This is the second half of the second part (I, IIa, IIb) 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.
We’re picking up right where we left off discussing various methods for actually mobilizing an army, which is to say recruiting the troops, getting them armed and getting them in the ranks. We’ve covered ‘self-recruitment,’ systems where a lot of the burden of that process is handled by the troops themselves (almost invariably entitlement principle citizen militia), allowing for a fairly limited administrative apparatus, though I should note, not no administrative apparatus. The need to keep records of who is liable to serve tends to mean these ‘self-recruitment’ systems are most often used by urban societies with a literate upper-class.
We also looked at the over low-overhead alternative: having mobilization handled by local Big Men. The big caveat here is this functionally ensures the fragmentation of power (and thus a non-state society, since centralization of military force defines states) which means that a society which turns its local aristocracy into petty warlords in order to raise its armies has to then cope with having a whole bunch of petty warlords who have their own small armies they can use to push for power and position.
And I want to reiterate here societies do not choose these systems from first principles, instead these systems develop organically, over generations (it’s quite rare that someone plans such a system from scratch, although it does – rarely – happen) and are constrained by existing social structures. A non-state society is basically compelled to adopt Big Man Mobilization because, lacking state structures, they have no other options. By contrast, a long-established state cannot adopt Big Man Mobilization effectively, because they don’t have the petty warlords it relies on and creating those warlords would mean disestablishing the state to a substantial degree by fragmenting its power.
So for the most part, we ought not think of these systems as choices but as consequences of social structure.
This week, we’re going to move forward and discuss some of the more involved solutions, which might give the state a bit more control over the process, at the cost of greater overhead (although not always greater overhead for the state necessarily, as we’ll see).
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).
Households and Officials
Now we’ve seen how compact state societies with a broad ‘middling well-to-do’ class which can political preserve their interests and have some political entitlements to fight for can recruit. But what if your state society doesn’t have that well-to-do peasant or burgher class? At least, not enough of them?
That is the case for most pre-modern state societies: it is substantially more common for the peasantry to be pushed down basically all the way to subsistence. After all, it is in the domestic economic interests of the king, the temple and the local aristocracy to extract as much as they can from the peasantry and most do so – the conditions whereby that peasantry can politically defend themselves from that sort of extraction are rare (and it’s often not the whole peasantry). But now you have a problem: that aristocracy is not big enough to be the society’s whole army on its own, but your peasants are too poor to afford their equipment and have no political entitlement for which to fight.
Actually, to take an aside for a moment, there’s some complexity here in what is happening. Fundamentally, pre-modern societies are all about agriculture and subsistence and so what the society needs is for these small farmers to generate enough surplus to support two kinds of non-farmers: producers making military equipment and soldiers who aren’t farming because they’re fighting. Entitlement-systems do this by both allowing farmers to keep more of their surplus but then also tying the act of dedicating that surplus to warfare (acquiring weapons and serving) to their social status so those small farmers are willing to push out to the edge of their labor to keep their status. But poor peasants have no status to defend and little surplus labor to employ. Fundamentally the interactions here are about the food economy.
So for these societies with stronger aristocracies and weaker peasantries, the problem is two-fold: first the peasants have no reason to serve and second they have no wealth with which to afford the weapons they need to serve. However, the state may well still want to raise all these peasants they have rather than reaching for some other source of manpower (as below). The solution to the first problem is some form of compulsion (you force the peasants to serve or to enable service) and the solution to the second is what I am going to call brigading. ‘To brigade’ simply means to group something together (a military brigade was a combination of different units, often with different integrated combat arms), from which it acquires a lot of specialized meanings. What we’re interested in doing is brigading households: one peasant household, crushed down by extraction, cannot support a soldier – but four or five or ten might.
Now the mechanism of compulsion here varies and with it the mechanism of brigading.
The simplest system is brigading under a principle of universal male military service and we see this at play with systems like the Anglo-Saxon fyrd, the Carolingian select-levy. If the community was under direct threat – your town or village was being attacked – the king (or his local representative) could call up the ‘general levy’ of all adult males. But for regular warfare (including offensive warfare) one obviously couldn’t call up everyone (someone needs to be farming) but a better equipped steady-state infantry force was required to supplement the aristocrats. This was the ‘select levy’ and the fyrd system and the Carolingian system end up settling on a similar solution: bolt several peasant households together and require that, collectively, they furnish one soldier for the king’s army.
Under Charlemagne (r. 768-814), each peasant household was assessed based on its production in units of value called mansi, and for every four mansi they were required to produce one soldier for the select-levy. Now of course most peasant farms were a lot smaller than four mansi – the regulations make provisions for holders as small as half a single mansus – so smaller households were brigaded together until a unit of four mansi was created. That combined unit of several households then was expected to pick someone from among its military-aged men and then collectively pool their resources to equip him – a shield, a spear, a sword, a helmet and some very basic armor (probably textile) – to serve in the select-levy, presumably on a relatively long-term basis.
The Anglo-Saxon system of Alfred the Great (r. 871-899) worked similarly. Farming households were assessed in units called hides (by 1066, this unit is really big, around 120 acres, but my understanding is we generally think it was a lot smaller before then). As with the mansi, households could be brigaded together to make up a single hide, though the hide itself was, notionally, a ‘standard small farm’ (the same way the mansus was). Each individual hide was required to provide one man for local military service (garrison duty, etc.; basic, part-time sort of work that wouldn’t require much kit) and every five hides together to also provide one man – similarly fairly well equipped – for service in the royal army that represented the kingdom’s main field force.
Now that’s the most direct way to brigade the households together, but not the only way. Mass conscription in the Warring States and early Han Dynasty, as I understand it (this is very much not my area of expertise) worked on a rolling, age-based basis where recruits would spend just 2-3 years in the army before being discharged back to their farms as part of the reserve. That too is going to have the effect of distributing the burden of service across a bunch of households, though I am not clear who handles the cost of equipment in that system. Over time, the Han Dynasty converts over to a fully professional system, discussed a little bit below.
The other option for brigading households, at least economically, is military settlers. We see this system at work in the Hellenistic kingdoms that form after Alexander’s death. Instead of brigading a bunch of households together and making them pick one of their members, we (the state) pick for them, by imposing a soldier’s household on top of them. It’s not hard to see why this tends to be a feature of conquest states: the state seizes the land of the peasantry and redistributes it to the families of soldiers, such that the rent from that land is sufficient to maintain a heavy infantryman’s family in relative comfort. The peasantry doesn’t go anywhere, but now they have to pay a portion of their production in rent to the soldier’s family (in addition to taxes – this is an exploitative, unpopular sort of system!) who generally doesn’t do any farming himself and so the soldier (or his sons) are both wealthy enough to afford their equipment and available for conscription, since military service is the flipside of the deal by which they get to live as tiny little petty aristocrats.
Now you can see that each of these systems relies – at least for the peasants – on compulsion. The peasants do not get anything for their service – they aren’t paid, they don’t get increased social status nor can they expect some sort of personal relationship as a client with a noble patron – so you must force them. Which means you need bureaucracy.
Where an entitlement-based system can function often on self-reported wealth or volunteer militias – because military service is a positive honor – a compulsion based system needs bureaucrats. Someone needs to go to each farm and measure its production, assign it to a hide or mansus or to a military settler’s estate or decide which household is due to send a recruit this year and then enforce that decision. That means a small army of literature bureaucrats – royal officials – operating at a very granular level, in the villages (though once set up, the military settlers can perform this role themselves to a degree in a military settler system – they are the local enforcement and rent extraction). Those officials need to be paid, which means heavier taxes and so fundamentally they represent a kind of deadweight on the system: resources that have to be spent on military mobilization but which do not (directly) produce any soldiers. Military settlers functioning as rentier elites (distinct from the frontier-farmer-soldiers below) aren’t much of an improvement here, because they’re capturing a whole lot of value beyond their nominal ‘cost’ as soldiers, making them very expensive as a source of heavy infantry.
Consequently, brigaded-household-systems tend to produce less military power per unit population than entitlement self-recruitment or even fragmented Big Man recruitment. However their advantage is that they scale much more easily over large populations and land areas, so you can end up with more soldiers overall if you have a very big state.1 These sorts of systems thus tend to be creatures of large, relatively well-centralized, bureaucratic states.
Nevertheless, for the worldbuilders out here: this is the first sort of system where you are likely to find some sort of official actually operating at the village level where they might actually interact with the peasants.
Of course you may note that this system requires quite a lot of administration – you need to have local officials keeping track of local landholdings and conscription liability on a granular level, in a context where you cannot trust anyone to self-report their liability. Those bureaucrats need to be paid and likely so do these soldiers once they’re under arms (you can compel them before you give them weapons, but after they have weapons, you have to pay them, because they have weapons) and all of this demands just quite a lot of state capacity. And I want to stress that demand of state capacity: large, effective bureaucracies composed of literate bureaucrats are really hard for pre-modern states to build and so even ostensibly ‘wealthy’ (that is, high state revenue) states often are not able or at least are not willing to build them.
What if you wanted to shift that administrative burden somewhere else? Maybe you could just pay someone to handle all of that hassle for you…
Contractors and Colonels
The solution here is to outsource the task of administrative organization to some kind of private contractor.
The clearest example of this are the armies of early modern Europe, particularly during the 16th and 17th centuries, raised via a system of private military contractors in what is sometimes termed ‘private enterprise war’ (albeit that term also covers the seaborne commercial-imperial ventures of European powers in the same period, which we’re not going to get into here). The origins of this system stretch earlier – it emerges organically out of systems of mercenary and ‘feudal’ recruitment in the late Middle Ages. And this system is also often present to provide auxiliary units for armies largely recruited another way.
The basic schema goes thusly: the state (typically, but not always, a king) decides they need a unit of soldiers (a ‘regiment,’ generally), but they don’t have to handle all of that administrative hassle directly, so instead they contract someone – typically a military aristocrat (because that’s who has the experience and connections to handle this) – to raise a regiment, promising them payment. Sometimes the contractor is handed the money for this in advance (ancient mercenary recruiters are often sent off with a bunch of silver to hire guys with) but it obviously serves the king better to use the contractor as basically a source of financing: promise him money in the future for a regiment recruited today. So the contractor is not an employee, but rather a creditor who the king owes money.
The contractor then takes on both the financial and logistical burden of raising the regiment, but of course a regiment might be several thousand men which is still too big of a task, so the initial contractor might subcontract parts of this task to other, more junior military aristocrats in his orbit. The initial contractor is a colonel, his unit is a regiment; his subcontractors are captains, their units are companies. Yes, this is the origin of the modern, broadly used, international system of units and ranks.
The colonel and those captains would then employ recruiting-sergeants to enroll the actual men to form the companies. Recruiting scenes in period artwork often feature men being enrolled (and sometimes paid signing bonuses) at impromptu recruiting ‘stations’ consisting of little more than a table or sometimes an upturned drum, with the recruiting-sergeant writing their name down (enrolling in a literal sense) in the company’s rolls. The question of equipment was a problem for the colonel, rather than the king: this was, fundamentally, the colonel’s regiment.
The usual expectation is that such units might recruit from anywhere, but they tend to be fairly geographically focused. After all, the colonel doing the recruiting was able to get the contract because he has some connections or experience and that tended to be geographically localized. Lucian Staiano-Daniels notes (op. cit.), for instance, of the Saxon army and also the Mansfield Regiment during the Thirty Years War, while there certainly were men drawn from very far afield, the bulk of the soldiers came from a fairly tight geographic area around Saxony. Likewise, these sorts of ‘contractor’ units are often how ancient mercenaries show up in our sources and the fact that the fight in distinctive ethnic styles and are marked with ethnic signifiers certainly suggests that the bulk of the men were recruited from a fairly specific geographic and cultural milieu, although we should be aware that just as with those Thirty Years War regiments, there’s no reason you might not have a meaningful number of ‘international’ mercenaries from all over bolted on. These units, if they stay in being, also often recruit as they move, picking up whoever is willing to sign on from wherever they go.
Now we’re not dealing here with navies (which can press sailors by force because after that the boat sails away which reduces desertion risk), but by and large these sorts of armies raised by contractors are reliant on volunteers, which means they need to pay these fellows. From an economic perspective, they’re often skimming excess labor manpower off of local labor markets, which explains the somewhat counterintuitive fact Staiano-Daniels (op. cit. again) notes that the largest chunk of the recruits came from towns and cities – because of course that is where men without a stable niche in society tend to gather, looking for employment, opportunity or adventure. But in most cases these contractors do not have the legal power to compel service (and also quite limited ability to stem desertion of things go badly).
We’ll come back to finance in the next part, but it is worth noting here how heavily financed (that is to say, debt-based) this system is. The king essentially goes into debt with the contractor to get the regiment formed up and the contractor-colonel then raises the regiment. But the main expense there is the wages of the soldiers themselves, but most of their pay is ‘on the books’ (rather than in hard currency) to be paid out in full when the soldiers are dismissed or the regiment disbanded; we often see the officers of the regiment (who are vocational-type junior military aristocrats) lending soldiers hard-currency ‘advances’ on their pay out-of-pocket when the regiment itself was short on hard cash.
Now of course if a meaningful part of pay here is back-pay when a regiment is mustered out, the expectation is that the regiment is going to get mustered out and thus these are not standing units. They can be used to create standing armies (raising new regiments to replace old ones, etc.), but there is often going to be ‘churn’ in this system. That said, when mustering out an old regiment and raising a new one, the soldiers of the old regiment are the obvious first place to start for recruitment: they’re freshly unemployed, trained and experienced soldiers and they are available. As a result, you may get ‘professional’ soldiers in this system, even though it is not a long-service professional system.
That may seem like a terrible system and it could go very badly wrong (and frequently did) if the money to settle the debts didn’t emerge. But from the king’s perspective (and the contractor-colonel’s) it was a great system: it enabled them to finance the whole operation at a relatively low cost, allowing rulers to push their military capacity well beyond what they could afford in hard cash. Financing could even be added on top of this: the Mansfield Regiment’s operating costs were supposed to be covered by another loan (which seems to have ended up diverted to other regiments in the event), so the soldiers are owed their pay from the contractor-colonel and the regiment who in turn is owed this money from the king or the king’s representatives who in turn are trying to arrange their own financing to cover the funds.
The other advantage of this system, of course, is that it imposes minimal administrative burden on the king. The administrative hassle of finding men, recruiting them, keeping track of them, paying them, getting them equipment, uniforms, food and so on all falls to the contractor-colonel (who in many cases is really an absentee proprietor and has deputized someone else to actually run all of this for him; this fellow gets called a lieutenant colonel, he is ‘holding (‘tenant’) in lieu of the colonel’) who has to make those arrangements.
The disadvantages, of course, are numerous. These contractor-colonels basically own their regiments and so expect some leeway in terms of equipment, uniforms and command; not infinite leeway, mind you, they still consider themselves vassals or servants of the king, but it is very hard to enforce standardization on these armies. There’s also just an enormous amount of latitude for graft and indeed in many cases graft – pocketing the wages of dead soldiers, for instance – is how the captains and colonels get paid. And everyone in this system expects to get paid for their service at some point, so while financing can put off the day that the bill comes due, there will be a bill in money, so the state needs revenues to meet it.
Spain famously manages, despite acquiring a running river of silver and gold from the New World, to go bankrupt overextending itself with these sorts of armies in 1557. And then again in 1560. And again in 1575. And then once more in 1596. And then again in 1607. And again in 1627. And then bankrupt again in 1647. And one last time in 1653. This has, you may imagine, a deleterious impact on military discipline off of the battlefield and generally these armies tend to be, we might say, ‘rowdy.’ Again, I invite readers to check out L. Staiano-Daniels’ The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War (2024) to get a sense of the short of things these men get up to and the kind of society that forms in these regiments. One certainly gets the impression that Hellenistic military men were not much more restrained (the arrogant, braggart mercenary soldier was a stock character of Greek New Comedy, for instance, memorably captured in Roman Comedy (which derives from Greek New Comedy) in the Miles Gloriousus (‘The Braggart Soldier’)).
In terms of the kinds of societies that use these methods, contractors tends to be a response for states that are reaching for military power beyond what their core state apparatus can support – it tends to be a response to limited state capacity. It merges a vocational principle military aristocracy (the officers/contractors) with an employment principle common soldier and so requires a society that is monetized enough and economically specialized enough to support that framework – which is to say a society with quite a bit of commercial activity going on (often more commercial activity than the state can fully control or supervise – certainly true for both early modern Europe and the Hellenistic Mediterranean) and with enough daily business done in hard currency (rather than ‘non-monetized’ debt-or-bullion-based systems) that the soldiers can actually spend their pay.2
For many fictional fantasy settings, I think the ‘contractor’ method of raising troops is remarkably underrepresented. While Tolkien’s Middle Earth in the Third Age is a relentlessly early medieval setting outside of The Shire, most modern high fantasy settings – simply because modern readers and writers are moderns ourselves – tend to be quite late medieval or early modern in character, almost by accident. In that context, emerging states struggling with administration relying on contractors to set up their armies would make a great deal of sense.
Professionals and Prisoners
Finally, we come to the solution that is, I suspect, the first that most modern folks think of but one of the less common solutions for pre-modern states: direct recruitment by the state. State officials (be they military officers or civilian officials) directly handle recruitment and equipment, with the state absorbing the full administrative and financial burden for military activity.
That phrasing, ‘the state absorbing the full administrative and financial burden’ may explain why this is such a rare option. Direct state mobilization is the preserve of strong, centralized states with relatively well-developed bureaucracies and that is certainly not the most common kind of pre-modern polity.
Generally speaking, if the state – not a contractor, not a Big Man aristocract, not local households, not the citizenry itself, but the state – is going through the effort of handling recruitment, training and equipment, it is generally going to want to only do that once and so one thing that direct state recruitment tends to have in common is that these tend to be long-service regimes.
Longtime blog readers will perhaps have noticed that often where folks would casually use the phrase ‘professional soldiers,’ I tend to default to the longer, ‘long-service professional soldiers’ and here we get to why. The soldiers in the previous section, for instance, recruited by contractors, are often effectively professionals: they have a professional set of skills that they’ve acquired, along with an expected code of conduct (however alien it is to civilian society) and they often move from one contractor’s regiment to the next, staying in the business over multiple campaigns as one regiment is mustered out and another formed. But they’re not long-service – they are not serving a single state continuously in one stretch of employment.
But when the state takes on the fully burden of recruitment, that is often just what they expect. The long-service professional army created by Augustus at the start of the Roman Empire eventually settled on a twenty-year term of service (with another five years in the reserve), which would mean a stretch from 17 (at the earliest) to 42 (at the earliest), which is basically the full stretch of years the Romans might define as military-aged. The Song Dynasty (960-1279) military system likewise expected to discharge “old soldiers” between the ages of fifty and seventy, effectively at the point when they could no longer do any useful soldiering; unlike the Roman system which settled or paid out soldiers on discharge, the Song system made few provisions for the retirement of soldiers, discarding them more than discharging them. Mamluks – military slaves, most often of Turkish extraction common in the Islamic world from the 800s onward – also served for life.
Direct recruitment for long-service regimes can work on a variety of principles and thus with a range of methods.
The most immediately understandable to us is a volunteer, employment-principle system: the state simply hires men with specific terms of service and then pays them (though once hired, they cannot voluntarily leave). That’s the Roman system from the imperial period. Even here, recruitment is not wholly centralized: legions and auxiliary cohorts tended over time to do most of their recruitment locally and so increasingly were made up of men from where they were stationed. The legions had to recruit from the citizenry, but the regular discharge of veterans (who settled and started families generally near their posts – they’ve been away from ‘home’ for 20 years, so ‘home’ is where the legionary fort is) created an available pool, which might be supplemented by citizen recruits from other parts of the empire.
Roman military pay had to be relatively generous by the standards of the time to attract troops and it largely was: 225 denarii per year, from which necessities were subtracted but it seems clear that the food deduction was well below the value of the food actually offered. At discharge (20 years in) they got a discharge bonus (the praemia) around 3,000 denarii (assuming they’d never gotten above base pay), so the per-year average is actually 375 denarii per year, simply back-loaded. The result is a base pay rate that exceeded the daily income of an unskilled laborer (famously a denarius a day), except that it was steady, whereas other forms of wage labor were irregular. So the Romans pay a premium to get men to enlist, which simplifies the process a bit, since you can then largely rely on men seeking out recruitment rather than the other way around, which probably explains why legions were able to recruit mostly locally. The recruits (mostly) came to them.
In stark contrast, you have something like the Mamluk system, which is a vocational military slave system reliant on compulsion in which the state (in the form of a king or Caliph) buys enslaved military men in bulk for military service; we have discussed this system before. Typically these were external populations being purchased (very often warriors from the Steppe), rather than internal sources – we’ll leave aside the Ottoman devshirme and its complexities for today. Now it is important to remember: once you arm these fellows, their relationship with you fundamentally changes. The notional status of Mamluks was low – they were enslaved warriors – but practically as well-armed, vocational-status warriors in the service of the state, some came to wield meaningful power and wealth.
For our purposes here, though, the ‘recruitment method’ for Mamluks is commercial: they’re purchased. The states that employed large Mamluk armies were not usually the polity initially enslaving them – instead, warfare on and around the Steppe generated significant numbers of enslaved warriors which Steppe societies could not absorb and wealthy Arab states soaked up that supply (and of course their demand stimulated more supply, which is to say, more warfare for the purpose of enslavement). Naturally doing this requires a lot of revenues (to purchase large numbers of valuable enslaved warriors) but also a significant administrative machine which could feed, house, clothe, equip, organize and manage these fellows once purchased. At least initially, the machine relied upon was the remnants of the Sassanid and Eastern Roman Imperial administrative systems which had existed before the conquests of the Rashidun Caliphate and had been taken over, in modified form, by subsequent Caliphs.
On the ground, that system is going to look like private slavers traveling to the ‘source’ regions for this manpower, purchasing captured warriors and then trafficking them to the markets of the great state powers where they know royal officials will be eager to buy them.
The other kind of compulsion system are prisoners-turned-soldiers and here the Song military system is a good example as it was substantially reliant on this method. I should note that certainly other professional or contractor-based recruitment systems will also lean on the expedient of turning out the prisons into the muster field as well (and indeed, under ‘brigaded household’ systems, we find a lot of indications that village leaders use recruitment as a way to get rid of troublemakers). Prisoners were not the only source of Song recruits, but their presence speaks to the level of compulsion in this system.
The Song system emerged out of a period of consolidating warfare where generals could – in the context of high intensity warfare – impress large numbers of civilians into the army and where surrendering armies had their soldiers absorbed. So this is an army comfortable with compulsion during a period of high conflict which then – consolidation having been completed – has to transition to a steady-state system where it couldn’t be relying on simply impressing wide sweeps. Instead, it relied on leveraging compulsion against groups who were socially unprotected in society, as Alyagon (op. cit.) lists them off, “soldiers’ families, the poor and the idle, local militias, non-Han groups, convicts and refugees.” In short, Song officials grabbed who they could with the least hassle from powerful constituencies (like local landholders or other officials).
The baseline of the system were local militias, which functioned on a brigaded-household model (run by local officials, of which the Song had no shortage); when the standing professional army required new recruits, men on the militia lists might be forced into the army, tattoo’d with their new unit to discourage desertion (since a man caught with a military tattoo out of service could be assumed to be a deserter and punished) and essentially never sent home. But, unsurprisingly, this produced a lot of resistance to the militia system – “understaffed units, out-of-date registers, abandoned fields” (Alyagon, op. cit., 66) etc. So the Song also pressed non-Han ethnic groups around its frontiers into service and also implemented military service as a punishment for law-breaking. The military thus likewise swiftly became a dumping ground for anyone that local officials might want to get rid of. Finally, the families of soldiers, because they lived in the military camps, could easily be compelled to serve: when the state already has possession of your father, mother and sisters, if they tell you to enlist, there’s going to be a lot of pressure to do so.
New recruits, however they were acquired, were checked for physical fitness (swiftly reduced to a mostly bureaucratic height standard), enrolled in the army, had their faces tattoo’d, were handed their uniform (equipment was at the unit level) and payment and escorted to their unit in a process referred to as “conscripting, tattooing, and giving tips.”3
What all of these systems share in common is that they are fully bureaucratized: there is a royal or imperial official who has to oversee the acquisition of soldiers (either voluntary or compelled), their enrollment, the issue of their equipment, their continued pay and maintenance and eventually their discharge. That may seem normal to us, but it was not normal for pre-modern states.
The main advantage for this kind of direct recruitment was that it enabled states to keep a standing army in peacetime with relatively minimal disruption to civilian affairs. Long-service professionals could also be highly disciplined and well-trained, but I think the performance of the Song Army warns us that it is not always so – unsurprisingly the poor terms of service, low status and high degree of compulsion involves in Song military service seems to have produced relatively poor military performance as time went on. It is not always the case that professionals are better.
The main disadvantage, of course, is the expense of it. By directly assuming the full cost of military activity, the state is shouldering a tremendous administrative and economic burden. We’ll talk in the next part about how that burden might be met, but it is no surprise that most pre-modern polities were willing to give up a lot of political control – either to citizens (for entitlement-self-recruitment) or vassal Big Men (for retinue recruitment) or to colonels (for contractor recruitment) – simply to lessen the tremendous direct administrative and financial cost to the state. The army of the high Roman Empire was professional, disciplined, and very impressive, but it is also worth noting that it was only about a third bigger (~300,000 compared to ~185,000) than the peak deployment capability of the Roman Republic, despite the empire it served being ten times larger in population (c. 50m compared to c. 5m, very roughly).
Next time, we’ll turn to the question, now that we’ve raised our army, of how different sorts of polities pay for it.
- Just don’t fight the Roman Republic, which has some neat tricks for scaling entitlement self-recruitment to cover all of Italy.
- Folks will point out here that pre-coinage systems are debt-based and are still ‘money’ and yes that’s true and I hear you. But at least when historians talk about these societies, we use the word ‘monetized’ somewhat in-artfully to refer to the introduction of physical hard currency (coinage, later bills), so ‘monetization’ is the process by which transactions shift from pure debt-and-credit (mediated in some cases by bullion but often not) to being understood as transactions in coin (even if the values of coin remain entirely ‘on the books’). In this case, for our contractors, the hard currency matters, because these transactions are often taking place in a low-trust, low-familiarity environment where a pure-debt system isn’t going to work (because post-discharge these soldiers will never see you again), so coinage is almost required to mediate the payments. You generally do not see these contractor-based employment systems in non-hard-currency economies.
- Alyagon, op. cit., 88.
typo: literature bureaucrats–>literate bureaucrats
“Someone needs to go to each farm and measure its production, assign it to a hide or mansus or to a military settler’s estate or decide which household is due to send a recruit this year and then enforce that decision. That means a small army of literature bureaucrats – royal officials – operating at a very granular level, in the villages…Those officials need to be paid, which means heavier taxes and so fundamentally they represent a kind of deadweight on the system: resources that have to be spent on military mobilization but which do not (directly) produce any soldiers.”
Does it though? Perhaps I’m dense, but I would think that in a premodern society it would be very possible for a local official appointed by the king to wear multiple hats–e.g., the local tax collector is also the guy who does the brigading, because he has a good idea about the relative wealth of the various families in the area and I wouldn’t imagine that said brigading requires much time and effort once the initial structure is put in place, with a hides/mansi system occasionally needing to shift families around to reflect changes in who is farming what land, while a strict conscription system (at most) only requires that you not denude families of all of their sons when you come through.
You are assuming a tax system which involves going to each village and checking what they can afford to pay in taxes, which is not my understanding of how taxes were usually collected by most states in this time, precisely because it requires that overhead of paying a guy to go do that.
I think the author has previously mentioned that state taxes (i.e. not peasant rents to local landlords and Big Men) were generally collected from the market towns, so the problem isn’t just that that’s not how taxes were collected on villages, but that taxes simply were not collected on villages or levied against individuals at all. After all, the surplus in food and goods will eventually make their way to market, at which point the king takes his cut. But from the kings perspective, whilst he has to know where the market towns are from an administrative level, this tax system doesn’t care, or likely know, where any of the taxes came from or which peasants originally paid them, to the point of not needing to know the direction you’d walk to get to the original village. This also makes sense when you remember the peasantry generally didn’t have much local access to physical coinage.
The other type of tax collectors I’ve seen discussed were the Roman provincial tax collectors, but from my understanding they were basically state-sanctioned bandits, so weren’t likely to be assessing a portion of each houses’ wealth as much as just running off with everything that wasn’t nailed down from the first house they came across.
Taxes were rather definitely collected from villages – but through the landlords or – for royal estates – the bailiffs. Merovingian and Carolingian kings also drew income from tolls (at bridges, town gates etc), fines, and sales taxes at markets.
The Late Roman Empire assessed all land every 15 years, grading by productivity, and then levied taxes on the assessment (so the landowner was liable for the sum). That is why having a relative in the bureaucracy was important.
The key point is that dude is not a soldier, but is being paid by the state.
Bear in mind that brigaded-household systems have to be operated under the assumption that the people you’re pulling your soldiers from have few or no “pull” factors to get them to volunteer information, so as the local literate bureaucrat, you need to regularly stick your nose into people’s business to make sure you know how many kids they have now, whether their loser younger brother has turned back up again from trying to be a wage laborer, etc. And especially if there’s a shift in terms of low-equilibrium to high-equilibrium subsistence or vice versa happening.
For the example of the fyrd system, when Bede was translated into Anglo-Saxon the term was used as a translation of Latin “terra [n] familiarum”, meaning “land for [n] families”, suggesting a hide was at that point land sufficient to support a family… possibly a freeholder. But by the time of Alfred the Great or somewhat later, it seems to have become equated with the Danish carucate, defined as land which could be plowed by a team of 8 oxen in one plowing season, which would mean a substantial herd of cattle and thus in practical terms multiple families must have worked a carucate most of the time, and this would also be true of a hide… so instead of five families producing one man for the fyrd, you have perhaps twenty or forty doing so… which is both a driving down towards bare subsistence but also presumably means fewer people as a percentage of the population are obligated to serve in the fyrd. Which is to say, there is less labor you can lawfully extract for military service, if you’re trying to do so for some Mercian pretty king, which you would ideally want to avoid… and so it goes.
From what I understand, the recruitment was based on the amount of land, not population. So regardless of how many people farming a land, they still were expected to provide the same number of recruits, no?
I think they only counted land already under cultivation.
I presume the question is why would the local big guy want to do all that work for an army that will then answer not to himself but to the king?
Whatever local official the king uses has to be insulated in some way from local political pressure. That’s not an easy thing to achieve pre-modern travel speeds.
In the early modern mercenary case, the king owes a massive debt to the colonel (who then owes debts to the individual soldiers) and gets to write that off if you try to usurp him or go it alone as a warlord. If it looks like that pay is unlikely to arrive, the regiment is liable to start indiscriminately looting the nearest city, as happened at Antwerp.
The Spanish monarchy levied a 20% tax on all the precious metals coming out of the New World so it could, to an extent, buy power. Compare the House of Saud today.
For the (post-)Carolingian case, the local aristocrats did increasingly seize concessions from the king. The Carolingian empire was replaced by a French monarchy that had to fight wars against its own dukes (who sometimes happened to be English kings), and the HRE which was the HRE.
The reason is that it is a way to become a local Big Guy. There is good research about the small-time civil servants in 16th century Eastern Finland: they tended to be sons of relatively small landowners, but with some schooling. Essentially, if you could read, write and tomsimple arithmetic, the position of a tax-collector/military recruiter/military logistics commissioner was quite well-paying. You didn’t need to be the Local Big Man. Instead, the government was strong and legitimate enough that being the clerk of the local royal Vogt, and having about half a dozen burly guys with you gave you enough authority to do your administrative work, and to override (perhaps literally) the traditional Big Guys, should they become troublesome. (This was a piss-poor region, so the traditional Big Guy would probably be just a rich peasant.)
And you would get enough land, honestly or inhonestly, to become a big land owner yourself, although probably, it was not the main object of your career anymore, because there were wider possibilities.
So, in more scholarly terms, the central power was able to co-opt the rising educated middle classes against local entrenched interests.
If you are talking about Sweden-Finland after the dissolution of the Kalmar Union the Swedish term is “fogde” and the Finnish is “vouti”. It use to be translated to “fogd” in English.
Absolutely! Sorry for my bad English. I actually was somewhat at loss to translate the term, which, in mid 16th century Sweden was actually pretty high an office.
Don’t worry, my native Swedish probably shines through too.
Switzerland. Vogt.
In medieval Europe, kinship, honour and oaths all bounded paths to advancement. You may be the local Big Man – but the count is appointed by the king (from among men of the Big Families), you are bound by oath to the count and the king, and by honour not to stretch the terms of the oath too far, and by your family ties not to get too far out of line. Plus, although the king is distant, one of his missi will come around sooner or later, and you have to attend the regional assembly, where your standing with your peers will be crucial.
One the peasant-lord relationship, it was exploitive, but the degree varied markedly by region and over time. It was not always ‘everything above subsistence’, if only because the costs of extraction from a resistive peasantry could outweigh the gains (Chris Wickham uses pottery shards to estimate local wealth – if the peasants could afford finer pottery they were doing better than subsistence).
I suppose “finer pottery” mean made by a professional and possibly imported form a different area.
Yes – if the peasantry have painted ware from Egypt or Spain, or just glazed ware from a regional producer, that’s an indicator of wealth. Also, the amount of large jars and their origin – indicating trade.
“In medieval Europe, kinship, honour and oaths all bounded paths to advancement. You may be the local Big Man – but the count is appointed by the king (from among men of the Big Families), ”
That varied a lot and what you said applied to a modest fraction of Middle Ages.
From late 6th century Merovingian France, we know the Count Leudast of Tours. Who was appointed by a king – but not from among men of the Big Families, Leudast was a slave (maybe manumitted at some point of his career).
In Carolingian times, I don´t hear complaints about slave counts, the counts are called well-born – but often with obscure origins. Like Robert the Strong, the ancestor of Robertians – his parents are unknown, but Robert of Worms is suspected. Suspected based on reuse of names – the contemporary sources don´t seem to actually say that the Robert Strong sent to Tours was son of Robert of Worms. It was not essential to his appointment – he was sent to Tours without previous connections to the region.
This ability to appoint, transfer and fire counts the Frankish kings lost in 10th century, and the counts became hereditary Big Men. Until 13th century, Kings of France did not even create counts.
Missi dominici operated for maybe a century in Carolingian times.
If Robert the Strong has unknown parents he is the earliest known patrilineal ancestor of the current king of Spain.
Yes, Robert the Strong is the first certain ancestor of the Borbon now King of Spain. As mentioned, there are speculations that he was son of a Robert of Worms – but the contemporaries don´t bother specifying.
Compare the ancestors of Gustav Erikson…
*”Ketil” is mere patronym, without positions or patronym of his own
*The first to actually have a full name, Nils Ketilsson, was a fogd of 3 crowns, and häradshövding… of Frötuna ship district.
*Krister Nilsson was häradshövding… but of Semingtuna härad. And the commander of a castle… but of Viipuri
*Johan Kristersson was häradshövding – of Vallentuna härad. And “länsherre” – of Västeras
*Erik Johansson was häradshövding – of Danderyd and Rydbo. And “länsherre” – of Kastellholm.
Note that every generation held office – but the castle commands and specific härads held were different every generation.
When Erik Johansson mobilized troops to fight on Sture side (that he was beheaded for), did he do so under his hat as the private owner of Rydboholm or Örbyhus Castle (which were private property and passed down from his father), under his hat as häradshövding of Danderyd and Rydbo or under some other hat?
Leudast seems to have been an outlier in his origins (or the story was put about to discredit him). Missi were a Carolingian thing, but the Merovingians seem to have had a reasonably firm grip on appointments to counties.
The name of the town is Västerås and not Västeras. If you are writing in a word processor you can probably insert the letter Å. Which by the way was introduced with the first Swedish Bible translation in 1541.
Because the king could replace him with another big guy? Or if the king lost the war, the victors could replace him with their own big guys?
The later certainly happened.
In practice, if you appoint one guy to be the local official who funnels taxes back to the king AND who keeps track of and coordinates conscription for the area, you are fairly close to just appointing that one official as ‘lord of this particular district.’ Your appointed bureaucrat needs so much power and so much time spent in that one area that he effectively runs the place as some kind of local magistrate. His authority comes from a royal appointment rather than being hereditary, though, like it would be in ‘classic’ European feudalism.
Now, very bureaucratized states can sometimes work this way (maybe China possibly?). Some obvious failure modes: You need enough surplus to raise a very large bureaucracy that aren’t warriors (China) or to get your warrior class to agree to take on bureaucratic duties that funnel significant resources up the chain rather than staying among them in their role as warrior magnates (Japan, maybe?).
And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our examples of this come from eastern Asia, because rice cultivation is kind of ‘magic’ compared to other staple crops when it comes to getting a lot of surplus out of a relatively modest amount of farmland and labor. There’s a reason China has historically been the per capita richest sizeable region of the Earth, one of the most populous regions, usually the most technologically advanced, and by far the individually strongest state on Earth, for much of recorded history. China being vulnerable or being only one power among many, the state of things we’re accustomed to over the past couple of hundred years, is actually the anomaly if you look back across the sweep of premodern history.
Your last point (associating Chinese state capacity with rice cultivation) would run into the problem[0] that the Chinese state system originated in the north, which is not rice-growing territory; even today, wheat is dominant. As did every unifying dynasty[1] up to and including the Song. The relative economic prominence of South China is a trend beginning only in the later middle ages.
As an aside, the history of the Sinification of South China, and more importantly the ancient-to-early medieval non-Han cultures of the region and their relationship to the Imperial state, is something I would be fascinated to learn something about, but all the easily available materials I have got access to (eg, Harvard Histories of Imperial China) treat it in a very perfunctory manner.
[0] this post is not intended to be confrontational!
[1] Of course, during the periods of disunity, there were often powerful states based in the south, though the core of those states was usually relatively far north compared with what we would regard as South China today.
> The relative economic prominence of South China is a trend beginning only in the later middle ages.
Not true; the south was already much richer than the north at the beginning of the Tang dynasty (c. 600 AD).
I’m no expert! I’d be interested in any sources you can recommend — the ancient history of south china seems a massive hole in my knowledge. My inexpert impression is that the Sinification of the south is really a process largely happening *during the Tang*, which I’d consider “medieval” by Chinese standards. That would leave the Song as “later” medieval — hardly precise terminology, especially as applied to East Asia!
Still, this doesn’t solve the problem of the Chinese state system coming into being *a thousand years or more earlier* firmly in the non-rice growing north, and coming to dominate the south, for a rice-centric explanation of Chinese state capacity.
To add, this paper
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-026-07086-6
while hardly a be all and end all, estimates 65% population in North-Central China during the middle Han; 45% in the middle Tang with another 13% in the North-West, with 35% along the Yangzi and its tributaries; and by the mid Song 25% in North-Central China, the old Imperial heartland, with about half the population in the Yangzi basin. This is more or less the pattern I had in my head.
Of course, when you say “richer” there’s a lot of things that can mean. Not necessarily more densely populated: richer per capita, with more prosperous peasants further from Malthusian limits; more monetized and mercantile, producing or procuring more luxury goods admired in the capital; a “pseudo-colonial” society far from the central state allowing the big men to become extremely wealthy; and of course no amount of tropes about the luxurious decadent east actually made Roman Syria richer than Italy.
Population densities should say something about were the majority of economic activity was.
Indeed, these appointed-lord systems have a tendency to decentralize into hereditary feudal lordships.
1) If the same guy oversees end-to-end the process for raising the army, they are one legitimacy check away from raising an army for themselves, against the king.
2) Let’s say King First established the system, and appointed trustworthy men. But as time passes, they kind of have to be replaced. The recruiting pool that King Firstsson Second will have will consist to a large extent from the sons of the guys appointed by his father. And each of them will have some experience with exactly the one district their father was posted to, so it makes perfect sense to assign them there. …wait, is the royal assent just a formality over de facto inheritance?
The first step a centralization-minded king/state can take is to openly curb any legitimacy problems, and appoint the officials to closed-ended terms (e.g. N years). This costs basically nothing, other than officials (Roman provincial governors are a high-level example) rotating fast enough that they never have deep familiarity.
The second, which is a much heavier lift, is to create separate silos for tax collection, for military recruitment (manpower by the numbers), and for disbursing money to pay for turning that manpower into an army. Basically, a modern-shaped ministerial bureaucracy. Of course, this only really works if your society is significantly monetized: the peasants have money so you can tax them in money, you can use money to buy the gear and food your army needs, and you can pay soldiers in money because they can spend it. If this hasn’t happened yet, and your officials can only extract surplus in the form of bulk grain (as was the case for the Roman Republic’s overseas imperial holdings), or even worse, directly as soldiers, the options to profitably run a ministerial system are much more limited or nil.
Merovingians and Carolingians were well aware of the problem of entrenched nobility, so counts – although almost always from influential families – were usually appointed to areas outside their core holdings. And their sons to different counties. This broke down 850-900, but was good for the several previous centuries. The revived royal power in France from 1200 on created a parallel structure. of treasurers, stewards etc.
The tasks of collecting taxes and raising armies were often handled by different ministries in China. You may be thinking about something similar to the Byzantine theme system in which the local governors handle both tasks themselves.
You need enough surplus to raise a very large bureaucracy that aren’t warriors (China) or to get your warrior class to agree to take on bureaucratic duties that funnel significant resources up the chain rather than staying among them in their role as warrior magnates (Japan, maybe?).
Wasn’t this also the case in some Islamic states (i.e. reliance on appointed governors, bureaucrats etc. rather than hereditary lords)?
My understanding is that a lot of tax collecting happens without bureaucratic overhead, because it taxes income, not wealth, and the income the wheat, which is done in a fairly narrow time frame. Basically, the official comes by with a cart, drives out together with all the villagers going to the harvest and makes sure that every tenth bundle collected goes on his cart. He doesn’t need to know who owns how many fields in what condition to do so – he doesn’t even need to know who the field the community is currently harvesting belongs to. The only administrative burden there is “I saw this many bundles of wheat being harvested, and I took this many as the tax.”
There is something to your idea, though, for agricultural systems that aren’t rain-based wheat farming. When the agriculture requires some degree of literate record-keeping, that does mean there’s already a system in place which can also take on other administrative duties. My go-to example for this is Egypt, where the flood-based agriculture requires such administration: Since it’s impossible to place any markers about property boundaries in the flood plains in such a way they can be relied on afterwards, the fields had to be re-surveyed, re-assessed and re-distributed every year. In addition, the flood had to be controlled and harnessed using a system of levees and dams that stop it from flooding places it shouldn’t (like people’s houses), but also not recede too quickly, so that it deposits its silt instead of washing it away. These are communal projects that require oversight by a learned and literate individual who can plan and direct the construction.
So every village had to have its scribe who kept track of who owned what, and what lands were used for what. This of course made it very simple for the State to know how much manpower it can draw out of the peasantry for its own purposes. Old Kingdom Egypt is a bit unusual in that it did not draw out much *military* manpower (mostly because it didn’t need to), but it still mass mobilised its population, just for construction projects instead of war. I haven’t looked into it in detail to what extend Middle and Late Kingdom Egypt, with more of a foreign policy, could use that administrative system to “punch above its weight” in terms of military power, although it for many stretches of history a major power, despite its lack of useful wood – both for construction but also for charcoaling to make iron.
You make tax-collection sound a bit too easy. In practice, the visibility on a field is only a kilometer or so, and in many types of countryside much less. If you rely on being able to tax only that grain that you see, you are going to be wildly inefficient: either you collect very little or you need an enormous corps of low-level tax collectors. Instead, when you have a list of households and their productivity, you can tax everyone, including those farms far away from the main roads.
We know what a tax administration that lists households looks like, and it can be done with surprisingly light administrative machinery. Gustavus Vasa managed to do this in Sweden by 1540, and he did it with maybe one literate clerk per 5,000 people.
He largely instituted this system himself. In doing so he actually did Sweden-Finland a favour by creating the beginning of a civil administration.
Quite true, and reformation was one thing that allowed this. Not because it temporarily freed up a lot of capital to royal coffins but because Gustavus could order cathedral schools to send students to service in the royal “computation chambers”. This influx of educated manpower was a necessity for the creation of Swedish administration.
Oh yes, Gustavus Vasa founded our administrative state. We can really be thankful to him – and to Carolus IX who reformed his work after the tumults of his brothers.
While we both know what these “tumults” were most other readers don’t. His oldest son developed mental illness which led to power struggles between him and his younger half-brothers. In the end it was von by the youngest brother who turned out to be quite competent.
That argument about visibility doesn’t really apply. It’s not about the fields you see, but the villagers you can supervise at once while they’re harvesting. The wheat harvest is labor intensive, so the entire community does it together, and they’ll gather the day’s harvest in one spot to cart it to the threshing ground in one go. Hiding a bushel of wheat during a harvest isn’t easy, when the tax-collector is following the harvesting crowd around.
It shows that we are coming from different agricultural practices. Here, the grain was traditionally first dried by heating it in a dedicated building, then threshed indoors in the same building (called riihi in Finnish, ria in Swedish). The heating and threshing were household-specific tasks. So, there wouldn’t be any visible heaps of crops around for more than a day, and no communal threshing-ground.
I know that more Southerly lands did dry crops in open air, but that is something you do when you are lacking fire-wood. It produces clearly inferior grain that rots rather easily.
Has the system you describe actually been used somewhere?
I thought we were threshing indoors because were don’t have distinct wet and dry seasons. We actually get more precipitation in summer than in winter but the difference in temperature makes it seem like the opposite.
As for reasons of threshing grain after drying it in heated indoors building (wet summer vs. availability of firewood to dry grain)… what do the peasants of Norway, Scotland, Ireland and Wales do? They also have wet summers, but many areas have exhausted firewood.
Ireland, Scotland and Wales probably used peat. These areas suffered deforestation and catastrophic soil erosion in the Neolithic. I have never thought about Norway suffering any significant deforestation. Anyone who can tell?
Collected taxes does not have to be in wheat even in a low-monetarized economy. If the local agriculture is rain-feed any cereal grain would be useful for this purpose. Here in northern Europe people cultivated more barley and rye than wheat.
See Bret’s posts on peasant life. They had multiple plots, usually several crops (wheat, but also barley or rye), plus non-cereals (fish-ponds, vines, tree-crops), plus wool, linen, animals … The village turned out for harvest – plus labourers from nearby towns, but it was not centrally stored, it took some days per crop and spread over a few weeks. The lord’s steward had a good idea of the product of the demesne, but a less good but reasonable idea of the villages’ output – if diligent . The peasantry would of course conceal stuff or evade inspection (again, Wickham remarks that the peasantry had the better resources in this game). It was often simpler to set a sum and negotiate over adjustment each year. Landlords could and did squeeze, but the record is that peasant life inched upwards slowly without war or famine (both big caveats).
Considering the gradual improvement of cultivation methods this makes sense.
Dr Devereaux, one thing I’d love to know a little more about, is how the Anglo-Saxon system was able to be so centralised and bureaucratic, despite being a fairly small state. Is it partly down to the the way that (once Wessex had conquered out the other kingdoms) the kings were chosen by the witenagemot? That would mean the great magnates had consented to the king’s rule in a way not as explicit for other societies, so the King had more leeway to get things out of them? Or the way the choice was from the royal house, so other powerful nobles couldn’t challenge them legitimately in the way some other systems (looking at you HRE) struggled with? Or are there other factors as well, like unusually high literacy or something?
Accidentally posted this as a standalone below, reposting here.
Written charters and law codes seem to have been pretty important pretty early in the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and we have quite a lot of them surviving: https://esawyer.lib.cam.ac.uk/about/index.html for charters is a nice resource. Add that to Alfred’s founding of a court school and general encouragement of education, and the unification of England coming from Wessex and so carrying that around to an extent.
The fact the country manages to not break up again after sometime in the 900s or so is also pretty useful for that, since it means the bureaucracy can continue through periods of political disruption.
That’s really interesting, thanks, but do we have any particular ideas about why written agreements were more popular? That makes sense that if they had that they could do greater centralisation (like Bret says about society shaping your options) but is it just a random quirk that Anglo-Saxon society was more focused on writing than other comparable societies?
I did my degree in this field but haven’t really kept up on the literature since, so this might be a bit out of date, but afaik we don’t have a super good explanation. One point that is worth noting is that Carolingian France (just over the channel, and with lots of documented contact) was also fairly literate and administratively developed, so there’s an obvious model and it’s not like the AS are necessarily a huge outlier for ~800AD or whatever.
The obvious difference there is long term political stability – they managed to not break up. So maybe the underlying reason is just “not adopting the practice of dividing the kingdom between heirs”.
Really interesting, I remember doing Anglo-Saxon as part of my history degree, but alas I was less focused on this area. Good to know for worldbuilding though that smaller states can still do bureaucracy and centralisation.
It’s also that a lot more English documents survive, comparatively.
You’ve placed the size of the state- relatively small- and its level of centralisation- relatively high- in opposition here, but I think it might be valuable to consider the opposite: whether the small size of the polity *allowed it* to be so centralised. England had short lines of internal communication and well defined boundaries with few soft frontier regions. To be somewhat glib, the eorls were trapped on a small island with the king.
Additional to that is the fact that much of the best farmland on the island is concentrated in the south and east of England (the region the Welsh termed Lloegyr)- which would have made it easier for a central authority to dominate. And of course with the bulk of the agriculture goes the bulk of the wealth and population.
The basic driver was the Viking/Danish/Viking-Irish invasions. They destroyed most of the small kingdoms and put fierce pressure on the larger ones (Mercia and Wessex). But until the Danish Great Armies arrived they could be paid to go away (the dane-geld) or their leaders co-opted with riches. Which meant taxation in coin. The Great Army added centralised defence (the burhs) and a semi-standing force (the huscarles). England emerged as a probably the most centralised state in western Europe.
I’m curious. When you’re talking about brigading systems or the military settler system, it seems implicit that these systems ‘produce’ a heavy infantryman. Is this an artifact of the specific historical systems you’re talking about, or is there a structural reason that these systems tend to have resources dedicated to arming soldiers in a specific fashion?
I think there are two key factors at work here:
1. If your system can’t produce a reasonable number of contact infantry, it can’t really hang out against systems which can. Pure light cavalry is sort of workable (although even then it’s usually substantially overstated), but pure light infantry just can’t really do much by themselves.
2. The logistical overheads also matter. You can’t take everyone out of their fields regardless, and you can’t move or feed an army twice or thrice the size, so you’re better off just brigading households until they give you one decent soldier you can actually use in the line of battle.
Adding to Tea Kew, it also isn’t enough to furnish heavy cavalrymen, who need to be lot wealthier than just a heavy infantryman, so you get a lot less of them for the same area of land. Heavy infantry are probably the best cost-to-effectiveness ratio of all soldiers to be honest, although there is not an exact way to judge that given different land types, equipment, numbers, etc.
In practice, if you have brigaded your society’s peasant households into large enough units that each one can support a heavy cavalryman (that is, to feed his multiple horses and to feed him while he constantly trains with the equestrian and weapons skills that make him effective)… Well, by that point you’ve basically set up this one heavy cavalryman as a local ‘Big Man’ just by virtue of the sheer amount of prestige and resources going into training and equipping him.
At that point the line between the “military settler” system and the “rely on local magnates, but as a conqueror you just kill most of the old magnates and replace them with your own followers spread out all over the kingdom” gets kind of blurry- and that’s pretty much what William of Normandy did in England, for example.
Horses in an agricultural society are basically eating from the same fields that the humans do. There’s only so much land, and so much grain/grass/whatever being produced, so more horses = less humans.
Outside of military service horses are somewhat useful, but humans can handle a much wider variety of tasks. It costs very little to have a spear and hauberk stacked in a corner of the house, but a horse has to be fed, and sheltered, etc all the time.
Infantry have less overhead and resource requirements, and as Tea Kew writes heavy (or at least close order) infantry are more effective on most battlefields.
This made me think about the infantry revolution of the Early Modern period: when the pike and the musket made well-trained infantry capable of beating cavalry formations.
I believe we have now seen the same with regards to the modern cavalry equivalent: the drones and man-portable anti-tank missiles (e.g. NLAW) have made it very possible for infantry to stop an armoured advance even in the open terrain.
A sufficiently large group of foot soldiers with pikes, halberds or bayonets can stop cavalry.
Pike and musket infantry were a “revolution” to medieval European states that had been dominated by cavalry warrior aristocrats, but with the benefit of hindsight the societal changes that produced those armies were what was really significant.
Well trained infantry had always been capable of beating cavalry. The Swiss and Flemings did their share of aristocrat massacring with just pikes and polearms, any firearms they had were almost irrelevant. Roman legions beat cavalry more often than not, and Hellenistic pike phalanxes were immune to frontal cavalry assault.
The swiss famously charged French knights on multiple battlefields, routing them. Close ordered infantry could crush cavalry; in fact being heavily armored was actually secondary to being cohesive and trained. Napoleonic era formations were basically operating as lightly armored pikemen once the cavalry got in close, and they could absolutely fight off cavalry forces in melee. They simply had to keep formation. But in war the simplest thing is hard.
Neither the pike nor the musket made infantry capable of beating cavalry – the Swiss were doing it just fine with the halberd in the 15th century, the Flemish in the 14th century did it with spears and plançons. The English did it with bows and field fortifications. Heck, 12th century Crusaders were doing it with spears and crossbows.
Instead, the “infantry revolution” is social. Being able to recruit enough quality infantry and handling them in such a way as to get effective performance from them.
Then I suspect it was the development of a significant middle class that did it.
I think there’s a tendency to make the pendulum swing too far, yes, heavy infantry can beat cavalry, but there’s a bunch of things cavalry can do that heavy infantry can’t. (to a lesser extent the latter is true too, but cavalry can always dismount and fight as infantry if needed, it’s just that you’re very rarely going to have that kind of army…) For all that the roman cavalry tends to play second fiddle it was still very important, and a lot of the more crushing roman defeats tends to involve the cavalry getting routed.
Truth is you want both in the vast majority of circumstances. And right up until the motor car becomes a valid option there really are functions that you really want cavalry for.
See also the Scottish with pikes.
To the point of arilou, this example brings up a key tactical weakness of shock infantry; they have to break formation to pursue skirmishers. If the enemy has a superior advantage in both skirmishers and cavalry they thus have a pretty complete tactical counter to the infantry, with the skirmishers disrupting the infantry formation while the cavalry engage if the infantry move out of formation.
This is precisely what happened to the scots at Falkirk. The English cavalry routed the Scottish archers and cavalry, then the English archers and slingers weakened the pike formations until the English cavalry could break them.
This was also key to Carrhae, where the parthians used heavy cavalry and horse archers to harass the Romans then charge any infantry which tried to catch the archers.
The pike and musket revolution did change this calculus by making combined arms of skirmishers and infantry practical and scalable, so it did matter. That said it took until the later muskets with bayonets and higher rates of fire for the calculus to really change, as at this point infantry was capable of firing and withstanding shock with one weapon.
@Arilou
To be clear, I’m not trying to assert that cavalry were useless or anything. Obviously they give an army a bunch of unique capabilities and can be extremely potent on the battlefield (whether heavy or lighter). There’s a reason they’re so important throughout history.
My point is that the classic technological story of the infantry revolution is very much off base. Infantry could beat cavalry formations just fine for hundreds of years before pike and shot – and cavalry stayed very much relevant for hundreds of years after.
These various technologies catalyzed the social transformation in different societies. Crossbows in Italy, stakes in England, guns in Russia, and so on. Technological advances change local costs (including the opportunity cost to the elites entailed in promoting cohesive infantry).
Personally, I wonder about the effects of muskets devaluing *armour* and therefore armoured infantry. If you can no longer improve the effectiveness of your army by making it more heavily armoured, you might tend towards making it larger, which means there are more people whose loyalty you need to maintain.
What – if any – are the differences between Big Man recruitment and brigaded household recruitment? Especially from the perspective of the peasantry? Apparrently, Gaulish Big-Man recruitment was ridiculously good at achieving mass mobilization. But medieval feudalism couldn’t hold a candle to that, even though the sociak structures seem pretty similar at first glance.
Also, why do some extremely oppressive and stratified premodern polities – Tsarist Russia and Imperial China come to mind – manage to so efficiently mass mobilize huge numbers of downtrodden peasants and get such relatively decent military utility out of them, especially compared to the dismal failure of the Hellenistic monarchies to do so?
The only power that could stand against Revolutionary France was Reactionary Russia, after all.
Quality of troops.
Gaulish big-man recruitment is drawing on most male peasants – but they’re going to be showing up with a spear and a shield and a knife if you’re lucky.
The Anglo-Saxon general fyrd is basically equivalent (everyone, very limited equipment requirements, brief service for local emergencies), the select fyrd trades off numbers for quality of equipment. You see potentially quite substantial armour, an expectation of longer terms of service and wages paid during service.
Ok.
But where do Russia and China fit into this?
They are different, because they’re not really pre-modern. Modern in terms of history usually means 1800s onwards, but it’s not exact, Early Modern goes back to the 1500s. Society changes massively in that time, as does what states are capable of. Reactionary Russia and Revolutionary France operated under modern principles of the state. Imperial China is different because that spans a massive time scale, but it operated differently at later times. The end of Imperial China was very much the modern period.
Tsarist Russia is a modern state, even if not particularly industrial compared to other European states at the time. So it’s got the money and resources to equip those downtrodden peasants with muskets, and the money and drill sergeants to teach them to march and volley fire. The transition from medieval combat, armour and hand-powered melee / missile weapons; to early modern combat, firearms, makes it much easier to turn poor unskilled recruits into effective soldiers.
(I’m not a specialist in Russian history. My understanding is that “Tsarist Russia” generally refers to the Russian state formed after the collapse of Mongol power. Russia before then was much like any other medieval state.)
As for Imperial China, the downtrodden peasants were hardly ever useful, at least until they went the same sort of transformation into musket infantry. The post doesn’t go into details, but Song/Sung China lost major wars against the Hsi-Hsia, Khitans, Jurchens, and finally Mongols. The Ming and Manchu did better, but by relying on cavalry (mostly for the Ming, almost entirely for the Manchu), not peasant infantry.
The point is, how does a modern state form in preindustrial conditions that otherwise result in big man type societies?
Neki, while politically Principality of Moscow did have surprisingly strong central authority, administratively it still relied on cooperation of Big Men. Most of “gathering of the Rus lands” military campaigns were done by a very medieval “local notable as an armored horseman bringing a few serjeants on foot” kind of mobilization
There was some flirting with entitlement/professional estate of streltsy and contractors raising regiments, but even early Romanovs relied on the noble knights bringing their non-noble clients substantially. It’s only Peter the Great who speedran the reforms and established the select lifetime conscription and therefore the state really organizing the army itself
@Scifihughf,
Also, I wouldn’t exactly call Czarist Russia a military powerhouse (although the contrary narrative made famous by Stalin on the left and i guess by some modern day Russian imperialists on the right, that they kept getting rolled by stronger neighbors, isn’t true either). They won some and lost some (and lost some against substantially smaller powers, including Sweden in the 17th c and Japan in 1905).
Russia has been too large to conquer from the outside for centuries now. Unfortunately, a considerable number of Russian still believes they have to conquer others to avoid being conquered themselves. Which becomes an excuse for an expansionism many other countries don’t have anymore.
For some reason I can’t reply to your last comment, but basically, there are a lot of factors, but there’s lots of advancements made that make more centralised states possible before the full industrial revolution. Bret has talked about this a little in other articles, but things like agricultural advancements supporting a larger population with more specialisation, a shift in weaponry and siege craft that gives an advantage to the top powers over small local leaders (small castles can no longer hold up as well against big cannons), the printing press promoting literacy, etc, etc. These are not strictly necessary for centralised states, as others did exist before, but they make them easier to create, and more powerful, allowing them to conquer other non-centralised states more easily.
Russia had long-service conscription. The conscript served 20+ years – effectively for life, since they lost all contact with their village. the village leaders decided once the word came down on how many were required (so poorer and less influential families lost their sons). Once in, training, discipline and an entirely different life shaped them.
Relative to population Russia was not heavily mobilised – but it had a large population (thinly spread, so it was slow process). Pay and equipment was always a problem – Russia needed large subsidies from Britain in 1812-14.
On the other hand, those who survived Imperial Russian military and finally got discharged didn’t necessarily do badly. Quite often, a long-term soldier learned a trade, and they were personally free, so they could set up a shop after discharge. (And guys who survived 25 years of service, when a single campaign routinely caused losses of some 75 per cent were probably hardy and plucky enough to survive also in the civilian life.)
They’re somewhat interchangeable in some ways. Often the “bureaucrats” doing the brigading are precisely the local Big Men, in one of their other hats.
We see that blurring very clearly in Anglo-Saxon England, where the earldormen and shire reeves who supervised the fryd were nominally royal officials, but were chosen from the Big Men (and used their positions to make themselves bigger).
My understanding is that the difference is who the intermediary is, and therefore what role they play and who they are loyal to. In brigading the intermediary is a literate (usually non-soldier) official of the national government (King). In Big Man, the intermediary is a warrior noble who is nominally loyal to the King, amongst others, but also has the whole set of other ambitions, which the official probably can’t have (not that they’re inherently more noble/honorable/honest/loyal, but they generally know they can’t be king, unlike the Big Man).
If we are talking about Europe, royalty was pretty much out of reach for anyone but male members of the royal kin. The founding lines were remarkably tenacious.
Yes, but the Big Man, if he got big *enough* could imagine that he could become King, and stopping him could be annoying, and civil war basically always damaged Royal authority.
Meanwhile the official would need to convert their position into becoming a Big Man if they wanted to aspire to the same.
Various branches of the Capetians may have ruled France for 800 years. But Sweden has had four different royal houses since the position of king formally became hereditary in the 16th century. Has anyone calculated how long a European royal house has stayed in power on average?
The Merovingians lasted 300 years – and the Carolingians (300 years) were closely related. The Capetians were close kin to the Carolingians. The kings of Castile go back through Leon and Asturias to the 8th century (with side-steps to cousins or sons-in-law, and a good deal of in-house murder). The Danish kings go back to the 10th century, many of the ruling duchies in Germany to the 11th century, the Rurik line to the 9th and so on. Basically, you needed a strong claim by descent or close affiliation to aspire to a throne, even in elective monarchies (Henry VII of England – a couple of generations removed, both in female lines – is on the fringe).
The Vasa in Sweden were upstarts, the Braganza descended from a bastard son. There are not too many others.
How far back can you trace decent though written sources in Europe? My uncle is a historian who has done considerable genealogy after retirement. He has said that descent from the Romans is bullshit.
How far back can you trace decent though written sources in Europe?
This is not in Europe, obviously, but I’ve been told that the House of Confucius in China has a pretty well documented and reliable line of strict patrilineal descent, which would go back about 2575 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Yansheng
I think Kong (as in Kong-Fu-Tse) is the world’s longest running family name. My idea is that literacy in Europe dropped below a certain critical level at some point in the Early Middle Ages. Combined with the conquerors of the Western Roman Empire coming from cultures not having much in the way of writing this would limit how far back we can get.
“My idea is that literacy in Europe dropped below a certain critical level at some point in the Early Middle Ages. Combined with the conquerors of the Western Roman Empire coming from cultures not having much in the way of writing this would limit how far back we can get.”
I think that´s not the reason.
Both in Western Rome and Eastern Rome, as well as Caliphate, the Roman hereditary surnames dropped out of use and people went about without hereditary surnames. Eventually, new and unrelated surnames started to reemerge around 9th…10th century.
Checking up the replacement of Carolingians in France and Germany, the Conradines like Robert the Strong also emerged from obscurity in mid-9th century. The reason being that Carolingian counts held office by royal favour and would be posted in areas away from father´s office or landholdings. Later people might guess that a Count Robert posted in Maine might be son of a Count Robert posted in Worms – but for contemporary historians, it was not important to specify. Because Robert Jr´s position in Maine was his own achievement, not inheritance.
Medieval chronicles almost always introduce a notable person by referencing his or her kin connections, and counts and similar were almost always from powerful kin groups (although one historian noted that by the 12th or 13th centuries people were stressing the self-made character of their ancestry even when this was not the case). That Robert the Strong’s ancestry is lost does not mean he was of humble origin.
I always assumed he came from a group pf Big Men anyway.
Tsarist Russia destroyed parts of its own country to stop the Franch invasion. This country was too large and too sparsely populated to be conquered anyway.
France only attacked Russia because their dictator suffered from victory disease and refused to listen to two of his ministers.
The brigaded households system runs on rules (and the threat of punishment) and the Big Man system on favors (and the threat of shame). If infantry drawn from the general population is important enough to make a difference on the battlefield, the Big Man doesn’t have the manpower to force his clients to give him a particular number of men, he needs to rely on their willingness to go to war for him (with communal shaming keeping peasants who don’t want to go in line). To resist the king’s recruitment on the other hand the peasantry would need to coordinate beyond their immediate ties, because the king will have forces superior to any individual village and can punish individuals or villages who refuse.
Written charters and law codes seem to have been pretty important pretty early in the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and we have quite a lot of them surviving: https://esawyer.lib.cam.ac.uk/about/index.html for charters is a nice resource. Add that to Alfred’s founding of a court school and general encouragement of education, and the unification of England coming from Wessex and so carrying that around to an extent.
The fact the country manages to not break up again after sometime in the 900s or so is also pretty useful for that, since it means the bureaucracy can continue through periods of political disruption.
This was supposed to be a reply to @Jasder upthread
Re contracting, it’s grimly worth noticing one big feature of the credit side of this: you don’t need to cash out dead soldiers. A substantial part of the cost of the 30 Years War was “paid” by the troops themselves, in the form of wage arrears never settled.
And it was a substantial part in extending the war: Most of the territorial issues had been settled by, I think 1642 or so, the rest of the war was essentially fought to get the Imperials to pay for the anti-imperial (mostly swedish, since France had more cash) soldiers being cashed out.
It also gives soldiers and sailors a dilemma: do you desert (and write off your back wages) or stay around where you can threaten to lynch your paymaster or sack a town the commander does not want sacked unless you get hard cash tomorrow? A few thousand armed and organized men are a real problem for most states. Rowers during the Ionian War seem to have leaned in the first direction, Hapsburg soldiers in the Eighty Years War / War of Dutch Independence the second.
While the situation with the rowers is more complicated (the most famous instance of desertion during Lade was possibly a political act) ships in general tend to desert while soldiers riot.
A sailor on a ship is A. Sitting on a huge piece of property he can sell if he steals it, namely the ship, B. Capable of leaving and reaching another state, and C. Primarily trained in how to sail.
In contrast a soldier is A. Only sitting on property in the sense he is physically sitting on real estate he can threaten, B. Only capable of traveling as far as his company can march without state support, and C. Primarily trained in how to fight.
This naturally leads the sailors to steal their ship and sail to a neutral port, while the soldiers has to threaten local infrastructure.
This is also where Pirates as an independent political entity come from by the by. The Caribbean pirates were in part deserting sailors who realized that they didn’t need to sell their ship, they could use it to threaten shipping and become filthy rich. This was hardly a new concept and mutinying sailors becoming pirates is damn near primeval in the Mediterranean. Every once in a while these mutineers seize some port or build a simple shipwright facility and become a semi independent polity, hence becoming a pirate state. There were a couple in the golden era of piracy, but also Cilicia may have been operating a de-facto a pirate run state during the late Roman Republic (One of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus’s victories was against them, and they famously held Gaius Julius Caesar for ransom as a lad).
The extreme parallel amongst mercenaries was a mercenary coup d’état, famously Sforza pulled this off in Milan and became its Duke. While there are (as always) more complicated politics involved, one of the core issues was that of paying Sforza’s men after the untimely death of the Duke, an issue neatly resolved by overthrowing the government.
“One of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus’s victories was against them, and they famously held Gaius Julius Caesar for ransom as a lad”
I suspected this when I heard that Gaius Julius Caesar was once “enslaved”. This claim I interpreted as him being taken as prisoner of war. Either he had escaped or his relatives bought him free before he could be put to work. Had this upper-class Roman been economically exploited as a slave (even as a city taxman or private teacher) he would never have had the chance to get famous.
This is almost certainly the referenced incident, yeah. Critically he was only ever enslaved under foreign law, which Romans barely tolerated in the best of times. Under Roman law people kidnapped or captured were still legally Roman citizens if freed, or else legally dead, and hence they had no restrictions upon return even if forced to labor. However if enslaved under Roman law they had legal restrictions including a lack of right to hold public office.
I actually don’t know of any Roman citizens who were freed from foreign captivity and later became notable besides Caesar, but he’s one of the most well documented Romans so that means very little; for all we know some of Pompeys clients might have traced his patronage back to being freed in the pirate campaigns, but we don’t know that story and wouldn’t expect to.
However we can say with relative confidence that noone legally enslaved in Rome became notable as a politician in the Republic. A few became notable clerk administrators in the empire, and there are some freedmen famous for non political reasons fltting about as writers, doctors, and scholars, but no politicians. It was illegal, and one of the few customary laws that wasn’t breached.
I can understand that there was such a ban.
How do brigaded-household-systems handle casualties? Foobar village provides an armed man for the army, but what happens when he is killed or dies of disease? How soon does Foobar have to produce a replacement?
Depends a bit. The swedish system for domestic troops (as opposed to enrolled mercenaries) during the 30-years war and earlier worked on a brigading model and they basically did rolling recruitment sweeps. Often seemingly fairly often. But note that the brigading “units” could be relatively large and you could eg. pool your resources and pay someone else to go rather than provide a man yourself.
It should be noted that this provided a *significant* amount of manpower (5-10% of the population, though many were mercenaries) on a rolling basis, and had some noticeable demographic impacts. During it largest size the swedish army matched the size of the roman republic, with a population of about 1.5 million. (thoguh as said a good chunk of that was offloaded on mercenaries, but conscripted soldiers remained a majority of the total army, though usually not the field armies)
My understanding is there is often a grace period, how long varies. But the beautiful thing about this system is it makes military losses in theory a self-solving problem for the locals to figure out. Sweden takes this to its highest form in the Great Northern War. Sweden and Finland had perhaps half a million adult men and suffer 200,000 military dead.
Finland suffered proportionately about the same military dead per year as WWI France, but for 14 years instead of 4. While Sweden suffered losses proportionate to the Union in the American Civil War but for 21 years instead of 4.
In practice most states are not Sweden and this system has scaling issues, it tends to result in relatively reliable but not very intensive recruitment is my understanding.
Like for instance Francia at the time of Charlemagne or Anglo-Saxon England seem to be able to field ~1% of their population (by comparison this figure is ~2.5% for Sweden and in practice they double that again by various measures). About the same as a standing army but they are not one.
However they tend to be pretty good heavy infantry, you can use them offensively also, and of the options in this post they are probably the lowest difficulty. Standing or mercenary armies require much more tax capacity.
Sweden (then including Finland) had a standing army by the time of the Great Nordic War.
Sweden yes, but my understanding is these systems often are an obligation to provide X men when called on as opposed to permanently raise X men.
We had government trained and equipped soldiers which were supposed to work like peasants when not called upon. This system was instituted by the father (and predecessor) of the guy who was king during the Great Nordic War.
I like the notion of literature bureaucrats and their role in military recruitment – it sounds like something from a Jorge Luis Borges story.
I’ve been listening to a podcast about early modern England lately, and it’s striking how the government’s inability to pay soldiers affected politics, especially during the civil wars. Parliament had enough money to raise an army, but they frequently couldn’t afford to pay their wages, and once they’d won the war and imprisoned the king, the army refused to disband until they’d received their back pay.
I think by the schema here we could understand this event as a breakdown in the principle of the army. The men had mostly been recruited as volunteer, short-term professionals, and intially their demands reflected that: they wanted back pay and a law indemnifying them for crimes committed in the course of the fighting. But as the months passed and they still didn’t get paid, they grew increasingly organized and began to see themselves as a constituency entitled to a say in governance. Many of the soldiers pushed heavily for universal male suffrage and land reform; essentially they wanted a transformation in society that would produce the kind of social structure – society dominated by prosperous, politically engaged freeholders – that would allow an entitlement principle army.
The Song in particular suffered badly from a ‘rotted-out’ military structure, as I understand it, because very often the state’s reaction to “maintaining a large peacetime army of convicts is expensive” was to massively neglect the soldiers, pay as little as possible, and also systematically distrust any officials appointed to command the army.
So long as the main threat to the Song was internal rebellion, this worked out well enough, because an army that’s so chronically underpaid and undersupplied that it spends most of its time growing its own rice just to survive, and whose officers are constantly being shuffled around at random and encouraged to see their troops as interchangeable cogs of no value, will generally be ineffectual if some general gets the idea “I want to be the emperor, instead of the emperor!”
But when the steppe nomads to the north started getting more organized and raiding the Song, an army in a shape like that was in no position to repel them. The Song rulers repeatedly used “just buy off the nomads” rather than building up a viable army, which in the short term worked… but in the long run meant the nomads grew strong enough to start permanently taking over chunks of China, to the point where by the time the Mongols under Genghis Khan show up in 1200, the entire northern tier of what we would normally consider ‘China’ is a collection of states ruled by what were formerly other nomadic peoples that had conquered chunks of the Song territory.
Or that’s my understanding; I don’t have a broad enough base of reading to be truly certain I’m getting all this right.
Part of why the Song went that route was that previous dynasties had tried the opposite, having strong military to keep the steppe nomads at bay, and as a result getting into really bad civil wars when the relationship between the emperor and the military went sour. It was basically an unsolvable dilemma.
When Bret wrote “By contrast, a long-established state cannot adopt Big Man Mobilization effectively, because they don’t have the petty warlords it relies on and creating those warlords would mean disestablishing the state to a substantial degree by fragmenting its power”, that’s not a theoretical. That’s what the Han Dynasty did, and the only good thing to come out of it is an eternal classic of literature, Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
The Han didn’t directly fall because of the military. They weathered various military rebellions before the final mess of the warring states, and the true proximate cause of their fall was the yellow turban rebellion. The breakdown in the state that followed occurred as an immediate response to local aristocrats raising their own forces in response to the turbans, but the cause of the yellow turban rebellion was popular unrest. This unrest was caused in turn by disease, falling agricultural yields, and a sense that court intrigue had overwhelmed the normal business of state.
It’s this widespread unrest that’s the true cause of the fall of the Han. Once the people writ large had to be suppressed with force there was no way forward except disaster; the best path for China as a state would probably have been the yellow turbans winning.
While this unrest was partially caused by the taxes needed to fund military campaigns there was actually limited campaigning leading up to the rebellion; the steppe nomads were a threat but had been largely subdued decades ago at this point, the Xiongnu Empire crushed and the Xianbai too unstable to truly threaten the Han. Hence there wasn’t a major military buildup and wasn’t a major breakdown in military relations until *after* the turbans rebelled.
It was instead mismanagement by the bureaucratic class that triggered the yellow turban rebellion. The sources at the time and histories written after make this clear, and the only other plausible trigger was plague. This bureaucratic system had in part been designed to manage recruitment, but also existed to manage the complex dynastic clan system in a way that mitigated bloody conflict. However various problems with this system broke out owing to conflicts of interests between various classes of official in it, including the clan consorts and consort kin, the scholars officials, and the eunuchs. The Eunuchs get pegged with the greatest blame by contemporary sources, but critical analysis suggests the system failed due to strife between all of the moving parts, often exasperated by a child emperor or unsuitable aristocrat gaining power through birth.
All this to say the failure of the political systems in the Han dynasty ultimately caused all the knock on effects that resulted in mass strife and the ensuring breakdown in military recruiting triggered by the people being the enemy of the state. It wasn’t a breakdown in military civilian relations, but the breakdown in civilian leadership itself.
While true to some extent, the actual breakdown (IE: in order to suppress the yellow turbans military power is decnetralized to local aristocrats who then proceed to become warlords) is basically that.
A similar thing happens to the Tang, and even, arguably, the Qing. (though there it has a longer tail)
In a lot of ways the Taiping Rebellion mess has dynamics not all that different from the Yellow Turban mess!
One interesting thing in China is giant peasant revolts are a not insignificant driver of change though the revolt itself usually fails (though the Ming succeed)
My point is that once the population rebelled any military system which recruited from the population writ large was untenable. The decentralization of recruitment was an inevitable response to a breakdown in centralized recruitment, and this was directly caused by popular rebellion.
“What if anything do coins actually do over baskets of grain and lumps of silver or copper?” is a deep question that I struggle with. Remember that coin names start out as weight names (complete with 1 drachma = half a fifty-to-the-mna Punic shekel), and actual practice involves a lot of weighing handfuls of coins, marking down foreign currency, and estimating purity. Babylonians never seem to have cared about the difference between standard-quality hacksilver and coins, and a lot of Archaic and Hellenistic coins are ‘big money’ that nobody actually uses for everyday transactions. I am enjoying Greeley’s The Almighty Dollar on some of these issues.
“and a lot of Archaic and Hellenistic coins are ‘big money’ that nobody actually uses for everyday transactions.”
Kind of a myth created by selection. Nobody really goes looking for small change in a archeology dig by sifting bucketful of dirt. But Hoards do get found and out of those the big denominations with the best art is what gets collected or saved. You don’t find what you are not looking for.
But why coins. Well it does matter in the jurisdiction you are in since the local currency is probably enforced. After that a pile of hacksilver and some expensive furniture is great and it is wealth but its kinda hard to shop with vs some Athenian owls and a few Cyzicene staters in terms of portability and frankly trust that they are what say are. After all the owls will ring true at well over 90% silver.
Err sorry I forgot that there is apparently no way to edit a post I typed sloppily.
In any case let me try again with some more carful typing (hopefully)
The point you made “and a lot of Archaic and Hellenistic coins are ‘big money’ that nobody uses for everyday transactions.” Has been the standard opinion for quite some time. Kraay “Hoards, Small Change and the Origin of Coinage” 1964 stood uncontested and uncontroversial more or less on that conclusion for a long time [https://www.jstor.org/stable/627696]. Kraay is aware of the issue of both hoards and collection bias but still with the evidence he had concluded small change as missing and that kind of remained a fact.
But then stuff happens. “A hoard of archaic coins of colophon and unminted silver (CH I. 3)” HS Kim, JH Kroll
[https://www.academia.edu/3787028A_hoard
_of_archaic_coins_of_Colophon_and_unminted_silver_CH_I_3_AJN_
2nd_ser_20_2008_].
Colophon went through a lot of effort to issue a large amount of very small change very early in the adoption of coinage. Moreover, that was essentially invisible before this one hoard. Also, on rereading Kim and Kroll make an interesting statement or mistake at p 58. They suggest they are being “very conservatively that each obverse die produced only 1000 to 5000 coins before minting of the coinage was finished or the die wore out,” citing Figueira “The power of Money…”. 1000-5000 is not very conservative but radically conservative. 8000 – 10,000 would be very conservative, their range sans any other reference is radically low. But it still leads to lot of small coins.
In the same way it now looks like Dionysius Chalcus succeeded at Athens in a roundabout way since the bronze Salamis coins look to have been issued by at least ~430 BC (and followed by the festival Eleusis bronzes in the 4th century). Athens at the same time is one place noted even by Kraay in 1964 as having a lot of small silver coins. Thus, overall, a lot of small change coins to had (but of course the bronze would be fiat money). [Sheedy, Kenneth A. “Some notes on Athenian bronze tokens and bronze coinage in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.” Tokens. Cultures, Connections, Communities (2019)].
I am sorry to say I mentioned shifting above because I thought I still had paper or two explicitly about digging in classical Palestine and aiming to fine sift earth a lot more than usual. Obviously requiring more manpower and cost. The result was a lot smaller change recovered. But alas I can neither recall titles nor find the files.
I thought Athens used silver coins for large transactions and bonze coins for small everyday ones.
I mean (for example) all the hoards of Alexander’s tetradrachm found in Thrace. A tetradrachm is about half a piece of eight. A large fraction of Alexander’s booty seems to have become coins like that which you use to buy a house or a herd of cattle but not a spade or a dinner. They looked very pretty and showed the King being badass though and that may have been the real point.
Will check the reference about the coins of Colophon!
The word “tetra” means “four” in Ancient Greek.
Oh, this is relatively simple, they’re decorated with a symbol of authority. The coin itself thus represents a claim of authority, hence why every two bit Roman emperor or wannabe emperor started out by minting a bunch of coins with their face on them; it was the doing thing for rulers. This also explains why monarchies and republics had different patterns of coinage decorations; republics issue them with symbols of the state and faith, monarchs issue them with their own faces on them.
Aside: two bit actually refers to small change, meaning the allusion actually comes full circle from reference to descriptor, which is fun.
In a practical sense this acts to identify where the coinage is from, and hence who or what you’re doing business with, and why you should trust it’s proported contents. Raw silver has neither benefit. You must either trust the person you’re dealing with or test it, whereas with a coin you know that the currency you’re dealing business with is attested to by the issuer, on penalty of quite literal death. Counterfeiters were viewed as *traitors*, they were viciously murdered.
Plus you might be viewed with suspicion if you roll up to port with a bar of unmarked silver, whereas if you have Roman coins everyone instantly knows you’re someone who at least does business with Rome and might be a citizen-meaning hurting you is semi suicidal. And if you have one Roman pretenders coins they know you do business in that guy’s area and might be connected to him-quite a boon to your businesses if he’s, say, Aurelian, and hence broadly respected.
Plus, it’s pretty.
Depends on where you are. Jonathon Sumption notes that French kings devalued regularly in the Hundred Years War as simpler and quicker than raising taxes through multiple obstreperous parlements, and the population seems to have accepted this, as inflation did not follow. On the other hand, Roman coins in India seem to have been treated as bullion (as raiders did – see hack-silver).
Inflation not rising defies all economic sense and is not consistent with what I know of the hundred years war, nor is it consistent with what I know of Sumptons History. Inflation isn’t a pure product of public trust, it’s a product of the currency supply in circulation increasing faster than gdp.
In a preindustrial agricultural economy this basically means that you can simplify inflation to coinage being issued or acquired without a corresponding increase in arable land bring conquered or coins being destroyed or lost.
The actual theoretical content of the coins matters less than their issuing authority for local purposes, as the only thing pegging a coins metal content to its supposed worth is arbitrage with other currency or specie, but debasement as a technique involves issuing more coins with less metal, meaning more physical coins enter circulation. Unless France was losing coinage at a corresponding rate there must be inflation. And while the English seized treasure at times, I don’t know of anything that would offset the madcap debasement being done. The only thing that comes close is the forced loans that the king levied.
The only way in which public trust matters is in that the public accepting coins or not accepting them into circulation might devalue a coinage, which actually *counters* inflation of the originals, but it does nothing to influence if there is inflation of price from more coins. In other words if I issued eight trillion quarters with no metal content the thing causing inflation isn’t the plastic quarters, it’s the two trillion extra dollars I just invented wholecloth. It actually reduces inflation if people don’t trust the quarters, because then the old quarters maintain value and the new ones become worthless.
In metal currencies pegged to global markets this is what debasement does, it splits your currency into New Coins and Old Coins, but actual prices are often maintained steady as long as there’s consistency in the content inside mintings; if there’s widespread confusion in what a coins worth is then things get nasty, but the idea is maintained otherwise. If you have a mostly internal economy you can mitigate this, as people effectively use the coins as a fiat currency whose value is divorced from the metal, but nothing about this means new issuing if currency doesn’t cause inflation, it just might affect the coins evenly.
Also, I’m almost positive Sumpton details how there was inflation.
“pocketing the wages of dead soldiers”
This was something I was curious about from the beginning. How does the record-keeping and each of these systems handle the payout for soldiers who died? I presume there is some polities taking on the attitude of “the dead cost nothing”, but I would think that this would be very unstable.
Also, what is the general level of fatalities in these systems where people were re-enlisting?
Was just looking formuust these questions, did the soldiers list a next of kin for payouts, how was it supposed to be handled and how was graft and mismanagement of pay seen by the various actors?
My guess is the fatalities were pretty low. Somewhere below 10%, though that’s going to be concentrated in a few groups and a few times.
There are three main ways to kill a soldier: Disease on the march, a route, or as prisoners. A professional army would have some advantages in each area.
For disease, those who’s constitutions couldn’t handle camp life would die out early on, so those who re-enlisted would be used to that lifestyle. Not immune to disease, but more resistant than the general population due to disease culling those NOT more immune. Losses will primarily be among the newbies, plus some old farts who stuck around too long. This is going to be true regardless of culture, just because of how attrition works. Doesn’t matter if you’re an immortal elf, a dwarf from the mines, or a dragonborn shape-changer, lack of experience is going to get a certain number of people killed.
For routes, it’s a matter of cohesion. A bunch of peasants who’ve never held arms before is going to be much easier to terrify than a bunch of professional soldiers who have been here before. Same principle as the Triari. They know that the best way to survive is to stand together. Again, this isn’t proof against routes, but it does make the unit less likely to break. What may happen is the unit decides it’s too hairy and withdraws–but a withdraw in good order is NOT a route, as evidenced by Rome’s habit of inflicting tremendous loss in battles where Rome lost. At a rough estimate we’re talking (based on historic examples) something like 5-10% casualties before the unit decides they’ve had enough.
As for prisoners, it often doesn’t make sense to kill off the professionals. There’s a simpler way to deal with it: Buy them off. Happened with the Norse in Byzantium, for example. This is going to be heavily dependent on culture, though. If your culture (and remember, this is a discussion about world-building so this can be any hypothetical culture) views paid soldiers as morally inferior (they aren’t fighting for loyalty) maybe the professionals are slaughtered out of hand. If your culture incudes prisoner exchanges or ransoms, they may keep the professional soldiers alive (see the early Modern Era). Or they may sacrifice the prisoners to the gods (see the origins of the wicker man, plus some Mesoamerican examples).
As an aside, the difference between how cultures deal with prisoners is a fantastic story element. There are historic examples–the Zulu slitting the bellies of fallen British soldiers, for example–where one side is trying to show respect, but the other side takes it the wrong way. There are plenty of stories to be told about, say, a group from a culture that routinely sacrifices prisoners being captured by a group that offers to enlist the prisoners into their army. It would create a very interesting moral dilemma for the characters.
Well-run premodern armies tended to experience ~5% death rates annually during war, mostly of disease. The high end is quite a bit higher, probably close to 20% for instance during the Thirty Years War because it was a mess and there was a lot of plague going around.
So in a multiyear war that adds up to a lot of attrition.
It may have mattered it took place during the approximate peak of the Little Ice Age. This would have med it harder to acquire food for the soldiers.
Long-service soldiering was pretty deadly: even at 5% a year your chance of living to a payout after 20 years service is slim. Swedish records show few came back to the village. From the 16th century many soldiers recorded a next of kin or beneficiary. My reading is later centuries suggest not much death-pay went back either.
>For many fictional fantasy settings, I think the ‘contractor’ method of raising troops is remarkably underrepresented.
I can think of settings that have the idea of the ‘mercenary company’ (Warhammer Fantasy’s Dogs of War is the one I’m mostly familiar with, or there’s Berserk’s mercenary armies during the Golden Age arc), but they act as small independent armies only serving a specific employer for a limited period of time and frequently changing sides, you don’t have the element of ‘they were gathered solely in vassalage to serve this one entity and don’t change service’ that you mentioned.
Warhammer’s Dogs of War are inspired by the Italian Condottiere (being mostly centered around Tilea, Warhammer’s equivalent to early-modern Italy), which I have the impression were often more idependent?
The Flaming Fists in Baldur’s Gate 3 are described as mercenaries, but they seem a lot closer to the contractor system.
I think that really true mercenary units are rare, in the sense that they would be actually composed without a specific enemy in mind, just to be hired on commercial basis. Even in the heyday of European mercenary units, those units were really hired to serve a specific state or lord.
I think that the Italian “Great Companies” are probably the closest thing to a military unit as a free actor. And the 18th century European nobles are probably the freest actors in the sense that they could really leave their country and get recruited as officers abroad, and as long as they refrained from serving against their homeland, nobody batted an eye. But these were individuals, not military units.
Condottiere were basically contracted units but often raised “on spec” by the contractor, instead of directly in service to a specific polity, which meant they could shop around to a greater extent.
I would guess this should be turned around: the chaotic strategic situation, with many independent polities all looking for military power, is what makes it possible for entrepreneurs to raise companies speculatively, because they can trust that there will be someone who will buy them.
FYI volume one of a new Chronicles of the Black Company series is just out in hardcover right now.
The Valdemar series discusses this to an extent, with Kerowyn’s story. It’s more like a freelance company–literally free lances, independent people trained at war who would sell their services.
I think that’s the reason contractors are underrepresented in fantasy. Fantasy is largely set in the Middle Ages, and freelancers took the role of contractors. They may have primarily worked with one lord/king, but they weren’t bound by oaths (that’s the “free” in freelance) so they could end up on both sides of a conflict. These could also be composed of soldiers that were in armies that were disbanded, and who really didn’t have any other skillsets. Turns out putting a bunch of weapons in the hands of men and taking them to a foreign country and then dropping them there doesn’t do much in the way of assisting with re-integration into civilian society, and this was the solution folks came up with.
During the 30 Years’ War, Sweden used brigading and mercenaries, so a mixed system. We became so indebted to the soldiers that we needed a *very* good peace to finally pay all the soldiers if we weren’t to go bankrupt. This probably prolonged the war by 14 years – most of the internal affairs of the Empire was settled in 1634, but Sweden prolonged war to get good ‘compensation’.
When I’m more awake tomorrow, I’ll try to write more about the Qin dynasty method, which doesn’t conform to *any* of these.
Meanwhile, Dr D said, re the Han Dynasty: “I am not clear who handles the cost of equipment in that system”.
Your rule of thumb should be that up until 1700 if not 1750, the tech level in eastern Eurasia/China Proper is several centuries ahead of western Eurasia. So by the later centuries BCE (Warring States) most iron tools and shafted weapons in China were produced from *cast iron*, which is capital-intensive. Hence, Chinese soldiers were equipped by the state. There was a millennia-long debate in Chinese state policy over whether iron should be a government monopoly or not; check the Wikipedia article “Discourses on Salt and Iron”.
Another difference between China & western Eurasia was that China always exacted a textile tax *on women*, as individuals in the Han and as household members at other times, and most of this cloth went to clothe the army and to make padded armor. So I’m pretty sure conscripted soldiers didn’t have to clothe themselves, either.
> Your rule of thumb should be that up until 1700 if not 1750, the tech level in eastern Eurasia/China Proper is several centuries ahead of western Eurasia.
By which measure? If you look at GDP per capita, China is only slightly ahead in the high middle ages, but parts of Europe (e.g. Italy) pull substantially ahead by 1500. If you naively tally up every technological category and compare them individually then Europe also seems to pull ahead by 1500, as Europe caught up in areas where china had an advantage while also starting to come up with more and more innovations on its own. The starkest contrast is the printing press: whereas in most of the middle ages East Asia had an advantage here, the mass adoption of the Gutenberg press meant that Europe was miles ahead in the 16th century and going forward.
>So by the later centuries BCE (Warring States) most iron tools and shafted weapons in China were produced from *cast iron*, which is capital-intensive.
Europe had some isolated blast furnaces starting in the 13th century, and large scale adoption began in the 15th century.
As a sidenote: shafted weapons and most tools were never made out of cast iron, high carbon (>2%) iron was merely an intermediate product. What was done is that blast furnace produce pig iron bars, which were then decarburized in fineries, producing wrought iron and steel. Cast Iron is not particularly tough, brittle, can’t be formed after casting, and can’t be sharpened. As such, it’s limited to items that are not highly stressed and of simpler forms, such as pots and the occasional plowshare.
Yeah, they are pushing the date way to far forward. Europe by the late middle ages and renaissance is making *very* rapid progress relative to the rest of Eurasia. The late 1700s may have been when the gap grew wide enough for outright largescale conquest despite the disadvantage of having a powerbase more than 10,000 miles away, but the Portuguese spend the first half of the 1500s proving the balance has already shifted.
Is 1300 Europe centuries behind? Sure! 1500s? No, if anything ahead other than some measures of state capacity. 1500s China is picking up some technology from the Portuguese and western Europe is probably wealthier in per-capita terms.
I feel like the Military Revolution is a bit misleading in a macrosense. Was it a big deal in European military dynamics? Sure! But clearly by the mid-1500s there already has been a First Military Revolution given Portuguese bullying and powers like Iran starting to use European military advisors.
China suffered two demographic catastrophes in the High Middle Ages. First the Mongol invasion killing millions in areas with no forests to hide. Then Black Death less than a century after the establishment of a Mongol-descended dynasty. Europe was largely saved from the former by a chance occurrence. Genghis Khan died from his injuries after a hunting accident forcing the commander in Europe to return to East Asia.
It’s not that relevant, but it’s not Genghis Khan. By the time he died, mongol haven’t even reached Baghdad. I guess whether it’s him or his successor dying that saves Europe doesn’t really matter here, but it’s common misconception that Mongol immediately crumble after Genghis Khan died rather than some generations after. It’s remarkably robust for its size!
The areas conquered by Genghis Khan were divided by his sons from his first marriage when he died. This event may have been mixed up with their various heir’s lose of power. If I understand it correctly his sons and grandsons continued to fight with the same methods using members of the same tribes as formed the original tribal coalition. People from additional cultures may have joined them as needed.
I’m using “tech” in a very Needham-like way. So: Chinese agriculture was more productive (better plows, seed dibblers, etc) even not counting how *insanely* productive wet rice is (50 seeds produced to 1 planted!). The British Agricultural Revolution of the 17th C was based, among other things, on a Han Dynasty Chinese plow design the Dutch had picked up. Chinese invented paper during the Han (or before), had a print revolution during the Song. Of course very sophisticated textile & world-beating ceramic technology all along. And then there’s gunpowder!
Many scholars of China think the Song are best characterized as the first Early Modern state. There’s also the fact that, from the Qin (at least) onward, Chinese empires developed far more sophisticated systems of statecraft and control than anything attempted in western Eurasia.
Technological advances in China mainly happened during the periods it was splintered into several independent countries. At times of unification the area largely stagnated. During its 276 years under the Ming less depopulated Europe could well have got the chance to catch up.
Not just could, in fact it did. The other thing is in some ways China is regressing in this period. The Ming seem to have had less fiscal capacity than the Song perhaps partially knock-on of peasant origins, then the Qing are a foreign dynasty.
Though its not really a demographic problem, population probably recovered its pre-Mongol level by the 1500s, not that different from Europe’s rebound, and then actually grew *faster* in the 1600s and 1700s.
The founder being incompetent and setting a bad example is one reason for the technological and organisational regression during the Ming. The world becoming colder during this period may also have mattered.
China has generally been the most ‘advanced’ society the last couple thousand years, I was just pushing back on the date when that ceased to be true.
The Qin method was simply state-enforced mass mobilization, similar to the Han method. In fact, the Han mobilization system was a direct continuation of the Qin system.
As for individual soldiers and their obligations, the Qin-Han system of huji (household register) divided the general population into several different categories (a kind of caste system), which could be summarized as three groups: officials, peasants, and the subalterns.
– Civilian officials would act as military officers in wartime.
– Peasant soldiers composed the bulk of the army, with some of them having specific roles (such as specialized crossbowmen), but they usually had a 1-to 3-year rotation, and when peace returned, they would go back to farming; so this is not a standing/professional/long-service army. Their military service would also count towards their ranks in the 20-rank system (a type of socio-military ranks of honour for the whole society, which decides one’s status and pay).
– The subalterns consisted of what was considered the underclasses and outcastes at the time, including landless peasants, officials with a criminal record, son-in-law who belonged to the wife’s household, and the entire merchant class and their families (yes, merchants were very low status even before Confucianism kicking in – in fact, the mass spread of Confucianism in Song times corresponded with the raising of the merchant class). Since these folks were the subalterns, their military service was seen as a punishment (謫戍, “punitive military service” or “punitive soldiers”). They were forced to have much longer military services (at least 5-10 years) than the regular peasants, and often served in harsh frontiers that normal soldiers could not withstand. They receive less pay, and their services also cannot count towards the ranks.
The problem with the Qin system was that everyone could be a “subaltern”. Normal peasant soldiers received more pay and would be rotated out after 1-3 years, which means they were not suited for a prolonged campaign. But subaltern soldiers, with their much longer service time, were seen as a good fit. As a result, when the northern frontier (against the proto-Xiongnu) and the southern frontier (against the native Yue people) returned into the Qin Empire’s Vietnam, many normal peasants were mobilized as 謫戍 “punitive soldiers” and forced to serve in much harsher conditions without any prospect of raising their rank. This was why many peasant-soldiers decided to join the rebellion that toppled the Qin Empire.
For the footnote on monetization, I think it all stems from a mistranslation. In Romance languages the cognates of “money” (moneta, moneda, monnaie) usually mean “currency”, not “money”, so it makes perfect sense to talk about “monétisation” in French for “currency-ization”, and I suppose the word was borrowed as such into English.
“Money” in English can also mean ‘currency,’ broader uses don’t replace other meanings.
One interesting feature of the regimental recruitment system is that it does a passable job aligning everyone’s incentives towards aggressive action, which probably isn’t the natural state of the world.
The king wants aggressive action from the get-go. He’s got a war to win. The soldier in this system has a reason to take aggressive action; that’s how (if he survives) he gets booty. The colonel wants a win for the glory and the booty, but potentially specifically he may want to seek out a high risk and – even more callously – a high cost win, if indeed he pockets some or all of the dead men’s wages and also gets booty. A real heads-I-win-tails-you-lose scenario between colonel and his soldiers, but it could be sustainable as long as he does pay and fete the survivors, and honor the dead.
So if the king is taking out a loan to finance his army, he gets to leverage other people’s money (the booty) and encourage his army to go the distance, merely because of the pay structure. It’s a clever arrangement, and also a seductively easy one to enter into.
“The long-service professional army created by Augustus at the start of the Roman Empire eventually settled on a twenty-year term of service (with another five years in the reserve)”
That sounds like a good idea only if you are expecting to need only about the same number of soldiers for the next 20 years. For how many states would that be a reasonable expectation? This sounds like a system for people who never need to mobilise.
Such as a hegemonic empire with no peer rivals, but a long series of borders to consistenly defend (and admittedly expand over) from much weaker polities, that’s just come out of a long period of devastating civil wars that might give the victor, in his moment of dominance, motive and opportunity to limit the ability of local governors to raise their own troops?
That would be an example, but I was trying to be more general. And highlight that this system is not so much the pinnacle of military mobilization schemes, as something dependent on your not needing one.
I was telling one of my friends about this series and how the entitlement principle relies on an “upper lower” class of peasants rich enough to afford armor. My friend said “Upper lower class? So like the 500 BC version of car salesmen and liquor store owners?” and I said “yes! and you’ll note that to this day they feel compelled to equip themselves as heavy infantry.”
About those brigades, I assume the obligation is bounded by time? What happens if the soldier is killed, looted, or deserted? Do they have to immediately send another (fully equipped) one?
Also I guess this will give at least some political representation to the brigades. I mean, they have weapon and they always will. I remember that Tolkien represents English countryside as fiercely independent.
What makes military settler different from good old big men thingy? I assume one will evolve into another.
Remember what our host wrote in his series about the peseants live. 80-90% of a village would
own a third of the villages land. 10-20% would own the second third, and the Big Men would onw the rest. Military settlers would be in the richer part of the second group. Not in the third group.
Enough land to rent out most of it. But not enough land to controll the whole village.
“only about a third bigger (~300,000 compared to ~185,000)” – that seems like strange math. it’s 62% more, which is closer to “two thirds bigger” than one.
still far less than “ten times” of course, so the point still stands – but small things like that give pedants and people arguing in bad faith something to get their hooks in, so it’s better to avoid them
~185k is roughly the same as ~200k, ~300k is roughly the same as ~300k, 1/3 of ~300k plus ~200k is roughly the same as ~300k. Pedantry is fine, but Comms Department math is also important.
Yes, if you fudge all the numbers then you can get to 1/3, but when the *actual* answer is 2/3, 1/3 is not acceptably close enough.
Good you pointed out it was closer to 2/3 than 1/3. I actually misread 1/3 as 2/3 for this very reason.
One thing this series really puts up front all the time is the reality that military action is nothing but an economic drain. At best you can steal more from your enemy[1] than you spent on the military campaign, but it’s always going to be a close run thing.
The whole anime/manga/light novel conceit of adventurers having to fight monsters who have “magic stones” which can be harvested as a sort of fuel may be a lot more clever of an idea than people give it credit for. If military action/violence is made to be economically productive (if still hideously dangerous) in those specific circumstances, then it becomes a particularly exotic form of mining. You can at least imagine a societal setup where that sort of thing is the province of independent contractors willing to take on the personal risks in return for the profit.
[1] Including stealing the enemy himself by enslaving them; the main way the Romans were able to make violence pay off for so long.
“We also looked at the over low-overhead alternative”
->other low-overhead alternative
“Now we’ve seen how compact state societies with a broad ‘middling well-to-do’ class which can political preserve their interests”
->this could be either “politically preserve their interests”, or “preserve their political interests”, or something else entirely
“and also quite limited ability to stem desertion of things go badly”
->if things go badly
“to get a sense of the short of things”
->the sort of things
*Sigh* Sorry, this was supposed to be a standalaone comment.
“One thing this series really puts up front all the time is the reality that military action is nothing but an economic drain. At best you can steal more from your enemy[1] than you spent on the military campaign, but it’s always going to be a close run thing.
[1] Including stealing the enemy himself by enslaving them; the main way the Romans were able to make violence pay off for so long.
The whole anime/manga/light novel conceit of adventurers having to fight monsters who have “magic stones” which can be harvested as a sort of fuel may be a lot more clever of an idea than people give it credit for. If military action/violence is made to be economically productive (if still hideously dangerous) in those specific circumstances, then it becomes a particularly exotic form of mining.”
A society which has better military technology and organization than the neighbours, which these neighbours after some experience are not able to copy or otherwise counter effectively (because the neighbours get overwhelmed before they can learn to respond, or because the attacker comes up with new innovations faster than the defender, is a society which might make a profit by intentionally starting aggressive wars against “barbarians”.
“anime/manga/light novel conceit of adventurers having to fight monsters” is an idea… to call the profitable enemies “monsters” rather than “barbarians”, “savages”, “natives”, “aboriginals”, “Indians” or something like that sounds “lighter”.
“At best you can steal more from your enemy[1] than you spent on the military campaign, but it’s always going to be a close run thing.”
Depends on the time period.
In the Middle Ages a huge part of warfare was ransom. Capturing enemy nobility was common (don’t want the unwashed masses getting the idea they can stab their betters!), and the idea was that you’d treat my nobles well until I either paid you for them, traded you for them, or crossed a red line and you slaughtered the lot to show how upset you were with me. A captured nobleman could pay for a campaign. So even if you lost, you may come out ahead if you captured the right person.
The other under-appreciated aspect is, what are you spending? A lot of times what you’re spending is third and fourth sons. These kids would have fairly poor prospects at home–servants under their brothers, basically–and this could make them quite angry. Rebellions and uprisings and such could happen. If you sent them to war somewhere you dealt with the problem quite handily. Either 1) they’d win and thus have lands to manage, giving them the status they wanted but which was otherwise denied to them by the fact that their older brothers were breathing, or 2) they’d die gloriously and become martyrs or saints or whatever. Essentially a society that gave wealth, lands, and titles by inheritance had to have a release valve for those who should, by society’s standards, inherit but who had no chance of doing so. Monasteries and war were the two Europe came up with.
So in essence you HAD to spend those younger sons of nobility. The question was, how? War was as good a method as any other.
The other thing is, there was no other realistic way to increase production. Productivity was based on subsistence farming, and while some technology advanced it (the heavy plow, for example), until we had fossil fuel burning engines it was increasing the margins a little. The only way for a group to get more wealth was to get more land. And all the land was taken, so you either had to buy it (nearly impossible), marry into it (common enough), or take it by fire and sword.
Buying territory in the Middle Ages was more common than you might think. But the issue of course is that requires you already have substantial financial resources, so usually already landed guys.
A fair criticism. We tend to under-estimate how sophisticated people of the past were, despite the fact that they aren’t hugely different from us.
There are two things that support your point, in as much as they demonstrate the use of money to buy/pay for things (two slightly different concepts):
First, we have records of, well, their records. Most people in the Middle Ages weren’t literate, so at least in England they developed a rather genius solution. They’d take a stick and notch it, with different notches representing different values. Then they’d chop it in half, so that both parties had a copy of the notches. Since sticks don’t break smoothly, this created a very good record for things that required payment, like taxes–you could literally match the sticks up and prove you paid. (Having a lot of dry sticks around caused the obvious problem; a lot of them burned up in a fire.)
Always thought that would be a nifty way to make site tokens for a small SCA event. Hard to scale up to something like a war, because the number of sticks would become huge, but for a local event it may be possible.
Second, I’ve read that many payments were in gold on paper but in practice were equivalent. Like, if (to use some random numbers to illustrate the point) you wanted 15 gold coins for some fields, and cows were going at 5 cows per gold coin, I could pay you 25 cows and 10 gold coins. Or 25 cows and a bunch of wheat and cloth, such that it added up to 15 gold coins. We’d have to both agree on it and obviously there’d be negotiations, but it was a common enough practice that I’ve seen it in ransoms of royal captives.
I think England used silver coins in the Middle Ages since gold was too expensive for this purpose.
Significantly better agricultural methods were developed in the Netherlands and Britain during the 17th and 18th centuries. I think most of this process took place before the development of an engine efficient enough for more than one particular use.
According to the British sources I’ve seen, the engines could be put to multiple uses. An engine is just a way to turn chemical potential energy into rotational energy, and it’s easy enough to turn that into useful work on a farm. A lot of things, like grinding and thrashing, are already essentially circular motions anyway, and you don’t need to be super-efficient. One engine can provide the power, and different belts can transfer the power to different things (same method as was used in factories and in tractors). Most of the technology was already there; the difference was moving from wind and people/horses to some sort of fuel-based system like steam.
Big innovations also came from seeding. Prior to that time period broadcast seeding was the primary method, which was not efficient. “One for the rook, one for the crow, one to let rot, and one to grow” was the guideline, meaning you expected to lose 3/4 of your seed. In the time period you’re discussing they developed methods for planting seeds down in the soil, which allowed for far more seeds to produce crops. What that requires is metallurgy and an understanding of mechanics, which advanced during the same period (blast furnaces and the like).
The engine I was referring to is the steam engine patented by James Watt. Before his substantial improvements heat engines could only be used for pumping water out of mines. Possibly only coal mines at that since they were so horribly inefficient. In contrast agricultural methods first started to improve in the Netherlands during the 17th century. I think the Netherlands escaped a major European famine in the 17th century thanks to this. During the English Civil War a lot of economic experimentation became possible because government regulations could not be upheld. Of cause the successful experimenters refused to be regulated after the war was over.
Slaves were probably the most common and lucrative part of the loot. Vikings took and sold slaves (Dublin was a major market), Avars and Bulgars and Magyars took slaves and sold them to Constantinople, as did the Rus, who also sold to the Abbasids through the Caspian. The Tatars made a living at it, as did the Sulu Sultanate.
If I’m understanding you correctly, the “military settlers” approach is quite similar to an entitlement-based system, albeit one where the “entitlement” extends to a relatively narrow slice of society. If that’s correct, what kinds of political rights would the military settlers typically get in the bargain?
I ask because a project I’ve been working on on-and-off for a while involves an empire with relatively low but increasing state capacity moving from a clientage-based system to an entitlement-based one, and it seems to me that turming the former lower classes into military settlers might be one way to make this work.
I think the military settler is best understood as a vocational warrior in that his status (getting to live as a leisured elite off the rents of his tenants) is tied to his obligation to fight. A warrior aristocrat minus the aristocrat, as it were.
In China, at least, most military settlers were *not* rent-collectors, they were peasants who were moved to border provinces and given land there, to farm for themselves. The idea was for the military to be self-supporting in food, at least to some extent.
This could be an attractive option in theory for younger sons or others who had trouble getting enough land to be self-supporting. “In theory” only, though, because as a rule land in the border provinces was MUCH lower-quality than that in the heartland.
The Chinese military-settler system also kept running into trouble because it was unsustainable long-term for the simple reason that there isn’t infinite land to give away. All land handed out to a soldier-farmer eventually passes to his peasant son and thus stops being a military resource.
The Chinese state was powerful and centralised enough to be able to embark on land redistribution programs, so the system never reached the point of collapse, but the land scarcity was still a major roadblock to scaling it up. Because a farm does need a certain minimum of working hours invested or it can’t sustain the soldier, the travel time between the farm and the location of the army the soldier served in had to be subtracted from the time the soldier could serve on a tour of duty. By the time you had soldiers who were on the farm most of the year, traveled over a month to the capital, drilled there for two months, then went back home, you had for certain hit a point of diminishing returns.
(Although I think in all fairness, I don’t think there’s any pre-industrial military system that can be scaled cleanly and allows a continent-spanning empire to effectively convert its population living far away from the borders into useful military manpower)
Winchell Chung has suggested that an empire can only hold together if its borders can be reached in 10 – 15 weeks:
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/empiredyn.php#id–Can_Galactic_Empires_Exist?–Reaction_Time
It should be reached from its capital.
“The Chinese military-settler system also kept running into trouble because it was unsustainable long-term for the simple reason that there isn’t infinite land to give away. All land handed out to a soldier-farmer eventually passes to his peasant son and thus stops being a military resource.”
No. There is little reason why a son of a soldier-farmer should be a peasant. That´s kind of the point of military-settler system.
Commonly whoever inherited the land of a military settler was also a military settler/soldier-farmer.
You might expect that if the military settler was selected as soldier for being particularly good as soldier then the next generation should have regression towards the mean, and as a mediocre soldier be a worse soldier than his father was.
But even as a mediocre soldier, the son inheriting military obligations and land to support him would be a military asset, not a peasant.
And would the first generation military settler/soldier-farmer be even selected for being a good soldier?
Or would he rather be selected because he´s not lucky to evade the army and remain a peasant?
If the soldiers are recruited by conscription, or enlisting refugees, they´re not selected to be good soldiers. They are mediocre soldiers to begin with. Therefore when their sons are forced to continue in the army, the fathers were already at the mean to regress to, and the sons are no worse.
I feel like the punishing cost of the contractor model (or the state commission army as John A. Lynn termed it) is mainly built on Spain’s failure to maintain it consistently, but Spain’s financial resources are exaggerated by the perception of a river of silver flowing from the New World.
Goubert’s The Course of French History (1988) asserted that the King of France had more revenues than the King of Spain even accounting for silver, simply because France had 20m people and Spain had 8m, of which only 6m could really be taxed because Aragon was basically impervious to taxation. France used the same model and it substantially held its armies together through the most trying times of the War of the Spanish Succession.
I view it as Spain being ruined by a combination of inflation and population loses. During the 16th and 17th centuries most Native Americans died from contagious diseases. Some died from overwork or direct physical violence. But the great majority would have died from disease they had lacked opportunity to evolve resistance to. In don’t think the Spanish Conquistadors forced Native Americans off their land to any significant degree. They mainly wanted the natives to work for them which in the longer run did not work out.
I’ve always wondered about the European resistance to North American diseases. I mean, part of it is that Europe, upon realizing natives of the Americas were vulnerable to Smallpox, intentionally weaponized the disease. But you’d think that there’s be as many diseases in North America that the Europeans were vulnerable to. Syphilis, maybe, but it didn’t cause societal collapse on a continental scale and its origins are pretty murky.
Among the ways to salvage the “It wasn’t the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs” idea in the 1990s/early 2000s was the idea of disease. Land bridges allowed animals to spread to new areas, they carried diseases with them, and the areas they migrated to saw their native fauna wiped out. But in the one good case study we have of such an event (the closing of the Isthmus of Panama is a close second) we see a very one-sided outcome.
This is all tangential to the discussion of Spanish finances, I know, but I think it’s an interesting question, both from the perspective of a world-builder and as a matter of historical science.
I the quick answer I always see to that is that they didn’t have as much in the way of domesticated animals as Eurasians. Swapping diseases back and forth with chickens, ducks, pigs, etc. is how you get lots and lots of new diseases.
I don’t buy that, though. It relies on an outdated view of North American agricultural practices. Most of what we consider normal for the population of the Americas is post-plague; it’s extremely difficult to get a sense of what life was like earlier because they didn’t write it down in ways European settlers understood as writing. The glimpses we do see show a very different story: cities that rival anything in Europe population-wise, incredibly sophisticated agricultural systems, even (mostly wooden) castles and keeps (which require a fair amount of food, including meat, to produce).
The Americans practiced food forest agriculture, which put them in contact with a LOT of animals. Not necessarily as close contact, but that’s both a blessing and a curse here. A blessing, because less contact means less opportunity for transmission; a curse, because the fact that the animals remained relatively wild means they were going to get exposed to novel diseases more than, say, cows and horses, which weren’t allowed to just wander around. (Hogs were allowed to do so in Europe, to an extent.)
I’m not saying this isn’t part of the story–I’ve read that the larger landmass, and occasional invasion from Asia, put Europeans in the path of more diseases, building resistance, for example–but I don’t see it as being sufficient.
Fewer domesticated animals and the Americas being much more sparsely populated. To me it seems plausible that both the Americas combined had less people than China in 1492.
To Dinwar:
While Native Americans practiced agroforestry I think companion planting mattered more. In the Andes Mountains they even developed crop rotation. All four groups of civilisations kept dogs. Mound Builders are known to have kept turkeys. Mesoamericans kept turkeys, Muscovy ducks and peccaries. Amazonian Natives could have kept Muscovy ducks but I am not sure. Highland Natives kept llamas, alpacas, guinea pigs and possibly chickens. It is uncertain if chickens existed in the Americas before Columbus. If they did they had been taken there by Polynesians probably in the 11th century.
Mesoamericans kept turkeys, Muscovy ducks and peccaries.
Were peccaries ever domesticated? I’ve never heard that they had been domesticated (or that they were domesticable), so it would surprise me, but if you have a cite I’d be interested to know.
They did at least breed them in captivity. What I know is peccaries tending to clump together when threatened. Which mean you can at least herd them. They may have been outcompeted by Old World pigs like the leopard cat was outcompeted by housecats.
I don’t think smallpox was ever successfully used as biological weapon. This was just something various conquerors accused their competitors of.
The spread of the 1862 Pacific Northwest smallpox epidemic into Indigenous people (on both the US & Canadian sides) was encouraged by policies of at least malign neglect. Certainly there was no government vaccine campaign extended to Indigenous people, as there was to the Whites.
If it wasn’t smallpox it was something else. It’s pretty clear a plague of some sort hit the continents. There were a few (smallpox and diphtheria being the big ones I can find).
To be clear, I’m not saying disease was the only thing. All the horrors of genocide were going on at the same time. I’m just saying that when disease is considered, it clearly hit the native population of the Americans much, much harder than American diseases hit Europeans. My admittedly naive assumption would be that there’d be roughly equal deaths due to disease, maybe higher among Europeans because they tended to cluster together more. And we simply don’t see it. The only disease I know of that’s attributed to the Americas that impacted Europeans is syphilis, and the origin of that has been called into question.
Influenza, malaria, measles and salmonella also played a part. To talk about genocide there have to be an intention to get rid of some social group. There may have been in some places but not in the Americas overall.
“To talk about genocide there have to be an intention to get rid of some social group. There may have been in some places but not in the Americas overall.”
Maybe not Central or South America. The Spaniards had other ways of brutalizing the population. In North America we ABSOLUTELY DID attempt genocide, and failure to succeed in such a task does not absolve us of the guilt of the attempt. How much a role intentional germ warfare played in this is an open question, but that we attempted it isn’t something up for debate as far as I am concerned.
None of this has anything to do with how diseases spread when two populations encounter each other, which is my main focus here.
I think it was a combination of more domesticated animals and higher population density. To me it seems likely that the Old World housed more than 80% of humanity in 1500. Regularly eating wild animals living in farmed forests or drained wetland canals does increase the risk of diseases. But with modest population density these would not have had much chance to spread and evolve further.
@Dinwar: If we were attempting genocide we sure did a bad job of it.
Yes, there were guys who were in favor of exterminating the Indians, but it was never official, or even unofficial, government policy.
“Yes, there were guys who were in favor of exterminating the Indians, but it was never official, or even unofficial, government policy.”
If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I’m gonna go ahead and call it a duck. What our ancestors–not so distant ones, either–did was functionally indistinguishable from genocide. Even if we ignore disease, there are so many other things we did to systematically destroy the lives and cultures of the native populations that to call it anything but genocide is to do an egregious disservice to those who suffered from it. I’m not willing to give our culture a free pass merely because our ancestors were too cowardly to openly state what they were doing, and too incompetent to succeed.
I strongly disagree about it not being “official, or even unofficial, government policy”. Enough official and unofficial things–such as forced relocation, forced “re-education” (which resulted in a huge, but currently unknown, number of deaths), and the “buffalo hunts” (really the systematic destruction of the subsistence strategy of entire nations)–happened that the idea that this wasn’t sanctioned, either officially or unofficially, is pure nonsense. When the Army is involved it’s pretty hard to say the government didn’t know about it.
The result is not the intention as conspiracy talkers take it for granted. Genocide is pretty much the worst thing you can accuse others of in modern society. This means you need a strict definition of the concept to minimise misuse. When you have individuals labelling INTERBREEDING BETWEEN PEOPLE FROM DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE WORLD as “genocide” you very much need such a definition. I think scientists on the subject agree that expressed desire to get rid of certain groups is a necessary part.
@Dinwar:
“functionally indistinguishable from genocide”
Yeah, no. Sorry, but when you have no official orders to kill them all, you don’t have a genocide. And, y’know, there’s also the whole thing where the US government at least tried to keep the Indians alive, even though it didn’t do a great job of it thanks to corruption and such.
I will also point out that the brutality of the Indian schools was less a product of “we hate Indians” and more a product of “late nineteenth and early twentieth century institutional childcare was even more awful than early twenty-first century institutional childcare.”
Yes, it definitely was. Either they did not think about how much children actually needs to taught. Or there were far too few adults to teach them. The result was what would now be considered child neglect. Neither was the food adapted to the children’s ability to digest it. Those factors together explain the forced assimilation facilities’ high death rate.
“Yeah, no. Sorry, but when you have no official orders to kill them all, you don’t have a genocide.”
Two things:
1) Official orders are not the only way something can be true. What you’re doing is the “I’m not touching you!” game. It’s a child’s attempt to avoid reality, and as adults we need not take it seriously. Or it’s pure magical thinking, of the type any witch or Pagan or Heathen I know would consider rather silly.
2) You are in fact arguing that military action occurs without official orders. Remember, many of these actions were conducted by the military. But that’s apparently not official. Or you’re arguing that only an official writing “Commit genocide” is sufficient–at which point, see Point 1.
For my part, I’m a Gouldian in epistemology. If believing something is false is perverse, it’s proven true as far as I’m concerned. And to believe, in the face of an overwhelming preponderance of evidence, that our society didn’t attempt genocide is a perversion of logic. I’ve accepted the existence of entire species with less evidence supporting the conclusion.
Does that mean I’m accusing anyone today of anything? No, of course not! I’m making a statement about the past–something which frequently gets lost in these discussions. And remember, that’s tangential to the actual topic at hand (which is disease spread between populations; I started this with dinosaurs). The genocide only came up as a confounding factor. But it’s a fact of history, one which we must face as maturely and soberly as any other fact.
The concept of “genocide” requires a strict definition because it is so frequently misused. Particularly by people which can’t grasp the concept of threats being imaginary. We here in Europe are as plagued by racists and Fascists as you in the US are by Creationists and religious fanatics. I think you should read some definitions used by scientists in the field of genocide studies. Then you can see for yourself what they have in common.
“Among the ways to salvage the ’It wasn’t the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs’ idea in the 1990s/early 2000s was the idea of disease. Land bridges allowed animals to spread to new areas, they carried diseases with them, and the areas they migrated to saw their native fauna wiped out. But in the one good case study we have of such an event (the closing of the Isthmus of Panama is a close second) we see a very one-sided outcome.”
A similar idea was introduced by Bob Bakker in “The Dinosaur Heresies” (1986). In this book he claims all continents became connected by land bridges or island chains. Large animals would then have been able to spread all over the world with disastrous ecological effects. Not only diseases but also new predators which local animals lacked adoptions to. At the time this was his favoured explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Sensibly, our knowledge of palaeogeography has improved in the past 40 years. There is now sufficient evidence of a 10 kilometre asteroid having hit the Gulf of Mexico wreaking worldwide havoc through its ejecta.
About the Great American Interchange it seems to have largely favoured animals of North American origin. Not so much trough diseases as these tend to affect groups of closely related species. Rather it seems many South American animals were outcompeted by North American ones. The explanation I have heard is that North America (at least periodically) had contact with Eurasia which in turn had contact with Africa. Three connected continents would have provided a much more competitive environment resulting in higher specialisation. Which would in turn have given North American animals an edge in competition with South American ones. The later only had one continent of competitors as it had been isolated for tens of millions of years.
The risk of contagious diseases increases the more closely related two animal species are. Before the Isthmus of Panama formed North and South American mammals were quite distantly related to each other. The only mammalian order they had in common were rodents. These must have sailed over from Africa on rafts of tangled vegetation back when the South Atlantic was narrower. (This is how monkeys got to South America too.) The guinea pig is more closely related to African mole rats than to hamsters. This applies to loads of rodents found in the Americas today. Evidently, South America’s rodents did not go extinct when coming into contact with the ancestors of deermice.
Populations recover from pandemics quite quickly – if not under pressure in other ways. The Native American population was exposed to continuing settler violence and to colonial imposition (forced labour, heavy taxes), which kept them from reviving.
You have to remember that there were multiple diseases even if the death rate of each decreased for each outbreak. Moreover, population growth in agrarian societies was relatively slow. I think the Americas were underpopulated until Industrialisation.
@Dinwar,
I think Peru is a good test case here. They did get European colonization, of course, but surprisingly less than a lot of people might think. A genetic study I saw estimated that the overall population today is about 75% of native “Amerindian” descent (obviously that’s going to differ between region, and between self-identified ethnic groups: like anywhere else, they have people who are nearly pure Western European descent and others who are nearly pure Indigenous). In spite of the relatively low colonization level, though, it took over 400 years (!), till about 1965, for Peru to recover its pre-colonial population level. So, yes, without colonization the peoples of the Americas would have recovered eventually from the epidemic shock, but it would have taken centuries.
I think the main reason is genetic adaptation to high altitudes. Large Placentals gets trouble reproducing if there is less oxygen in the air. To overcome this problem particular high-altitude adaptations are needed. Highland Natives have had the chance to evolve such adaptations over millennia. Tibetans and many Ethiopians also have such adaptations but through different genetic pathways.
Then I remember that Peru is not just the mountains. However, Whites are not adapted to moist heat. This gives the local Natives a selectional advantage in the lower parts of the inland. I don’t know how it is at the coast. It depends on the more specific relationship between air moisture and temperature at ground level.
Depends on how bad the disease is. Covid-19 was a pandemic on easy mode. The Black Plague was something else entirely–wiped out a third of Europe (roughly), and forced widespread societal changes. A disease that had a higher death rate would necessarily have a higher impact. Diseases can wipe out, or all but wipe out, populations of organisms. The American Chestnut is an example of this, and it’s one of the constant risks associated with modern monoculture agricultural practices. Unfortunately we don’t know the death rates for native groups from European diseases, except through the impacts; what data we do have suggests that while the populations may have eventually recovered, they hadn’t by the time Europeans moved into the area. So it was really, really, really bad.
One of the impacts may be leaving areas. If the disease is bad enough they may abandon villages or towns and move to other locations. A village or town needs a certain number of people in order to function, and if you drop below that level the people will disperse–they will go to where they have horizontal social ties, since the ones where they are aren’t sufficient to keep everyone alive. This would prevent recovery in those areas, as well as spreading the disease to new areas. This is analogous to organisms moving to less-suitable habitat. Remember, the whole point was to gain territory; you don’t need to kill people to gain their land, you just need to make it not worth sticking around.
Finally, as you say, this isn’t an event that happened in a vacuum. Even if germ warfare wasn’t intentionally utilized, the European settlers weren’t stupid and would take advantage of a weakened enemy to expand their territory. Not really anything in the animal kingdom (outside some apes and ants) that’s similar to this.
It may be that European settlers handled American diseases by rapid recovery and continuous influx of new settlers, but I’m skeptical about that. You just don’t see discussions of diseases heavily impacting European settlers the way you do diseases impacting native groups.
You have to consider the difference in population densities between the Old and New World. Mesoamerican cities only had a few dense blocks in the middle. These were temples, marketplaces and dwellings to the elite. The rest was garden city with embedded parks. Fairly large gardens at that since the city-dwellers had to grow a significant fraction of their own food. I don’t know how the cities of the Mound Builders looked. However, I think their food production and transportation methods were comparable to those of the Mesoamericans. If so their population densities would have been comparable too. Cities in the Amazon were even sparser with multiple smaller cores. Only the cities of the Andes would have been relatively dense since food could be more efficiently transported on llama-back. (A llama can’t carry more than a human but can eat things a human can’t.) Still, I suspect they had little more than one-story buildings.
All these can be contrasted with the cities of Europe, the MENA countries, South Asia and East Asia. Their much more efficient methods of food production and transportation meant much higher population densities. By the late 15th century they would have had cities like Beijing, Cairo, Delhi and Paris. My educated guess is them having much of their population cramped into multi-story buildings built right next to each other. Long before that Alexandria and Rome had been significantly denser. These would not have been able to function without aqueducts, sewers and organised garbage disposal. Yet they were still plagued by contagious diseases. The only Mesoamerican city I know to have had an aqueduct was Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City). This was because it was built on islands in a brackish lake which water was undrinkable to humans.
I don’t know how it is at the coast. It depends on the more specific relationship between air moisture and temperature at ground level.
Coastal Peru is desert, so, not going to be super disease prone, but also not welcoming to large scale settlement of Spanish agricultural settlers either. They do have some major cities, of course, but in a pre-industrial age those were going to be dependent on agricultural production and mining elsewhere. They also have one of the world’s richest offshore fisheries, and access to a really productive source of nitrogen fertilizer on offshore islands, but i don’t think the fertilizer became a major export industry until after the Spanish had left.
I was of the impression that pre-industrial population concentrations near the coast were along rives running from the mountains to the sea.
The Spanish Conquistadors assumed gold and silver to have intrinsic value. In reality they are considered valuable partially because of their scarcity. With more and more of these substances reaching Europe each weight unit of them became less valuable. Spaniards in the Americas contributed to their own country’s economic loses by sending home what they believed to be wealth.
The existence of inflation does not imply that a pile of silver isn’t a meaningful measure of wealth in a world where currency is backed by precious metals.
In any case inflation has nothing to do with how much revenue the King of Spain (or the King of France for that matter) can or cannot extract. If the King of Spain has an income of 100k ducats a year and the King of France gets 120k, the King of France is richer regardless of what exactly 1 ducat buys. The assertion I quoted was that the King of Spain even with the Indies still couldn’t match the revenues of the King of France.
Consequently, using the King of Spain’s inability to pay his armies and the consequent mutinies to illustrate the costs of using the contractor model exaggerates its downfalls, because it could be and was used (albeit strenuously) by a monarch with more money and more recruits without bankrupting his treasury.
It does not matter how much you have to pay your soldiers. If they can’t buy enough supplies for the money they would still not efficiently fight for you.
My understanding is that economic growth in the early modern era made the Spanish economy “money-hungry”, this is the reason we now have paper money.
Fiat currency is probably a better word.
Since our host mentioned that Chinese military history is very much not his area of expertise, as a Chinese historian I’ll quickly use my comment to recommend some of the works on historical Chinese military forces and soldiers for English readers here:
– For the Qin military, see all of Maxim Korolkov’s works, and any of Miyake Kiyoshi’s (Kyoto University) works that have been translated into English.
– The Han military system was very similar to the Qin one, and all of Nicola Di Cosmo’s works are very helpful. See also Enno Giele’s works on the Han military. (For works in Chinese, see all of Sun Wenbo’s works on the Qin-Han military system.)
– For the Tang military, I don’t think we have any big names in English here, although Franciscus Verellen’s new book also looks quite decent. (In Chinese academia, Li Biyan’s work on the regional warlords is really great, but I doubt it will be translated into English in the foreseeable future.)
– For the Song military, our host already had Elad Alyagon’s “Inked”, and the go-to work on why the Song military was developed into such is always Shui-lung Tsang (Ruilong Zeng), “War and Peace in Northern Sung China: Violence and Strategy in Flux, 960-1104”. Tsang/Zeng was such a talented scholar, and his untimely early passing was a great loss for the entire field.
– For the Ming military, Michael Szonyi’s “The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China” is simply the best. Highly recommend this book even if you are just trying to have a casual read.
I’d really appreciate your learned response to my amateur, over-generalizing comments on Chinese peasant armies & on Lord Song/Qin military below. Because I am *way* out over my skis!
You keep on Mentioning “The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War”.
That’s a pretty expensive book. Any suggestions on something cheaper that will cover most of the themes well?
Lauro Martines’ Furies: War in Europe 1450-1700 is very good, in e-book at a reasonable price.
I don’t think it’s reasonable for OGH to dismiss the state-levied, bureaucracy-dependent peasant armies of the Sinosphere as “too *hard* for pre-modern states” when they were really important for a significant part of the human population for many centuries at a time.
Population registers of the Sinosphere were *far, far* more detailed than census records in Western Eurasia at comparable periods–goverments always seem to have been interested in *full* population records, not just records of men of military age, partly because they were always tax and corvee lists, not just military lists, and the taxes always included textiles (produced by women) as well as grain (produced by men). Sometimes, as in the Han, some corvee labor was also expected from women, though it’s not clear to me what kind of labor that was.
I say “Sinosphere” because these registers start before the first dynasty. For context, speed through the timeline map of the Spring and Autumn Period, 770-476BCE by Linn Atlas at https://youtu.be/1adpzntMuUY?si=KoWi5cLFzSRmb4O6. Starts with almost 150 states, ends with 32 states. You can see an animated gif of the subsequent Warring States period here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/De_stridande_staterna_animering.gif
Unlike in Western Eurasia, there was a constant pressure over half a millennium for states to win militarily or go under, there was no stable stopping point before all of the North China Plain was a single state. I don’t know very much about the history of military innovation in this period, but there must have been a HELL of a lot of it, because the stakes were so high, the competition intense, and there was a lot of exchange of ideas and even personnel.
Under these circumstances, when the states of Ji and Chu started keeping standardized registers of their populations and the ones they conquered in the 6th C BCE, other states had to follow suit to keep up. This was especially the case as fighting shifted from an aristocrat-centered chariot warfare to fighting with huge armies using mass-produced iron weapons during the Warring States Period.
The expectation that the local government would keep a standardized register of everyone in an area, to be reported up to the regional and central government, has AFAIK been a feature of Chinese culture ever since, it’s one of the ways people know that the government is working. Which also means, of course, that the Chinese know more ways of lying to census-takers than anyone else.
Anyway, the standard for large Sinosphere armies (and many of these armies were *very* large, 10s of thousands to 100,000 or even more) for many centuries was brigaded peasant armies, serving more or less under compulsion. One point I learned from David Graff, Medieval Chinese Warfare 300-900 was that this is why their handbook, Sun Tzu’s Art of War, emphasized battle-averse strategies and much use of feints & strategems– but when it *does* come to the point of battle, the wise general may choose “fatal terrain (si di)”, a position from which his own troops cannot retreat: like facing the enemy, with a river at one’s back. Motivation by the threat of extermination, not by trust.
In my next comment I’ll talk about the Chinese military strategist who found a different motivator for peasant troops–and whose state won the Mandate of Heaven.
Incredibly confused as to why you think I am “dismiss[ing] the state-levied, bureaucracy-dependent peasant armies of the Sinosphere” when I explicitly reference the Warring States, both early and late Han Dynasty and the Song here.
Sorry it took me so long to answer, I didn’t think to check back for a couple of days. By “dismiss” I meant, really, “take them seriously as worth having a section about.” Especially the systems of the Warring States (& before) — the impression your statements give is that it can be considered as though these, too, had the advantages of the super-large Imperial Chinese states to make bureaucracy-heavy brigading systems feasible.
But the whole point about the Warring States (& esp the Spring & Autumn Period) is that there were *lots* of states, none yet of continental size. They started developing the systems that turned into the Imperial Chinese bureaucracy not because they were so large, but because they were under such existential military pressure that aristocracy couldn’t cut it (or the aristocracy was killed off, or both). The military bureaucracy came first, the state later.
Also it looks to me as though northern Chinese agriculture was more productive than that in western Eurasia, even before we start talking about rice farming. The loess soils of the North China Plain were more productive, their tools were much better, & their techniques were better. For instance, they didn’t broadcast-sow millet & wheat, they used seed dibbles to put the seeds only where they were needed. Their textile production methods were MUCH more efficient: a western Eurasian peasant woman + assistants could only just clothe her family, a Chinese peasant woman+ could clothe her family AND pay a textile tax, which generally had a market value approximately equal to the grain tax the Chinese peasant man owed.
Anyway, I was partly expressing my frustration that your extremely important historical and world-building articles remain so focused on western Eurasia–merely because that’s the area of your expertise! (joke, I know I know.) Maybe you could get an eastern Eurasia expert to guest post, from time to time, so your world-building overviews are more global, not so focused on the history of the barbarian West. I’m not suggesting myself! Evolutionary biology I can talk about with a little authority, but on China I’m somewhere between “educated amateur” and “embarrassing amateur”, I don’t even have the languages.
There are considerable areas of loess in Europe. However, I think there is relatively little overlap with areas with climate suitable for intense agriculture. The North Chinese plain does not have this problem as the Yellow River flows through the Loess Plateau. It then deposits the loess on a plain with often reliable summer rains along with other sediments.
Damn, bare URLs don’t work either. Reposting w/o.
I don’t think it’s reasonable for OGH to dismiss the state-levied, bureaucracy-dependent peasant armies of the Sinosphere as “too *hard* for pre-modern states” when they were really important for a significant part of the human population for many centuries at a time.
Population registers of the Sinosphere were *far, far* more detailed than census records in Western Eurasia at comparable periods–goverments always seem to have been interested in *full* population records, not just records of men of military age, partly because they were always tax and corvee lists, not just military lists, and the taxes always included textiles (produced by women) as well as grain (produced by men). Sometimes, as in the Han, some corvee labor was also expected from women, though it’s not clear to me what kind of labor that was.
I say “Sinosphere” because these registers start before the first dynasty. For context, speed through the timeline map of the Spring and Autumn Period, 770-476BCE by Linn Atlas on youtube. You can see an animated gif of the subsequent Warring States period on Wikipedia.
Unlike in Western Eurasia, there was a constant pressure over half a millennium for states to win militarily or go under, there was no stable stopping point before all of the North China Plain was a single state. I don’t know very much about the history of military innovation in this period, but there must have been a HELL of a lot of it, because the stakes were so high, the competition intense, and there was a lot of exchange of ideas and even personel.
Under these circumstances, when the states of Ji and Chu started keeping standardized registers of their populations and the ones they conquered, other states had to follow suit to keep up. This was especially the case as fighting shifted from an aristocrat-centered chariot warfare to fighting with huge armies using mass-produced iron weapons during the Warring States Period.
The expection that the local government would keep a standardized register of everyone in an area, to be reported up to the regional and central government, has AFAIK been a feature of Chinese culture ever since, it’s one of the ways people know that the government is working. Which also means, of course, that the Chinese know more ways of lying to census-takers than anyone else.
Anyway, the standard for large Sinosphere armies (and many of these armies were *very* large, 10s of thousands to 100,000 or even more) for many centuries was brigaded peasant armies, serving more or less under compulsion. One point I learned from David Graff, Medieval Chinese Warfare 300-900 was that this is why their handbook, Sun Tzu’s Art of War, emphasized battle-averse strategies and much use of feints & strategems– but when it *does* come to the point of battle, the wise general may choose “fatal terrain (si di)”, a position from which his own troops cannot retreat: like facing the enemy, with a river at one’s back. Motivation by the threat of extermination, not by trust.
In my next comment I’ll talk about the Chinese military strategist who found a different motivator for peasant troops–and whose state won the Mandate of Heaven.
Really not sure what you’re disagreeing with here.
Prof Devereaux didn’t dismiss state levied etc armies as too hard for pre-modern states. He wrote that it is hard, and therefore usually not done. Extracts from the paragraphs just before “Contractors and Colonels”:
…you can end up with more soldiers overall if you have a very big state. These sorts of systems thus tend to be creatures of large, relatively well-centralized, bureaucratic states. … large, effective bureaucracies composed of literate bureaucrats are really hard for pre-modern states to build and so even ostensibly ‘wealthy’ (that is, high state revenue) states often are not able or at least are not willing to build them.
So I don’t find it surprising that the largest and wealthiest state in all of Eurasia for pretty much the entire ancient and medieval period actually manages to create such a system. China can do this, some of the time, other states can’t or don’t.
I’m disagreeing because it wasn’t just the super-large, Imperial Chinese states that had bureaucracies. Those bureaucracies started back before there was a “China”, the seeds laid in much smaller states during the Spring & Autumn period.
I’ll argue that they weren’t the creation so much of large, centralized, *stable* states as of states fighting an ongoing Darwinian battle for survival and expansion, one which may well have depleted the supply of loyal aristocrats (to organize home & conquered territory) faster than the supply of commoners (I’m following Edgar Kiser & Yong Cai, in “War and Bureaucratization in Qin China: Exploring an Anomalous Case”, 2003).
How is “the only state that did it featured a richer and stronger government than the Roman Empire” not evidence that it was too hard for most pre-modern states?
But it wasn’t just one state, the one w/ a richer & stronger government than Rome. Those bureaucracies started back before there was a “China”, the seeds laid in much smaller states during the Spring & Autumn period.
I’ll argue that they weren’t the creation so much of an extra-large, centralized, *stable* state as of states fighting each other in an ongoing Darwinian battle for survival and expansion, one which may well have depleted the supply of loyal aristocrats (to organize home & conquered territory) faster than the supply of commoners (I’m following Edgar Kiser & Yong Cai, in “War and Bureaucratization in Qin China: Exploring an Anomalous Case”, 2003).
Shang Yang, Lord Shang, was a Warring States military strategist who I know mostly through the work of Yuri Pines. Start with The Book of Lord Shang: Apologetics of State Power in Early China, which is a translation of Shang’s book along with Pines’ long, extremely helpful introduction. Pines stresses that “Lord Shang” was really a school of thinkers, but I’ll talk as though he was an individual.
To oversimplify: Shang said, all these wars between civilized, Chinese-speaking states are terrible. The only solution, the solution we all agree on, is unification (notionally re-unification) of our various states in a single, peaceful state under a single ruler. But to get there will require military victory.
Like Dr. Devereau, Shang points out that armies absolutely depend on agriculture. Therefore, a great military requires a state with maximum agricultural output. All other enterprises should be discouraged.
Shang realized that, as Dr. D. says, a military reflects its society. He concluded that to get a better military *he needed to remake the society*, to use the power of the state in a totalitarian way to create a society with maximum military ability in the form of a peasant army.
The way you make a *motivated*, brigaded peasant army is:
a) equality before the law, no special breaks for nobles
b) nobles lose their land unless they fight *a lot*
c) have a ladder of military ranks, & peasant soldiers start going up it with every enemy head they present to official head-counters. Military ranks correspond to cilivian benefits: release from the very long list of possible punishments, *extra land*, larger houses, even more land, government offices …
In other words, given them a carrot, as well as a stick. And give soldiers, even peasants, a way to rise in social class through military service, that’s a thing people will fight for.
Lord Shang’s totalitarian solution was partially implemented by the state of Qin, which went on to conquer the rest of the Warring States and found the Qin dynasty, the first Chinese Imperial Dynasty, All Under Heaven. It only lasted 14 years, but it set the template for the next two millennia, the Imperial era.
Lord Shang and his Book had a really bad rep with conventional Confucian Chinese scholars, ostensibly because of his heartlessly draconian lists of crimes & punishments. Personally, I think what they *really* hated and tried to force into history’s oubliette was the class treason, the way Lord Shang said a great military–and a great society?–would let any peasant climb the social ladder as far as he could go.
I’ve been having a harder and harder time reading your texts, because I find your unnecessary use of bold and italics distracting. I have not seen one of your posts where your use of these has increased readability. Italicized emphasis is especially jarring when the style is also used by you for inline Latin, which due to your background, is often.
Literate people can parse emphasis from sentence and paragraph structure, as well as from word ordering. Please consider dropping this style.
Too much emphasis, maybe?
For my part I have no problem with it. Nor do I have any problem with using variations in font to stress certain ideas–an idea as old as printing, if not older.
Can you accomplish the same thing via diction alone? Sure. But it’s nowhere near as easy and often makes the language clunky and harder to parse.
I will give credit to the rhetorical device employed in your penultimate sentence. No insult or double meaning here; there’s an artistry to such things that deserves some appreciation. Poisons the well quite nicely by more or less stating that anyone who disagrees with you is of lesser intelligence (literally illiterate) and thus not worth considering. The art is in implying the argument sufficient to make it, but not stating it, because once you state it the flaws become too obvious. That something appeals to certain groups is not an argument to adopt it unless one assumes that the audience is limited to those groups, and that’s demonstrably not the case here, as evidenced by the intentional use of pop culture (“300”, LOTR, GOT, etc) as a gateway to discussing more serious topics.
My contention is that there’s no need to change the way he forms his sentences, because they already make the emphasis clear as written, and the bolds, italics, and bold italics are just distracting and detract from any point made. Long-form writing doesn’t need to learn from ad copy or comic book speech bubbles. He doesn’t need to attract the reader’s attention on the glossy opposite page of a magazine, or clarify emphasis in a tiny amount of space inside of an intense graphical environment.
“Long-form writing doesn’t need to learn from ad copy or comic book speech bubbles.”
Ah, yes, because as we all know those are lesser forms of communication, enjoyed by the unwashed masses and therefore unsuitable for use among those of us of good breeding and culture.
(“I’m detecting a hint of sarcasm here.” “That’s good because I’m laying it on pretty thick.” I need to watch that movie again.)
What you’re doing is called moralizing preferences. (And yes, you’re making a moral argument.) There’s a suite of options for how to achieve the desired goal; as long as the goal is achieved, there’s no reason to prefer one method over the other. You get smug sense of superiority, but it’s at the expense of being taken seriously by anyone who recognizes the pattern. Sorry, but I have no sympathy or use for such arguments. They’re super common in discourse about literature, and I’ve yet to see any situation where they are correct. Style guides for specific journals are one thing, but…well, a blog post isn’t a journal now is it?
Turns out people communicate in a wide variety of methods, and the number of attempts to translate the non-verbal parts of speech (tone, inflection, facial expression, even body language) into writing are extremely numerous and have a fascinating history. Bolded text has been used for something like 180 years, and italicized text has been used far longer, to give but two examples (it’s easier to italicize with a goose feather pen than to bold, though not impossible–see Medieval manuscripts). Color is often used as well–see any Bible. Even ideas like spacing and punctuation were not without controversy; they are mere attempts to convey things which are obvious in spoken communication, after all. Sophisticated and educated intellectuals should be able to determine this from the letters alone, amiright!
I’ve more sympathy for the classist aspects of your argument. English, since the Norman Invasion anyway, has been built to be classist. You can tell one’s class by one’s diction (“My Fair Lady” takes this to extremes, but it’s not inaccurate). When your entire language is built on a concept, it’s hard to break away from. That said, there are ample reasons to reject such nonsense. “We hold these truths to be self-evident” and all that, as well as the inherent racial biases (see the history of the IQ test).
One of the neat things about my career is that it’s put me in contact with a huge variety of people, from day laborers to foreign dignitaries, and what I’ve generally found is that people are people. A welder may not know Aristotle from Artemis, but most of the men in suits and ties I’ve met don’t know 316 from 302 stainless. What I’ve found is that most people are extremely intelligent and well-educated in their chosen fields–and that no field is inherently superior to any other. I’ve seen PhD physicists differ to the opinions of plumbers who failed to graduate high school, because the plumber knew more than the physicist.
More significantly: many of the essays on this blog are specifically built to use popular media (and let’s not pretend that you’re not equating popularity with low worth; that’s inherent to the classist argument you’re making) to pull people into a deeper understanding of history. It’s a remarkably good tactic–called “tangential learning” if you’re curious about it–because it takes something people are already interested in and expands upon it. The problem with education is always getting the student to care. Present the logistics of military movement in a dry, academic setting, and I’m unlikely to be interested. Present it using LOTR as a case-study, and that changes the calculus. I’m already an LOTR fan, so I’m already invested in the question merely due to the framing. Now the author of the blog is free to lead me, in gradual steps, from “Here’s how the siege of Gondor worked” to “Here’s how agriculture limits army mobility” to “Here’s how peasant households functioned”. And using some lower-class font choices helps with that. It’s a style that the target audience is comfortable with, that they understand and can pull meaning from very easily–which makes it easier to move from “Let’s discuss this movie” to “Let’s examine, in detail, how to make a dress starting with seeds”.
Brett,
Something that which confuses me about the Contractors and Colonels section.
You mention in that section that the state is paying the contractors to raise their armies. But my understanding is that in the societies we tend to see that structure there is still an aristocratic class which extracts rent (taxes) from the peasantry. Why is this noble class not expected to pay the funds to raise these forces out of pocket? Or do the two systems run in parallel? If they do run in parallel, how is enough surplus value being extracted from the peasantry to support taxes from both the aristocrat and the state?
I think the state could extract significantly more taxes than single noblemen by then.
“Why is this noble class not expected to pay the funds to raise these forces out of pocket? Or do the two systems run in parallel? If they do run in parallel, how is enough surplus value being extracted from the peasantry to support taxes from both the aristocrat and the state?”
One example is England between 13th vs. 14th century.
In 12th century England, a lot of land was held by knight service. Which meant that the Big Men were obliged to recruit, arm and supply a substantial number of knights in return for their land.
One problem with it was that the knight service tax obligation raised a large cavalry force – for 40 days a year. Which was insufficient for longer campaign. The king could retain the feudal host for longer… if he paid.
In 14th century, perhaps with Hundred Year´s War, the army recruitment changed to contractors. In England, the money was raised largely but not exclusively by taxes from landowners – the landowners (lords and knights of shires) voted to pay taxes, and themselves were liable to pay.
And the King indentured with military contractors… who were a large part but not all of the same Big Men.
Under the call of feudal host, a lord who was indisposed to fight, e. g. physically ill, still had to send out the same vassals under his banner, probably appointing a commander.
Under the indentureship system, a lord who was indisposed to participate in person might pay taxes, stay home and let his clients volunteer in the forces of other lords.
Note that this exact mechanism must have varied by kingdom. English lords were taxpayers. Scotch lords were taxpayers in principle, but most of time in 14th…16th century they did not pay taxes because nobody did, and instead were called to feudal host. French nobility in North France got a formal exemption from taxation in 14th century.
Surely someone else above has already noted that in the “regimental contractor” system, when the Colonel had been granted authority to raise a regiment (at his own initial expense), one way the Colonel paid the expenses was to sell commissions to the prospective officers? That was the system that remained in the British army thru the mid-1800’s, if memory serves. Officers had to buy their rank, both initially and when they wished to advance. They held a sort of equity in the regiment, selling their current commission in order to pay for a promotion.
This has been mentioned more shortly in the comments to the next blog post. I think the Britons stopped doing so because it became obvious it did not work anymore. That would have happened at about the same time as larger numbers of people started to realise that society and culture were actually changing.