessary to fight in a shield wall or phalanx. A woman who’s abs have been split apart isn’t going to be much use setting up an armed camp or digging trenches. This may feed into misogyny, but it’s not due to misogyny; it’s due to the metabolic realities of peasant farming (remember, 90% of humanity was peasants so that’s who we should focus on) and human physiology and kinesthetics. It’s why modern militaries are more open to women–since women don’t spend their fighting years popping out babies they are more than physically able to handle combat roles. If we reproduced like sea horses, it would be the other way round.
I have never heard about a “whole Spanish order of chivalry that consisted entirely of women” What was it called?
Orden del Hacha. Order of the Hatchet, which was also their symbol.
In brief: In 1149 Tortosa, a city in Spain, was going to be overrun by Moors, having been conquered twice in fairly rapid succession and the main army having gone off to fight somewhere else. The women of the town took up arms and defended it, using anything they could, including the iconic hatchets. Pretty much everyone was so impressed that the survivors were knighted and the Order of the Hatchet created for them.
It’s a closed order–only those who defended that city at that battle were member, and no new members were allowed. Still, the members were given all the rights and privileges of knighthood, and inherited their husbands’ property outright upon their husbands’ deaths (NOT a small thing in an era where inheritance was the way to build wealth). They were also exempt from taxes. I haven’t looked into the later careers of these women–it would be interesting to see what they did with that freedom–but it at least demonstrates that the idea of women being equal to men, while rare and often requiring extreme situations, wasn’t alien to our ancestors.
The concept doesn’t appear to be unique to that incident, or to Spain. France had a system for granting women the status of knight (chevaleresse), for example. And no, these weren’t spouses of knights; the term is used for women who are not married to knights. There were also a few other such orders in the Middle Ages, including the Order of the glorious Saint Mary (suppressed in the 1550s), and some that appear to be mostly ceremonial in nature.
As a fantasy trope, I’ve wondered about a counter-factual world in which some Sumerian genius had stumbled upon the recipe for gun powder, and so in the ensuing centuries even before how to smelt iron was discovered musketry based on bronze had been developed. With firearms would come a reduced (if still non-zero) emphasis on upper body strength in war, and so a tradition might eventually develop of special orders of armed women, perhaps devotees of certain goddesses for example.
Having black powder is not the same as having reliable firearms. I know cannons can be made from bronze since such were made in the Early Modern period. But how small firearms can you make from this metal?
There were/are bronze “signal” cannon that were quite small. Given the relatively modest pressures generated by black powder I have no doubt that a musket could be made out of bronze. That they weren’t historically is because bronze was more expensive than iron, while the advantage of bearing that expense for cannon was that until industrial times it was difficult to make large iron castings without potentially catastrophic flaws (and even then cast iron and bronze cannon co-existed).
The thing is, if a woman had tried to show up to the muster point, she would be literally slapped down- there was no available path for women to decide that they wanted to participate and become a member of the ‘fighting citizen’ class. So there’s something of a chicken-and-egg paradox here.
Being a fighter forces the city to recognize you as a citizen in exchange for your fighting services. Being a citizen enables you to establish a degree of independence that allows you to be an effective fighter as opposed to being someone else’s de facto subjugated dependent. While the first connection was broken for women in these societies, so was the second.
The structure was, in other words, patriarchal, it was specifically designed with male primacy in mind and threats to male primacy were actively attacked and suppressed by mechanisms in play within the state.
They should’ve gotten together, founded a city of outcasts, and kidnapped their neighbors’ men by pretending to invite them to a festival but not letting them leave.
Absolutely untrue. There are several essays on this blog that go into detail about why it’s untrue.
Armies traveled with a LOT of noncombatants and camp followers, many of whom would be at the muster point. A muster point is a significant number of men gathering together away from their households; they need things like clean shirts, food, water, someone to watch the horses or donkeys, that sort of thing. And if the local populace can handle that, that’s one less thing for the guys running the muster to deal with. Remember, the guys running the muster are already about maxed out on planning capacity, which is why they’re doing the muster this way in the first place. The guys running the muster WILL NOT turn down a way to hand those responsibilities off to the locals. Plus, it builds good will between the army and the population.
Yes, yes, “good generals minimized this” and all that–it’s a literary trope to illustrate good generalship, not actual fact and certainly not the norm. The whole reason it works is because the normal conditions have about a 1:4 ratio of camp followers to “real” members of the army, many of them women. Without them, the army starves to death, or freezes, depending on the climate. Armies NEEDED WOMEN and generals KNEW IT.
Once the army marches it’s even easier for women to join up in combat roles. The difference between “camp follower” and “member of the army” is hazy. To give an example, in the Middle Ages women went with men on foraging parties, and were engaged in violence as part of that foraging. On the shield wall, generals weren’t going to look up everyone’s skirt; if an extra few hands happened to materialize they weren’t going to turn them down. This is evidenced by the number of times it happened. I’m mostly familiar with this in navies, but navies were a LOT harder to hide women in than armies. In more recent times, naval battles often included women doing combat roles–enough so that they petitioned the Admiralty to be included when the medals were handed out (they were refused, but the Admiralty admitted they had a valid point). Obviously these are the exceptions, but there are far more exceptions than people realize.
The idea that these were systems designed to slap down threats to male supremacy is rather silly. They were systems to summon people to war–and that has ALWAYS included women, starting from the boys leaving home, going through the muster points, and all the way to the front lines. The system assumed men did the fighting, but allowed for exceptions, more or less broad depending on the specific culture in question.
And infamously, women were among the scavengers that picked over battlefields for valuables after the fighting was over, quite frequently finishing off any wounded encountered there.
I’m really going back to something you said in Part I: “well worth reading as an overview is Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (2006).” I stewed so long thinking about what to say that the comment section had gone to 300+, so I’m posting here, instead.
I’m an evolutionary biologist by training (Master’s from UPenn, 1981). Please, for the love of Darwin, do NOT tell anyone to rely on Azar Gat. In the first place, his book is a generation out of date, which may not be much in the military history field but is a LOT in biology & anthropology. In the second & more important place, everything he says about human evolution or adaptation reveals that he doesn’t know WTF he’s talking about. It is *painful* for me to read, not least because he doesn’t appear to acknowledge that women are people.
The fact that Gat’s title includes the phrase “human civilization” shows that he also doesn’t know squat about archaeology & anthropology. The advent of reliable ancient-DNA testing, LIDAR, and other novel techniques has led to a revolution in knowledge of premodern cultures in the past 20 years. I’m currently reading Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World by Patrick Wyman (of the Tides of History podcast & friend of the blog), covering the period from the end of the Ice Age through the Bronze Age Collapse. TLDR: there was no single or even general path from foraging to agriculture to civilization, there were cultures with more and less organized violence for reasons that are currently obscure, people have always been *complicated*.
If some of you want me to suffer enough to pull out more specific examples of how Gat is wrong about evolution I will, if Dr. Devereau asks me to do a critical reading I can, but it’s easier to just refer you to a recent review paper: <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=The+controversial+origins+of+war+and+peace%3A+apes%2C+foragers%2C+and+human+evolution"?The controversial origins of war and peace: apes, foragers, and human evolution, by Luke Glowacki. I think there *are* factors that Glowacki and Gat are failing to consider, ways in which human violence & warfare is biologically *weird*. Things involving patriarchy & its psychological effects, and the way many human cultures create a surplus of boys & a deficit of girls (the opposite of what a biologist would expect), or just value boys more–though, as we said in grad school, “milk is the limiting factor in mammal populations”.
And IMHO the value of sons isn’t because they’re good for war but because they’re more reliable for social security, daughters will care too much for their children by comparison. But that’s my theory, which is mine.
Also don’t trust people who natter on about sexual selection in Homo sapiens who don’t seem to know a) female choice is the gold standard for sexual selection b) for the past 10,000 years *at least* arranged marriages have been a major force in H.sapiens sexual selection.
Man, I wish you had written this post last fall, before I got a copy of Azar Gat’s book (mostly because Bret talk about it so favourably). I haven’t read it yet, but was meaning to, but now you’ve spoiled it for me I may not read it after all.
I would love to read your more detailed critique of what Gat gets wrong about evolution, if you can spare the time!
The abstract of the paper you linked doesn’t clarify in what ways Gat is wrong.
I think that a couple of examples would be very helpful
Was waiting for some glue to dry, so read the Luke Glowacki paper. It’s fascinating, and even for a non-specialist like me clear and easy to understand. Thanks.
But, it is not, repeat not, a critique of Gat. The book does get a few references, but there are over a hundred referred books and papers in total so Gat is just one of many.
What the paper does do is review the evidence and academic scholarship around the evolutionary basis for warfare from chimpanzees and bonobos; the evidence for and against warfare in hunter-gather societies ancient and modern (and whether modern hunter-gatherers can be used as a template for prehistorical); and the limits of physical evidence obtained by archeology and anthropology.
Gat may be wrong in places or in detail, but that’s true for just about any historical or scientific overview. It’s not possible to only read papers and books that are absolutely guaranteed 100% accurate in every word. I think GAT IS ALL WRONG DO NOT READ is not the message to take away from the paper.
Gat is wrong because he’s not thinking like a biologist (or anthropologist), which comparison to Glowacki makes easier to see.
For instance, Gat says (in Chap. 3) “Moreover, human local groups, similar to those of chimpanzees, are predominantly patrilocal and patrilineal–that is, it is the females who leave their families on marriage, joining the males who stay with their original family groups. The local, family group is the composed of brethren.”
This is NOT similar to chimpanzees!! In both of the nonhuman species, most females (but not all) leave their families upon young adulthood, then wander until they find a new group to join. Female movement is driven by themselves and by pressure from females in their natal group, males don’t come into it. Here’s a review paper than gives a good flavor of how we think of these things: The evolution of social philopatry and dispersal in female mammals by Clutton-Brock & Lukas (Clutton-Brock is a colossus of the field).
Just a few pages after the sentence I just quotes, Gat is talking about regional groups of hunter-gatherers. He writes “When a daughter of one clan is given in marriage to another clan, this daughter and her children represent an evolutionary ‘investment’ ‘deposited’ by the wife’s clan in the husband’s.”
Just, no. If you’re talking about giving women between groups, DO NOT try to drag evolution into it, this is about patriarchal power not evolution or kin selection (which he’d been talking about earlier in the chapter). This is the kind of talk that gives “evolutionary psychology” a bad name, and Gat is quoting it second-hand.
This is in addition to the fact that Gat is out-of-date and is quoting even more out-of-date sources.
I appreciate having to write this up and think it through, because it’s made me put a few things together. One of the big differences between humans & chimps/bonobos is that humans are cooperative breeders (as elucidated by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy). This means that young human females in a “state of nature” will not be pushed out by their mothers, but will tend to stay in their natal groups, and old females will undergo menopause & extend our useful lives as helpful grandmothers. Meanwhile, young males will leave to seek mates elsewhere. As with most other social mammals (tho not the other chimps), we’d *expect* human social groups to consist of matrilines. Patrilineal cultures should be a minority, at most — not the majority, to be assumed as “natural”.
And in fact anthropologists and sociologists find that even in patriarchal cultures where it’s assumed that every grandmother looks forward to babysitting her *son’s* children, maternal grandmothers are critically important–and in a more free-wheeling society like ours, the matrilineal preference is clear. (see Matrilateral Bias in Human Grandmothering, Martin Daly & Gretchen Perry).
What this says to me–and I don’t think I’ve seen anyone put the pieces together before, so thank you–is that if, as the genetic evidence *seems* to suggest, patrilocality has been more common in the past 70K years, or at least the past 10K, then it’s fundamentally *unnatural*, due to something other than evolutionary psychology. My spidey senses are pointing to arranged marriage as a major co-occurring factor, but I’ll have to think about it some more.
The common chimpanzee and the bonobo behave very differently from each other. These two species belong to the same genus. Ours divided from theirs several million years ago. We learn more about what is natural to humans from historically recorded hunter-gatherers than from systematically observing those two species.
Patrilineality is far from universal even in historically recorded societies. There are plenty of recorded cases of matrilineal (mother’s group) and ambilineal (both parent’s group) societies. Some matrilineal societies exist even today! Thanks to developing examination of ancient DNA we can now tell if some archaeological cultures were patrifocal (bride moves to groom), matrifocal (groom moves to bride) or ambifocal (both about equally likely). Patrilinial or at least partrifocal societies seem to have developed as a consequence of differences in wealth. Something typical hunter-gatherers don’t have.
Matrilineal societies are actually reasonably common, and is basically unrelated to how patriarchal they are. There are plenty of matrilineal societies that transfers power/property to males via the female line. (usually that means the important guy is a womans brother, rather than her husband)
Much indicates social status being independent of gender was the original human state. I think patriarchy is Mesolithic at most.
I posted a long reply about 12 hours ago with several links that hasn’t been approved yet, and like a fool I didn’t save a copy for myself. So now I have to grub a linkless version out of my brain.
No, the Glowacki paper doesn’t refute Gat directly. Gat is an example of a “deep-rooter”, one who thinks human group violence has deep evolutionary roots, stretching back to commonalities with the other chimpanzees (chimps & bonobos). He is cavalier about saying that since the other chimpanzees are usually patrilocal (males stay with their natal group, females mostly disperse) that patrilocal societies must be the “state of nature” for humans, as well, and goes on to talk about the advantage of brothers to cooperate in kin groups. From that he takes only one step to talk about groups “giving brides in marriage”, trading females like they’re nonsapients (like Niven’s Kzinti or Puppeteers, hmmm issues much Larry?)
This is a serious error. Biologists know that the prime mover of sociobiology, especially for mammals, is female dispersal, female choice–I linked to a paper by Tim Clutton-Brock, one of the giants of the field, as an example. Humans are cooperative breeders (per the groundbreaking work of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy), that’s why we have menopause–so that we older women have an extended lifespan to take care of our grandchildren and other relatives. This means that the human “state of nature” would be closer to the norm for social mammals, groups organized around matrilines–although in the human case clearly with more pair-bonding and child care by males than usual.
One other piece of evidence I linked to is that anthro/sociology studies show that even in *strongly* patrilineal cultures where women are supposed to cut ties with their birth family when they join their husband’s family … they look for support from *their* mothers as much as possible. In free-wheeling societies like the modern US where there are no particular expectations, people feel closer to their mother’s side of the family, and maternal grandmothers provide more childcare than paternal grandmothers. On average, we are emotionally matrilineal–and IMHO that comes from an evolutionary history deeper than the patrilineal past of at least 10K years, maybe longer.
I don’t know much about the work of Azar Gat or its deficiencies, but I am familiar with the work of Larry Niven, so I will note the following:
1) Niven absolutely has issues, over and above the whole “born in 1938 Southern California with the social and gender attitudes to match” thing.
2) Whatever may justly be said against him, it must at least be pointed out that Niven does not present either the Kzinti or the Puppeteers as a society that it would be desirable, or even possible, for humans to emulate. The Kzinti in particular may(?) have gone through some kind of horrific radical patriarchal period in their pre-first contact history in which they inflicted female nonsapience on themselves as a species. If I’m not misremembering that, it was probably the worst thing they ever did to themselves because their culture is wildly self-destructive and manages to nearly commit collective civilizational suicide-by-cop against humans who have no better technology and widespread pacifism as their cultural norm… and that decidedly happened after the Patriarchate was in power. The Puppeteers’ biology is even more alien (I don’t recall the details) but the Puppeteers are not generally presented as an admirable species; they do what they do for the reasons they do it and are not in any way shape or form ‘heroes.’
3) With all of this said, Niven absolutely does have issues you can see in his writing of human characters. Like a significant fraction of the mid-20th century science fiction writers, he seems comfortable with the idea that women are people, but views them as mysterious and inscrutable people whose ways are not understood and are often not truly worth understanding by men.
I wonder if there’s a gender counterpart to ‘orientalism.’ [rolls eyes]
As I recall it, puppeteers have two sapient sexes and a third sorta-sex.
I think at some point Nessus demands someone mate with him as a condition of accepting a mission. One of the council he is talking to makes a noble sacrifice by agreeing to it. (Normally no puppeteer would want to mate with someone as crazy as Nessus is by puppeteer standards.)
The third sex is really a non-sapient domestic animal that reproduces with others of its kind, until it used to host a larval puppeteer. Yes, like in “Alien.”
Kzinti in particular may(?) have gone through some kind of horrific radical patriarchal period in their pre-first contact history in which they inflicted female nonsapience on themselves as a species
Am I reading that correctly? Because if so, that’s a…..wild, and extremely disturbing, flight of imagination.
Some of the Man-Kzin War stories written by other authors imply that Kzinret aren’t actually unintelligent but carry a female chromosome defect that causes them to lack the ability to process language.
Hector,
they inflicted female non-sapience on themselves as a species
One of the stories in ‘The Man-Kzin Wars’ series states this quite explicitly.
If I understand it correctly the Kzinti were highly patriarchal when first contacted by a star-faring species (not humanity). They then used newly acquired genetic engineering to make themselves mach their Bronze Age ideals. With the predictably self-destructive result of making their men needlessly aggressive and their women non-sentient.
“Am I reading that correctly? Because if so, that’s a…..wild, and extremely disturbing, flight of imagination.”
Ah, I see you’re not familiar with the later books of the Dune series! [Spoilers ahead, if you care about spoiling a book series this old.]
The Tlelaxu did something similar, turning the women of their culture into brainless bio-tanks to produce more males. Comes into play later on because it’s these tanks (and I believe specifically tanks that use Bene Geserit sisters, though that may be a retcon by Frank’s son) that allow the Tlelaxu to manufacture spice and thus break the monopoly on it and significantly reduce the cost.
The idea of turning women into brainless drones was also the plot of “The Stepford Wives”. And a few other works around that time. It was…not common, and generally (but not always) considered evil, but it was certainly an idea floating around the culture at that time.
@Hector, if memory serves, the first short story to feature the Kzinti mostly had the point that their telepaths confident statement that their prey have no weapons, is less meaningful that they expect, given that the prey have been pacifists for so long they don’t know what a weapon looks like anymore. Ends very badly for the Kzinti.
I think (not sure) that the bit about Kzinti females being nonsapient comes from the later novel Ringworld, along with a diplomat who job title is Speaker-to-Animals. (Guess who they mean by animals.)
And I think the idea of the intelligence being bred out of the females comes from the short story Briar Patch, written ~ 20 years later by Dean Ing.
The Puppeteers are reproductive parasitoids, like wasps. They lay eggs in the living bodies of another species, and eat their way out. They describe themselves as having three sexes, with the hosts described as “female”, and the other two being called “male”. They also regard courage as a mental disorder. Any puppeteer with enough courage to meet a member of another species is regarded as insane, and forbidden from breeding on eugenic grounds. Nessus in Ringworld blackmails their ruler into letting him have children, the ruler does this himself rather than ask another to do something so disgusting, and said ruler is later deposed in consequence.
The thing about written SF is that you get aliens who are so much more alien. Gives you an idea what cognitive diversity really looks like.
ad9:
I recall in “The Ringworld Engineers” they visit The Map Of Kzin, a planet sized Kzin duplicate on Ringworld. Chmeee (formerly Speaker-to-Animals) visits a harem of Kzinret descended from Kzin taken there many millennia before. He is surprised that they are more intelligent than the ones on Kzin. Not as smart as males, but they have some vocabulary.
The idea of turning women into brainless drones was also the plot of “The Stepford Wives”. And a few other works around that time. It was…not common, and generally (but not always) considered evil, but it was certainly an idea floating around the culture at that time.
Dinwar,
The dystopian novel Swastika Night by the socialist-feminist writer Kathairine Burdekin, has some similar speculation along those lines. It depicts an alternate history in which the Nazis (and the Japanese, who she sees as somewhat less horrific but still pretty terrible) win WWII, kill off all their enemies, rule for centuries, and create a new religion with Hitler as a god. She sees the Nazis in largely gender-based terms, as a kind of hypertrophied cult of masculinity, and she depicts them reducing women to essentially a breeding-livestock role. They’re not *literally* reduced to sub-sapience, but they’re treated as though they are. She speculates that the culture would shift its ideals of desire and sexuality to male youths instead of women.
The interesting thing about that book is it was written in 1937, so it wasn’t actually written as alternate history, even though that’s how we would read it today: it was written as a speculative, *really possible* future.
In her book, nature sort of gets its revenge though: women start having more and more male children as opposed to female, and the Nazis are faced with the real prospect that their civilization is going to go extinct.
The Kzinti “Speaker-to-Animals” is called so because he is trained to talk with other species. He is and eunuch by the way.
Lena Synnerholm
“Speaker-to-Animals” aka Chmeee a eunuch? Where does it say that?
I recall in “Ringworld Engineers”, after he invades another Kzin’s harem on the Map Of Kzin, he cuts a deal with that Kzin that any sons he sired will not be killed, but will be raised to adulthood and sent out with the traditional knife, rope, and bag of salt.
Sorry, I have only read what other people have written about the novel. If you have read it yourself you are probably correct.
Common chimpanzees are among the most aggressive mammals while booboos are largely peaceful. Humans are near the mammalian average in this respect.
It isn’t terribly useful to talk about aggression with intelligent species to begin with. Humans have a baseline aggressive impulse, but it’s quite muted; it takes significant provocation to trigger violence in most people. It’s just that desensitization to violence is normalized in modern society, and human cultures have mastered training people to be aggressive.
Other than that humans tend to be proactively aggressive. We plan and execute violence in response to a situation we decide can be solved with violence or warrants violence, we rarely spontaneously fight. It’s a choice. There’s a soft exception with juveniles undergoing puberty, but even them aggression is limited, sporadic, and we expect any young adults to have mastered themselves; the legal and moral range where we accept and expect instinctive aggression is limited to a few years.
This is actually quite similar to Bonobos. Contrary to popular belief Bonobos do fight, but only in two general situations. Young males will sometimes escalate roughhousing to violence…and if a male threatens a female every female in the group will join together to violently subdue them. Further, if a male threatens an infant they will brutally kill the male.
In other words, Bonobos females enforce peace with extreme prejudice. This isn’t just reactive, they will plan and execute joint retribution, stopping or continuing depending on the severity of the transgression.
Elephants, orcas, humans, and Bonobos are all quite similar in this regard. We’ll all decide to kill and execute the plan, absent any survival necessity. And this means any comparison to a species that can’t or doesn’t do that is misguided.
@Terry,
Young males will sometimes escalate roughhousing to violence…and if a male threatens a female every female in the group will join together to violently subdue them. Further, if a male threatens an infant they will brutally kill the male.
I mean, that strikes me as fundamentally defensive / pro-social / benevolent violence. Very different from the kind of violence that, unfortunately, humans and chimpanzees often engage in, such that I don’t think it’s useful to label it under the same term.
@Hector “I mean, that strikes me as fundamentally defensive / pro-social / benevolent violence. Very different from the kind of violence that, unfortunately, humans and chimpanzees often engage in, such that I don’t think it’s useful to label it under the same term.”
I think the boundary is a bit fuzzier than that. Is it ‘pro-social violence’ to raid a neighbouring tribe, force them off their land and claim that land for your own group? Is it pro-social violence to engage in internal group violence to determine hierarchies?
The latter one is especially interesting in chimpanzees, considering that all of the known chimpanzee ‘wars’* appear to have been precipitated by uncertain dominance dynamics within large groups. Not that I’m saying that there isn’t a difference in how violence is wielded in these groups, and how it affects them. But I don’t think a ‘pro-social/non-pro-social’ spectrum is all that powerful of a tool to understand it (though it isn’t without its uses).
I suppose the key question for us here is ‘are humans more chimpanzee-like or bonobo-like in our natural violence-dynamics (so far as ‘natural’ exists), or do we not cluster with either of these and have our own ‘human-dynamic’ that can’t be meaningfully informed by our two closest living relatives?’.
The answer to that, broadly I think, is ‘we have no idea because we’re conjecturing based on an exceptionally sparse dataset’. With a dash of ‘both our and our closest relatives’ relationship with violence may well have changed over time considering all of us are capable of at least rudimentary ‘culture’ in relation to violence’ to muddy the waters. As well as ‘violence in bonobos and chimpanzees is more complicated than we initially thought**’.
* I put ‘wars’ in quotes as, as far as I’m aware, they’re pretty one-sided affairs. There’s a group that does the killing, and a group that gets killed. No fatalities are known to have been inflicted by the ‘victim-group’ on the ‘aggressor’ group’, which I would probably term ‘slaughter’ rather than ‘war’.
** For instance, we know comparatively little about the causes and frequency of these super-violent chimpanzee ‘wars’ (e.g. how much are they influenced by comparative environmental pressure). We have also found some interesting findings about bonobo violence, with male bonobos fighting more often than male chimpanzees, but much less lethally. This isn’t majorly surprising (if violence is more likely to escalate to lethality, there’s a stronger disincentive to start it). However, it does show that the overall picture of violence systems in bonobo society are more complex than the overarching ‘matriarchal free-love hippy’ popular conception. It also raises the question of how much about violence in these respective groups is innate vs cultural (it’s likely to be a bit of both, but the proportion matters for the conversation of its applicability to human societies).
I was thinking about the risk of being killed by someone of the same species. Historically recoded hunter-gatherers are near the mammalian average for such risk.
@Lena “Historically recoded hunter-gatherers are near the mammalian average for such risk.”
While this is a useful data point, it’s worth considering that living hunter-gatherers are a decidedly imperfect model for historic hunter-gatherers on account of having lived alongside agricultural societies for a really long time. This has led to multiple different confounding effects, principle among which is the fact that all present hunter-gatherer communities have been driven off the prime productive land many of them once inhabited by agricultural societies. As such, we might expect this to have some impact on the degree of interpersonal violence we might expect.
One of the difficulties there is determining which way the impact might be. This is where some of the work around chimpanzees and bonobos might be useful (though you’d also want meta-analyses of living hunter-gatherers). Does increased resource pressure drive increased interpersonal violence, or increased interpersonal co-operation. This is not an easy question to answer!
@hector this is exactly my point-most human violence engages with social norms, often redress for breech or the interests of the group at the expense of outsiders, but almost always justified in a premeditated way that accounts for public opinion.
Bonobos do this too. This manifests as actions we instantly sympathize with, but it’s *rare* among species that they’re capable of this degree of reasoning.
Chimps also do this, but mix it with a high rate of instinctual aggression that blends with their ability to plan violence as the inciting incident. People have drawn parallels to humans, but my point is that this blend is at best useful for talking about juvenile males, and even that’s overselling the physiological similarities; Chimps are more like teenagers than the rest of us, but teenagers are much more like the rest of us than Chimps.
This reply is really in regard to the whole subthread below 👇.
One of the exasperating, wrong things about Gat’s book is that he makes NO distinction between human impulses, and aggression as exhibited by chimpanzees, which he calls “war” to make it seem on the same spectrum, just another version of the same basic process.
I should have said, subthread above ☝️
Steven Pinker (a Canadian brain scientist) has pointed out the difference between impulsive and planed aggression. Most acts violence humans have committed in historical times are of the later type.
Considering the biological costs of pregnancy and nursing it makes sense for female choice to matter a lot for Placental evolution. Azar Gat seems to have modelled the original human society on later historical ones where women were denied this choice.
In order to develop the capacity for non-productive warfare (early warfare is often more productive than any other task, but also catastrophically unproductive when it fails), some portion of a non-technological population must be reduced to compelled servitude, ceding the resources they produce to others to support those others’ leisure.
Monogamous patriarchy is not the only way to arrange a society to maximize the number of masters, but it is the most bureaucratically simple way to do so. Primitive societies that do not adopt it will have to come up with military strategies other than mass mobilization; primitive non-patriarchy survives best in foot-nomadic societies and places where terrain is so isolated/defensible that men are presented with no outside forces to regularly defend the community from.
There is a reason why historically recorded hunter-gatherers survived in areas largely unsuitable for agriculture. Be they too dry, too cold or the local soils being too poor.
“It is *painful* for me to read, not least because he doesn’t appear to acknowledge that women are people.”
I don’t have a copy to hand, but I do not seem to recall coming to that conclusion: Would you mind telling me how you did?
“The fact that Gat’s title includes the phrase “human civilization” shows that he also doesn’t know squat about archaeology & anthropology.”
I don’t understand this complaint at all: Have archaeologists and anthropologists discovered some non-human civilization?
The complaint is with the “civilisation” part of the title: The word civilisation derives from latin civitas, the city-state. There’s been war before there were cities.
My complaint is that it implies that there is a singular state, “human civilization”. Since most of the book is about anthropology/biology, it further implies–or rather, has the mindset–that there’s been an inevitable progress toward that singular state, perhaps with different parts of the world progressing faster than others. *twitch twitch twitch*
Patrick Wyman’s Lost Worlds is an excellent antidote to that kind of thinking, as well as being a truly mind-expanding work in its own right.
Etymology is not meaning.
But a choice of specific title can on occasion be enlightening as to the underlying assumptions of an author.
Sure, Ynneadwraith, and if there was an equivalent synonym for ‘Civilization’ that had a different etymology then Gat’s choice not to use that word might be related to the etymology of ‘civilization’ or might not; but there isn’t an equivalent word (not in a *publisher’s* vocabulary, at least).
Look, I’m responding to a critique from a biologist that a historian is misusing biology, and the biologist derives that critique by misusing linguistics. I haven’t the expertise to criticize further.
No, that’s fine. I understand what you’re doing. I just think you’re focussing your criticism too narrowly on the term ‘civilisation’ which wasn’t the point that was being objected to. That point was against the whole term ‘human civilisation’ which implies that ‘human civilisation’ is even a discreet observable thing (as opposed to, say, human civilisations which at least acknowledges that there are multiple different forms civilisation has taken in human history, which is at least closer to the anthropological view of how this all works (i.e. each individual human culture must be assessed against the specific material circumstances it finds itself in, rather than there being some hierarchy leading from ‘undeveloped’ to ‘civilisation’).
Now it’s perfectly fine criticising that as a view, but it’s a bit broader than just objecting to the use of the word ‘civilisation’ in a title.
Personally I would go the other way. “Human Civilization” is a world like “human intelligence.” Despite the fact that intelligence is manifested in a uniquely different way by each individual person, there is only one intelligence. Similarly, there is only one civilization–the capacity to produce cultural artifacts.
This implies, of course, that there is no such thing as a “Western” or any other, civilization. This eliminates at a stoke all questions of which civilization a given polity at a specific time and place “belonged to.” It then becomes a question of “How did they uniquely manifest civilization?” What constraints did they face? What opportunities did they exploit?
And thus, anthropology becomes a science.
I use the expression “state society” to avoid the ambiguity of the word “civilisation”.
If I refuse to read any book by a person who believes there is such a thing as civilization, I’m not going to be reading many books.
…is that what the person you were replying to was saying?
Ynneadwraith, arguably only books that touch upon anthropology.
For example Bruce G. Triggers survey of early civilizations, Understanding Early Civilizations: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/understanding-early-civilizations/4E22C3F88D6A41563441A9422767ADA7
I feel this book, and any other on a like subject, would fall foul of a prohibition on writing about human civilization.
I’m happier with that (as I suspect OP would be) as it at least mentions human civilisations. It’s the implication that there is one singular human civilisation (which some groups are closer to and others are further from) that is objectionable.
I can’t speak to the content of the book and how accurately it reflects this nuance in the titles, having not read it.
It is far too common mistake to ascribe the cultural practises of ancient civilisation to typical hunter-gatherers. In reality their cultures are so different that to the extent they show any overlap in behaviour it usually requires different explanations.
I can’t stop thinking about that woman who ignorantly suggested wet-nursing and slavery as solutions to hunter-gatherers’ problem of taking care of more than one baby and/or toddler at the same time. She had no idea of how unrealistic it would be for couples to produce a surplus just to have someone to one-sidedly exploit.
Having recently finished WiHC, I’m actually kind of surprised that our host recommended it, because it seems that he and Gat disagree in some pretty important areas. i.e., Gat approvingly cites Guns, Germs, and Steel multiple times (which I understand from our host is not terribly well-regarded among historians), he more-or-less embraces the Fremen Mirage, and he even argues for a version of the “take the gloves off” thesis, saying that liberal democracies are not willing to engage in the levels of violence necessary to defeat insurgencies. (In fairness to Gat, he doesn’t argue that democracies *should* be willing to use that level of violence, as the “take the gloves off” proponents do, merely noting that they are not. However, this is still in contrast to our host’s view, as I understand it, which is that “taking the gloves off” *does not work*.)
Yes, this is also a problem I have with it! I haven’t directed my criticism to the later chapters about more historical eras, because that’s not my area of expertise–and also because I didn’t read that far, I was too mad & had done the ereader equivalent of throwing the book across the room.
I have read “Guns, Germs and Steel” myself. It is largely about what happened between the end of the Last Ice Age (9700 BC) and the Age of Discovery (around 1500 AD). If one generation is 25 years this equals 448 generations. This is less than half the time required to profoundly change the workings of the human mind. Which in turn makes the processes during this time period irrelevant to human nature.
Jared Diamond may have been fooled by the word “intelligence” having diverse meanings. It may refer to mental capacities but also to specific information. This ambiguity can fool native English speakers to believe they are more connected than actually is the case. Not only is wilderness survival very much a learned skill. It is a biotope-dependant skill as well. I think everyone appear stupid in situations they are unfamiliar with.
“This is less than half the time required to profoundly change the workings of the human mind.”
I’d be curious as to how you came to this conclusion. Selection can vary quite widely based on selection pressure, and we have some evidence for various selection pressures causing physiological changes in that time. Not unreasonable that cognitive abilities change on similar timescales.
That said, I’m HIGHLY dubious about almost all claims about the intelligence of people of the past (and most of evolutionary psychology), for two reasons. First, such theories have been proven wrong so consistently that the assumption should be “We’re wrong this time too, but maybe a little less so.” Intellectual humility demands we accept that we’re not smarter than the people of the past, and while we may stand on their shoulders that doesn’t mean we necessarily stand very high. Second, intelligence doesn’t get preserved in the rock record. The byproducts of intelligence–tools, writing, drawings, that sort of thing–do, but it’s notoriously difficult to derive intelligence from material from a culture we don’t understand. And intelligence itself doesn’t fossilize at all, so we have NO direct way to measure it (brain size only gets you so far). Any statement about the past without fossils to support it can only be tentative at best, because it’s lacking the evidence necessary to support it. See the history of thought on why we have five fingers to see a case study in this exact issue.
The two play into each other: the paucity of evidence means that our theories are based on very little evidence, most of which is subject to interpretation.
I would argue that there were two huge changes to the workings of the human mind in the Recent past (sorry, stratigraphy joke). First, the rise of math–and writing in general–greatly altered how we think. Being able to count, to calculate, fundamentally shifts how people view the world and interact with it. Without it things like civilizations, trade, engineering, navigation, and the rest would be impossible. And for the first time knowledge could be transmitted well beyond a single generation. This is quite different from only being able to learn something from word of mouth or trial and error. These are two huge shifts in how society and individuals functioned, due to a singular technology. Second, related to the first, the rise of mass communication. The printing press altered our perceptions of the world in ways that we struggle to comprehend, and the internet is doing so to an even greater scale. Widespread reading and the wide availability of books broke the ancient world order, at least in Europe and her colonies–see the USA and France. And as for the internet, we still don’t know what that’s going to do to us!
“And intelligence itself doesn’t fossilize at all, so we have NO direct way to measure it (brain size only gets you so far).”
It’s also important to note that the evidence we do have from brain size indicates that it peaked sometime during the last glacial maximum…
“It’s also important to note that the evidence we do have from brain size indicates that it peaked sometime during the last glacial maximum…”
While that may be true (it’s a bit more complex than simple numbers suggest), I’m not convinced it’s important. Brain size doesn’t neatly correlate with intelligence. If it did, blue whales would be the smartest animals on Earth. There is some evidence that the ratio of brain size to body mass does, but even there it’s again far more complicated than simple numbers suggest. Toss in things like autism (different ways of thinking) and culture (someone who would be a fantastic neurosurgeon living in the Neolithic isn’t going to achieve their potential), and this becomes a hopelessly muddled mess.
Further, we may be investigating this question all wrong from the start. We are treating “intelligence” as a single thing, something easily measurable and reducible to a single number. Like height or weight or number of teeth. But there’s strong evidence for the existence of multiple types of intelligence, and the research is active and ongoing. Basically we’re at a point in psychology where we know the existing paradigm (IQ) is bunk (it’s heavily culturally biased, was nakedly racist throughout much of its use, and doesn’t have a solid theoretical foundation anyway–you can gain 10 points by getting the right glasses), but we don’t have a solid paradigm to replace it. And if it’s true that there are multiple types of intelligence, this makes the whole question of correlation with anything vastly more complex.
And then there’s the reproducibility crisis, which calls everything into even more question. Even the stuff we think we know may not be true because we can’t reproduce the results. This may be because humans have undergone some partial radiation (ie, different groups diverged due to genetic isolation, as we see with physical traits such as lactose tolerance in adults, how certain drugs are processed, and how oxygen is processed in high-altitude communities [well beyond acclimation], among others), or it may be because we’re just wrong. Again, this is an area where research is ongoing.
So here’s what we’re left with:
–We don’t really know how intelligence works at this point.
–We don’t have a good way to measure what we DO know.
–We struggle to get reproducible results when we try to measure it.
–The thing we’re trying to measure doesn’t fossilize.
–The stuff that DOES fossilize is stuff that may or may not correlate with the stuff we’re trying to measure, and we don’t know how to test that.
For my part, in such a situation, I’m EXTREMELY hesitant to make any firm statement. I’m someone who’s pretty aggressive about accepting hypotheses as true, too; if I’m not willing to accept something is true even for the sake of argument, it’s a bad sign.
To be clear, I’m not saying this is hopeless. These are data gaps. All of them are being investigated, and some of them may be gaps we can close (I’m dubious about the last two). To scientists, a list like this is basically a list of targets, stuff to investigate. But as it stands right now, given the current state of our knowledge, there are simply too may issues and unknowns to justify anything but the most tentative of conclusions. The most valuable use of these tentative conclusions is to offer us frameworks to test ideas, rather than actually being information. And that’s not bad! It’s good, solid scientific investigation! But it does mean that right now the only honest answer we can say about the evolution of how human minds work is “We’re working on it, get back to us in 20 years or so.”
Of cause there are many different types of intelligence. I have an Autism Spectrum Condition myself so I am live evidence of this. However, I have read that evolution requires at least a thousand generations to change the workings of the human brain in any decisive way. If so our brains have not evolved since before the development of agriculture. I think writing, reading and making written calculations trains us in connecting different mental abilities. This could explain why literates appear smarter on average than illiterates.
I don’t deny that human populations have evolved since agriculture was developed. But its is mostly things like resistance to specific diseases and the ability to digest various foodstuffs. Adaptions to high altitude is of cause part of this short-term evolution. I think the predominantly light skin colour of Europeans and East Asians is also a result of this. It evolved as a response to combinations of lower UV and less animal products in the diet during the last few millennia.
“However, I have read that evolution requires at least a thousand generations to change the workings of the human brain in any decisive way.”
What’s the evidence for this? Again, other organs evolve in decisive ways in much shorter timespans; what evidence is there that brains require vastly greater spans?
My guess–just a guess, but I’ve read enough of these that I’m reasonably confident in it–is that the authors took the paleontologists’ rough estimate for speciation, said “Any major change would be a new species!” and adopted the number uncritically. Which is rather foolish. Every paleontologist I know (as a member of that group, I know more than a few) accepts that this is a VERY rough estimate, not an actual hard number, and that there are so many factors involved that it’s essentially meaningless when you try to apply it to any question. And it was never intended to discuss responses to selection pressures anyway; those can happen in a few generations (see Hardy-Weinburg Equilibrium), basically the limiting factor is mutation rates (which are variable).
The other issue is selection pressure. Mild selection pressure can cause very, very slow changes, if any at all (remember, we’re talking population dynamics so statistical artifacts come into play). There are also far more extreme selection pressures, which can cause dramatic changes in a very short timespan (see those experiments where bacteria are subject to increasing concentrations of antibiotics in agar gel). Any statement about rates of evolution that doesn’t include a discussion of this can safely be ignored because it’s necessarily incomplete.
“Adaptions to high altitude is of cause part of this short-term evolution.”
I’m not sure what “short-term evolution” means. It’s not a technical term used in evolutionary biology, at least not any that I’ve ever heard. Biologically it’s nonsensical; any response to a shift in fitness space is going to be, well, a response to shifts in fitness space; ie, evolution. This is why “devolution” isn’t a thing, and why going back to previous conditions can cause sufficient stress to cause extinctions.
If you mean something like microevolution, we’re going to have to have a very technical discussion before we can have this discussion. Different fields use the terms in different ways. In paleontology (the field relevant to this discussion, as we are discussing change through very long periods of time) it’s generally accepted (Creationists aside) that speciation occurs because of the accumulation of incremental changes. The rate of those changes is hotly debated–Punctuated Equilibrium folks say it happens fast, Phyletic Gradualism folks say it happens slowly and steadily, Neocatastraphists point out that we’re missing huge chunks of the rock so this may be a sampling error anyway, etc–but no one really disputes the idea that speciation occurs due to accumulated small changes. Too much evidence supports this view; ring species alone demonstrate that at minimum this is one way for speciation to occur, as we can literally see and even map out the accumulation of those changes. Anyway, microevolution is not commonly used in paleontology, since it doesn’t tell us anything; we just talk about adaptations and selection pressures and whatnot. Macroevolution is evolution above the species level, and is used when studying large-scale trends in evolution, such as “The Madea Hypothesis” or whether specialization or generalization generally leads to more favorable outcomes for a clade. Interesting, potentially critical for our future, but not terribly relevant to this discussion.
I know some biologists who discuss microevolution as adaptations within a species, and macroevolution as changes between two species. But again, once you factor deep time into the equation, the two become virtually identical. In a lot of cases it’s a question of whether certain populations get wiped out (cut the middle out of a ring species and it’s two species), or if the populations reconverge (as with humans). Historical contingency, to use Gould’s term. Doesn’t make much sense to me to come use different terms in this case, but biologists deal with extremely truncated timelines by my standards.
I will say that changes to diet are one of the things we’ve seen cause populations to diverge (ie, speciation events). I know it happens with certain insects, for example. To call something that literally causes new species to arise a “short-term evolution” is rather silly. Doesn’t make such a huge chang in humans, our adaptability is one of our greatest strengths, but it’s worth noting just how significant this sort of selection pressure can be.
@Dinwar Oh absolutely. You’re mostly on a hiding to nothing attempting to prove conclusive changes in intelligence (however that ends up being bracketed) in closely related animals. Even in modern populations we can literally test it’s fraught and difficult.
I was more supporting your point around ‘Intellectual humility demands we accept that we’re not smarter than the people of the past’, whereby on one of the exceptionally few measures we can actually look at in the fossil record (however flawed it is)…modern humans come in at just a little under our ice age ancestors. In fact modern humans also clock in at a little under Neanderthals as well (though it seems their brain was a slightly different shape, for whatever that’s worth).
I do know about the brain-to-body-size thing. My understanding is that ice age human populations were at maximum a similar size to modern human populations (meaning their brain-to-body-size ratio was greater), if not slightly smaller than modern populations (in which case the effect is even more exaggerated).
I understand the basics of evolution theory pretty well. When I wrote “short-term evolution” I meant something like requiring the spread of single or just a couple of alleles. Not dozens of them as I think would be needed for speciation. The fact that humans all over the world can interbreed without problem should say something about how small the changes have been.
About reading and writing we have to consider just how recent the spread of literacy is. Just two or three generations ago most of humanity was illiterate. Now most of humanity is literate with illiterates being mostly elderly. I don’t think a species numbering in the thousands of millions can change profoundly in its hereditary capacity in such a short time. The fact that nearly everyone given the chance can learn to read and write should indicate these skills use pre-existing capacities. Reading combines at least two mental abilities. One is language and the other is recognising abstract symbols. The later has been found as part of cave paintings tens of thousands of years old. The cultures creating these paintings must have had common agreement of what these abstract symbols meant. Writing involves dexterity in addition to language and abstract symbol recognition. Incidentally I can’t do precision work with my left hand. I can stir a pot but not write or draw something.
To me it is very evident just how badly adopted human nature is to agrarian state society. I have written two blog posts on this issue:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/Human-nature-changes-too-slowly#wbb1
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/The-difference-between-biology-and-reactionism#wbb1
Now I may have misunderstood one thing or another. However, to me it makes sense that our brains have not evolved significantly since before the development of agriculture.
My inlay containing two links to my blog was not published. I understand the basics of evolution pretty well. When I wrote “short-term evolution” I meant the spread of one or just a couple of alleles. I don’t think this would be enough to create entirely new mental capacities. Instead writing, reading and calculating by hand combines two or more pre-existing abilities. One used in all three skills is recognising abstract symbols. Such have been found as part of cave paintings tens of thousands of years old. The cultures creating these paintings must have had a common agreement of what they meant. Which is a basis for all documentation systems.
Then we have to consider the historical spread of literacy. The areas were writing first developed – the Middle East and present-day eastern China – did not have widespread literacy until less than a century ago. Even 200 years (eight generations) ago I think less than 10% of humanity was literate. During the following five generations North America and much of Europe went from maybe 10% to more than 90% literacy. Did the literate upper and middles classes greatly outbreed the illiterate lower class? No, but rising standards of living and compulsory education allowed nearly everyone to learn. When given the chance the children of illiterates were to a great extent capable of learning to read and write.
75 years or three generations ago only a smaller part of the world was majority literate. These were North America, Western and parts of Eastern Europe, Australia, New Zeeland and Japan. With the exception of the last country these are all majority White. Since then not only have literates became in majority worldwide. The world’s population has more than tripled. Is the majority of the world’ population of such recent White or Japanese biological descent? No, they are definitely not. South Asians, Southeast and East Asians together consist at least half of humanity. Even among East Asians those with at least one Japanese great-grandparent are in clear minority. People of overwhelmingly Sub-Saharan African descent are at least as numerous as the unquestionably White. Those of mixed white and other descent are significantly less numerous. Moreover, most of this group have their interbreeding with Whites going more than three generations back. Additional groups such as people from the MENA countries are even fewer.
As such the global spread of literacy is not about the spread of biological capacity for it. Instead it is globally rising standard of living allowing children to learn related skills. This as opposed to being exploited as manpower from an early age. Without such demands from inefficient production we can develop skills combining two or more mental capacities. Reading at least involves language ability and abstract symbol recognition. Writing by hand adds dexterity to this. Calculating by hand requires numerical ability on top of these. The ability to develop these separate capacities is inborn. Connecting them into much more specific intellectual abilities is not.
Alright, it was published after I started writing my previous inlay but before I sent it. You may excuse me for repeating myself for a couple of sentences. To Ynneadwraith:
I think we should not underestimate our ancestors. Particularly not hunter-gatherers belonging to the current human species. It has been pointed out that if they were as stupid as commonly believed they would not have got where they were in the first place. These people were aware of their physical surroundings in a way which seems unknown to a lot of people today. When they spread into a new area they could figure out the uses of various lifeforms and rocks in a couple of generations. After a few centuries their descendants would have developed a lifestyle based on using the remaining ones sustainably.
In addition we have to consider the minimum technology necessary to spread into a certain area. Humans can’t reliably get across the sea on floating tree-trunks. Their movements are too unpredictable for this purpose. The ancestors of the Papuans and Australian Aborigines must have used rafts to get there. In these cases they also had to cross straits too wide to see across. This means they would have used other clues to figure out there was land beyond sea horizons. My educated guess is them following smoke from bushfires.
Neither is the current human species adapted to cool climates. I am convinced we could not spread to Europe and most of Asia before inventing the needle. This made it possible to make windproof clothes which would have been needed in the cold climate of the time. Also, people would have used boats made from skin on a wood or bone frame to get around the Laurentide ice sheet. The oldest archaeological finds south of this ice sheet predates its splintering.
Of cause there have been human cultures were most of the population behaved in a way which can be considered idiotic. However, these were agrarian state societies where positions of absolute power had resulted in one-sided exploitation being the norm. Among the poor masses children were heavily economically exploited from a far too early age. When these reached 18 – 19 they were mind-bogglingly naïve, highly superstitious and quite unimaginative. Interestingly a lot of their biological descendants don’t show anything of these. This means the combination of many genes enabling us to learn better when given the chance were not lost.
Even in those societies not everyone were the idiots they have been pictured as. Hereditary positions of absolute power may have prevented people from learning about other points of view. Yet having enough economic resources not to be forced to use children as cheap manpower did make them smarter. This would have given the chance to discover a lot of their physical environment as well as developing some imagination. Such individuals could create small changes in their culture’s technology and society. Over the centuries these could add up to some unwitting progress.
There have always been cultures enabling children to learn a lot about each other as well as the natural world. Not only historically recorded hunter-gatherers. But also agricultural societies which population was too scarce for heavy economic exploitation to be feasible. This not only enabled an awareness of nature’s own processes long lost in densely populated areas. It allowed people to have a basic awareness of each other’s point of view. The resulting way of treating each other contrasted so sharply with many agrarian civilisations it gave rise to the myth of the “noble savage”.
Differences in opportunity to learn persist to this day. Even in White-majority countries there can be significant differences. Maybe I should consider myself lucky who has grown up in contact with nature. I grew up in a walkable neighbourhood with loads of green spaces. Most of them were not fenced in either. From at least the age of seven I was allowed to move freely within built-up areas. On a regular basis I spent time in nature together with others too. Combined with all my physical needs being met these experiences mean I don’t fear nature. The dangers posed by the natural world can usually be protected against.
Add my curiosity and sense of detail. Then I acquired a basic sense of what happens in nature. I have seen the stars and seen the naked-eye planets. Similarly, I am aware of the difference in amount of time with daylight over the year. As long as I can remember I have seen variable clouds. Since Stockholm gets snow every winter I developed basic snow-how. Moreover, I can discern the differences between various species of visible life. To mee it is just natural that in-deep knowledge of all these things exists. It makes perfect sense to me there are people able to navigate by the stars. Or that the Eskimos have up to a dozen unrelated words for different types of snow. Same thing with people eating a wide variety of animals, fungi, plants and algae.
In the last 15 years I have repeatedly read on the Net about Americans lacking all this knowledge. They suddenly discover the normal and are then gripped by fear. Unaware of the limits of their own personal capacities they believe things to have literary not existed befor they personally became aware of them. Each time it did not occur to the person that knowledge about what they just saw already existed. Does this mean these people are stupid? “Thoughtless” is probably a better word to use. Their opportunity to learn about the natural world was so poor they remain unaware of their own unawareness.
IIRC, GGS claims to be about why the West is richer than the rest of the world, but mostly theorises why Eurasia (and its colonies) is richer than the rest of the world.
It is, however, quite plausible if you are wondering why so much of history and civilization seems to cluster near the southern coastline of Eurasia. (Because a lot of domesticated crops and animals originate there, and can easily spread east and west along the climate zones. Civilization is downstream of agriculture.) But that is not really a question of interest to most historians.
@ad9,
I think Jared Diamond in general (I’ve read most of his books and can’t necessarily remember which claim he makes where) makes a number of pretty easily correctable errors. The claim that Australia has no easily domesticable plants for example (the wild ancestors of both rice and sugarcane, two of the most productive crops in the world, are both native there), or that obesity in Nauru has peaked due to natural selection (it might have peaked due to sexual selection or self selection, e.g. obese people being more depressed and less likely to have sexual partners/children, but that’s a separate issue from what he hypothesizes). That said, none of that reduces my respect for the man in general- he’s a big thinker and makes correspondingly big mistakes, but he’s at least gotten people to think about the right questions and along the right lines, and his capacity to synthesize across intellectual fields, and to bring in his own experience, is truly impressive. Whatever my criticisms of some of his specific claims, I still think he’s one of America’s most important public intellectuals, and we’ll miss him when he’s gone.
@Hector “The claim that Australia has no easily domesticable plants for example (the wild ancestors of both rice and sugarcane, two of the most productive crops in the world”
Having not read Diamond I may be mis-speaking, but there’s a lot of colonial holdover in how Australian Aboriginal societies are viewed, and their lack of agriculture is one of the major issues.
There’s a broad societal assumption that Australian Aboriginals were wholly isolated from agricultural societies, living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle because they themselves had simply not hit upon the invention of agriculture (as if we did in Europe ourselves…oh wait, we didn’t either), or had not yet been exposed to it by outsiders.
While this was true of quite a lot of the Aboriginal population, northern populations had been in contact with Austronesian agricultural peoples from island South East Asia for around 700 years prior to the European discovery of Australia, including Aboriginal individuals travelling to places where agriculture was practiced before returning home. These populations were fully aware that agriculture was a thing, and deliberately chose to not adopt it (which stands in contrast to things like ironworking and dugout canoes, which they did adopt from Makassan traders).
There’s a general bias that agriculture is such an amazing thing that anyone exposed to it must necessarily adopt it, which flies in the face of fairly significant evidence of societies deliberately avoiding adopting agriculture all over the globe (even to the present day). The fact that agricultural societies are globally dominant is obvious as an overwhelming advantage to us as societies a very long way along the agricultural development route, but it’s not necessarily obvious to other non-agricultural peoples where it can more meaningfully be weighed up against the benefits of other subsistence systems, especially at an individual level (what do you mean I need to spend 8 months of the year digging in this one patch of earth so my diet can be 80% this one type of grain”).
As I said, I haven’t read Diamond so I can’t comment whether he follows this same agricultural bias in his arguments. But it’s worth highlighting just for education’s sake.
As I remarked in the blog about Logistics and Foraging, there seems to be a very strong connection between raising grain and supporting armies; I commented on grain in the military context of frumentatio, an army’s food supply. Storable, transportable and calorie-dense food that gave armies a seven to ten days operational radius made large-scale warfare possible. Given that states with armies so supplied could operate on scales of distance and time that no culture without agriculture or herding could hope to match, it’s inevitable such such states and their values would come to predominate.
I have read his books “Guns, Germs and Steel” and “Collapse” in Swedish translation. There is a reason why Jared Diamond has called the development of agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”. The spread of agriculture was mostly by direct descendants of those which first developed it. Hunter-gatherers generally did not become farmers because they did not want to. Fully developed agriculture meant significantly more work for less reliable food sources. It was not until early Industrialism that the supposed benefits of agriculture arose.
Historically recorded Australian Aboriginals I consider Mesolithic. They had some traits of typical agricultural societies but did not possess monoculture. I think the explanation is a combination of mostly poor soils and unreliable weather patterns. This combination makes agriculture too unreliable over a human lifetime. Semi-domesticated dogs were introduced maybe 4000 years ago and gave rise to the dingoes. The only crop successfully introduced by people from Southeast Asia seems to have been the tamarind tree. It is a legume meaning it is capable of fixing its own nitrogen. This ability may have helped it grow in northern Australia.
I think the explanation is a combination of mostly poor soils and unreliable weather patterns. This combination makes agriculture too unreliable over a human lifetime
Yea, the weather thing is the most convincing explanation i’ve seen for why Australian Aboriginies didn’t invent (or adopt) agriculture in the premodern era. Jared Diamond sort of concedes much of that point, actually. He mentions that numerous early attempts at agriculture by British colonists in Australia failed, and that much of the Australian agricultural sector (particularly livestock) is not sustainable today and depends on government subsidies, in both cases due to unusually variable climate (more recently involving thngs like heat waves and wildfires). He just doesn’t go all the way and accept that the level of climate variability might very well have made it uneconomical to develop agriculture from scratch (as opposed to transplanting an agricultural system that was already part of a global trade network, which is what the Brits did).
If I understand it correctly the area around Melbourne has soils suitable for intense agriculture. This is mentioned in Jared Diamond’s “Collapse”. At least parts of Tasmania are also suitable for this. Too bad a few thousand people got isolated from the rest of humanity for millennia there.
My most important lesson from reading “Guns, Germs and Steel” is you don’t need to invoke racism to explain the different developments in different parts of the world. Mostly these differences can be explained by the following factors:
¤ Where there were suitable plants and animals to domesticate.
¤ How these could spread.
¤ How ideas could spread.
This is the basis for the differences in surviving technology within my post-apocalyptic world. The more densely populated and interconnected a culture is the more technologically advanced it is. Of cause, technologically advanced is relative. Even the most densely populated parts of the world initially only have what can be made with 15th century artisan methods.
Also I use 50,000 as a minimum number of people a culture needs to form their own state. This number has actually been listed in “Guns, Germs and Steel”. At least I think this is a useful rule of thumb.
It’s also close to the minimum number thought necessary for a population to maintain the genetic diversity to sustain itself indefinitely.
I thought 10,000 was enough for this purpose.
When I think about it there is great uncertainty on how many would be needed to found a viable human population. “Close to” 50,000 sounds like a significant overestimate to me. I personally think the number is in the thousands. We can say 10,000 to get some error margin. Not all are able to reproduce as about 6% of humanity is sterile. Then we have pure homosexuality which would prevent people from reproducing unless they have artificial insemination. One can imagine the lose of industrial technology leading to homosexuals being unable to reproduce.
We have numerous accounts of male royals who were almost certainly homosexual who none the less managed to fulfill their obligation to have heirs. And for many women obligatory marriage was often licensed rape. And there’s not a strong link either way between wanting to conceive children and wanting to have them. In a culture sufficiently dedicated to child rearing I don’t see homosexuality as that high a barrier to having children; even prolific human reproduction seldom exceeds twelve children in a lifetime.
The genetic viability population number I’ve heard bandied about is 30,000. Obviously this could vary; in particular a population could rebound from a much smaller bottleneck provided that it expanded back to carrying capacity rapidly, to minimize loss of diversity. But for a truly isolated population (i.e. no occasional infusions from outsiders) 30,000 is probably close to the indefinite number.
@Lena
The average Greek city-state was much smaller than 50,000 (the ones most people have heard of like Athens and Sparta are the larger ones, but the average city-state would have only a few thousand inhabitants, some were in the hundreds). So it would seem possible to form a state with considerably fewer than 50,000 people (unless you want to argue that Greek poleis weren’t real states).
But a polis isn’t a closed breeding population. If even 3% of the male population are outsiders who moved to the polis, the gene pool is more or less the entirety of Greece.
Maybe not all of them were able to uphold all the functions of a state? Some of them may have been more like chiefdoms. I also want to point out that societies of less than a thousand people don’t need formal political leadership.
To Michael Hutson:
I agree that a considerable number of marriages were legalised rape (some countries still have them). If a gal got pregnant before 14 it is not very likely she agreed on having sex. However, if the guy did not want to have sex with his wife it would have been considerably harder for her to rape him. Not only because of the average difference in physical strength. But because women were prevented from developing their full possible physical strength too. Either by being denied sufficient nutrition, typical clothing restricting movement or being constantly told not to make any effort.
About homosexuality it is not either-or. Just because a man showed sexual interest in other men this does not mean he had no-one in women. There is pansexuality in which case individuals the person finds sexually attractive can be of any gender. I think the Sun King’s younger brother was a pansexual. Had he been purely homosexual he would only have been able to have sex with a woman if he simultaneously imagined he did it with a man. This probably pretty hard to do. So if he has had such a problem I don’t think he had been able to produce loads of children.
Under some circumstances the pansexuality argument applies to women too. Just because the person is known with reasonably certainty to have had a homosexual relationship this does not mean the person was entirely homosexual. A few examples:
¤ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is thought to have had both a boyfriend and a girlfriend before he married.
¤ Oscar Wilde was unfaithful to his wife with a man he had fallen in love with resulting in her demanding divorce.
¤ Simone de Beauvoir had sex with both men and women before settling for a relationship with a male colleague.
¤ Tove Jansson had sexual relationships with men before forming a steady relationship with another woman.
Please note that neither Simone de Beauvoir nor Tove Jansson ever married. So being handed over to a man to freely rape can’t explain their sexual relationships with men.
I may have used authors as examples to show pansexuality in historical context. However, we have to remember that royalties were people too. Within Christendom marriage and reproductive sex were not universal among royalty. Several female ruling monarchs never married for various reasons. (Contrary to the cliché image of her time Queen Victoria married voluntarily.) There was a Byzantine emperor who was open about his inability to penetrate women. A possibly second homosexual monarch was the Swedish king Carl XII. He was killed in battle at 36, unmarried and without any known children. Had he felt obligated to marry I think he would have done so by then.
Moreover, there are documented cases of royals being formally married without ever having sex. Marriages could be arranged on purely political grounds without considering the personalities of the forcibly married. At worst that resulted in husband and wife not standing each other. In less severe cases the husband was not sexually attracted to his wife. This would exclude legalised rape as an opportunity to reproduce. In some cases impotency may have been an issue. But its prevalence should not be overestimated. Finally, I want to point out that children of married women sometimes have a different father than their mother’s husband. These might be consequences of unhappy marriages.
I see we’re breaking out the letters early this series. Almost always a good sign.
I imagine two even more minimalist mobilization methods at the very small end of the scale. In one you are mobilized because your policy is small enough that everybody knows everybody, and every able bodied man is obligated to go to the town square when the word goes out. In another you are functionally mobilized ad hoc by the enemy because your farm/village has come under assault and you will likely be killed very soon if you don’t act. Maybe that’s not mobilization proper, but I figure it must have happened sometimes.
Local mobilization when an enemy shows up is probably its own thing. Lots of polities had those kinds of stuff “All hands on deck” mobilization schemes. (the classic method was sending a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidding_stick)
Similar scheme could work on a country level
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wici
The points about devolved supply of arms and armor got me thinking about consumables. Food I understand is typically a major logistics challenge and must be managed by the army. But what about arrows, javelins, sling ammunition, shot and powder, etc? Would a soldier be expected to bring his own? How about something subject to wear but not as cleanly expended like replacement shoes? I suppose sutlers may sometimes be part of the answer, but what else?
Obviously this varied a lot, and I won’t even attempt to answer myself, but I will note that by the time you start talking about shot and powder the logistics begin to become so complicated you *must* have either central planning or some other form of coherent organizing principle. This is not a small part of why centralized states dominated the early modern period after all. Even early on the difference in effectiveness between a professional and centralized, let alone standardized, artillery train and the kind of ad hoc artillery you could levy out of other recruiting systems was absolutely massive.
There are other valid organizing principles now, but only because industrial society has developed universal standards. A separatist warlord arming his traditional levy can buy a motor and know exactly what caliber it can fire, down to the millimeter, and procure or commission ammunition to match with basic machine tools. This quiet miracle of international science and engineering doesn’t often get bought up in how easy it is for arms dealing to effectively arm paramilitaries, but it’s there if you know where to look.
England supplied arrows by contract. But mostly it was bring your own. Shoes, clothing? Also bring your own. By the end of a campaign the army was often barefoot and in rags.
Adding – clothes and shoes and such were the province of the sutlers – the non-Combatants who trailed after every army. It occurs to me that a Roman army, made up largely of middling peasants and small craftsmen, with a semi-professional officer group inclined to keep the men busy, could probably make or mend most things. We regularly see detachments set to work on civic improvements.
We see evidence of chainmail patching in or near legion camps, incidentally, which supports the idea that roman soldiers uses their craft skills. It’s not definitive, but would be consistent.
It just shows smiths worked in the legion camp.
What it does not say is whether the smiths were part-time smiths who drilled and joined the battle line when drawn up for battle, or whether they classified as noncombatants and stayed behind in the camp.
Unless non-soldier smiths have been mentioned in writing we can’t know if they were any.
Javelins, probably bring-your-own.
Archeologically recovered arrowheads are often inscribed with their owner’s name. On the other hand, they — particularly the steel arrowheads — may be somewhat state-issued, since various places (including England) in an effort to limit poaching made it a crime to carry iron-headed arrows without a good excuse.
Slingstones can be picked up off the ground in much of the Mediterranean; lead sling bullets would probably be made by groups of soldiers around their campfires from lead distributed by army command.
Lead firearm bullets, much the same. Gunpowder, invariably states issued it from magazines for legible forces (standing armies, conscripts, mercenaries, and of course artillery), and would presumably be willing to sell to “irregular” forces attached to their armies.
On bullets, I’ve assumed without checking that since that was before standardization, it was important to try different bullet molds until you found one that worked well with your musket or whatever.
Well, your average soldier in a European gunpowder army honestly doesn’t know whether his bullets are hitting the target or not; he’s trained to fire volleys, not to hit targets at a long distance the way we imagine a modern rifle range. The norm would be for everyone’s bullets to be noticeably smaller than the barrel diameter, to allow a gap known as “windage” which makes reloading much easier. Erring on the size of “bullet too small” will nearly always be better than “bullet too big.”
With exceptions for light skirmishers. This was partially down to equipment, with the British (and Americans, but they did limited fighting in this period) using rifles, but the French Voltigeurs uses smoothbores. Smoothbores aren’t quite as inaccurate as wildly believed if you fire a well fitting ball and are trained; accuracy to a hundred yards was achievable, and a hundred and fifty was conceivable.
This is, to be clear, less than a fifth the range of a modern rifle and probably half that of a good period rifle, but it’s not random.
TBH, while an accurate range of 100-150 yards against a point target sounds awful from the perspective of a modern rifle, in practice it’s not that far off the sort of effective ranges we see even up to WWII and beyond for shoulder-fired rifles.
The first part is false, and the second isn’t exactly correct for the early gunpowder period either. Both manuals and memoirs up to the first half of the 17th century generally called for the Shot to take careful aim, and this is borne out by the fact that earlier firearms often had better sights than the crude front post and rear groove that became the norm in the 18th century. Even 18th-century soldiers often received at least a little training in individual marksmanship and the inaccuracy of 18th-century fire was probably more due to psychology than a lack of technical skills, especially soldiers opening fire at too long a range (200-300 yards was commonly cited in 18th-century battle accounts when officers usually wanted battalions to hold fire until 100-150).
Prescribed bullet sizes and archaeologically recovered bullet moulds also strongly imply that armies became more tolerant of larger windages towards the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th centuries. The slower rates of fire prescribed in earlier manuals also might have made smaller windages practical since there would have been more time to lightly scour the barrel during the loading process (which is borne out by the fact that the ramrod was more commonly known as the “scouring stick”).
In short, they did. If you look at equipment lists for late 16th- or early 17th-century Shot, Dragoons, Carabines/Arquebusiers and similar firearm-based troop types, it was very common for such men to carry bullet moulds in their baggage. It didn’t really go away until the late 17th/early 18th century, if not later, and in such cases it was often a matter of bullet moulds being concentrated in the company or regiment’s supply train rather than being all the way in the rear with the civilian industrial base.
“That’s what makes the vote in the assembly so important: by having a majority of the citizenry decide for war in the first place, it ensures ample public support for the self-recruitment that needs to follow.”
“You may immediately notice some commonalities: these are urban societies, generally structured around a single major city center. They’re also relatively small (except for the Roman Republic, which is exceptional in pulling off this kind of system at scale).”
“Systems of self-recruitment like this work because military service is tightly bound to membership in the community which comes with political rights one of which is some kind of right to decide on if the community goes to war or not (that may be a counted vote, but it may also be a collective affirmation, the sort of thing where the sources will say, “and then the men of [town] said with one voice, “Yes!”).”
“incentivizes service because military service is bound up with that political power: they fight because they vote and they vote because they fight.”
Um…
In both Roman Republic, by Middle Republic, and Lacedaemon, the majority of heavily armed infantry were men who could not vote and whose neighbours and friends could not vote either. Not for the decision to go to war.
You described the self-reported census and dilectus… of the citizens of Roman Republic.
Who were under half of the Roman army.
Because the other half or more were the socii. Who had no say in the decision to go to war, or in electing the consuls, praetors and military tribunes.
Sure, a citizen of Pompeii had “a” vote – to elect the magistrates of Pompeii city herself, and maybe the officers of Pompeii´s contingent in Roman army´s allied wing. But how did Rome produce the social pressure to comply with census and mobilization *for the members of allied communities who had not voted for war and who would have voted against if they had been asked*?
And the remaining less than half of “citizens” included a large fraction of “civites sine suffragio”. Thus the citizens “optime iure” were well under half of the Roman army.
Lacedaimon – similar issues. Spartiates could vote at Apella. We have the numbers at Pylos. Out of 292 surrendering prisoners, 120 were Spartiates. The other were not.
From what we hear of Sparta, the majority of Spartan army were “perioeci”, who were armed and fought as heavy infantry like Spartiates, and whom sources often neglect to distinguish from Spartiates.
Note: the voteless soldiers of army of Roman Republic were normally contingents of allied communities – free peasants owning their own arms, commanded by lower officers elected by themselves. Not, say, clients and armed slaves of Fabii or Attus Clausus.
“or splitting them into units of regular size for tactical convenience (the Roman, but also Macedonian and Spartan approach).”
You´re listing Macedonia.
Macedonia was big compared to any single Greek polis too.
And yet Macedonia seems not to have been centered on a single city. Consider the manner in which “capital” was moved from Aegae to Pella, except Aegae remained important.
How did Macedonia of Argeads manage to motivate the men to register and fight, while continuing to recognize a need for a hereditary King rather than vote for elected magistrates like they knew their neighbours the Greeks did?
> Because the other half or more were the socii. Who had no say in the decision to go to war, or in electing the consuls, praetors and military tribunes.
And we already begin to see an efficiency gap in this, as the entitlement theory would predict. Rome, a single city – admittedly with some colonies – is contributing as many men to the combined army as the rest of Italy combined. The Roman infantry is probably heavier and more reliable too.
Presumably Rome mobilised more heavily than its colonies, too.
I wonder how this was negotiated between Rome and its colonies/ allies.
Rome and its colonies though were a pretty large share. The 225 census puts the Romans at a little over 40% of those eligible for conscription. Now I suspect that they were a somewhat smaller share of the actual population, Socii on average have more cavalry, implying they probably aren’t *quite* as egalitarian societies, I would expect more too poor to serve. Rome also mobilizes more heavily within those eligible. Rome gets half its infantry from the 300,000 Romans and half from the 400,000 socii. In the second century, on average probably 1-in-6 Romans and 1-in-8 Socii eligible for conscription *are* serving at any given point. Which is still a quite high average mobilization rate for the Socii!
But that does get on a theme which is that it is pretty common for the ‘core’ population of an empire to actually be burdened *more* by that empire than the subordinate areas. Because you can get away with demanding more of them. Not always, if you have a small core group they often get some great tax cuts! But not uncommon either.
What was the split between Rome and its colonies? Presumably the colonials were physically unable to vote in elections in Rome.
Well, the socii of course have a choice to join the war!
The thing is the question isn’t yes/no, it’s which side. With Rome, or against. Because if you’re not answering Rome’s call to give them an army, then you’re not a friend of Rome anymore, are you?
Friends need to help friends. It’s honourable to help friends, and dishonourable to not. The dearer the friend, the more aid you should be willing to give. For friendship.
And since you (usually) lost against Rome¹ to become Socii (friends) in the first place, and all the other Socii are probably more interested in taking your stuff than trying to fight Rome, well…
Being good friends is probably best. A retributive legion often offends.
¹(or needed them to not lose against someone else)
Nah, I think this is too simplistic. You can’t just go around punishing allies willy-nilly; the reputation of a bully is not good to have outside of maybe some Machiavellian 4d chess. Specifically on Rome, this blog theorized that Hannibal failed to break away the socii because they preferred Roman rule over what might come next.
Any type of vassal has the option of reducing support. Maybe they don’t try quite as hard to punish the draft-dodging artisan, maybe they don’t put themselves into ruinous debt providing the best supplies, maybe they send the second sons instead of the firstborn. Its not like they didn’t show up at all, they still have plausible deniability. A king, or a Roman senate, invading a vassal “just”because of some perceived deficiency, is going to gain a lot of notoriety and achieve nothing.
We have the same thing in the tiny interpersonal world. The boss knows that you sometimes browse reddit. But what’s he gonna achieve by sanctioning you for giving 80% instead of 100%? He’s just gonna piss all of his employees off. The stick ensures minimal cooperation, if you want more you either offer a carrot or you replace the guy.
Rome also guaranteed the safety of those cities from their nearby rivals, and vice versa. All Rome has to do in response is start favoring your local rival over you as punishment. And in response to those that rebelled during the Second Punic War, like the Samnites, Rome dissolved their communities and threw them to the metaphorical wolves. So you better be really, really, really certain that not backing Rome is the right move, and that Hannibal is going to cover you against your neighbors, who, not having gone against Rome, see you as a juicy target.
The flip side of this (Laigrek touches on this) is that it cuts both ways. You can withhold 10-20% of your effort at work with the reasonable certainty that your boss probably won’t 100% ruin your life by firing you in retaliation. But your boss has a variety of ways to make your life 10-20% worse that are far less likely to infuriate your co-workers and which still leave him room for an “out.”
Likewise, the Romans have options for making a socii city-state that fails to contribute to a series of Roman campaigns start to regret their decision, short of just showing up with an army and burning the city to the ground.
While it’s easy to read the Roman legal fiction of “nah, you aren’t my subordinate, you’re my ally!” cynically, the impression I’ve gotten is that the Romans took said legal fiction incredibly seriously (which makes some sense, since they already had a cultural script for being “friends” with subordinates).
So sure, you have the big stick of Rome’s military record as a threat, but Rome’s also going to a) feed their “allies” while on campaign, which solves headaches for both of them, b) give them an equal share of the loot, and c) praise them for their contributions. And if they have any problems with their neighbors (or some outside force), Rome’s going to back them up with a legion or two because, after all, “friends need to help friends”.
On top of that, the fact that all but the lowest “tier” of socii have the right to marry Roman citizens means that after a few generations it’s not unlikely that someone with a political voice in a subject community would end up being indirectly related to a Roman citizen. I’d have to imagine that that would encourage them to side with their “ally” when the “hey, should we give the Romans the soldiers they want or try our luck?” vote happens.
To be frank, the idea that Rome was purely cynical is a bit of modern politics smashed into historical context. There’s a thread in realist political thought that tries to reduce everything to interests and incentives, which has several political ties which make assessing it problematic. In particular realism is often invoked to explain why countries should be in conflict, which is a propaganda that heavily favors those that stand to profit from this conflict, specifically oligarchical figures who own factories and profit immensely from government contracts.
While it’s debatable if this even works in the modern world it certainly doesn’t accurately explain historical sociopolitical trends. We can’t assume people mean what they say or value their words, but we equally should not discount that they do. A lot of what Rome does and does not do was immensely difficult, and consistent with an idealogical motivation for what they did and why.
That this often eventually resulted in military power is a correlation versus causation problem in my mind; was the socii contract a cynical ploy to convince them to give rome power, or did treating the socii like people represent an idealogy which was validated in that it inspired people to fight for it?
To me it’s clear that we’d expect much worse performance from the socii if they were actually being cynically exploited. We see other contemporary states levy massive armies out of their subordinates, only for those armies to disintegrate on contact with a Roman legion. While Italians were unusually tactically capable allies the gradient in performance between the dregs of large empires and similarly armies under better leadership suggests it wasn’t a matter of armament. Motivating men to effectively fight is non trivial, and Rome motivated an unprecedented number of non Romans to effectively fight for her.
While it’s debatable if this even works in the modern world
It doesn’t. At all. At least, if you take a narrow view of “realism” and “interests” that excludes ideology, values, loyalties etc..
Modern wars are so devastating they are economic lose-lose situations.
For the population.
They work out great if your primary source of power is the extraction of rents from workers and your primary concern is your relative power in society.
Then wars represent an opportunity to siphon wealth from the poor by limiting trade in favor of autarkic measures manipulated to favor your businesses as well as directly siphoning tax to your businesses through government contracts whose inefficiency margins are justified by war and whose products don’t create wealth for those pesky workers to benefit from. If your side wins you can often secure spoils from the victory via more contracts, and even if these spoils weren’t worth the cost this cost was offloaded to the working class soldiers who died and suffered or the taxpayers who paid you to build weapons and technologies for the war.
Remember for posterity that Musk became a trillionaire while inciting race riots in Belfast during an economically disastrous war started by a politician he has deep political ties too, on the basis of the stock valuation of his company which is the primary contractor for military intelligence satellites. After eroding the SEC rules that are designed in part to protect retail investors (including retirement accounts in index funds I believe) from unknowingly gambling on risky IPOs.
None of that is accidental. It’s all connected to why he became a trillionaire. And as pertains to this discussion, he doesn’t give a flying fuck if the world economy crashes into dust because oil is 200 dollars a barrel, that’s a buying opportunity for him.
In other words the idea that wars don’t happen because they’re too destructive assumes state decisions are made with any regard for what’s best for the citizens of that state.
Elon Musk is one of those thoughtless people imagining they could do without the rest of society. Why humans have always lived in groups larger than a single nuclear family they don’t spend a thought at.
As usual the things are a bit of a mix, basically the romans mobilize based on the dilectus and then they outsource running the dilectus to the socii (which mostly works, since they get a share of the booty and get to fight on the winning side) at least until the Social War.
Well, you’re assuming socii would have voted against the war. That’s not at all certain. After all, they have pretty similar cultures and incentives to the Romans who DID vote for it. They’re getting loot and status, they’re serving their community, etc, etc. (Also, IIRC the Romans do shoulder a little more of the burden of feeding them while in the ranks, so arguably a socii conscript gets a slightly better deal than a Roman conscript.)
Now, in a modern context, being a citizen of one state and having a different state conscript you to go to war is certainly a friction point! But war was a more profitable activity in those days, and it was extremely common in the Italian peninsula and had been for generations, so the outlook was different.
(And even in modern times, should we assume that Canadians, New Zealanders, and Australians all hate the British for dragging them into both world wars? That’s not, generally, the case: even where there is bad blood (*cough*Gallipoli*cough*), it seems to be focused most on the specific bad military decisions. IANAC/IANANZAC, but my impression is that the main sentiment about both world wars is pride, not bitterness.
Sentiment in Inda and Ireland is much more… mixed, so it’s quite possible that some socii communities did resent Rome dragging them to war… But I note that the Social War seems to have been more about attaining equal civil status than about gaining an equal say in whether to go to war.)
I think your last thought regarding India and Ireland is important to also understand the socii situation, because AUS and NZ citizens had a very different experience of the British Empire than Indian and Irish citizens. To your average Australian, being a member of the Commonwealth means having some minor (but not irrelevant) perks if ever travelling overseas to this far away place, plus of course a certain amount of promise of protection by this more powerful state, both as the individual citizen and as the citizen body of Australia.
As an Irish however, being part of the Commonwealth means getting oppressed by legal restrictions in your own country, a second-class status that will follow you overseas if you ever get to travel abroad within the British Empire. And whatever promise of protection from foreign invaders the British might be willing to give is irrelevant when the most immediate threat to your life and liberty is an Englishman the law does not bother to restrain.
I think the Socii experienced being part of the Roman alliance network more like the first case. Especially because they did have a higher legal status and rights within Rome than other foreigners.
I think the difference was because they were different types of colonies. Australia and New Zeeland were settler colonies due to their shortage in pre-existing manpower. The Australian Aborigines were never more than a few hundred thousand people. Most of them died from diseases, starvation and in some cases direct violence within a few decades. Being Mesolithic a lot of Britons did not even accept they were people. For the Maori the problem was their crops being poorly adapted to the local climate. This severely limited the land they could cultivate resulting in overpopulation by the time of European contact. (I think this was why the first European to get ashore was beaten to death.) When they got access to firearms they started killing each other with unpreceded efficiency over this limited land.
In contrast Ireland and India were founded on exploiting the pre-existing population as manpower. Ireland has had a considerable immigration from the island of Britain. This is not the case with India as White people are really poorly adapted to its climate. Instead Britain put a few colonialists on top to economically exploit the pre-existing population. But in both cases the cultural descendants of the pre-colonial population were significantly discriminated.
It really just comes down to the local population; India and ireland had millions of people and a replacement style colony was never going to work, while new Zealand and Australia a few hundred thousand and hence they were largely subsumed into an imported population.
Plus, the British really, really mistreated the native population. India was basically sold to a private military contractor, and ireland was brutalized for a thousand years. The potatoe famime still hasn’t been demographically recovered from and was a consequence of British imposed inequality. Meanwhile Indian gdp per capital was fucking flat until colonial rule ended-its like if you paused industrialization until 1950, it’s astounding how divorced the country was from *any* economic benefit of industrial technology. Plus, several famines, also British caused, limited population growth.
Both of these countries recovered after British rule ended-not necessarily instantly, but the relationship was swift.
Given you can literally read the British colonial period in a gdp graph or population chart it’s not surprising the people there hated the British. The Maori and Aboriginal population have just cause, but they were smaller. Hell, you can make a strong case that the Maori were treated better than the Irish, too; a lot of the demographic damage there was legitimately inevitable or self inflicted, and the Maori population has recovered since.
@Terry,
What would you say opinion about England and the legacy of the British empire is in the Anglo-Caribbean countries? Because on paper, it seems to me that those countries would have better reason to despise England than just about anyone else: they were treated probably worse than the British have ever treated anyone else. Certainly worse than South Asians or Africans: as bad as English colonialism in India was, we weren’t literally slaves on a Jamaican sugar plantation with the treatment that went along with it. But, I’ve heard from someone who lives in the West Indies currently (though not in a former British colony) that there’s surprisingly more Anglophilia than you would expect on paper, mostly because Anglo-Caribbean culture derives so much from English culture (including English being their mother tongue in a way it isn’t for anyone in South Asia or Africa).
I think the Britons treated the Maori better because they had to get the locals on their side. New Zeeland was formally founded by a treaty with a lot of Maori chiefs.
Something can also be said for the British just hating the Irish in particular.
My impression of the Caribbean is that any goodwill is based on modern economics; it’s always a good idea to be nice to tourists, and acting nice biases you to thinking kind things as a fundementally part of psychology, so long as their overture isn’t abused. Hence if tourists are well behaved and big spenders it fosters good will, and the Caribbean was the prototypical fun party place for much of the neoliberal era, so there you go. It’s not like anti British sentiment disappeared, but recent history always matters.
The island of Ireland likely had a population of about a million at the time Henry VIII conquered it. In contrast South Asia could have had a population in the tens of millions before colonialism. I am assuming colonialism in this part of the world to have started with the military conquests of the British East Indian Company in the late 17th century.
I am assuming colonialism in this part of the world to have started with the military conquests of the British East Indian Company in the late 17th century.
It was a gradual, peacemeal process: it started in the late 17th c, but I wouldn’t say the EIC really achieved domination over South Asia until they won the Second Anglo-Maratha War in 1805. Some parts of South Asia remained independent substantially later than that, of course.
Thank you, I thought it would have taken generations for the British East India company to reach that point. A little more than a century, it turned out.
@Lena,
Yes, and as I said, while that was probably the tipping point, some parts of the subcontinent held out for much longer. One prosperous, highly populated and militarily effective state was the Sikh Empire (something of a misnomer, most of the population was actually Muslim) and they held out till 1849. I think some of the princely states might have lasted even longer although it’s sometimes difficult to say exactly when they lost independence (e.g. Manipur).
I always though it was called the “Sikh Empire” because the ruling group was Sikhish. Is there any area were Sikhs are in majority even today?
@Lena,
Sikhs are a majority in the Indian state of Punjab today (28 mln people or so). They were not a majority when the former East Punjab state was formed in 1947 (West Punjab having gone to Pakistan), nor after the Punjab was then expanded by the addition of former princely states in the area. The Punjab State was partitioned in 1966 (in keeping with the general pattern at the time of reorganizing states along ethnolinguistic lines), and while the lines were supposed to be drawn along linguistic rather than relgious lines, it had the effect of creating a Sikh-majority state (which a lot of Sikhs had been agitating for).
They’re not a large majority though, only about 57-58% based on the last census, and a source I’m looking at right now (which is 30 years out of date, so who knows) indicates that Hindus predominate in cities in Punjab State while Sikhs dominate rural areas. I think people tend to perceive them as more numerous than they are (I certainly did) because they’re extremely culturally distinct (and because of things like their distinctive names, dress, food taboos, etc., are highly “visible”), and also played an outsize role in history (engaging in conflicts with the Mughals, Afghans, Marathas and British, and apparently giving each of them a run for their money).
This explain the weird-looking state boundaries of Haryana.
I’m (just) old enough to remember when Australia celebrated Empire Day. Australian (and certainly NZ and probably Canadians) had a secondary but important identity as British subjects – full members of the Empire, able to travel freely within it, looking to Britain for their cultural lead, participating in its politics. They went to war automatically on behalf of the Empire (in Sudan and South Africa and both World Wars). I imagine that the socii felt some lesser version of this.
Australians have the reputation of being more British than the Britons. Which does not work in your favour when you are living in a very different biological environment.
Got reminded of the Soviet Ilya Muromets movie (the one they stole Ghidorah from). At the climax, Prince Vladimir says “Three days, and I’ll raise the whole Rus’ to the battle”. Then, we switch to his personal guard, who left him due to his actions, debating whether to fight for him regardless. At the end, Ilya must go to the enemy and pull off some clever diplomatic trick, because the mustering actually takes a week.
“That small size matters because this system relies – because it lacks lots of enforcement officers – on social peer pressure to get recruits to show up. Men show up to the muster because they would be ashamed not to, which only works if they know their friends, family and neighbors will notice their absence and that only works in a fairly small community. The larger the community, the less those ties work.”
This part just clicked with me and made me understood why my city used parishes as units of local government in the late middle ages. For a regional capital, the city was likely big enough for regular “all-hands meetings” at a rostra or agora. However, the christian population* was expected to gather weekly for mass at their closest parishes, so it made them a useful subdivisions to elect councilmen, split taxes or levy assigments. You are likely to see periodically that neighbour who is supposed to take its turn on guarding the city doors or doing his part of the works to maintain the walls.
* There were important muslim and jewish communities in the city, but they were aljamas (separated comunities) not part of the city citizen government. They instead reported to the merino as royal official, since the aljamas were owned by the king instead of having a devolved local rule stated in the city fueros (charter)
In Sweden you see the parish kinda becoming the backone of the royal bureaucracy with the Reformation, because there’s already a priest in every parish (at least theoretically) they’re somewhat popular (people believe in their religion, and that means you need a priest!) and so putting them to work handling recording births and deaths (and occasionally propaganda) works very well.
So how would you expect the mobilization in the Shire to work? For instance, the battle of Green Fields, where Bullroarer Took invented golf. Hobbit big men (4′)?
More or less the same way Frodo recruits his band, with all of the Shire’s big men involved. We see that the Shire’s peacetime culture is centered around its big men, we would expect no less in wartime.
The Thain is in charge in time of war. In the Scouring of the Shire, one of the hobbits brings word that “The Thain has raised the Shire”. The Shire has formal governing institutions, though very weak ones (made possible by hobbits’ naturally lower propensity to violence against each other than humans’). In a normal situation, the Shirriffs would presumably go around calling on the population of the various villages to muster, which they would then do based on the social peer pressure mechanism. In the Scouring, with the Shirriffs technically on the enemy’s side, this presumably happened through informal social networks, with the Thain giving instructions to be relayed through said networks.
So . . . where did the weapons and armor come from? If you’re a citizen-soldier responsible for your own equipment, where do you get it? Were there dedicated armorers who did nothing but make military gear for purchase? Or would the citizen-soldier buy his stuff from a state armory, in which case it looks to me like you’re getting taxed to collect your state-issued gear?
In a fantasy/rpg setting, how common would weapon “shops” actually be? Every village? Major towns? Itinerant craftsmen going from village to village?
It really depends? Armour is more specialized and hard to get than weapons a lot of the time. But basic stuff like spears and helmets is probably something most blacksmiths could do. (of the simpler types at least) Specialized weaponsmiths and armorers are probably something that would exist either at the Big Man’s place (he probably has one on retainer) or in major cities.
And these things tends to keep, while there’s some degradation chances are you’ll inherit your dads equipment.
Carthage as mentioned had state armories, Rome didn’t (in the republican era at least)
Helmets are tricky. Spears and long knives are the ordinary stuff of smithing (scythe and sickle blades, carpenter’s tools, hedging tools – like the famous Brown Bill of English archers).
Also even if the big men sold his armor and horse, how many peasants can he arm it with? Ten? Doesn’t sound like it’ll change victory rates so much especially since now your leader is much more easily killed.
In the Roman case and English forces in the Hundred Years’ War, it was literally “all of the above.” Some people were known to have bought weapons from craft workshops, some inherited or bought them from retired veterans they knew, some received arms from centralised armouries (presumably paying for it with deductions from their salaries), some bought them on secondhand markets, and so on. In the English case we have paper trails of cutlers selling arms to indentured forces about to set out for France, while the swords found in the Dordogne River were stored in barrels, presumably to be supplied/sold to nearby English forces. There were also men known to have made a career of buying up weapons looted off the battlefield by local peasants and reselling them to cutlers for refurbishment (and further resale).
Well, if you at a decent sized Polis hit the market. In Athens, say? Visit Lysias’ Sheilds-R-US with 120 ‘staff’ and over 700 items in stock you can’t fail to find the aspis you need (or maybe a pelta or one of those shiny bronze shields Xenophon says Cretan archers like if you plan to go mercenary) (Lys 12.19). Of stop in at Pistias’ place for the best curiass in Athens made to fit and no silly ornamental bling to add weight (Xen Mem 3.10.9 ff). But if you have got a whole (friendly) army with money to spend, any big city can roll out every kind of craftsman to fit your needs say Ephesus (Xen Hell 3.4.17). Although unless you are proper gentlemen of class and wealth you want to be cautious about cities run by Oligarchs they on occasion have issue with who should have military kit as it were (Xen Hell 2.3.20).
Given the scale of Lysis’ operation, even when Athens’s local economy was cratered under the Thirty and demand for shields was artificially low one assumes he was exporting (like Demosthenes also with his large knife factory). Other polis were know for exporting all manner of particular manufactured goods – roof tiles, cloaks, shoes, types of furniture… so I would think most ports on note would have a goods selection of arms and armor even if the local market could not support all manner of specialist craftsmen (obviously selection and fit might be limited but some more or less felt padding might do for sizing a helmet just fine).
Good you pointed out that weapons and armor could actually be bought at shops in Ancient Greece.
One interesting point is that the amount of metal accessible clearly increases over the middle ages: At Visby the peasant levy that was massacred seems to have had decent protection (lots of coat of plate with bits of mail, though few full on mail byrnies) of the kind that would probably put them only slightly below a roman legionary in protection, and above a phalangite.
Any culture able to extract metals would accumulate them over time making them cheaper.
Up to a point. You can lose metal.
First, because metal items can be simply physically lost. If you drop your knife in a snowdrift, you may not be able to find it again before you risk death by hypothermia from staying out there looking for it. If you are fleeing an armed enemy in battle and you escape into the woods and you trip and fall and your sword skids into a tangle of thornbushes, trying to get it back is a risk.
Second, because metal can be stolen, either as a mundane act of theft or, especially for weapons, as loot in a battle, since much of the losing side’s arms and armor will be captured by the winner.
Third, because many metal tools have to be maintained by subtractive methods (most obviously, blades must be sharpened). When you sharpen a knife or a scythe or a sword, you are grinding away little bits of metal from the blade. And it is generally not possible to capture those bits and somehow recycle them. They’re just gone. There are examples among the last generation of Greenland Norse settlers of iron knives found preserved in the ruins of the settlement where they’ve been sharpened down to a tiny point like a pencil stub, entirely because the Greenland colonists were cut off from trade with iron-making societies and had to use up the last of their iron tools in an attempt to prolong their survival until there was little or no iron left.
Fourth, because iron rusts, even with good maintenance and especially if there is a lapse of maintenance for any reason. Now, in theory a rusted-out iron implement can probably be treated as a small lump of inexplicably high grade iron ore and reprocessed back into iron along with naturally occurring ores, since the rusting process (oxidation) is precisely the process that smelting reverses to turn metal oxides back into pure metal. But in practice, this will never be a 100% efficient process, nor will 100% of rusted iron implements undergo such a process.
With all this in mind, the total civilizational supply of metal a culture has does not necessarily increase over time, of ongoing extraction and smelting of metal fails to keep up with the gradual destruction of metal or the loss of metal to thieves.
The Norse of Greenland travelled to present-day Labrador on a regular basis to get wood and bog iron. However, the last generation could well have lacked resources for that.
Thieves lived outside of the civilization? It’s not like thieves *eat* metal.
No, but they are likely to be poorer at maintaining metal tools. Of cause metal recycling will never be 100%. It might be that cultures capable of extracting metals get better at this over the centuries.
Raiders. Soldiers love to take metal stuff.
I don’t think this can be generalised to all societies. It happened in medieval Europe because we have credible evidence of smelting and metalworking methods improving in terms of both scale and efficiency, but we don’t see the same rate of progress in all regions and/or periods of history. There were actually instances where metal became _less_ common in written inventories and and/or archaeological finds, such during and after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
I think it was a lose of economics of scale resulting from the shrinking of the population.
And trade. During the Pax Romana anyone with waterborne access had the entire Mediterranean and its watersheds as a market. Production vastly beyond local usage was profitable. With trade collapse manufacture could only find local markets.
I imagine that over the almost two millennia that separate the phalangites from Visby there was some progress in iron production. And given the importance of charcoal in the process, I imagine the tree-to-human ratio matters quite a bit, and might well be higher in Scandinavia than Greece.
The area where most of our Medieval mines are found has little land suitable for our traditional crops. So there would have been plenty of trees relatively easily accessible there. Also, the Battle of Visby took place only ten years after Black Death reached the area. People surviving this pandemic got a higher standard of living since there were fewer people around sharing the same natural resources.
“Via Wikipedia, an imagine of an armory for the Swiss Guard.”
Should be image of course.
Possible editing glitch: the “MMORPGs and fantasy worlds alike love their ‘local village guards,’” line appears twice verbatim in different sections.
Relevant in both places, but the repetition made me think I’d lost my place somehow.
>Often alongside these warrior aristocrats of varying levels of ‘bigness,’ there are non-aristocratic warriors maintained on an employment principle – though because non-state societies generally aren’t heavily monetized, these fellows are typically ‘paid’ in status (including valuable prestige goods) and maintenance (food, board, equipment, etc)
This sounds like a sweet gig. Or at least better than dirt farming. I assume that it provides a chance of social mobility: A very heroic battle deed might get me ennobled?
How does a fellow get this position? Does the local Big Man keep track of the sons of his peasants and pick out those that seem strong, loyal and courageous?
I think getting the position was rather ad-hoc and differed from place to place, with some broad stroke similarities. The sons of trusted household servants (second/third/fourth son of the steward, for example) may be chosen, as would sons of retainers already (these probably made up the majority of non-noble retainers). A client who managed to distinguish himself to the local Big Man in some way (on the battlefield as part of the levy, or at home in some act of loyalty beyond the standard expectations) could also be chosen. If a retainer is expected to provide their own equipment, a peasant/yeoman on the winning side loots someone else with the minimum kit necessary, then offers his service to the Big Man.
In elaborated elsewhere, but it was context dependent only to an extent. Throughout the ex Roman world two classes couldn’t reasonably advanced except through providence; villeins and slaves. Neither could meaningfully own property, and thus had no way to make any social progress outside of lucky breaks or providence. Looting or theft was one plausible method, running away and converting yourself to a freeman through obscurity was another. Otherwise the labor requirements were crippling. And serfs were generally the majority of the population, at least until the black death (which started to reverse the trend).
The freemen class, generically the class who had the right to freely move and own property, was the class which could potentially produce men at arms out of the peasantry. They are also the class which the Diocletian reforms destroyed by tying farmers to their land, *and* were not incidentally the class that formed the historical core of the legions. Hence why there’s one European model here; the class structure was from the end of Rome and influenced all successors.
The post Roman class structure saw a further contraction in the number of freemen and increase in serfs due to the death of the Roman empires overarching customs Union and the corresponding decommercialization and poverty of europe, which crippled the military and economic capabilities of the state. Hence this entire mustering without administration business; this is all a sort of post apocalyptic response to Rome falling and society coming apart at the seams.
Peter Brown points out that the ‘barbarians’ had three classes: free men, semi-free men and unfree. The semi-free had a military obligation. In the later western empire there were honestiores and humiliores: two classes. Effectively the barbarians had a two to one mobilisation advantage. How far serfdom had gone by the Carolingians is difficult to gauge, but their edicts envisage a fairly wide mobilisation.
Usually not peasants, at least in the medieval period I know a bit about.
“Aristocratic adjacent” mostly. Bastard sons who can’t officially be acknowledged. Lots of third, fourth, etc sons of other aristocrats who have no real hope of inheritance. Some times and places fostering was a thing, where it was normal to send your children, after the first few years, to be brought up in another household. Sometimes kings would have the sons of other less powerful aristocrats in their household, who were well treated and trained, but also in a sense hostages for the good behaviour of their parents.
Depends on what you mean by peasant; as it was primarily wealth gated. In practice only serfs were basically forbidden from serving, and mostly because they had no free time to acquire wealth. Various other intermediate classes could have acquired the money to buy arms and armor, including by serving as a lesser military function and capturing loot or a captive worth ransom.
Obviously burghers and the sons of Burghers, although they more likely would serve as part of the local milita (which had its own arms and armor requirements) rather than pledging to a local big man, but various Yeomen or equivalent classes would likewise have the potential income to send a son into the men at arms, or send them as a specialized soldier who could expect to earn money enough to become a man at arms or raise a son to that rank.
At that point good performance could lead to various noble titles.
Getting from a peasant to a burgher or yeoman status was not easy, but was possible. In particular freemen could often make the leap, and freemen were around 10%-20% of the peasant population. If you were a freemen you could either move to the city, working long enough to accumulate enough money to enter a trade and possibly buy property, or potentially attach yourself to a Lord as a domestic servant, potentially entering the Yeomen class. Serfs could become freemen, but it was rare; the easiest method was to flee and start over elsewhere, which was illegal. Otherwise serfs were generally limited by labor demands to poverty, excepting lucky breaks.
Some Particularly successful freemen could also have earned enough to become a men at arms directly just by buying armor, barding, and a horse, potentially as an all in gambit.
Hence some non knights could become men at arms, mostly from intermediate classes or the top percentages of the free peasantry.
I often think about how The Lord of the Rings goes with a point that Theoden is forced to go to war with only a fraction of the military resources available to Rohan, simply because the need is urgent and he can’t wait for the full force of mustering every fighter he could before setting off.
Then there’s Denethor, trying to hold out Minas Tirith against a siege with existential implications for Gondor, and all of the regional nobles can only really send token forces to aid in the defence because their first obligation is at home and Denethor doesn’t really have the means to command them any further than that. Notably, the strongest force by far that comes to them are the knights of Dol Amroth (accompanied by men-at-arms), and that’s probably owed in no small part to Imrahil being Denethor’s brother-in-law.
“all of the regional nobles can only really send token forces to aid in the defence because their first obligation is at home and Denethor doesn’t really have the means to command them any further than that.”
Worth noting is that they are facing actual threats–Aragorn using the Army of the Dead to rout the Corsairs of Umbar with their fear powers, which allows the men of Gondor to butcher them, not only deprives Sauron of troops, but also allows the men of southern Gondor to go relieve Minas Tirith.
(Note: it’s interesting that Tolkien has Aragorn’s tactically sound decision to hide the fact that the ships coming up the river are NOT the Corsairs be a contributing factor to Denethor’s decision to commit suicide, because the palantir shows him the ships at just enough distance that he can see the black sails but not who’s under them. It makes complete sense, but most authors wouldn’t think to include such a detail.)
Oh certainly, I didn’t mean to imply that their first obligation being at home was out of order.
I kind of think Tolkien’s narrative there is fairly typical of dramatic irony. I’m not going to try compiling a list or anything, but I know there are plenty of stories in which characters, good or bad, are ruined by their complete misreading of a situation that would otherwise be to their advantage. In this context, it’s also an effective showcase of Sauron’s cunning, and Tolkien being consistent in the rules he attributes to things; that the only way he can weaponise the palantir against Denethor is to misleadingly frame genuine information.
Would love a write up about the Pospolite Ruszenie system in the Rzeczypospolita Obojga Narodów (Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth). A nobility focused mass mobilization system.
People with formal noble privileges consisted 10% of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s population. Which did not work so well in the longer run.
I think the “bring your own equipment” model would work well for Fire Emblem-style games where your army is a ragtag band of misfits with unique abilities. Why does this village let you recruit both a guy in full plate armor and a lady in Greek-looking spear+shield kit? Well, it’s what they had lying around when they got called up to fight.
Genghis Khan actually organised his army more like a modern one. This may well have been necessary to keep together hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Some members of his original tribal coalition even spoke unrelated languages.
It also broke up the tribes, and displaced the existing elites mostly likely to lead rebellion. So his empire lasted a good bit longer than most nomad ones, he made Chinggisid descent a sine qua non for steppe leadership for the next several centuries. When it did fission, it was along the lines of Chinggis family, not any pre-existing divisions. Some set up as army units (the Kalmyks are ‘the regiment’, the hazara ‘the army’).
The origin of the name “Hazara” is uncertain. But the Kalmyks are Mongolic-speaking so your etymology makes sense to me.
I’ve seen it traced back to ‘ordu’ – Mongol for army camp, entourage, army
This is only one out of several possible etymologies. I checked out on Wikipedia and it says the origin of the name “Hazara” is disputed. A lot of etymologies certainly are.
@Peter T,
That is where both the English word “horde” and the name of the Urdu language come from (Urdu originally was associated, apparently, with the Mughal military).
This etymology makes sense to me as the word “horde” is primarily associated with conquerors from the Eurasian Steppe. Although I have seen it used about unusually large crowds of people or groups of wild animals. I have heard the word “Urdu” originally meant “the camp language” so this makes sense too. Do you have a good word for native Urdu speakers? The best I could came up with is “Urduvans”.
Do you have a good word for native Urdu speakers? The best I could came up with is “Urduvans”.
@Lena,
I have never come across a term to refer to either Hindi-speakers or Urdu-speakers, actually. Which is interesting, because in other parts of South Asia you have clear demarcations of ethnolinguistic groups: Marathis speak Marathi, Malayalis speak Malayalam, Balochis speak Baloch, Meiteis speak Meitei etc.. I’m not sure if this is an effect of Hindi and Urdu both having become major lingua francas, or if it says something profound about the way identity is constructed in the Indo-Gangetic Plain versus other parts of South Asia, but it would be intresting for me to learn, if anyone knows.
The word I have created to refer to native Hindi speakers is “Hindians”. It was formed in analogy with Indians since the words are related.
According to Wikipedia the word “Kalmyk” is an exonym meaning “remnant”. However, their word for themselves is “Khalmgud” which could have the etymology you state. If so “Kalmyk” could be a folk etymology in an unrelated language.
Possibly I missed this, but it’s important to remember limitations on message transmission speed in pre-modern societies. If all you’ve got is riders on dirt roads, with no “posting” system, it’s not beyond plausibility to think that getting out the message to raise one’s levees might take 2+ weeks (1 week outbound from the capital/chief castle to deliver the message, 1 week inbound returning). If you don’t have any infrastructure or technological aces up your sleeve to accelerate this (signal fires/mirrors, telegraph systems, pigeon post, magic), that might be your only option. In some cases, a small war at one side of a large country might be over by the time the levees from the country’s other side arrive. Lots of good stuff in the ACOUP archives about this kind of mobilization in Lord of the Rings.
Useful links for those who want a real-world estimate of travel times for Romans can be found here:
https://orbis.stanford.edu/
https://itiner-e.org/
To use these resources, you need to make certain assumptions about how fast your story’s people can travel relative to the Romans. But at least you can come up with defensible estimates based on those assumptions.
One of the things that I thought about when reading about the recruitment methode was how you could try to get out. And how difficult that was in a society in which most people knew most other people. And the story of Odysseus trying to pretend he was crazy in order to not have to go to war was what came to my mind. There is this group of Big Men (Menelaus among them), whom he is part of, being the Big Man for Ithaka,. And who try and entice him to go to war. They can’t really force him, as they have no means to do that, especially not on Odysseus home island. Also they do not have any (semi)legal or honour binding claim or status that they can invoke. So they just have to try and convince him. But Odysseus has this very personal reason(s) (young son and such) to not want to go. So after he is found out, he then has no socially/honourably acceptable way of declining the call to war.
And where Philip II’s Macedonia for example fits into this model? Ok the heavy cavalry is a warrior aristocracy. But the pezhaiteroi as the men who made up the phalanx are what? Not retainers and clients of the aristocracy, after Philip has his hand with them. not just conscripted peasants either. Has Philip effectively invented his own hoplite class?
We don’t really know how they were mobilised, but in terms of recruitment: they seem to have started out as “employment principle” paid soldiers (got to love those silver mines), and shifted over time into “vocational principle” military settlers as the Macedonian empire grows.
This appears unlikely I would argue. The first major campaign and victory of Philip is that on the Erigon against Bardylis. He already has 10000 phalangites in this one. No mines yet, Pangaion has not been seized yet and the Chakidiki mines are controlled by Olynthus while Philip is not even controlling parts of Upper Macedonia yet. How is he paying the 50 talents a month this army costs? Then by the tiime of Chaeronea he had at least 24,000 phalangites from a Macedonian population of maybe 700,000. 3.4% of the entire Macedonian population is being employed by the king as professional soldiers with their only service obligation being the king paying them? The numbers simply do not add up…
Seems like Philippos II had a citizen army regardless of what citizenship meant in this case.
> lists of names of fellows that are to be conscripted, implying – among other things – that the kingdom is keeping a full and accurate name-by-name census of the entire male population
For that matter, doing this requires that people have definite *names*. As far as I’ve heard, it’s pretty much a feature of modernity that individuals have definite, fixed “official” names; in most societies people were referred to in different ways in different contexts. Though the suggestion in ACOUP is that Rome did have a system where each person had a fixed official name … which was likely a result of the census, one of whose purposes was to enable raising large armies. I have read that in late czarist times the Russian peasantry resisted the assignment of family names because they (correctly) understood that it would make it easier for the central government to directly tax them.
I am not saying it is impossible but the idea of Russian peasants resisting surnames would surprize me. Taxation (and before it was abolished select lifetime conscription) was imposed on communities and not on individuals surprisingly late in Russia, so it mattered little if pencil-pushers in Peterburg can pick you individually – the headman of the village will know you and will pick you. And an enterprising peasant seeking to obtain an (internal) passport and (limited) freedom of movement would understand the need to be identified specifically.
@Gwytherin,
Right, i don’t think surnames really have much to do with taxation, or with other forms of government authority either. My own ethnic group has traditonally done without them (still largely does, except when they move to other Indian states or to foreign countries where surnames are expected). Before the 20th century we would have been identified as either “ancestral village name, patronymic, given name, caste community identifier” or as “patronymic, given name, caste community identifier”, depending on the community or family. Starting in the early to mid 20th century caste identifiers became unpopular for political/ideologically reasons, so the pattern shifted to “ancestral village, patronymic, given name”. And that’s in a part of the world that has centralized states for a very long time, longer than Russia, so it didn’t exactly prevent people being identified for tax purposes. In a high-context environment, people tend to know who you are, or can find out, without needing a surname, it’s hard to be truly anonymous in a village (or in a town where most people are recent transplants from the village).
Some Southeast Asian and West African cultures have even more complicated naming systems that I’m not going to attempt to understand (someone who had lived in Indonesia tried to explain how the Javanese get by without surnames, and even after his explanation i still don’t get it).
I think it can often be overstated how big the difference is between systems with “fixed” names and flexible names. Both systems usually amount to the same thing, which is a general “given name” used for addressing the person, followed by a series of identifiers which can be appended to the name until it’s actually a unique identifier for a single individual. This can be obscured in fixed-name systems, but it’s easy to see when filing paperwork: The state does not just ask for first and last name, but also birthdate and even birth place, to make sure they get the right John Smith. This isn’t that different from for example an Arabic name getting extended by an “ibn Mohammed” patronymic.
I thought people would have had personal names and possibly established nicknames. Something more specific could have developed in historical times.
In Sweden the nobility and priests started to adapt family names in the 17th century. During the 18th and 19th centuries people living in towns adapted them too. Famers mostly used patronymics until family names were made mandatory in 1901. These consisted of the father’s given name with the suffix “-son” (“son of”) or “-dotter” (“daughter of”). When family names became mandatory the masculine forms were turned into such. Even today our 16 most common family names are all of this type. The 17th most common is Lindberg meaning “linden-mountain”. This represents our second most common type of family name which has words for things in nature put together into one.
One question I have about the retinue of retinues structure: How much autonomy did the smaller Big Men have when not at war on a large scale? I assume that on campaign the high stakes and proximity to superiors meant limited tolerance for shenanigans, but did they mostly tend to sit idle between major wars and count on the passive income from owned land and exploitative vertical relationships to maintain their standing, or would they tend to use their military power to e.g. fight rival small Big Men for more land?
And relatedly, how did the superiors feel about that? Did they encourage conflicts to keep their clients too weak to alter the deal? Did they worry that infighting would deplete their manpower or sow infighting on campaign?
Those smaller vassals were using the time in between the big wars to fight amongst each other for more land. Bret has talked several times about Hugh IV of Lusignan (e.g here: https://acoup.blog/2024/07/12/fireside-friday-july-12-2024/), where we have a document about an agreement between him and the count of Acquitaine, which lists just how often Hugh has gone to war with another vassal (all the time), and tries to straighten out some land property claims in the hopes of getting him to sit still for once.
A good introduction to retinues of retinue structures:
https://acoup.blog/2022/09/16/collections-teaching-paradox-crusader-kings-iii-part-i-making-it-personal/
How the “smaller Big Men” behaved would vary depending on personal preferences, location, and power of those above them. Some would like to fight (Bertrand de Born), some would be happy to live a good life without fighting. Some would be in peaceful states with strong central monarchies that would squash them if they got up to shenanigans, some would be in conflict-ridden areas where fighting was unavoidable.
Rulers for the most part did **not** want their vassals fighting each other, for economic and social reasons.
Warfare in pre-modern eras is profitable but only for the victor, and in general zero sum or even negative sum. So if your vassals invade and conquer somebody else, they and you get richer. If your vassals fight each other, one gets richer, the other gets poorer, and you are either no better off or poorer overall. And yes if your vassals have been recently fighting each other, they’re not likely to co-operate all that well when you need them on campaign.
The “social contract” is that you become a vassal of someone more powerful because you get something from it, in particular better protection against invaders than you could manage on your own. Become a vassal of the King of X, and the King of X’s army will come to your assistance when you need it. If vassals are fighting each other, who is the King going to support? And also what’s the point of becoming a vassal if you’re going to get invaded by your neighbours anyway? Maybe instead of the King of X, you should think about becoming a vassal of the Emperor of Y instead.
That said, although almost always the ruler doesn’t want vassals to fight each other, these social structures arise **because** the central administration is too weak to main control any other way. So very often the ruler can’t stop the vassals from fighting each other anyway.
Fighting was often acceptable as a way of settling a dispute. Maybe not the best way – hence tries at arbitration – but not immoral or illegal, just inevitable but with a strong preference for keeping it sporadic and local. These were, after all, warrior-aristocrat societies.
Fighting among themselves is a thing that happens in some times and places, often indicative of weaknesses in the authority of the monarch and generally with a sense of tension rather than being accepted as a norm.
Good you pointed out why they did not fight each other all the time. I though they did not but could not tell why.
Fief holders might engage in private warfare in instances where their liege is distinctly weak as to not arbitrate justice and monopolise the use of force between them, but even then I think it was more often in the form of raiding and muscling into one another’s manors rather than lining up for battle, simply by virtue of not having the numbers or the scope for manoeuvre.
People cite Bertran de Born, but I think often leave out the significant context of how this is France in the era of the Angevin Empire. French noblemen aren’t fighting one another just because they’re neighbours, they’re fighting in the context of how the king of England is a gigantic and often rebellious feudal overlord within France. These are less often “neighbouring barons are fighting one another” and more “neighbouring barons deciding whether their opportunities and obligations are better placed with a rebelling duke or with the king being rebelled against”. Bertran’s situation also having additional opportunities arising from the fact that in addition to the English king Henry II being somewhat rebellious against the king of France, he also needs to deal with the fact that his own sons (whom he has endowed with major French fiefs in their own right) are frequently at odds with himself and one another. In-fighting between princes of the blood or them engaging in rebellion against their father is a whole other thing.
The rivalries between regular noblemen in this kind of situation matter, but it appears to me that finds far more regular expression in a form of making the calculations as to whether or not to support a rebelling liege and occasionally to persuade your own overlord that a bit of rebellion might be in order.
If a lone nobleman lacks the retainers and serfs to build a proper army to fight a rival, they can make up for those numbers by convincing their master to fight their rival’s master, and letting the numbers come from unaffiliated peers who are roped into it.
Hint: you can’t spell “feudalism” without “feud”.
While an overlord might not approve of a vassal being too nakedly ambitious (at his other vassals’ expense and hence the overlord’s overall strength), human nature being what it is a particular vassal might be a jerk who continually “responded” to affronts real or imagined.
I would call that “individual variation” rather than “human nature”. On the other hand it is natural for humans to disagree. The likelihood of this natural tendency leading to violence depends on social context.
The words “feudalism” and “feud” actually have completely unrelated etymologies.
Monolinguals may not realise that such arguments are language-dependant. In my native Swedish the cognates of “Feudalism” and “feud” are spelled “Feodalism” and “fejd”.
Can’t you just focus on the Roman Empire and just tell a budding worldbuilder “here is something that works, adjust as you need for the story”?