This is the third part (I, IIa, IIb, III) 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. In the last part, we looked at the various ways pre-modern armies might mobilize their armies, a process that mainly consisted of recruiting and equipping soldiers. If you were wondering what about larger capital items (ships, artillery, fortresses, and so on), we’re going to treat those as part of this section because pre-modern states experience those problems primarily as financial costs, rather than as the products of a military-industrial complex (a thing which they by and large do not have).
So now that we have our recruits, we now have a bunch of continuing financial demands: we have to pay them, as well as paying for their food, replacements for anything that gets worn out on campaign, and so on. There are also larger capital costs associated with military activity: ships, fortifications, artillery, and armories (if any of the equipment is state-issued). All of that needs to be, on some level, ‘paid for,’ though as we’ll get to, we may need to think about payment a bit more broadly.
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).
Surplus Economies
Before we get into specific methods, I want to actually stop and have us think a bit about what we’re actually doing in all of this. As modern folks, embedded in highly monetized, largely capitalist economies, we’re really used to the way those economies solve this problem which is they pay people with money and we don’t normally think too hard about what is going on in the background of that process. But here it is helpful and important to think about the physical economy first, before the financial one.
We have a set of major costs (and some minor ones). The major items here are pay for the troops (which generally includes the cost of their rations and further supplies), which is the largest item, followed by a set of key capital costs, with ships, permanent fortifications (castles, city walls, fortresses) and in some cases artillery (be it catapult or gunpowder) as the major line items here. If the state is maintaining large armories of equipment, that also fits under this heading, though as we noted in the last two sections, most pre-modern polities do not do much of that.
From the perspective of the physical economy – the economy of stuff and people, rather than of money – what we are looking to do is create and support non-subsistence labor. Some of that labor (shipwrights, blacksmiths, etc.) is specialized and some of it (peasants stacking rocks to make a castle wall, green infantry recruits) is not specialized, but crucially it is not subsistence labor or labor involved in making consumption goods of any kind. We are thus looking to extract, in a sense, labor from the economy (we’re also looking for raw resources here, but for the most part, that’s also just a labor problem: we need people to cut trees to make timber, to mine ore so we can smelt metal and so on).
That means the polity needs to take people (the laborers) out of the subsistence economy – either long-term or short-term – and then subsist them, providing for their food, clothing and such because those laborers, removed from subsistence as they are, are no longer providing it for themselves. For specialized laborers, that may include long periods of training and effectively permanent specialization – a skilled blacksmith probably didn’t come from a farm and certainly isn’t going back to one. So the challenge here is mostly taking subsistence goods – food, clothing and so on – and moving them out of the agricultural, subsistence economy and re-tasking them to support non-subsistence laborers, especially specialist laborers.
We’re used to the monetized form of this system, where the state pays those non-subsistence laborers, who can then buy their subsistence needs from the broader civilian economy (the loop then generally being completed with those civilians use that money to pay their taxes). But as we’ll see, that is not the only way to meet these costs and indeed not necessarily even the most common way. So we want to think about this, in its most simplified form as a question about how we move food (and other stuff, including workers!) from the agricultural economy to military purposes which have no real economic value of their own (you can’t eat a fort). That’s our problem.
Now let’s look at some solutions. Naturally, these solutions also aren’t usually choices, but legacy structures, consequences of the way a society is organized and the options available to it.
Redistribution Economies
For societies that are not heavily monetized and where a fair bit of economic power is centralized in the hands either of Big Men, the King (the Biggest Man) or temples (which could function as Big Men), often the solution was to simply handle all of the economics in-house through a redistribution economy.
We can imagine this first in a small-scale: consider the position of a Big Man in an agrarian non-state polity. He controls a fair bit of land and has a lot of clients and peasants under his thumb, but his power in the broader polity (compared to other Big Men) is largely dependent on his ability to raise an armed retinue, the core of which are warriors he keeps in his own house (those vocational principle warrior aristocrats). Those men are probably going to require expensive metal equipment – swords, helmets, mail and so on – as well as horses and of course the Big Man has to sustain the men themselves. As aristocrats, those men expect a standard of living that includes ample food, relatively nice clothes and so on.
Now it might be hard for the Big Man to regularly buy all of that, because his non-state polity hasn’t developed coinage and isn’t heavily monetized in that sense, so it’s hard to strictly speaking pay a wage to a bunch of skilled craftsmen. But what the Big Man can do is bring those craftsmen into his household economy, providing them with the thing he has a surplus of – food (and also clothing, itself a product of the agricultural economy he controls) – in exchange for their labor producing finished goods. He can do the same for his warriors, meeting their subsistence needs directly out of in-kind rents (that is, a portion of the produce) of his dependents. At this small-scale, a lot of this exchange can be handled through a sort of gift-economy: the Big Man banquets his retainers and gifts their smaller households weapons and fine cloth out of his reserves, which are kept stocked by the extractions of his dependents.
For states, however this sort of system can be dramatically scaled up into what we sometimes term a redistribution economy or (when the key actor is – as is often the case – a king) a palace economy. This seems to have been the dominant economic system in the broader Eastern Mediterranean (Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Mycenaean Greece) during the Bronze Age. Under this system, much of the land (though generally not all of it) is owned directly by the king or temples (whose bureaucracies often serve as extensions of the king) and the tenants of those land thus owe substantial rents to the king, which are generally paid in kind. There is often a notional value for these things, calculated in weight in precious metals, but apart from long-distance trade, most economic value remains ‘book value’ – not a lot of transactions involve physical bullion changing hands (and coins won’t be invented in this region until the 7th century BC). What makes the monetary system work in many cases is that everyone has tax obligations to the king or temple, so debits and credits can be placed against those obligations.
The result is that agricultural products flow to the state through rents and taxes. Those products, in turn, can be used to directly support priests, bureaucrats and so on, but they can also be pushed back out to support craftsmen or other specialists. Alternately, they can be used to trade (Mesopotamian states seem to have often been trading their agricultural products for wool from the pastoralists on their frontier) for goods available locally. When the king needs unspecialized labor – soldiers or workmen – he can demand it from the peasantry and then simply credit the value against their future tax burden. In some cases, a certain amount of forced labor – what we call corvée labor – was simply an expected part of the tax burden: you owed the king a certain percentage of your harvest but also a certain number of days per year of labor maintaining public works (which might well include things like city walls or service as a local militia).
Such a system is naturally quite administratively intensive: someone needs to be keeping track of all of these transactions, which means these states need a significant literate bureaucracy, often (but not always) supplied by a full-time hereditary priesthood. This is also a really hard system to scale up, because of the micromanagement and administration it requires: when these sorts of kingdoms expand into empires, they generally do not directly administer their conquests, but instead rule through vassal kingdoms, so that what you have is the central ruler (with his palace economy) siphoning off tribute from his vassals (with their palace economies), creating rather fragmented large states.
I don’t want to dismiss this sort of redistributive system, but I also do not think it is an accident that once coinage becomes widely available, these sorts of systems become much less important. You can still have Big Men maintaining small versions of these systems for their household retinue, but it simply makes more sense to handle mass mobilization with coinage, once you have the coinage (and a coinage-based economy) to do so and let the market bear some of the administrative burden of organizing economic activity.
Taxes, Revenues and Payments
The option that is probably the most conceptually simple to a modern reader is to simply pay for it using money. Now I should note, conceptually simple, rather than simple in practice: actually managing wages for 20,000 soldiers (or hundreds of smiths or shipbuilders or timber-cutters or masons or what have you) is really quite administratively complicated.
But conceptually it is simple: you raise taxes, pay wages for your soldiers and laborers in coin and let the market do the rest. The problem is coinage and revenue.
To start with the first, for this system to work, you need an economy that is based around transactions with physical currency, which allows for low transaction costs in low-trust exchange. But a lot of pre-modern economies are not heavily monetized: coined money may exist, but it is often used primarily for long-distance trade and large-scale elite transactions. To be able to simply pay for everything in coin, the polity needs coinage to have penetrated down into the peasantry so that soldiers or laborers paid in coin can use it to buy food and basic necessities. That sort of monetization is not, I should note, a simple function of time: Greece from the Classical Period and Rome from the third century BC were sufficiently monetized for this to work, but many early and even high medieval European polities were not. If your peasantry do not use coinage, you will have to tax them in agricultural products (called “taxation in-kind”) which are a lot harder to move around and store than coins.
It is possible for a state to intentionally monetize an economy for the purpose of employing a coin-payment based system and the one of the clearest examples we have of that are the Hellenistic successors of Alexander: Macedonian kings coming from a coinage-based economy in Greece and Macedon found themselves ruling a largely non-coinage based (but vast and often wealthy) economy in Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia and responded with different strategies to convert that wealth into coinage. To simplify greatly, Ptolemaic Egypt relied on bulk exports (especially grain) into the coinage-based Eastern Mediterranean world to bring in hard currency, while the Seleucids in Syria and Mesopotamia minted a lot of coinage and then used colonial Greek-speaking settlement to create market towns where local peasants could sell their goods for money they could then use to pay taxes.1 But this was no small task: both processes took up multiple reigns to complete and involved the large-scale resettlement of Greek-speakers (the military settlers we’ve already discussed). A state needs quite a bit of state capacity to force coinage usage in this way.
The other problem is revenues: paying for everything is expensive.
Now I should be clear here: dealing with costs in non-monetary ways doesn’t make those costs go away. Someone, somehow has to bear the costs, regardless of if the state pays in grain or coin or tax remission or simply makes someone do it for free (in the latter case, the forced laborer is bearing the costs). In all of these cases, labor still has to be taken out of the civilian economy and it has to be subsisted while it does something military in purpose, be that soldiering itself or providing for military capital. Just because something isn’t paid for in money does not make it ‘free.’
However, it is also the case that the cash revenues of many states are both really complex and often quite limited. The thing to understand is that these are generally traditional polities with tax regimes that are also customary and traditional, which is to say that the ruler often has very limited latitude to simply change the system without triggering intense resistance. As a result, rulers often focus on developing revenues in the areas where they do have substantial latitude, even if those areas are smaller parts of the overall economy (remember: most of the economy is in farming).
A classic example of this, to get a sense of the general situation, was pre-revolutionary ancien régime France. France in the 1700s had a direct agricultural land tax (the taille), but by old custom, the First Estate (the Church) and the Second Estate (the nobility) were immune, limiting the revenue this tax could collect. However, the king had a state monopoly on salt and so the salt tax (the gabelle) become a core source of revenue for the state, to the further repression and impoverishment of the peasantry (who were required to buy a certain quantity of salt per year).
A lot of tax systems, when one looks closely at them, have these sorts of quirks. Roman taxes were, for instance, divided into two categories: tributum (a property tax based on land) and the vectigalia, which covered a wide variety of state revenues from things like renting state owned land or state monopolies (as on silver mining). Rates of tributum outside of Italy (where the tax wasn’t collected after the 160s, since the whole point of having an empire is to make someone else pay taxes) were often set by truly ancient tradition, with the Romans generally preferring (for reasons of local stability) to preserve whatever taxes existed before they conquered a region, merely redirecting them to the Roman treasury (the aerarium Saturni). But that too might mean that while Roman revenues could be vast, they could also be remarkably inflexible as changing tax rates on a region was a breach of tradition which could provoke instability (and was ‘being a bad emperor’ to boot!). The workaround of all of this was the emperor’s private purse: property of successive emperors becoming a parallel form of revenue called the fiscus (the word for a household’s private money supply, literally a box of cash in the house), which at least notionally could be a bit more flexible.
In short, these state revenues tend to be messy, complicated and idiosyncratic, the product of generational layers of both innovation and stubborn tradition. But even as an economy grows, state revenues may stay stubbornly static.
Moreover, outside of the smallest citizen communities, collecting taxes requires significant administrative capacity: you need bureaucrats to track the economic activity you want to tax and a legal and enforcement mechanism to compel extraction. Consider, for instance, a sales tax charged on something like auction sales (as with the Roman centesima rerum venalium tax, a 1% sales tax on auctions which under Augustus partially funded the retirement bonus for soldiers): now you need an official present at public auctions, recording the transactions and calculating the tax liability. You need that official in every major city where such auctions take place.
Now of course that official might also have other duties, but you still need a guy and he needs to be literate (because this process needs to generate written records) which, as you will recall, is not a ubiquitous skill. One solution to this administrative burden is tax farming: the state sells the right to collect a certain tax (for a certain time) to a private business who then collect the tax. The state thus gets a portion of the revenue upfront without the hassle of administration, while the tax farmer gets to pocket the difference between the tax collected and the money paid for the right to collect the tax. The downside of this sort of tax farming, of course, was rampant corruption, since the tax farmer has every incentive to over-collect the taxes in his remit. Even if the tax farmer was perfectly honest – and they most certainly were not – the entire nature of the arrangement is one in which the state is forgoing certain revenues (the profits of the tax farmer) simply to avoid the hassle of collection.
All of which is to say many states found their cash revenues quite limited: they might have economic activity happening in the underlying economy which could be taxed, but due to either lack of administrative capacity, lack of a coinage-based economy or due to traditional or customary constraints, the state found itself unable to effectively tax that activity. Relatively strong states, as we see in China or with Rome, might muscle through these problems and thus handle most or all of the expenses of their armies in cash. But for most states, which didn’t have nearly as much administrative capacity – not to mention non-state polities, which had even less – it was necessary to shift some of these costs off of the state’s balance sheet. Which leads us to:
Devolution
When the state shifts an expense downward to individuals or communities, we say that the cost is devolved on to them. Devolution is thus a strategy for shifting costs off of the state balance sheet and given the above discussion, you may already be able to see the value: for a polity that has a lot of economic activity happening which (because of low administrative capacity, sticky traditions or a lack of coinage-based economics) it cannot effectively tax, devolution provides a means of shifting military costs directly onto those economics actors.
In historically-inspired or fantasy worldbuilding, this is a strategy that is often both neglected and unintentionally evoked. It is neglected in that it is rarely explicitly placed as part of the system: no one says, “oh, the town guards have to buy their own equipment” and generally the town guards never look at motley as they ought if that were the case. On the other hand, the basic nature of the ‘adventuring party’ involves a lot of devolved costs: the state needs monster hunters, but it expects those hunters to equip and supply themselves and often doesn’t do much to pay them (though part of this is ‘payment in loot,’ discussed below). But cost devolution was very common and worked on both smaller and larger scales.
Conceptually, we can break this idea down into three categories, based on upon whom the costs are being devolved. We can thus distinguish between individual or household devolution, where the costs of war are devolved onto individuals or their households, Big Man devolution, where costs are instead devolved into wealthy members of the elite (often, but not always, for bigger ticket items) and finally communal devolution, where costs are devolved onto a whole community, like a town. Naturally in each case the thing having its cost devolved is going to vary – you will not get very far asking a single peasant household to support the cost of a warship or castle – but you would be surprised just how much can be devolved in this way. And again: the purpose of devolution is to move costs down into the underlying economy, so the state does not have to bear them directly – this is especially true if your society has no state to bear the costs at all, making devolution almost a necessity.
When it comes to individual or household devolution, the most common forms by far are requiring commoners to furnish their own military equipment or serve at their own expense. The Roman Republic neatly provides an example of both: Roman citizen-soldiers were expected to buy their own military equipment and then to serve at a rate of pay probably around one-third of the Mediterranean norm for heavy infantry military service. That is a fairly extreme example, but this sort of devolution shows up all the time: peasant levies expected to bring their own (generally cheap) weapons, for instance. It is implicit in the ‘brigaded households’ mobilization model: the reason you are brigading the households is so they can afford one properly equipped infantryman between them (as well as to be able to spare his labor). Note that this isn’t just devolving buying equipment, it is also devolving the cost of a soldier’s labor, by underpaying him such that his household essentially bears the cost of his lost labor: the difference between what a state would pay a mercenary or professional and what it pays a militiaman is a devolved cost.2
That said, the recruitment principle matters a fair bit here. You can compel farmers to reach into their own resources a little bit, but if you want them to really dig deep for a war effort, they need to motivated by something beyond compulsion. Systems that devolve heavy infantry service – which demands a considerable investment in armor – are generally entitlement-principle recruitment systems. We see this with the hoplite armies of ancient Greece, the citizen-militia armies of the Roman Republic and also the heavy infantry militias of many medieval towns: what gets these men to work harder in order to afford to be able to shell out for that expensive equipment is the fact that their status in the community and their political position in the community are connected to it. Polities that are unwilling to devolve any political power to the commons are going to struggle to get the commons to buy expensive equipment or be highly motivated on the battlefield.
Taking one step up, we then have what I am going to call Big Man devolution, although in this case we’re thinking really of devolution to the wealthy, who may or may not be Big Men in the sense of being able to independently wield force. It’s not hard to see the appeal of this approach: Big Men are, almost definitionally, invested in the political system which backstops their power and wealth, there are few enough of them that the state can monitor their compliance directly and most of all they have a lot of spare capital. Because they’re very wealthy.
The most common and least intense of this kind of devolution is generally self-funded elite cavalry service, which shows up in a bewildering array of agrarian societies. Essentially, the wealthy are expected to fight on horseback, their social status is often tied directly to this combat role, but the polity or state expects them to provide their own horse, their own equipment and train on their own time to be effective at this task. This is the most common way that pre-modern agrarian cavalry forces are mobilized. There may be some state support here (it is a good idea for the king to have spare mounts), but it is often quite minimal. In essence, this is the same principle as individual devolution (devolving the cost of service and equipment), except for much more expensive cavalry service.
But we can go bigger.
What about devolving the cost of maintaining a warship? In Classical Athens, while the state paid to build triremes and pay rowers, the cost of maintaining the ship – and to be clear, this is a c. 35-40m long ship with a crew of roughly 200 – was born by a trierarch. The cost was a ‘liturgy’ – a compelled state service assigned to rich citizens. So each year Athens selected, from its wealthiest citizens, trierarchs for each of its triremes, who would then have to foot the bill for maintenance and then command the ship in battle (though they have a specialist helmsman for the tricky bits). Needless to say, the costs were burdensome: triremes needed continuous maintenance to remain seaworthy and trierarchs were also responsible for making sure they had a full crew (even if the state paid them), which could mean additional costs getting or retaining rowers.
But we can go further than that: early modern European navies well into the 17th century made extensive use of multi-purpose ships, mounting guns and marines on merchant vessels to make up the bulk of the fleet, organized around a handful of purpose-built ‘royal ships’ functioning as flagships. The state thus essentially conscripted its merchant marine – ships and all – when it went to war and while ship-owners might expect to be paid for their ship’s time and risk, in practice a lot of the costs here are being devolved onto ship-owners.
What about the cost of an entire military unit? We’ve really already covered this, noting that Big Men often outfit out of their own resources a whole retinue: when they were called up by the king to fight, they would bring their retinue with them. We have a decent amount of evidence that in Iron Age Gaul and Germany, this might extend to providing the weapons necessary to arm their peasant clients to make a larger infantry force. We can even understand medieval castles – the fortified manor homes of Big Men – as, in a way, devolving the cost of fortifications. Those castles, of course, enhanced the power of the Big Men who owned them, providing them protection against local rivals and also leverage against the king (do you really want to spend the time to siege me?), but they also served as the defensive network of the kingdom itself.
Finally, we have devolution to entire communities, most frequently towns. The socii system of the Roman Republic provides a remarkable example of this system: the Roman ‘deal’ with subject communities in Italy was that they provide troops for Rome’s armies, but that process was entirely managed by the socii who were expected to provide their troops in cohorts (units of c. 480 men) with their own officer and paymaster. The socii thus made whatever internal arrangements they cared to to manage the selection of soldiers, their wages and equipment. Some socii, the socii navales were even expected to provide ships (generally lighter ships) in lieu of troops. But this kind of devolution was hardly unique to the Romans: the Schuttersgilde militias of the towns of the Low Countries functioned similarly, as they could be pulled into the service of the army of the town’s liege (from 1384 to 1482, this was the Duchy of Burgundy).
The advantages to devolving costs are substantial: the state is able to forgo the administrative burden of collecting the tax revenue and at the same time, shift the cost of raising military force off of the ‘balance sheet.’ However devolving the costs of warfare downward in this way almost always means devolving political power, to some degree, downward as well. It is not an accident that the very effective systems of individual devolution tend to be citizen-communities with entitlement-based recruitment. Likewise, state formation is often a process of moving away from Big Man devolution towards other forms of raising force as a process in which military power is centralized in the state. Meanwhile, for non-state polities where power is highly fragmented, devolution is often simply the only way to support military activity.
Loot and Foraging
The other way to shift costs, of course, is to shift them onto the enemy or at least whoever is unfortunate enough to be in the proximity of the army. What I would stress here is that it is very rare that a “war will feed itself” (Cato the Elder’s words, Livy 34.9.12-13; bellum se ipsum alet).
We should distinguish here between three categories under this broad heading: foraging (the process of extracting, often violently, supplies from wherever the army happens to be), loot (the taking of moveable wealth, including prisoners, during operations) and indemnities (the practice of forcing the loser to pay you as part of the peace settlement).
We’ve discussed foraging in some depth already, so we can be brief here: for pre-modern armies, foraging was essentially required in order to operate in hostile territory. Even in friendly territory, armies often extracted their supplies through requisition or ‘forced purchase’ (compelling peasants to sell food, often at below-market prices). All of these practices shift the cost of feeding and supplying the army onto the population around it, albeit at the cost of doing some damage – potentially very significant damage – to the underlying rural economy. One of the real challenges that standing armies posed to states that sought to build them was the need to arrange for their permanent supply in peacetime without having those armies essentially tear up friendly rural communities. Communities in the Roman provinces would even pay large bribes to avoid having legions quartered on them, because having twenty thousand armed young men dropped on your town was quite robustly disruptive.
Taking loot, meanwhile, was an expected part of nearly all pre-modern warfare and so the promise of loot was a regular inducement for service. What I want to note here is that the promise of loot was almost never sufficient inducement: it was very rare for armies to serve only for loot. Instead, promises of loot were layered on top of other recruitment principles: loot and pay, loot and social status, loot and a role in the community. And that should make sense for two reasons. First, loot is never guaranteed, it requires winning, which generally only one side is going to do. Indemnities – which unlike loot, flow entirely to the state, rather than at least partially to individual soldiers – require winning the war and imposing a peace and again, only one side is generally in a position to impose indemnities (and often neither side is!).
Second, loot and indemnities are often insufficient. Armies are extremely expensive creatures, capable of devouring enormous amounts of wealth simply in order to function and so even the most spectacular windfalls are often insufficient to support an army long-term. Alexander took all of the wealth, built up over two centuries, of the Achaemenid Empire, one of the largest conquest-windfalls ever managed and by all indications he was at least in sight of running out of money – if not already out – when he died. The combined loot and indemnities Rome imposed on its enemies after running the table on the rest of the Mediterranean powers in the third and second century BC were staggering and also only covered about 75% of Rome’s military spending in that period – Rome’s spectacular run of conquest was still a net cost.3
In short, the one-time blast of loot is generally not enough to sustain the armies used to do it: for that, extraction has to be repeated and regularized, which is to say it must stop being looting and must instead become taxation or tribute, which neatly returns us back up to the first two options: tribute in-kind (with redistribution) or taxation in coin.
This is something, I will note, that RPG-economies (both table top and computer) get quite wrong. The problem is three-fold on the one hand, these games invariably underestimate the cost of simply subsisting even a small adventuring party. Food and basic clothing consume quite a lot of resources in a pre-modern context, but that would be irritating to players and so it is often ignored or the cost reduced massively. Second, the loot gained is often over-valued, with itemization systems that fail to take into account that an old, busted hauberk pulled off of a corpse is not going to command the same market value as a shiny new one, freshly crafted to order.
But most importantly, these economies fall apart because they assume an insane amount of fighting and an absurd ‘win rate.’ Recall that, for an aged hoplite, having been in three battles was quite a respectable number even in a very violent period in ancient Greece. By contrast, your typical Dungeons and Dragons adventuring party has been in three battles before they unlock their subclass features at level 3. Moreover, most of the combatants on the losing side of a battle typically flee. In a battle between two armies of 10,000 men, we might expect the winning army to have lost around 500 men (5%) and the losing army to have lost perhaps 1,500 (15%), so that is 9,500 survivors splitting the loot of 1,500 fallen (2,000 even if they’re willing to rob dead comrades). So while your D&D party or Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord company sustains itself by splitting the loot of dozens of foes for every party member, in an actual army, you’re lucky to get your ~1/6ths share of a fallen foe.4 Loot is still a factor, but one cannot expect to run an army on it, long-term.
That said, loot distribution can have interesting distorting effects even if it isn’t enough to relieve the whole burden of running an army. Loot is a high-variance sort of thing: many soldiers get none, but some soldiers, if they are lucky to be on the right campaign, might get a great deal, potentially enough to alter their social position and status. Again, this simply cannot happen to everyone in a society, but it can happen to select individuals. Some of Alexander’s soldiers did get rich off of his conquests and certainly some Romans did too, although it is worth noting that in most societies, the structure of power channels looted wealth upwards: most of it ends up in the hands of the elite (as was certainly the case for both of those examples). Often this was institutionalized, with the proceeds of conquest being distributed in shares based on rank, with higher ranks getting a larger slice of the pie.
What I want to pull out here at the end, however, is that once again these systems are sensitive to the nature of the underlying society. It takes a strong state with a lot of administrative capacity and a coinage-based economy to simply pay all of its military bills in cash. Such states certainly existed, but they were hardly the most common type in the pre-modern period. Instead, we see a lot of polities making a mixed use of all of these strategies. The Roman Republic, for instance, mostly devolved the costs of its armies, but paid its soldiers a wage (which allowed it to recruit poorer landholders, expanding the assidui, the class of men liable for conscription) largely out of tax revenue (the tributum), while also sometimes imposing contributions (effectively taxes) in kind (often in grain) on some of its conquests and directing that food directly to its armies. And of course the Romans absolutely engaged in looting – systematized and centralized, because these are Romans – with the rewards of a successful war shared out among the soldiers by rank.
On the flipside, for certain societies, some of these options are not really available. Societies that lack much in the way of coinage are going to struggle to pay for anything in cash (though some expenses may be handled in bullion) and so may rely more on devolution or in-kind redistribution. Non-state societies aren’t going to be able to manage much large-scale redistribution or taxation and so are going to rely on fragmented systems, mediated and devolved through Big Men. Meanwhile, highly centralized states often are able to devolve fewer costs: if the peasantry and local communities have been made to give up all of their political voice to a centralized state, then that state better also be able to provide most of its military force.
So as we keep seeing, the political and social structure of a society also dictates quite a lot about its military structure. In the next part, we’ll turn to the structures of military leadership, where this axiom will be as true as ever.
- On the Ptolemaic system, see von Reden, Money in Ptolemaic Egypt (2007). On the Seleucid system, see Aperghis, The Seleukid Royal Economy (2004).
- Technically, there’s probably also a skill premium involved as well, but it is important not to overstate that skill premium. The Hellenistic mercenary paid three times what the Roman legionary was paid was not three times as skilled (he was generally less skilled).
- Taylor, Soldiers and Silver (2020), 128.
- The absolute apotheosis of this is Henry from the Kingdom Come: Deliverance series who, because he spends the game personally slaying hundreds, if not thousands, of knights and men-at-arms (and then reselling their equipment), likely accumulates a quantity of money which would crash the entire medieval Bohemian economy. He was hungry indeed.
Interesting you mentioned DnD loot, because I know early DnD expected DMs to impose costs on players so that they always had a reason to keep going into dungeons. It was an explicit part of the game that a party was always on the edge of running out of resources. Now I never played those versions of DnD, but I’ve basically always found myself doing the same thing. I remember when I first watched Vox Machina I was shocked at them getting loot in the thousands of gold pieces, because, well, why would they keep adventuring at that point?
So yeah I basically do say, look we’re not going to keep exact track of all your food and general supply costs, but understand that it is a constant drain and I am just keeping those costs and the money you budget for it separate from the other stuff you’re doing.
Original TSR D&D didn’t really have a way to ‘keep score’ that would aid strangers in comparing their characters. AD&D somewhat allowed you to treat total XP as a score, WotC Third Edition standardized leveling costs so that you could use character Level instead of mathing out the XP totals; Hasbro D&Ds seem to tie bragging rights to gear and other loot, what can you expect from a toy company?
You have to keep in mind that for a decent slice of D&D specifically, that loot has to be re-invested in magical equipment to keep up with the expected performance of their level. A higher-level D&D adventuring party (in some editions) is a ludicrous concentration of combat capital. 3rd edition is especially associated with this.
This may have been less true in the early editions where they wanted to sink the money into your level-up expenses or funding a higher level character’s associated territorial domain instead.
The progression fantasy structure makes ‘why not retire’ a bit of an unreasonable objection though. By the levels where characters pull in that kind of money, they are also high-value experts with in-demand abilities that could easily be leveraged into more regular subsistence if they wanted to stop fighting orcs in subterranean 10’x10′ rooms for a living.
It’s also traditional at this point that adventurers aren’t in it for the money but are chasing something else. If you’re after an ancient McGuffin that might help save the world then you’re not gonna stop just because you’re filthy rich.
Given that early D&D was explicitly running heists based on Conan and similar sword-and-sorcery, we should consider how many of those stories begin with a variation of “Hero X had been living the high life but now his purse was almost empty”, necessitating the next adventure. In other words, it was assumed that, between sessions was the “spent my reward on ale and whores” portion of the program – you even see Conan doing it in the first Schwarzenegger movie!
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th edition has made this a game mechanic. You loose all your cash between adventures to various things left to the GM and player to narratively embellish (living the life and regular cost of living being part of it). Characters also have a day job though and usually start adventures with an amount of cash from that (provided they do the income in between adventures endeavors) and can spend any money on stuff before it all gets lost as well as do few other things with it.
I ran an Iron Heroes campaign in college that used the so-called Conan rule. The only way to gain XP was by blowing money on luxuries & frivolities that had no in-game benefit.
That 1100 XP to reach level 2? That’s 1100 gold spent on gambling, carousing in taverns, and making it rain for sex workers.
When the party was finally broke & sober, it was time to go back into the dungeon, find an evil temple to loot, maybe a bit of brigandage or piracy, until they could afford the next round of revels.
Makes sense. D&D was heavily influenced by Conan and Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser who conveniently blew all or most of their money between stories on frivolities like that, but a D&D player can simply state “My character abstains from such vices as they’re saving up for a +1 sword”.
The interesting thing to me was how delightfully mercenary the players immediately became.
The only mechanical benefit to fighting was to value of loot on the bodies or being offered as a bounty.
If combat could be bypassed and treasure still plundered, then getting into a fight was just wasting resources on consumables, equipment repairs & healing that could’ve been blown leveling up.
I gather that old school DnD players insist that was how the game was meant to be played. (Old school ADnD gave experience for loot as well as for monsters killed.)
Depending on settings probably. Many more JRPG inclined ones (with the most blatant one being with actual RPG game mechanic inherent in the worldbuilding) explicitly give quantifiable experience from fighting and killing stuff. So if someone just want to level up their skills, engage in more battle might be preferable.
In ODnD, it was intended for loot to be the reward and monsters to be the obstacle – if you wanted to get stronger, you ideally found a large, weakly protected treasure hoard and got that out of the dungeon with as little fighting as possible. Monster XP were meant to be at best a consolation price. To ensure that, Gygax had to errata the ODnD rules in the Greyhawk expansion, reducing monster XP by as much as 90%.
Later versions did not follow suit, and of course the default mode of play these days (5e and 5.5e) usually features no mechanically awarded XP at all, just level-ups at story-relevant moments.
As a DM, I always devolved that responsibility onto players.
“Here’s the adventure. If you don’t want your character to go on that adventure, I understand and I hope you find something nice to do with your afternoon.”
This also works for why your players should come up with characters who generally try to cooperate. Sure it will be really fun for a bit to be a too cool for school lone wolf while the other players try to find a way to include you. But their patience will run out sometime between ten seconds and ten minutes and then you’ll need to start frantically backtracking if you don’t want to be left behind.
Amusingly I once had the won’t play nice with others problem come from the GM. They really liked the setting and wanted to make sure they got everything according to the lore. So they spent like an hour shooting down every idea we came up with because they didn’t think the ideas were lore compliant. I’m a fan of the setting (Blades in the Dark) but the setting doesn’t do any good if you don’t get the show on the road. It at least gave us a good running gag for a few days where my girlfriend would suddrnly go on a spree of declaring everything not close compliant.
Should be noted that eg. WHFRP in 4th edition explicitly does this: You can save *some* money (at the cost of an “endeavour”, which is a kind of downtime activitiy thing, but that means you’re not doing something else, like training skills, doing research, etc.) but the expectation is that between sessions anything you haven’t spent will be gone.
To what extend adventurers are supposed to hang on to money is something that depends somewhat on the version you’re looking at.
As others have pointed out, the ur-games did feature money sinks. Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign both had the rule that money that becomes XP for leveling up has to be spent on something “frivolous” (there was a whole system about Special Interests that dictated how efficiently that could be done), while money spent on gear and consumables did not grant XP. In addition, the Blackmoor dungeon was money-positive since it was meant to be an intermediate step: By going into the dungeon, character acquired the money to be able to hire and pay an army, and join the wargame campaign around Blackmoor as part of Team Good or Team Evil. So the dungeon in the money source, and the army the money sink.
The Original DnD boxed set scuttles the Special Interest rules, leaving the question of which money awards XP up to the individual table. However, it still retains the wargame money sink, in that high-level characters were expected to build and fund a holding of a type appropriate to their class (Castles for Fighting-Men, Churches for Clerics and Wizard’s Towers for Magic-Users).
This wargame high-level money sink dropped out by ADnD already, and left the game with a legacy of dungeons being profitable, but not much to spend the money on. Up to 3.5e, the solution became the wealth-by-level table, which baked certain assumptions about how many magical items (and thus extra bonuses to their major skills) an adventurer was supposed to have, which forced adventurers to shill out the money on magical items if they wanted to keep up with the CR of the monsters.
But then of course DnD 5e scuttled that with its principle of bounded accuracy, which meant the straight +X magical items and their effect on the game balance disappeared. I’m not sure if there is any money sink left, or if people have become so inured by video games that they no longer think about the fact that their characters effortlessly amass more wealth than they can ever spend.
One interesting thing I once observed is that no matter what edition of DnD one talks about, a feature that is always missing in the economy is the player characters acting as patrons. They can’t post a quest to ask a lower-level party to please take care of the rats in the basement, or even comission a craftsman to *make* a magical weapon according to their needs.
The army/holding stuff was just moved to the back of the DM’s manual in AD&D where no one read it; the example of PC knight’s basic castle fief gives a budget of just under 3k GP per month. More extensive rules for holdings were available for purchase by players or DMs later in AD&D’s publishing cycle and again for 3rd and 3.5; I assume more recent editions also sell PC castle supplements, but I stopped buying.
Regarding the newer editions, I very much doubt 4e had anything about it, and for certain 5e didn’t either until Bastions were introduced with 5.5e. However, the Bastions are not a money sink, they’re handed out for free during level-ups and come with an explicit guarantee that they are economically self-funding. And just like the ADnD castle rules, they of course are completely ignored by the published adventures.
(In all fairness, the advancement from roleplaying game to wargame was dysfunctional even in Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign itself. No wonder it atrophied so quickly.)
All of which illustrates the very Marxian point that if you change the economic foundations everything above changes, which is why a lot of fantasy looks like a socio-economic chimera. Not that a consistent world with magic need resemble a Marxian utopia.
As you might expect, 3rd Edition rules for army/unit combat and mobilization were also for sale.
I’m guessing a lot of tables ignored the army money sink because there are a lot more people interested in playing a single character in an RPG than are interested in running an army in a battle.
Which is why D&D today is much more popular than any tabletop battle system (except possibly W40k, though I doubt it), and why Skyrim is still played today and only the Civilization series even comes close in player population.
The system as written likely would have stayed as an almost unknown niche interest if everyone insisted on keeping the army part.
I had a lesson in that when I ran the Kingmaker series of adventures for my table. One of the players was aggressively uninterested in anything other than roleplaying his single character, and it caused a bit of a crisis. We did get over it for that series, but I wasn’t going to introduce “domain” level play after that.
The character motivation is not coin and cost of living in combination with status , i mostly use it as a monthly fee
When it comes to loot, I would have thought the big score a historical soldier might have been contemplating is robbing a city, town, farmstead, or (should sufficient religious conditions permit) a temple, far more so than other soldiers of their gear. Which is also something that RPGs tend to discourage, even for ones where you play the bad guys, I would note.
>Which is also something that RPGs tend to discourage
Well, (traditional) RPG tend to encourage PC to go and pillage dungeons instead, which might be, depending on the circumstances, the equivalent to a town, a farmstead or a temple, or some combination thereof.
Dungeons feels like the perfect excuse of a location where there is a pile of wealth, guarded by things players won’t feel morally conflicted to slaughter, compared to say, a town of people. There are many settings where Dungeon just “appears” and/or is more akin to natural landmark, rather than something built up by years of labor and resources, and then to be a pinata to be opened with some violence.
It essentially becomes a sophisticated mine
My post-apocalyptic world has something in between real life mines and RPG dungeons. These consist of ruins of modern cities. A considerable number of cities have remained partially inhabited all the time. But there are many others which were abandoned for at least some time. Some coastal ones have been largely flooded by the rising seas like Lagos and New York. Others were unable to function without modern infrastructure like Brasilia and Canberra. Yet others are found in areas unsuitable for intense agriculture. Either they never were or they became due to global warming. However, if it is possible to bring there enough supplies for a mining town such cities can become one.
In the Middle East there are several cities which surrounding countryside has became unsuitable for intense agriculture. The ones I can come up with are Aleppo, Amman, Ankara and Damascus. All these existed in Antiquity. By restoring Roman era infrastructure it is possible to get in enough water for small mining towns. Some of this water is used for growing fresh fruit and vegetables in what used to be parks. Chickens can eat leftovers and pests. Goats can live on what grows around the ruins. Other supplies are brought in by camel caravan. These then bring back what is extracted from the ruins after the camels have eaten enough for their journey to the coast. This means metals and glass smelted or melted using plastic as fuel. The people doing the relevant tasks view them as their job although nothing prevents them from being proud of it. Taking things out of the ruins is risky as they might collapse on them. On the other hand there are no monsters. The worst that can happen is accidentially treading on some poisonous snake. Such are not even particularly common.
It did strike me, watching “Fallout”, that something vaguely similar would be a very good in-game explanation for why there are all these dungeons around.
Say there was a global war (nuclear or similar) centuries ago, the people on the surface had a tough time of it for a few decades, but now they’ve rebuilt and things are generally peaceful. But there are all these deep bunkers around the place, built to shelter the rich and powerful during the war. Some of them are empty – never used, or emptied years ago. In others, all the inhabitants died out long ago, so there’s lots of potential high-tech loot. But in others, there might be automated cyber (or weird biotech or cyborg) defence systems, and/or surviving and/or revived cryo-frozen inhabitants, who might even now be thinking about coming up and reclaiming the surface lands that they think are rightfully theirs. *And* valuable high-tech loot.
And you can’t tell which is which without going into them.
So if you’re a bright young surface dweller with a high risk appetite, you could do worse than meeting a party of similar types in a tavern and going into business…
The possibility of dungeons being explained as underground bunkers ha been discussed on Mythcreants (https://mythcreants.com) but I don’t remember more exactly where.
It’s worth remembering a good suit of armor could be *really* expensive—even if you can’t get retail price, it’s still potentially quite valuable, and it’s the one thing you’re basically guaranteed to find when looting the enemy camp (at least facing a peer or near-peer competitor rather than a peasant revolt).
I’ve actually noticed a trend where RPGs will explicitly say the weapons and armor of dead orcs has *no* resale value, I guess because that makes it easier for GMs to precisely control party wealth? Seems very weird and ahistorical though.
“It’s worth remembering a good suit of armor could be *really* expensive—even if you can’t get retail price, it’s still potentially quite valuable, and it’s the one thing you’re basically guaranteed to find when looting the enemy camp (at least facing a peer or near-peer competitor rather than a peasant revolt).”
Are you sure?
In case of battle, was the camp likely to contain appreciable amounts of loose good quality armour, especially whole suits? Or was nearly all of the armour in the army being *worn* by the soldiers, most of whom ran away?
“(at least facing a peer or near-peer competitor rather than a peasant revolt).
I’ve actually noticed a trend where RPGs will explicitly say the weapons and armor of dead orcs has *no* resale value, I guess because that makes it easier for GMs to precisely control party wealth? Seems very weird and ahistorical though.”
Battle of Visby mass graves. A peasant army, but not a peasant *revolt* – they were mobilized on behalf of their king.
Their armour was worthless and therefore buried in mass graves. Except the helmets, which the corpses consistently lacked.
Visby wasn’t typical, most of the time armor was removed. Apparently the bodies started to rot before they could be stripped, or so the explanation goes. Another one might be time and weight; the king had to sail again soon, and taking a few thousand extra hauberks was possibly untenable. There was nowhere else to resell the goods and nowhere to desert to; Visby is an island city.
In general we know looting was lucrative and worth the time.
A better point might be resale; there’s not always an easily accessible market. Even if you have a chain set that might be valuable enough to take turning this to coins is another matter. You might end up giving it to the blacksmith to use as patch work or iron ore. This doesn’t make the armor worthless, but it does stop you from turning three hundred chain shirts into a thousand gold pieces, nominal value or no.
Note that while the bodies weren’t stripped entirely, some bits (like helmets) seems to have been removed. They just didn’t bother pulling off the actual chest armour.
“Visby is an island city.”
Actually, Visby is a city on an island. Even today with high urbanisation the actually built-up area takes up only a tiny fraction of the island of Gotland.
In a more specific example, we know that ransoming captured aristocrats’ armour could net a considerable sum.
A more important issue is probably that it’s difficult to offload “normal” armour: The guys you can sell it to is probably other soldiers, which are precisely the guys doing the same thing and probably not having much more money than you do…
If you have time there’s the advantage of being able to sell to town militias and local big men looking to fit their own troops, but you still run into the problem of having to offload a relatively hard to sell good to people who will only need it a half dozen times in their lives, as a near maximum. If you don’t have a stable place to store your stuff, this is a problem.
Realistically soldiers almost always had to offload anything not premium or easily portable quickly, meaning they had to sell to one of the camp followers whom specifically traded in loot and hence had sharply depressed prices.
Most looted iron is going to be recycled, but all preindustrial refined metal is valuable. There were many places that could only make steel objects if they had used iron and steel to work with, so even though iron ore is relatively common taking some was worthwhile if you could carry the weight.
I though it was the captured aristocrats themselves being ransomed. Their families or higher-ups would pay to let captured aristocrats free.
Being a conquering army possibly makes some aspects of offloading armour worse, given you’ve just spent a great deal of effort depriving the local markets of said armour. Obviously this varies by local method of recruitment and equipment, but for some forms of military, selling the armour of a defeated army to it’s state may have the problem of having essentially gone some way to undoing the victory that got you the armour, as you’ve essentially just given the locals back the really expensive bit (finding young men with a desire for violence against their conquerors doess not seem to always prove very difficult).
Was this before or after Gotland joined the Hanseatic League? Visby definitely became a place at one point with an extraordinary capacity to move goods on and off the island for trade, but it was also rare in Sweden for importing wood. I’m not surprised helmets, which can be resold without remanufacturing if they’re not too fancy, were taken while things that would’ve needed a forge to salvage were left behind. It does point to a manpower shortage, as if the victorious army did not stick around looting and the defeated army represented a critical portion of the local population.
Visby was a part of the Hanseatic League at this point, but the battle wasn’t against the City but against a peasant levy raised by the rural Gotlanders. (who had a… troubled relationship with the city)
The danish king had invaded the island and fought and massacred the gutnish levy, at which point the city of Visby surrendered. (allegedly they watched the battle from the city walls)
IIRC the traditional explanation is that it was hot and the corpses were starting to rot at an alarming rate so they just threw them in a mass grave.
Sensible, as the Battle of Visby took place in high summer.
Heh reminds me of RimWorld where a second the body died, their clothes are all “tainted” and can’t be sold
And all weapons have a 0.2× modifier slapped on the sale price to discourage making a profit off of looting raiding parties.
Though since RimWorld explicitly scales raid strength with colony wealth and anything on your map is counted as part of your wealth, it’s also a way to prevent the player from winning one battle, coming into a windfall of loot, and getting utterly curb-stomped by the next raid.
yes because of anatomic reasons i believe or no true warrior would think so low but in some cases like Warhammer the loot from some factions like Chaos is too dangerous because it may corrupt the character.
In IIRC Zweihänder Orcs procreate by Infection
While not an RPG, this reminds me of Rimworld, where to prevent player wealth ballooning, all weapons and armor get a 20% resale price, and then another reduction for armor stripped off of corpses. This happens when a 80 man raiding party leave 40 corpses on player colony’s door step, packed with helmets, vests, assault rifles and rocker launchers.
Actually doesn’t work to prevent player wealth ballooning, because the game tracks the true value of the item for determining the colony wealth factor in game difficulty. If you don’t have a plan to quickly dispose of dropped weapons and tainted armor you can get into a difficulty spiral that wipes you out. Dead bodies also have a wealth value. Ruins placed on the map during map creation do too, but only the ancient furniture is really a problem, walls and floors *do* have a value discount that’s used in calculating colony wealth.
I presume that looting a temple in most D&D worlds would be a risky endeavour.
most of the time, but it can get worse
In the published settings, gods do die fairly regularly.
Vikings targeted churches, both for persons and portable wealth (altar vessels and other sacred items), or market towns, often taking ransom rather than loot. Danegeld was pretty substantial and, from the coin hoards in Scandinavia, a lot of wealth filtered down to peasant level (a lot is Abbasid coins derived from the Volga fur and slave trade, but mercenary work in Constantinople was also lucrative).
Entertaining to imagine the “liturgy” system as applied today: “Congratulations, Mr. Bezos, you have been assessed for the maintenance of the USS Gerald R. Ford for FY27!”
And to command the USS Gerald R. Ford in any battle that happens in FY27, apparently.
This of course would push Bezos to urge for war, so he can command the carrier and hopefully win.
After all, your position relies at least partly on being a winning commander. How else would you get to the top offices of state?
Yeah, it’s different when all the consequences are considered, isn’t it?
Well, as Triarch, Bezos would have to live on the ship and stay on it during battles. He could just bring his yacht alongside. That might change his calculus for pushing for war.
Is Bezos pushing for war?
Considering what the munitions cost, I think his accountant might vigorously advise against that.
The thing is certainly expensive in peacetime, but way more expensive when you’re flying sorties off it.
Maintaining a ship in war is more expensive than maintaining the same ship in peace. And Bezos also has to consider the risk to his own person. Being on a ship in combat isn’t that safe.
In the modern world, starting a war by randomly invading greenland isn’t popular. Winning a stupid war you started for no reason is probably not great for a political carreer.
Also, does Bezos even want to go for a political office, or would he prefer to go back to being Amazon CEO.
You can look to his comments on how much he hates running the Washington Post newspaper to understand how he would feel about running a critical naval vessel.
My original comment was intended to point out how different the circumstances would have to be to make liturgy actually feasible.
You would have to have a society where you advance in politics by being martial. So you get more status by being known for being able to do this.
Lots of money doesn’t do anything by itself, and clients would come to you for support only if you have a reputation not only for being rich but also for protecting your clients – by beating up others who have wronged them.
The Romans were famous for this. The Greeks less so, not because they weren’t doing it, but because they lost to the Romans.
We don’t have a modern state analogy really, at least not legally. The British regimental system where you raise a regiment and get a title is probably not too far away from that, but that system died in the 1800s as far as I know.
Organized crime, where you pay up the ladder for permission to operate, is probably the closest system still in place.
I think it was ultimately abandoned because it became obvious that ability to pay no longer correlated with competence.
Still, a thought of Bezos being stuck on a carrier for a few months in Arabian Sea is pretty funny.
While liturgies don’t really happen any more, Bret’s above framework does give an interesting way to look at modern philanthropy. Basically, instead of going through the effort of taxing the rich and using the money to fund welfare, the state devolves that cost by expecting rich people to fund a non-profit organization (and encourages it with tax benefits) which provides welfare in their stead. However, this has ceded political power to the rich, both in that even in the best of cases it means a rich person is in command of a welfare apparatus they can extend or withhold according to their political desires, but also in the worst case of the non-profit organization being a political lobbying group that has no function except to push and proliferate the political ambitions of their donor.
Absolutely. The Western liberal tradition is a very devolved political apparatus. When I think of the named foundations, names on hospitals, etc., I always think of Roman liturgies like the Baths of Hadrian and so on!
And the political capture that enables, especially at the local level with big developers, is atrocious.
I’d argue that western liberal tradition is only balancing the extreme centralization modern state has. Old non-states have even greater devolution just by technological necessity.
True; of course, making a historical analogy between premodern and modern states is always iffy (as our Host has pointed out before with the costs of war, there’s just a rupture or transformation in the historical continuum when we’re talking about the modern world).
By balancing act do you mean ‘a balance between the pros and cons of state centralization and those of having a separate civil society sphere?’
This is a system built by Nixon, to do precisely what you note that it does.
It does not help when the rich have no idea of how life is for their employees or spend no though at the need for infrastructure. Both seem to be common among the US super-rich.
Not quite true re: infrastructure –
You’ll often hear Zuckerberg saying we need to build more power plants so he can build more data centers for Ai 🙂
This sounds like something for his own profit.
“Why would I need infrastructure? Don’t the plebs take a helicopter from their super yacht to their mansion upstate?” – Super-Rich Douche TM
Your comment sounds like a parody. However, the super-rich seem to take it for granted others have economic recourses which in reality don’t exist. They are expecting virtually everyone to have what to me looks like upper-middle class resources. That people poorer than this not only exist but are commonplace is a possibility they don’t spend a thought at.
The super-rich use infrastructure without thinking about it. Things like plumbing, electricity and even telecommunications are taken for granted. There was a time before any of these existed. If they are not maintained they would sooner or later break down. A lot of Americans with political power either don’t know about their need for maintenance or have insufficient resources for this purpose.
It was intended to be parodic, certainly, but you’re correct there’s a psychological gap at play. Combined with the (North) American attitude of, “If you’re poor, you must not be working hard enough” – so infrastructure that benefits the lower third of the socioeconomic spectrum like public transit is not *really* necessary because, “why would spend money on the undeserving” when the morally and economically successful own cars.
There are many other factors, of course; there’s some research that shows certain levels of wealth just seem to break a person’s brain… They can lose empathy, they lose a lot of self-awareness, and they lose sight of reality (if they weren’t already a sociopath to accumulate that much wealth in the first place).
The American attitude you describe is based on believing relatively low wages to be much higher in absolute terms than really is the case. This is part of far too many Americans’ unawareness of other people’s situation. Which I think in turn is largely caused by insufficient education on the workings of society. However, it seems plausible that too much wealth can go to someone’s head.
One problem with this is that in actual practice, the rich do not donate nearly as high a percentage of their wealth to charities and non-profits as we would think. Often they do not even donate as high a percentage of their income as the poor do, especially when you factor in voluntary labor performed by low-income people for charitable activities such as church events.
Elon Musk may brag about donating $5 million to a foundation, but it’s worth remembering that unless you are yourself quite wealthy, $5 million to him is probably a lot less significant than one dollar would be to you. You wouldn’t brag about giving ‘a whole dollar’ to charity, especially if you only did it at most once every few weeks.
That’s definitely true – and hasn’t it always been the case as well?
Even a wealthy Roman naming a bath house is not immiserating himself, he’s bragging about his wealth and buying public prestige and status.
It’s as if we should just have a progressive taxation system and charities shouldn’t (and can’t) effectively replace public services…
Too many Americans probably believe they could for ideological reasons. I reality there are gaps they don’t think about.
Note that devolution has been a thing throughout history. It happens today.
The British regimental system was a consequence of most of the regiments being set up and equipped by various aristocrats who could afford to do it.
As for contemporary devolution, consider the “unfunded mandate”. Where a higher level of government says “You must do this, but we aren’t providing any money to do it with.”
Yeah, devolution as a framework for understanding governance decisions is one of those ‘once you see it, it’s everywhere’ things. Not only are unfunded mandates devolution, so are ‘block grants’ where the higher level of government provides funding for a stated purpose to a lower level but forces the lower government to take on all the administrative burden of spending the money.
Devolution is a sticking point of politics for Northern Canada. Allowing the Territorial governments and the various First Nations band offices to exercise greater administrative control over how local resources are managed is a pretty big deal.
A corollary to that sticking point is the administrative expertise still needs to be built up within Northern Canadian polities to actually manage the money efficiently over the long run – the lack of what would have been those temple-trained literate bureaucrats! (a.k.a. university-trained finance and MPA types today!)
I don’t mean that the administrative burden shouldn’t be devolved, only that I hope that the territorial and band governments have the administrative capacity to ensure they aren’t overwhelmed by deep-pocketed resource extraction companies.
I think often of the Menominee reservation in Wisconsin, which is the only place in Wisconsin that has unified County and Municipal governments (all other land in Wisconsin is assigned to either an ‘incorporated municipality’ or an ‘unincorporated municipality’ that is overseen by a County (rarely, two Counties)), and is also the only place where a Tribal government is unified with a County government. Unsurprisingly this is one of the most routinely fucked-over jurisdictions in the country.
Out of curiousity, is it being ‘fucked over’ due to discrimination, or is there an issue with the consolidated county government system specifically?
Defenders of the situation would say there’s no racism involved; however this is in the USA, so the 1950s architects of the plan to excise the reservation land from the counties that had been responsible for it were certainly racists even if they did not consciously understand that their effort to segregate local governance was driven by their racism.
As in most of the USA, the increased local practical sovereignty and the segregation (both of a minority population and of poverty) are used as justification for State and Federal governments to reduce material and service support.
Welfare in Ontario has been mostly devolved to the cities. Certainly the province isn’t paying the whole shot.
True. Homeless shelters and/or other (better) ways of addressing homelessness for one! Incredibly expensive and devolved onto municipalities. Municipalities that are legally “creatures of the provinces” and provincial governments (Ford, Houston) keep *actively undermining* by stripping away revenue sources (denying property tax increases) or deregulating (banning bike lanes, giving the green light to developers to screw over lower income renters).
what joy.
It also has an interesting place in American historical politics. Its late 18th century statesmen wanted their new polity to run on an entitlement-based self-equipping model, to the point they sold off the Navy and wrote laws (including the Bill of Rights) with this model in mind. They quickly learned why not having a navy is a bad idea. On land, it took some more wars (and more importantly, the industrial revolution) to successively move to armory-issued equipment (ACW), to central recruiting (WW1), to keeping a serious army in peacetime (WW2). By which point, rewriting the laws written with the militia model in mind came to be seen as too annoying to bother with, and so they were left in place.
I mean, I see re-establishing the entitlement-ish model of the militia as a positively *important political project*, as an American citizen I explicitly want to not give up that power.
(and it’s more than just “annoying” — I don’t think there was ever a time when actually abolishing the Second Amendement was on the table without at least heavy controversy, and the window probably closed semi-permanently around 1970).
The 2nd Amendment didn’t mean what it means today until very recently, with decisions like Heller. Colonial Boston had a urban gun ban that was not struck down by the adoption of the Bill of Rights, as did other places.
Repeal of the 2nd Amendment may be a viable solution to beginning to address gun violence in the USA, but a motivated Supreme Court could simply reverse precedent and return the government’s power to distinguish between legitimate defensive armament and offensive weapons and dangerous toys.
I think any such regulations on the federal level are stopped by interest groups consisting of poor-judging individuals insisting they themselves must have guns.
I really don’t think this is true; I am pretty confident that the historical record shows that Heller restored the original understanding of the Second Amendment of the bill of rights (although it maybe did universalize that understanding in a way that hadn’t been that formally universalized before).
I would generally view repeal of the Second Amendment as fairly similar to repealing the First Amendment and promulgating a state religion. This would be a tremendous transgression on a traditional basis even if theoretically legal.
To a first approximation, legitimate defensive weapons would mean the typical and ordinarily issued weapons of the American police and infantry, which would include the semi-auto handgun, the semi or full auto rifle, and so on.
Also, it is more correct to say that such regulations on the federal level are stopped because they simply are not as popular as their supporters would like them to be.
@Hoffnung no, the historical record is clear that the second amendment never meant to arm everyone. It was specifically worded in a way that devolved responsibility to the state militias so that states could maintain them, and that’s it. Individual rights to bear arms were considered and ignored, in part because black freedmen and even slaves would obviously petition under any such amendment, and the founders were alternatively terrified of this or just didn’t want that smoke.
As for public support, kinda. For one, Americans are idiots . The same pollsters that show 60% support for the second amendment can produce polls showing 60% of Americans don’t know what it is. The ability to manipulate a poll to produce a favored outcome is a time honored tradition amongst pollsters, and there’s astounding money in ensuring that no reform of the second amendment is implemented. A perception that public opinion is unanimous is a strong bulwark against reform.
The part that makes Americans idiots isn’t any part of this-manipulated polling is insidious-but rather that they trust polls released by interest groups despite this.
For two, there’s a belief that repealing the second amendment would trigger a civil war, which is just not supported by evidence, but believing this makes the second amendment too dangerous to repeal.
And finally there’s beliefs, like yours, which vaguely gesture at the second amendment as being somehow foundational to democracy like the first. The mechanism is unclear because it can’t possibly be true; many democracies have no right to bear arms but none lack freedom of religion and very few lack explicit protection of speech. The few that do are demonstrably vulnerable to authoritarian backsliding, a trend not demonstrated by the right to bear arms.
If you believe that repealing the second amendment would end democracy you wouldn’t want to repeal it, but it won’t so that belief is vulnerable. Hence support can be categorized as strong but brittle; it relies on public opinion manipulation and falsifiable pretenses.
From the text of the 1792 Militia Act:
“Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective states, resident therein, who is or shall be of the age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia by the captain or commanding officer of the company…That every citizen so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter,How to be armed and accoutred. provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein to contain not less than twenty-four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball: or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder; and shall appear, so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise, or into service, except, that when called out on company days to exercise only, he may appear without a knapsack.”
Later modifications expanded this out to black people, and then others.
Hoffnung is right. You and Terry are wrong.
Deal with it.
@60guilders this text actually definitely proves my point.
First, that’s effectively a national conscription system which is gated through the militias and, critically, *a law*, arising from a military conflict, enacted in war. It’s simply not relevant to if the founders imagined arming everyone when they wrote the second amendment; they *certainly* thought they were (within reason) when writing this law, but the very fact it’s separate is evidence the second amendment doesn’t do that. It allows for it, but that isn’t for debate.
But most telling…this law denies freedmen and blacks the right to bear arms. Well, to be technical this just doesn’t let them serve, but separate state laws restricted gun ownership at the time and this obviously shows Congress accepting this.
It doesn’t matter if the constitution was changed later. This indicates the founders thought the second amendment could be limited by law. *How* is legally irrelevant, the fact of its restriction proves that it never established a universal right to gun ownership, and the founders were perfectly fine with excluding classes from ownership.
So… that’s it. The second amendment cannot establish a personal right to gun ownership in intent. The best remaining argument is that the 14th establishes that uneven implementation of such regulations to be unconstitutional, but outside of specific cases involving regulations being applied unfairly, that doesn’t restrict firearm bans. This is what makes the recent hawaii case defensible, even ignoring a second amendment argument. Limiting someone’s rights for legal drug use is unconstitutional under the fourteenth.
Notably, that also doesn’t make Heller defensible. It’s legislation written by the court and legally emblematic of the complete mockery of justice embodied by the modern court.
Public opinion is never “unanimous”. I don’t think Americans in general are stupid. My problem is too many of them being so poorly educated they don’t know the limitations of their own or other’s capabilities.
@Terry:
“That every citizen so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself (emphasis mine) with a good musket or firelock… and shall appear, so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise,”
I realize this might have gotten lost in the wall of text, so I’ll excerpt this bit here. As you can see, the state did not provide the weapons, but the citizens did, and said citizens were supposed to have them ready to hand, not locked away in an armory.
Your argument has been disproven.
Oh, also, this was enacted in 1792–what war was the United States fighting at the time? Just out of curiosity.
@60guilders The Whiskey Rebellion Militia Acts were written as a response to the ongoing war in the Old Northwest against a Native American confederation supported by Canadian forces, and passed after Congress became afraid that Trans-Appalachian settlers who had armed for that conflict would start their own war against the Federal Government in response to the whiskey tax as what became the armed insurrection in 1794 was already engaged in distributed violence and revolutionary conventioneering.
But anyone seeking to use these Acts as proof that the initial Federal Government intended this legislation would establish universal gun ownership must address two historical realities:
First, why didn’t the (white, male subsection of) the American population respond to this law by becoming universally gun owners if that was the intent of the law?
Second, why was the law never *enforced* as a universal gun ownership requirement if that was the intent of the law?
Terry’s point that the Act’s wording (which you then re-quoted with emphasis added) specifies the nature of the weapons that conscripts should have available concedes somewhat to your perspective that it’s a universal gun ownership requirement, which is incorrect; but I would still also like you to address why the Act thereby *violates* Heller.
@60guilders you’re not addressing my point. Please try to engage honestly.
To clarify, again, the law is *irrelevant* because it is *a law*. It was enacted in response to the whisky rebellion, and the political context was not separate from that instant, nor uncontroversial at the time-but irregardless it doesn’t imply the second amendment armed everyone. All it implies is that Congress can require gun ownership. No one disputes that Congress can do that(1), but the question is if Congress can restrict gun ownership. The only relevance a law has to the Constitution is that it establishes the intent of the founders, but this doesn’t do that.
The more interesting point for this debate is is the law acknowledged the state laws restricting gun ownership on race implicitly, without challenge, by conforming to them in this act. The founders were thus aware of them and thought that the second amendment did not supercede them, as they wrote such restrictions as fact in a federal law. Hence the second amendment, as understood by the founders, allowed for restrictions to gun ownership; it was at least compatible with them. And, as raised elsewhere, the law also imposes regulations on what weaponry should be owned.
Again, the presence of free black citizens whom were denied gun ownership proves that the founders believed the second amendment did not provide an individual right to bear arms. You might want it to do otherwise, but it doesn’t.
1) but see debate on conscientious objectors, which was relevant to this act even at the time but largely regulated by the states.
@Endymionologist:
“First, why didn’t the (white, male subsection of) the American population respond to this law by becoming universally gun owners if that was the intent of the law?”
Because Americans, like most people, do not engage in activities they find to be costly or inconvenient if they think they can get away with it. This isn’t hard.
“Second, why was the law never *enforced* as a universal gun ownership requirement if that was the intent of the law?”
Because the late 1790s were an era of low state capacity. This, also, is not hard.
@Terry:
On the contrary, it does. The Militia Acts make it very clear what their understanding of the militia was, and establishes that it was the people, with their personal firearms, that they owned and kept in their homes.
As to your objection that this did not apply to free black people, I fully acknowledge that, at the time, the rights outlined in the Constitution were not applied on an equitable basis by any stretch of the imagination; that does not mean that said rights are not there.
As to your accusation that I am engaging in bad faith, that is your business, but given that from my perspective the words on the page are pretty clear in their meaning I find your stubborn insistence that they do not to be in similar vein.
@60guilders,
The new government did enforce laws though, including on the far side of the mountains. You are correct that state capacity was limited, and many things could not be *successfully* enforced, but Congress did not pass laws that it did not want enforced. On the contrary, they passed the Whiskey Rebellion Militia Acts *because* enforcement of other acts had been attempted unsuccessfully. You really can sort out the intent of the first few Congresses by what attempts were taken in enforcement; it is the case that the part of the law you cite was only intended to establish what a called-up conscript would have to bring with him, not to create universal gun ownership. We know from how the law was immediately used.
@Endymionologist:
It’s certainly fair to say that the Founders weren’t dedicated enough to the idea of universal gun ownership that they were willing to expend state capacity in order to have it; my issue is with the idea that they didn’t consider gun ownership to be an individual right. That is utterly ahistorical.
To 60guilders:
Good point! The belief there is an universal right leads to far too many handguns being owned single individuals. Which they then use to kill imaginary enemies. Or more often themselves as it is easier to get access to handguns than psychological help.
@Lena Synnerholm:
I think you misunderstood me; I do think the Founders considered gun ownership to be an individual right.
As to suicides, I don’t think it much matters whether you have access to firearms or not; if you want to do yourself in, you’re going to do it. It’s not that much harder to off yourself with a kitchen knife than with a pistol.
I hope you agree it is a problem that people with no grasp of the limits of their own judgement ability – and having faulty belief on what others can and want – have easy access to guns? Those are the ones killing others as imaginary threats. Oftentimes they are the same ones believing that if they themselves lose the right to own guns they would lose the rest of their rights too. I don’t think anything such has ever happened.
@60guilders
“On the contrary, it does. The Militia Acts make it very clear what their understanding of the militia was, and establishes that it was the people, with their personal firearms, that they owned and kept in their homes.”
This is the most common definition of a Militia and the one the founders obviously supported, yes.
Is your assertion that because this law musters all white citizens it implies the founder considered every white citizen a member of the militia at all times? That does not follow. Again, this is a *law*, not an amendment. It is definitionally transient and changeable, characteristics not shared by an amendment. The militia would be differently defined and administrated before the law and after it, within the founders lifetime.
That something *can* be done within a constitutional framework does not mean it is the *only* thing that can be done. The Militia Act of 1808 instead armed the Militia from federal armories, but federal armories aren’t an inalienable part of the second amendment.
I will, as an aside, note that that change was actually controversial too. No one was quite sure how to actually implement national defense. The founders might have naively expected the first militia act to actually result in universal compliance and a functioning public militia, and its failure and the subsequent political debate about what to do was helped define the early political parties.
This does show that there wasn’t really one interpretation of the second amendment. The founders likely had different intents, and certainly different implementations. But simultaneously that weakens the maximalist argument just as much as if there was only one, and it wasn’t Heller; Heller can’t restore the founders intent if the founders intent was divided.
“As to your objection that this did not apply to free black people, I fully acknowledge that, at the time, the rights outlined in the Constitution were not applied on an equitable basis by any stretch of the imagination; that does not mean that said rights are not there.”
That’s undoubtably true, but it is also consistent with them not believing that the second amendment granted an individual right to own arms to people. That some right to self defense for “the people” exists is undisputed, but is this a right of the people individually, the states, or the body politic in general? If some people are excluded one of the other interpretations is favored.
“As to your accusation that I am engaging in bad faith, that is your business, but given that from my perspective the words on the page are pretty clear in their meaning I find your stubborn insistence that they do not to be in similar vein.”
We’re talking now. It’s only bad faith discussion if there’s no actual engagement on the ideas being discussed.
@Lena Synnerholm:
I do not, actually. Legal gun owners commit unjustifiable homicides at a rate below that of the general population, not above it; the vast majority of gun homicides are committed by people who possess guns illegally.
@Terry:
That the definition of “militia” might be mutable is something I am willing to grant; however, since the 1792 Militia Act clearly outlines how the militia was conceived at the time of writing, I find it rather odd to claim that an individual right to bear arms was not intended by the writers of the 2nd Amendment, since at the time they at least paid lip service to the idea that it was not just a right, but a duty, for citizens to arm themselves.
As to the fact that this was applied in a racially inequitable manner, again, I cheerfully concede that the founders of my country were oftentimes inconsistent in the application of their principles. That does not mean they did not have them.
“Legal gun owners commit unjustifiable homicides at a rate below that of the general population, not above it; the vast majority of gun homicides are committed by people who possess guns illegally.”
Might this be because they are acquitted by juries which members take it for granted it was always in self-defence? A considerable fraction of the American population believes those different from them –especially members of visible minorities – to be out to destroy for them. Such could well be overrepresented in certain parts of the country.
@Lena Synnerholm: This is also not the case; the ratio of justifiable to non-justifiable homicides and the ratio of legal gun owners to illegal gun owners is such that your proposition is mathematically impossible.
What makes gun ownership illegal? If this differ between different states what is the most common?
“I find it rather odd to claim that an individual right to bear arms was not intended by the writers of the 2nd Amendment, since at the time they at least paid lip service to the idea that it was not just a right, but a duty, for citizens to arm themselves.”
It is odd. There’s no disputing that, the second amendment stands out amongst the others in the bill of rights; they all have their quirks, but only the second and ninth define themselves in terms of a community or organization.
The reason it’s so strange is that the founders weren’t in agreement. Individual gun ownership was a concept then, a right to own such arms was lobbies for, but largely ignored in favor of more coached language. In the process they failed to right a coherent, timeless right.
That’s why I think the second amendment is actually a mistake. Not in some liberal ban the guns sense, but in the sense it insufficiently defines a right and hence both encourages anti social behavior via gun fetishization (which is just a manifestation of mental illness) and gives too much room for actual transgress onto the right of defense.
It legitimately doesn’t do what it was intended to do. The nexus of popular resistance to tyranny hasn’t been gun owners, and when insurgent movements do arm themselves the second amendment hasn’t been upheld for them. And the USA has had several insurgencies that are generally vindicated by history, such as John Brown’s rebellion, the coal miners from the Battle of Blair Mountain, or the Black Panthers. I’m not going to really get into a defense of those organizations here, by the by, except to say that as time goes on we tend to become more sympathetic to those whom resisted systems we recognize as unjust in hindsight.
“I do not, actually. Legal gun owners commit unjustifiable homicides at a rate below that of the general population, not above it; the vast majority of gun homicides are committed by people who possess guns illegally.”
Be cautious of trusting statistics about gun ownership, crime rates, and self defense. A lot are just lies; the Kleck survey still gets cited, despite suggesting there are more gun self defense incidents than there were violent crimes in America in the year it occurred. If taken seriously one is forced to conclude that gun owners are threatening unarmed individuals constantly, which is itself the actual crime, but the real story is that Kleck did some mathematical jumbo wumbo to turn a bad survey into a nonsensical estimate.
Point being, the data is bad in general and lots of people just lie on top of that.
As pertains here, legal gun owners *might* commit fewer crimes, but the line between legal and illegal ownership blurs as more guns get added to the system. Legal guns getting loaned, sold, or stolen end up showing up as illegal guns, but they obviously started as legal; very few guns enter circulation because someone tossed a gun store. There’s also the domestic violence to murder pipeline, which can result in someone bring classified as unable to own a gun because they’re abusive right before they use that gun to murder a family member (or go on a spree killing). Point is that the way legal guns become illegal guns is more important than the gun ownership at time of shooting.
All this said; I’m actually for an unrestricted second amendment, out of practical concerns. There’s simply too many weapons in circulation and too high a chance of widespread social collapse or government violence. Gun restrictions have been and will be weaponized to oppress, and while a broad disarmament would be better for everyone, there’s insufficient government trust (because the government is insufficiently representative) for that to happen, so it’s better that the law be evenly applied.
I just don’t think the second amendment does that sufficiently. At best it works with the fourteenth to maybe accomplish the goal.
Good you pointed out that “60guilders” referred to a poorly conducted study.
It would appear that the “entitlement model” has been given up in America. Switzerland has it. Israel has it. Finland has it. The United States do not.
I mean, that is why I seek to reestablish it.
So you want mandatory conscription? This is what Finland, Israel and Switzerland have.
Universal conscription of citizens who do not arm or equip themselves is not the same as the “service as price of entitlement to citizenship” model practiced by Greek hoplites or whatever. In Finland, conscripted soldiers are not expected to supply their own equipment and people not eligible for conscription (e.g. because of physical infirmity) still have the same legal rights as citizens who undergo the conscription process.
Modern industry and changes in weapons technology have made the “entitlement model” largely obsolete, as the weapons that make a modern military effective are generally infeasible for private individuals to personally pay for and maintain. Importantly, the required equipment is diverse and complex. It is not enough to insist that every adult male citizen maintain his own spear, armor, and shield for the village muster to be effective as a heavy infantry formation. Who’s paying for the mortars? Who’s going to show up with the drone jammer and the training to use it to cover the unit from getting pecked to death by random quadcopter bombs?
This isn’t unsolvable in theory, but in practice the complexity, combined with the fact that unlike in ancient agrarian societies, skills like literacy are now ubiquitous, makes it so, so much more efficient to just tax the population to raise a budget and hire and train all the military specialists you need (optionally conscripting them but that only matters as a marginal thing).
@Simon_jester,
The silly flippant thing to say regarding modern equipment and skills is that you may just not know very interesting people in the space.
A bit more substantial thing to say is that, for all of the technology that has emerged since the late 19th century, none of it has made “bunch of guys with rifles and shovels” unimportant, and it doesn’t look like it’s happening in the immediately foreseeable future as much as drones have transformed things in Ukraine. Meanwhile, I think that a wealthy industrial society where large fractions of people are experienced with somewhat complex electronics is capable of providing… competency with somewhat complex electronics.
(a mortar also isn’t the asset I would have selected for being totally out of the reach of devolution to citizens.)
And, like, in these historical settings different parts of the military definitely came from different places (heavy infantry from levies or entitlement systems or other systems discussed, cavalry from warrior aristocracies along a few different lines, artillery and logistics from premodern state apparatus.
The political side of this is that the system you have described and that we have currently is also one that can pretty effectively disempower people, even while remaining democratic.
I *would* note that, while it is nothing like America, Finland is one of the countries in Europe where private ownership of modern small arms is fairly normalized.
Good you pointed out the difference between modern conscription and the entitlement principle of Antiquity. The person using the signature “ad9” seems to have conflated them.
Part of the issue with dnd in particular is that the relative cost of dnd items. About the only thing comparable to high level magic items in cost are mansions and large ships, which are basically between 2-10 times inflated off real prices; a sailing ship is generically 10000 gold, translating to around 4000 pounds in 1400 money by weight, while a seafaring vessel could generally be expected to be 1000-2000 pounds. This makes it clear we’re about an order of magnitude off real values.
The real issue then comes when you relate this to magic items. A legendary item can be expected to cost around 100000 gold, minimum. This well and truly dwarfs any medieval cost utterly; for comparison the 1400 era yearly state revenues if France translates to about a million ducats, which are about half the weight of a dnd coin. So 500000 gold. This basically means a single legendary item is worth about half the yearly revenue of France in this period.
Obviously, this completely breaks logic. Some magic items can almost finagle this into coherence by saying they’re Apollo program level expenses with similar uses; interstellar gates, a staff of the magi, etc. are game changers on the level of a space ship or a nuclear device, sure. But others are standard +3 items; 15% better than a regular suit of plate armor. Given that these are effectively special forces equipment they are utterly irrational valuations. It’s not so much that they might not be that rare, but that you would never treat them as being of that worth. You can literally equip a large army for that. And no matter how strong you are, a large army beats one guy with +3 armor.
The only things worth that much in medieval Europe were king’s ransoms, or as we’ve detailed fleets are comparable, as are armies. Land might compare, but even then it’s debatable if any quantity of that value was ever for sale.
Hence the traditional sink of dnd gold, magic items, suggests an insane economic valuation. The loot amounts naturally follow from the irrational costs, but the costs don’t make any sense and never could.
In terms of realistic world building the solution is to lean into non monetary payments; you don’t quest for a king’s ransom, you quest for a royal pardon, or a lordship, or land ownership, or a heirloom, and actual money is only occasionally useful for buying things. This won’t work for videogames unless it’s a core plot point, but it’s rational enough for tabletop play.
As for “adventure”, consider that it is high-risk, uncertain reward activity.
An employer who *could* afford to pay the adventurer up front but who has difficulty monitoring honesty and competence of the effort could well require the effort to be on the adventurer´s risk and cost and pay for results. In which case, even a competent adventurer cannot start the adventure unless he´s able and willing to cover up front the cost of making a honest effort and failing, or manages to find an investor other than the final employer who´s able and willing to take the risk.
For example privateers. If attacking enemy ships is risky and brings little loot (because what´s out there is warships, and treasures stay safe at port) then it would be tempting for the sailors to “patrol” empty seas, avoid meeting the enemies and collect salaries from King. Speculative investments of “No purchase, no pay” are popular even if the navy could afford to pay upfront.
Or adventures whom can go kill a monster without an employer and therin ride the glory into gainful employment. Wannabe social climbers, basically.
In general it would make sense if most adventurers only went on a single quest-they either die, or come back having proven themselves and get elevated to the man at arms class by the local authorities. “That guy that killed a hobgoblin chief once” would be an obvious pick for a sheriff, retainer, or other martially inclined job (even if his combat style isn’t martial in the dnd sense).
On that note the obvious other pathway is that if there isn’t a social pathway to give these people gainful employment they’d do what privateers often did; drop the fancy union jack and start robbing civilians and state noncombatants for goods instead. This was extremely common amongst privateers; either they secured relatively high social status or turned into independent contractors and outlaws.
Basically, adventurers should interact with society. Shocking advice, I know.
Oren Ashkenazi has written on this subject too:
https://mythcreants.com/blog/five-destructive-myths-perpetuated-by-roleplaying-games/
“Land might compare, but even then it’s debatable if any quantity of that value was ever for sale.”
Indeed. Some notable high price land sales from Middle Ages include sale of Cyprus, in 1191. Lionheart to Templars. Total price 100 000 bezants, of which 40 000 upfront and 60 000 to follow as instalments – but considering the aftermath, apparently instalments not paid. And sale of Estonia, in 1346. Denmark to Teutonic Order. Price 19 000 silver marks, apparently paid (and used to pay mortgages of parts of Denmark) – but Teutonic Order had seized Estonia 3 years previously.
A +3 armor is not “15%” better than regular armor. If an orc hits you on a 17 or better in regular armor, it will hit you only on a 20 with +3 armor, which makes it so that you are hit four times less (1 in 20 instead of 4 in 20). If you were expected to defeat a mook conga line of 4 orcs in normal armor, you can now be expected to defeat 16 orcs, making you 300% more effective in combat. (Other enemies with other to-hit makes the math different, it’s all situational. But +3 armor is a huge advantage.)
If the edition of dnd you’re playing doesn’t make crits auto-hit (like AD&D 1E), then a +3 armor can make a well-stated fighter have an AC so good that they are invulnerable to normal attacks. Such a fighter would in fact single-handedly defeat a mundane army. In such a game a +3 armor is a game changers on the level of a space ship.
Depending on the edition those orcs can bypass your armor by grappling you for instance, but yes, you might be more than 15% more effective from 15% better armor. The issue is that this doesn’t fit the scaling costs in any rational way. An adventurer in nonmagical plate already has most of the advantage of being impervious to attacks from those orcs, the additional benefit from +3 is minor compared to the original +8. You’re already well protected from that type of threat.
To put it another way; from a societal perspective, any problem that can be solved by a man at arms in +3 plate can be solved by a man at arms in nonmagical plate. From a personal perspective, any problem you could solve with +3 plate can probably be solved by equipping your own private army.
It’s a classic fence fallacy where building the fence higher doesn’t stop someone from digging under it or walking around. It’s actually worse, because every additional “foot” of fence (+1 ac) is almost exponentially more expensive.
All this said some less extreme investment might happen; as a good example, giving a wizard plus two ac (bracers of defense) isn’t that expensive. If my wizard feels safe enough with that plus two AC to go into the midst of an enemy formation there are all sorts of heinous things I can do to them that I couldn’t when I was safely a hundred feet away, which could easily trigger a rout. Hence some low level investments might make sense, in the same way it made sense to bling out your personal retinue with the best armor and horses in real life, a small force of elites *can* have oversized impact.
I’m not suggesting the entire dnd economy magic item is stupid, merely that the scaling of the economy once you reach higher levels, and thus start running into ludicrous loot hauls, is.
Your math is just off, as I explained in my previous comment. Going from being hit on 10 or better to being hit on 11 on better is a minor improvement. But going from being hit from 19 or better to being hit on 20 or better doubles your survivability. Marginal utility of extra armor is increasing, and thus why +3 magic armor has such a premium.
And again: Going from being mostly impervious to attacks from orcs to actually being impervious to attacks from orcs is not a minor change: it’s world-changing.
>any problem that can be solved by a man at arms in +3 plate can be solved by a man at arms in nonmagical plate.
Counterexamples:
* There are archers on that wall who fire on anyone who comes close. Take this shovel and go fill in their moat.
* There’s a nest of 1000 giant spiders whose bite is deadly poison. Go down there and destroy their eggs.
* There’s a big demon ravaging the countryside. He can only be hurt by the Sword of MacGruffin. We sent a guy in plate but the demon hit him on 16 or better and won the duel. Also the demon is rapidly regenerating.
*There’s an orc army here that’s bigger than any army we can muster. Also the orcs can’t grapple because now we’re playing an edition with optional grappling rules.
No it isn’t. I’m just considering things you’re ignoring to prove your point.
The rest is you constructing an argument against a strawman using examples constructed to be favorable to your point. I’m not ignorant of any aspect of DND rules, or the mathematical impacts therin.
To give some examples to illustrate TFTD’s point, regular orcs in 5e have a +5 to attack. Against an average unarmored human (10 AC), this gives them an 80% chance to hit. If we assume it would take, on average, 2 hits from the orc to kill the human, they can be expected to survive an average of 2.5 attacks.
If we now put that human in plate armor (18 AC), the orc now has a 40% chance to hit, so it now takes on average 5 attacks to kill them (effectively doubling survivability).
However, if we now put that human in +3 plate (21 AC), the orc now has a 25% chance to hit, taking on average 8 attacks to kill the human.
So the initial +8 to AC brought us from 2.5 to 5 “attacks to kill”, but that extra +3 AC brought us from 5 to 8, an even larger change!
(As an aside, the explosiveness of the math as we approach the edge of the accuracy spectrum in a d20 system is partly why I think bounded accuracy was one of 5e’s best ideas.)
If it’s not clear, my point is that this doesn’t account for all the ways armor can be bypassed entirely, not the mathematical effectiveness of it. Even in strict readings of the rules of the game there are numerous ways to kill someone in armor without trying to overcome their AC, and many of those ways can be implemented by simple dumb numbers. In a practical sense, kill the wearer while they’re sleeping or harass them to exhaustion.
Also, you can replicate the effect of being harder to kill by an army of orcs by outfitting a squad of men to also fight that army of orcs. You can break down the math on this, but limiting the frontage of orcs has a similar effect to the plus three AC in terms of how many orcs you can actually defeat before dying.
The other argument against this view is that many other, often less expensive, items can solve almost any constructed situation with more surety. Give a farmer a wand of fireballs and he can pretty reliably kill a dozen orcs. The armor is both massively more expensive and requires the user to be a decent combatant to get any use out of it; the wand is as simple as a gun, any spellcaster can use it. This becomes more extreme when talking about the supposed equivalent cost items, like staves of the magi which effectively make the wielder a mid level wizard with limited training. The iterative bonus items directly contradict with those that directly grant magical capabilities in terms of effectiveness.
D&D precious metal scarcity ratios aren’t real-world ratios; to convert the value of 10, 000 D&D GP to IRL values you have to first multiply it by 10, then compare the value by weight of silver. D&D silver is intended to match real silver in value/overall scarcity, but other precious metals are only in the game to allow the convenience of decimalization.
Gold : silver cost ratios have varied in history, I think they’re historically quite high right now.
The ratio basically exploded after nations went off the gold standard. I wonder why.
Japan at one point officially undervalued its gold compared to silver to make it easier to cont. Which lead to much of Japanese gold leaving the country.
The IRL buying power of silver bullion for durable goods seems pretty stable to me though, and my point is that D&D doesn’t correspond to a gold standard but to a silver standard, with gold, copper, and occasionally other metals only put into the game to mimic decimalization rather than their real-world metal equivalents.
I think much of Europe used a sort of silver standard during the High Middle Ages.
That makes sense. From what I’ve heard silver has been used for money a lot more than gold.
Using platinum is pretty silly. I don’t think it was reliably produced until the Industrial Revolution. Certainly not enough to use for coins. Its use in D&D is mostly because even gold pieces get unwieldy in the amounts found in treasure hoards at higher levels.
Maybe the problem is acquired wealth being too large? In the comments to Bret’s blog post on gold coins Dan complained about roll playing characters acquiring wealth equal to the “the Great Pyramid of Giza” in man-hours. According to my calculations this would be between one and two billion.
Was use of bullion as a medium of exchange really limited to long-distance trade? In the Hebrew scriptures there’s a ton of references to taxes, fines, and commercial transactions measured in so many silver shekels, a term that came to refer to a coin but probably still meant a unit of weight when the Torah was written. Sure plenty of economic activity might have taken place without any precious metals in any form changing hands, but this remained true even after coinage was introduced.
Remember, the vast majority of your economic activity in a pre-modern society like this one is with the same relatively small group of people – your family, your village, a few key people beyond that. None of you necessarily have much precious metal, but you know the value of things in terms of it, and when you’re dealing with each other it’s a repeated transactions so you have a good knowledge of your counterparties. All of that makes it very easy to mostly work on credit and in ‘book value’, and only occasionally settle up with actual silver.
Who breaks that? People from outside your small community, who you don’t meet regularly and repeatedly. So the metal you do have is going to get preferentially used there.
And yes, this very much stays the same after coinage.
For the state, specifying taxes and fine and whatnot in coinage is useful even when the people paying taxes and fines don’t use coins. Medieval vassal agreements could be specified in kind, so you’d get an obligation to pay two swans and eight ducks every Feast of St John or something. Which is really inconvenient if neither party actually wants swans, to raise or to eat/keep.
So most of the time in these pre-monetized economies, the measurement in coins/bullion is just to give a common frame of reference. The household tax might be three shekels a year, the actual payment is whatever goods or maybe service is worth three shekels. Easier for everyone.
The short answer is “mostly yes.” The long answer is that a “unit of account” is different from a “unit of exchange.” Just because those taxes and fines come to 55 shekels doesn’t mean that I went and sold chickens in the market for hacksilver until I had 55 shekels in the bag, and then came and paid my fines and taxes. It’s much more likely that instead, I worked out some other sort of payment that didn’t involve me ever having any silver bullion at all, and that notional “55 shekels” was just a way of recording the value I owed.
Unless the state was trying to force people to adopt coinage, which was absolutely a thing that happened; I literally just read a paper that uses the example of Kabala Mutesa forcing his subjects to pay taxes in cowries (snail shells) currency in the capital of Bugunda; states often forced currency adoption as part of modernization schemes, or as centralization mechanisms. Almost universally this was done by saying that thou shalt pay tax in coin, or we’ll find someone who will to farm your land.
(Source: The colonial currency transition, a view from east Africa)
Obviously colonial states did the same thing, to an incredibly pervasive degree. A lot of previously non monetary economies use money precisely because of colonial compulsion, and many populations resisted currency adoption as long as possible because it was obviously a tool to control them, which it was.
So it varies based on the states strategic policy goals of tax in kind was accepted.
@Terry,
You definitely know more about African history than me, but I just wanted to point out that cowries were really a fascinating type of currency, and it seems like they had both some significant advantages and disadvantages.
So much so that accounts at state or medium to large business level were often reckoned in units which had no equivalent in coinage (eg livre tournois or pounds sterling).
Well, in terms of practicality, a shekel was a very small weight- between 7 and 17 grams at various points, and the silver shekel was valuable enough in its late Bronze Age and Iron Age context that ten shekels would pay a year’s wages for a laborer. Even with hacksilber (chopping items of precious metals into smaller pieces to make change) it’s going to be awkward to use for most daily transactions… but archaeologically, the period right around the invention of coins sees many small silver ingots, about 4-6 shekels in weight, appearing in hoards in the southern Levant. So yes and no- but the use of easily transferrable petty ingots is a pretty direct precursor to coins.
For an example of this problem with coins, the Roman sestertius was defined during the Republic as a silver coin, one quarter of a denarius in weight and value, and so about two-thirds the diameter of an American dime or three-quarters the diameter of a 1 euro cent piece. It was thus rarely minted despite its use as a unit of account until Augustus converted it to a brass coin.
Oh that’s fascinating. Not sure if you’ll see this but if you do, what does “right around” mean here? Not sure if we’re talking about “same century” or most of the iron age or what.
> an old, busted hauberk pulled off of a corpse is not going to command the same market value as a shiny new one, freshly crafted to order
Now I’m curious what price that old, busted hauberk would’ve commanded. Surely historical sources occasionally mention this? Virtually all RPGs seem to say either “exactly half the price of a new one” or “zero”.
I think a reasonable comparison is what price does a second hand car have? It depends.
Maille armour seems to have been about the same level of investment in ancient and medieval times as a car is for people in industrial consumer societies. If you’re rich enough, people will happily take your money for all kinds of fancy armour. In general, the average self-equipped or state equipped legionary or man at arms is wearing the armour equivalent of a Corolla.
So how much is a busted hauberk worth? If it has one easily repaired hole, was salvaged before the rain came down, and fits me perfectly, quite a bit. Rusty, badly damaged, or too small to fit me, very little value.
RPG games, and gamers, generally don’t want to go into this level of detail. For a fast game mechanism I’d roll a D8 and multiply by 10 to give a percentage value compared to new.
I am curious about the utility of salvaged chain for repairing, or even being the basis of a new shirt. It seems like if it costs so much to put the rings together, any way to salvage a patch would be valuable too. As for the rest of the iron, the melt value of scrap steel in the age of handmade charcoal tends to surprise the modern mind.
maille t – shirts ha been used as bace for hauberc s
“Okay, this next hauberk is a great deal for a warrior who’s a bit more budget-conscious, it’s a bit used but just one previous owner, a little old lady who only wore it to battle on Sundays”
Man, a used armour salesman is just so quintessentially Patchett I can’t believe he never used the idea.
Sgt. Nobbs was a quartermaster between being an urchin and being a copper, a part of his life that was never depicted in any of the books, but it is noted that he joined the army to loot bodies (and may still be doing so in the Watch).
Interestingly, a pretty complete modern first-world infantryman’s kit (including a *nice* rifle, body armor, night vision goggles, a radio, higher end webbing gear and good purpose-made military uniforms/clothing, tent and sleeping gear, etc) is *also* pretty similar in cost to a (used or economy) car.
Curiously, during the Falklands War of 1982, Royal Marine firing an anti-tank round at a bunker (precious few tanks to shoot at) referred to the act as “Throwing a Cortina at it.”
It also probably depends on what the hauberk would be used for by the purchaser. If they’re going to actually wear it, that’s likely to increase the price. If you sell it to a blacksmith for scrap, then it would be unsurprising to get scrap value for it.
A hauberk is a bad example. A busted hauberk isn’t actually a busted hauberk. It’s busted RINGS, which are fairly easy to fix. You can even take some from the hem of the hauberk and use them to repair the hole, if you have some wire sitting around. And crafting a hauberk to order was not terribly difficult; it’s a matter of putting in and taking out gores, same as any other garment. A ring doesn’t care if it’s at the hem, a gore, or over your heart; it’s a metal ring with squished ends and two holes.
This isn’t exactly highly skilled labor, either. Making the rings is a bit fiddly, but if you have them riveting them is pretty simple. It’s literally “Use this pattern, insert wire, beat with hammer”; I’ve literally taught a nine-year-old to do it. The E4-1 pattern is the second-most stupidly simple patterns in maille (the Japanese 4-1 pattern is a bit simpler). And once you’re done, you essentially have turned an old busted hauberk into a new one.
I’ve long suspected that this is one reason why hauberks were so popular for so long. Armor made of solid plates is a LOT harder to fix. A chest plate that gets damaged needs replaced entirely, or to undergo a fiddly process of repair. Lorica segmentata is also far trickier to fix (I’ve done both). Maille? You remove the rings that you can’t re-use, put in new or repurposed ones, and you’re good to go. Takes time, sure, but in terms of skill level we’re talking somewhere around the level of “If you can feed and cloth yourself you can do this”.
If it’s not totally in rags, I’d suspect a hauberk taken off someone who’s been lightly killed would be worth almost as much as a new one of similar size. The worse condition it’s in the less it’s worth, but even a scrap that’s not rusted through or otherwise compromised is valuable (as spare parts).
Until recently I imagined Roman soldiers as wearing segmented armour on their torsos. Now I think it was replaced by chain-mail in the 3rd century because the later was easier to repair.
Minor point, but the image from Chroniques de France ou de St Denis isn’t soldiers “foraging” a farmhouse, but Parisians part of the jacquerie attacking and looting the homes of the local aristocracy as part of a larger anti-aristocracy revolt.
I remember once playing in a DND(-derived) game where the DM was sort of conscious of the ridiculousness of loot table values, and the typical low-level corpse might net you some coppers and an old dagger. The real value was in getting to stashes of magic items at the bottom of the dungeon.
I have also played straight by-the-book ADND way back when it was new with a DM who just followed the books and modules, and boy did that have a different feel.
“One solution to this administrative burden is tax farming: the state sells the right to collect a certain tax (for a certain time) to a private business who then collect the tax.”
Would you believe that the first time I learned of tax farming was in “Night Watch” by Terry Pratchett?
I would believe it because Pratchett is a genius and ‘The Guards’ series could be turned into a elementary primer on economic and policing principles!
I would not go that far. Pratchett was good on many things, but also blind to others. If you read the Watch series critically, there’s a shocking amount of police corruption and brutality that even the unbendingly straight Vimes is apparently comfortable with.
The books also do not bother to have a real theory of economics or politics beyond what the current joke requires.
Vimes is not meant to be an example to emulate and Discworld is not a ‘mirror for kings’ series. Vimes is explicitly said to have a messed up past and to be prone to do messed up stuff. The entire point of the Watch books (all the books, really) is the development of fundamentally flawed characters and how they are nevertheless driven to try their best in a fundamentally corrupt and crime-ridden environment.
In fact, the focus draws away from characters once they become ‘too good’ because they don’t have much of an interesting story to tell anymore. So first we watch Carrot (too dumb to live, until he wisens up), then Vimes (brutal, alcoholic, until he straightens up), then Moist (self-interested, liar, until he becomes an earnest state servant), etc
It is, of course, intentional. Not all art needs the narrator to face the camera and interject “this is bad btw, don’t do this” every five minutes into the story, you’re supposed to read between the lines.
That argument does not hold water. The Discworld novels are not driven by character development, and your analysis of the viewpoint wandering does not hold up. Carrot is an actual viewpoint character for all of two chapters of “Guards! Guards!”, before he arrives in the city, long before he was any character development. Also, his character development mostly happens off screen, between “Guards! Guards!” and “Men at Arms”. Vimes on the other hand does not have serious character development over the largest section of the novels he appears in. Personality-wise, the Vimes at the end of “Men at Arms” is the same as he is at the end of “Snuff”.
And to extend on what I said, the contrast between Vime’s self-image and image of the watch as “best it can be” for the down-trodden, and the depicted reality of the corruption and brutality (which is also never meaningfully addressed – the Watch also does not undergo structural changes between “Men at Arms” and “Snuff” except for being audited *once* in “Thud”) is only one example of Pratchett’s shortcomings in perception.
Take for example Vetinari, who is basically explicitly pointed out in every novel he appears in as the best possible ruler for Ankh-Morpork (both by the narration and by characters themselves), and whose politics are fundamentally conservative, to make sure that tomorrow is pretty much as today. How that is in conflict with the very many issues of Ankh-Morpork where lives could be fundamentally improved by laws is also never addressed or resolved – there *are* people who’d like tomorrow to be better than today. Take “Feet of Clay”, which is about recognizing golems as people and their status in society as slavery. What does Vetinari do in response? He writes a document recognizing a *single* golem, Dorfl, as being alive. He does not pass any law freeing golems in general, to protect them against violence or to prevent their sale or purchase. The political project of actually freeing the golems is not undertaken by Vetinari *or* the Watch, for all of Vimes’ outrage at the end of “Feet of Clay”. As we learn in “Going Postal”, that project is left to an unfunded, unprotected private organization barely able to pay the rent. Similarly, the Campaign for Equal Heights and the Silicon Anti-Defamation League are *always* treated as jokes, and never as maybe having a point about wanting to end systemic discrimination.
Or how in “Interesting Times”, the final word on the question of “Should we have a revolution to end a brutally extractive and repressive regime to help the peasantry suffering under that extraction?” is given to a peasant saying “A longer piece of string would be nice.”
I have heard there is some social progress over the course of the Discworld books. If so it might no have been deliberate. Anyway, Terry Pratchett did not believe that a world without technological progress was possible. As such Industrialisation does happen in-universe.
“As we learn in “Going Postal”, that project is left to an unfunded, unprotected private organization barely able to pay the rent.”
I’ve gotta give Pratchett this one: He came up with a solution. The golems funded it themselves, saving up to buy other golems and then freeing the golems they purchased. The private organization is mostly just there to find the things and manage the purchases, which the golems can do themselves. There’s very little for the organization to actually do–the entire thing could, perhaps should, be given to a random accountant to handle.
In fact, this goes along with the Silicon Anti-Defamation League and Campaign for Equal Heights, and even the Black Ribboners: most of these organizations are run by people who have very little interest in the actual people they ostensibly are helping. They’re in it for various reasons, be it power, prestige, money, exposure, or in Reg Shoe’s case (pre-death) an indominable spirit that can’t found an outlet. Many of the people these groups were made to serve treat them as jokes (see how dwarfs look at the Campaign for Equal Heights in the Watch series). Even the Glorious Revolution ended this way. It got started via a genuine desire to change things, but was almost instantly co-opted by petty self-interest and in-fighting.
The idea isn’t that systematic change isn’t being done. It’s that it’s usually pushed by exactly the wrong people. Even if the thing starts off good, such movements get distracted by petty personal interests and end up serving the people in power more than they do the people they were built to protect.
@Dinwar That’s a misread of “Night Watch”, a very reaching over-reading of the little information we have about the rights advocacy groups, and does not actually disprove my thesis.
The Glorious Revolution did not begin with some higher principles, Vimes even spells out what he wanted, to keep a few neighbourhoods safe. (In a broader way, what he’s doing is preserving the legitimacy of the Watch by channeling the desire of the citizens for safety in such a way that it’s Watch-directed instead of Watch-opposed. It’s for certain a strong case for what makes or breaks institutional trust, and why treating protesters as enemies of the state is liable to cause the breakdown it imagines has taken place.) Higher principles basically only get brought up by Reg Shoe, and is always immediately shut down by people we are meant to read as wiser and more experienced than him.
The books say basically nothing about how the Campaign for Equal Height or the Silicon Anti-Defamation League are led or organized, and thus your explanation that they’re led by the “wrong people” is complete theory. I think more telling than any speculation about the corruption of leadership is the following quote from the books (paraphrased because I don’t have the book right in front of me): “The Campaign for Equal Heights spent so much time explaining to people which rights they were lacking that they had almost no time to fight for them.”
Which is basically not how any serious civil rights organization works. Ask a feminist, a LGBTQ+ activist, an abolitionist, or a Civil Rights advocate why they’re fighting for their rights, and they’ll tell you a long list of direct negative impacts of the current policies on the lives of the group they’re fighting for.
And that’s why I’m talking about blind spots, because Pratchett wrote about these activist groups solely as somebody who sees them on the streets and reads about them in the newspapers, never as somebody who actually is lacking rights and needs advocacy. (Another example of this outsider’s perspective problem is visible in “Interesting Times”, in which he’s trying to criticize with his satire both the shortcomings of the Imperial Chinese government system *and* the Orientalist stereotypes about them. But he hasn’t done the work well enough, so a lot of the things he criticizes as the system itself are also just Orientalist stereotypes)
And why it doesn’t disprove my thesis is pretty obvious. We see examples of flawed systems being able to at least work well some of the time, like the despotic tyranny of the patricians, which is usually bad but okay as long as it’s Vetinari running things. Or the Watch, which is in constant danger of being corrupted by bribery and violence, but is okay as long as it’s Vimes + Carrot at the helm (Carrot’s required influence is made clear by the state of the Watch in “Guards! Guards!”). But we never see an example of a rights group being run well and achieving anything.
The Glorious Revolution resulted in England becoming a constitutional monarchy. At the time this was justified by there being no logical reason why normal rules would not apply to the ruler him- or herself. Which is the beginning of making conscious social progress. Before you can make conscious progress you have to first conceive of the idea.
I think Terry Pratchett was in a mental trap common among members of the group with highest social status. Not understanding what others complain about because you never experienced anything remotely similar yourself. In this respect we can compare to Jean-Paul Sartre. He was also a White man belonging to the ethnic majority of his country. To my knowledge his writings on Existentialism don’t consider restrictions on your individual choice imposed by society. This can be contrasted by his long-standing girlfriend Simone de Beauvoir. She was very aware of such restrictions and was actively fighting against them. Moreover, she was bisexual and had an abortion at a time when this was illegal in France. She even lead a list of signatures with women confessing they had.
“The Glorious Revolution did not begin with some higher principles…”
It depends on which revolution. There were 3. Maybe 4.
First, there was the one Reg Shoe and his ilk thought they were in. They knew the slogans, they were in the streets, they were, to use a rather offensive phrase, the useful idiots.
Second, there was the one the other copper was in–the one with the passwords and actual political connections. The one that succeeded in the end. This is what Vimes meant when he asked if the Army wanted to take a term in the barricades–technically Vimes’ group (which the Army viewed as working with the rebellion) was now (in the Army’s eyes) on the side of the (suddenly) legitimate government. Whether you want to lump the copper in with the likes of the duchess is up to you; the book doesn’t get into that much detail.
Third, you have Vimes and Colon and Reg after he resurrects. This isn’t so much a revolution as it is a bunch of people trying to defend themselves from a bunch of other revolutions and counter-revolutions, but the Army and the politicians who won both thought they were on the side of the politician who won.
The Glorious Revolution I was referring to was the second one. It started, like the first, with people who genuinely wanted to do good. But it was co-opted by a mere politician who’s first order of business was to attempt to have Vimes (who was instrumental, all be it accidently, in getting him into office) shot in the face.
“The books say basically nothing about how the Campaign for Equal Height or the Silicon Anti-Defamation League are led or organized, and thus your explanation that they’re led by the “wrong people” is complete theory.”
I disagree. We certainly get a fair bit about how others view them–for example, the forensic Dwarf officer pointing out that they have a fill-in-the-blank form for filing grievances and thus can be dismissed. This demonstrates that even dwarfs view the Campaign for Equal Heights as being rather silly. Other examples are also present in the books. More significantly, I don’t recall any positive mentions of them. Various characters make steps towards treating each other as equals, but they do so as much despite the efforts of these groups as they do because of those efforts.
The Black Ribboners get more screen-time, in “Thud” in particular. And it’s crystal clear what Pratchett is trying to say. He even points out that for at least one person involved (and it’s pretty clear that Pratchett intends us to view this person as, if not the average person in power in the group, at least not an extreme example) it’s all about image, going so far as to say it’s a hobby for them. It’s not much of a stretch, given what little we see of the other groups, to conclude that they are similarly co-opted by people who view the groups in similar terms.
“Which is basically not how any serious civil rights organization works.”
The term “serious” is doing a lot of work there. I’ve met Scotsmen who put sugar on portage. It’s not like petty in-fighting hasn’t stalled out movements before; back in the early 2000s I remember a lot of Feminist getting into heated debates about whether trans women should be included in Feminism or not (there’s an attempt to white-wash the entire debate now that Feminism has come to the conclusion that they are, but it was hotly debated at the time).
Besides, Pratchett pretty clearly is exaggerating for effect. That’s what Discworld IS, as part of the world-building. OF COURSE no real organization runs that way–same as no police force runs the way the Watch does, no university runs the way the Unseen University does, no kingdom runs like Lancre does. It’s caricature. He’s exaggerating the parts he wants to highlight, not because he wants to portray them realistically, but to bring them more into focus for the reader. Discworld isn’t a how-to guide on social reforms, but an exploration of ideas. Demanding full realism isn’t reasonable.
But let’s not pretend that it’s totally unrealistic. The French Resistance in WWII was hindered by exactly this sort of in-fighting, for example. Not a civil rights movement, sure, but it does demonstrate that a situation where in-fighting reduces the efficacy of a group due to silly, even stupid reasons isn’t unrealistic. Discworld took it to a comedic extreme, but again, that’s part of the world-building.
“But we never see an example of a rights group being run well and achieving anything.”
I’ll grant the first clause. The second, not so much. The question is, what constitutes “achieving anything”? By the end of the Watch series Ankh-Morpork is the largest dwarf city by population, trolls are everywhere including in legal professions (well, “Raising Steam”), vampires and werewolves are accepted members of society, even goblins are considered part of society. A tremendous amount of success has been made in terms of equal rights.
Again, this mirrors society. Not perfectly–obviously a lot of good has been done by civil rights groups! But a lot of that good has also been just getting people used to the idea. It’s why Pride Parades are so important: the more people are exposed to the idea that Group X is composed of people, most of them quite ordinary and not that different from you and me, the more they’re accepted. And to a certain extent, the silly aspects of civil rights groups contributes to that. They have the same flaws as everyone else–because they’re the same as everyone else.
Pratchett golems have a piece of paper inside their heads limiting what they can do. If this piece is replaced by their sales receipt this limitation disappears. I think the guy who discovered this came up with the idea of having the money earned by such freed golems being used to buy more of them.
Fair enough, my amusing internet take has been comprehensively discredited.
Perhaps a more balanced statement could have been : “Pratchett is a highly entertaining writer and scenes from his ‘Guards’ subseries of Discworld books could be used as engaging primers on economic and policing principles to be analyzed through the lens of the time they were written and the social utility of satire and children’s literature”?
Honestly, I do agree with some of your points below to @abcd.
My favorite example of the ridiculously frequent combat is Assassins Creed: Odyssey, where, by my reckoning, I had personally killed every single living Spartiate by the time I was done with the game.
I really appreciate the framing device for the AC games, where you’re exploring a past person’s memories and not necessarily in the order they were actually lived. This means I can imagine that the reason there are only about a half-dozen character models for the hundreds of soldiers I murdered is that there were really only a few real murders and the rest are just artificially induced PTSD flashbacks placing those murders in a hundred different locations.
Also Odyssey specifically has a good joke hidden in the emails in the midgame sequence about the mythological stuff.
PTSD flashbacks are a good explanation for violence being many times more common in the game than could be in real life. A lot of fictional cultures are said to kill each other at such a rate they would have been unable to uphold their numbers. At least considering all the other things people can die form which would all have been so much more common under the circumstances they live.
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger similarly uses “the protagonist is telling a tall tale and embellishing the numbers a lot” as justification for why you’re shooting your way through dozens of outlaws. Occasionally it even shows the enemies spawning or disappearing as the narrator changes his story.
“And then I saw a bunch more Apaches up on the ridge!” *enemies spawn in*
“Apaches? Didn’t you say you were fighting bandits?”
“Er… I mean, they came at me Apache-style. You know, firing down from the cliffs all around.” *enemy Indians get changed to bandits.*
The amount of killing that society is comfortable with in video games in particular but also media in general (how many mooks have ever tried to run away from John Wick?) is frankly absurd. A lot of fighting protagonists should be considered genocidal war criminals, instead of heroes.
Also fantasy novels, crime thrillers and whodunnits in which rural English villages have a murder a week.
Midsommer Murders is my second favorite attempt to move Lovecraftian cosmic horror into Britain, so subtle and relentless.
I think Midsommer is intended to be an entire fictional district.
I grew up in Midsomer (Norton) and can report that the TV series grossly exaggerates the local murder rate.
I did not even know there was a real place named Midsomer. The name sounded so silly to me it could as well has been made up.
Then I got it verified it is intended to be an entirely fictional county. It just happens to have the same name as the town were you grew up.
Tangentially related, but i remember a Conan spinoff comic which, as a comedy, explored how it would feel like actually _living_ in a city filled with so frequent murders; bleak atmosphere, sure, but hey, dirt-cheap rent (due to being a previous murder scene)! And once a week, you might get grand larceny _instead_ of murder, what joy!
If only I remembered the name…
Whodunits, however, accurately represent the real-life clearup rate for murders in Britain. 99% of murders in England are solved. Scotland’s last unsolved murder was committed in 2012.
Scotland has been able to greatly reduce its murder rate in the last 20 years:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260626-how-scotland-changed-the-way-it-tackled-violence
Those are not mutually exclusive.
Even in societies where violence was constantly present (as in Early Modern Europe) it did not mean people were killing each other all the time. It would mostly have been things like scuffles over personal conflicts. Or beating up your subordinates for doing something other than you personally wanted. Unnatural upbringing conditions resulted in trouble grasping that other even had a different point of view. Combined with the scarcity or lack of any police force this made people much more likely to use violence. On the other hand violence turning deadly less often could be explained by the inefficiency of available weapons. Still, present-day Sweden had about fives time more killings in the 16th century compared to its population. I say present-day Sweden because Finland was also a part of it back then. If I understand it correctly Finland now has several times Sweden’s murder rate. The difference between these two relatively similar countries can be explained in terms of weapon legislation. In Finland it is legal to keep a gun easily available at home. This enables the inhabitants to kill each other when drunk. In Sweden you have to lock up your gun when you don’t plan to use it.
“If I understand it correctly Finland now has several times Sweden’s murder rate.”
You might not.
According to the UNODC, Finland’s homicide rate is .982 per 100,000; Sweden’s is 1.147 per 100,000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Alright, my knowledge on this subject turned out to be outdated.
I always enjoyed the economics in Elite, where you must destroy a dozen advanced armed spacecraft in order to to deliver… 20 tons of food.
“Technically, there’s probably also a skill premium involved as well, but it is important not to overstate that skill premium. The Hellenistic mercenary paid three times what the Roman legionary was paid was not three times as skilled (he was generally less skilled).”
Yes, but I would imagine that the monetary value of a Hellenistic mercenary to the people who hired him was considerably higher than a Roman legionary to the people recruiting him, at least in nominal terms. First, the effective manpower pool Hellenistic monarchs had was considerably smaller than the Roman one–witness the fact that Pyrrhus considered his losses at Asculum to be well-nigh catastrophic, while Rome just whistled up more men. Second, the Eastern Mediterranean, to my understanding, had much more wealth than the Western Mediterranean did.
As a result, it kind of makes sense that an area with a relatively low supply of soldiers but a lot of money to pay for them would end up paying said soldiers more than an area with a relatively high supply of soldiers and less money, even if the soldiers in question weren’t as good.
Even paying in coinage had its costs. I read a novel with a scene where Roman soldiers stationed in Britain got paid (Gillian Bradshaw’s Island of Ghosts), and it really struck me how inconvenient it must’ve been to forge the coins and carry (and guard) these heavy, extremely valuable trunks halfway across the empire. Sure, it’s way more convenient than paying people in, say, chickens, but it still required significant logistics
That is basically why most armies pay their soldiers in arrears, meaning whenever the campaign is done and people are back home. It’s not just that each soldier has to carry (and guard) their individual accumulated wages (not a lot of opportunity to spend it on things on campaign), but army as a whole has to carry all *future* wages it expects to pay out to its soldiers around with it all the time. Which amounts to a ridiculous large pile of silver, which would reduce the operational range due to the tyranny of the wagon equation, and also be a massive security risk. What if the camp gets looted? Or even, what if some of your own soldiers decide not to wait for pay-day? They have weapons and the chest of silver is *right there*.
All in all it’s better to keep all transactions in the army as de-monetized as possible, using pay stubs and coins of account, and then settle those accounts at the end.
Yes, this was an example of soldiers who were stationed on Hadrian’s Wall for longterm service. It just made me realize that even stationing soldiers in a previously built fort required significant bureaucracy and logistics just for the payment alone.
“military purposes which have no real economic value of their own”
to be extremely nitpicky, defense has economic value itself as a public good, although obviously most historical militaries did a fair bit beyond just defending
to be extremely nitpicky, defense has economic value itself as a public good,
This is certainly true, in an important sense, but there’s a different sense it which it doesn’t have economic value. That’s to say, it neither increases your supply of capital goods and your capacity to make things, nor does it increase societal welfare and consumer satisfaction. And in a better world, with stronger norms against aggression and means to enforce them, there would be less need for defence spending. It’s in that sense that you could see the military (and many other sectors of the economy) as “unproductive”. I’m not an economist, but I think Adam Smith made that distinction, and then Marx and later Marxist and Marx-influenced thinkers certainly did.
Depends. If the raiders come over every autumn and carry off people and goods then an effective defence does increase both your capital stock and your capacity to make things. It is the instrument of your ‘stronger norms against aggression and better means to enforce them’. As an aside, the increased security and the flow of revenue to the frontier legions of the Roman Empire fostered considerable development in those areas.
Like many things (eg social security or state provision of education or healthcare) the indirect contribution of notionally unproductive sectors can be quite strong.
Welfare is not a matter of consumption but a matter of justice. It is righting wrongs a lot of Americans are unaware of.
@Peter T,
I completely agree, I was indicating that they’re not productive in the same sense that say a farm or a steel mill, or even a clothing factory, is productive. Which I think you’re alluding to in your reference to “indirect contribution of notionally unproductive sectors. Obviously the military is still needed, just like those other things are!
There’s a case-study in industry. Folks considered management a waste of money. After all, they don’t increase the supply of capital (that’s what executives do), or your capacity to make things (that’s what your purchasers do, buy better equipment to make more things), and most people considered them to be parasitical and reducing workers’ welfare and satisfaction. So the USA stopped treating management as a job. Most managers are direct contributors AND managers. And the results are….not great. The economy hasn’t collapsed, but there are definitely a lot of problems associated with this that people are trying to figure out how to fix. And a surprising number are realizing that the fix is to have real managers again. They do valuable, complex, highly specialized work, it’s just not as obvious what that work is.
The military is similar. If you just look at the dollars and cents of this fiscal quarter it’s a drain, probably a huge drain. But no culture has survived without some sort of defense. It’s nice to imagine a world where cultural norms prevent anyone from doing anything bad to anyone else, but societies have to deal with the fact that some people will inevitably break those rules. For internal rule-breakers we’ve agreed on having police forces (though the increased militarization of police in the USA is undermining that pretty badly), and for external threats we have the military. Without the military individuals and companies would have to supply their own armed defenders, which–due to economies of scale and other considerations–would be MUCH more expensive. Plus, a group with a military strong enough to defend its territorial integrity is more or less a de facto independent country (see ancient Greece and Medieval Italy), so a culture that tried this would instantly fragment. (This is also my objection to political anarchy–it would last about thirty seconds, at which point people would band together into de facto states. How violent this process would be is open to debate, but the historic cases where this has happened tend to be bloodbaths.)
It’s the Doorman Fallacy, which is itself a version of the Broken Window Fallacy. Calling the military unproductive seems reasonable if you look at the surface of the question, but once you drill down into it you realize that the issue is a LOT more complicated than it initially appears.
Maybe the problem with managers was there being too many of them? I remember an article in a magazine from the 90ies suggesting the workplaces’ “chains of command” were generally too long.
When I think about it the article’s author thought specifically middle-managers were making organisations needlessly inefficient.
I’ll double down on your pedantry: “does not affect production, consumption, and is usually not enjoyed by itself”.
In macro modeling, govt spending can enter production (think roads), the utility function of agents directly as a public good (think, national parks) or indirectly as a supplement to consumption (welfare), or just be some sum taken from people without touching anything else. Whether you frame it as national defense, money thrown into the sun, the king’s champagne pool, cathedrals, it really does not matter, the downstream consequences are the same. So the point of our host (it is essentially value disappearing from the civilian economy you will never get back) is valid.
Given the empirical record, this suggests a defect in macro modelling.
One thing to note with loot is that is that it’s pretty hard to offload: Say you’ve looted something really nice. How are you going to turn it into cash?
There are often merchants following armies looking to buy the loot, but they know they’re the only game in town so they’re going to underpay you. You can try to lug around that gold candelabra until you get back home and then try to find a buyer, but that’s… a lot of investment. And of course, you’re in the middle of an environment where (if you’ve sacked a town say) EVERYONE has basically taken a bunch of stuff.
One interesting points is that elites often simply have an easier time “absorbing” loot in this sense: They have big households and can either hand it over to people who might need it or have the kind of institutional pull to sell (or ransom it back to the former owner, if it’s something REALLY nice and they’re still around…)
There’s a similar issue with slaves. (who are often a part of loot) you can sell them to a slave-trader who is probably following the army, but that’s goingt o be way below market price or… you can try to guard them, feed them and bring them home on your own either to sell or put them to work? The latter is a fairly complicated affair.
Loot can *absolutely* be a huge windfall for a soldier, and can catapult you into an entirely different register of society if you’re lucky… But there are a lot of factors working against it.
“you can sell them to a slave-trader who is probably following the army, but that’s going to be way below market price or… you can try to guard them, feed them and bring them home on your own either to sell or put them to work? The latter is a fairly complicated affair”
And historically avoided. Slave trade is important.
In Greek wars, it´s notable that slaves were rarely left even in the city that captured them in numbers. The few exceptions were captives used for public works – which meant they could be guarded in large groups.
A great majority of slaves at any time are NOT owned by their enslavers. This is kind of the point. Selling captives separates the enslaved person from his or her enslaver. The long term master of slave being a purchaser and not the enslaver dilutes the bitterness of a formerly free slave, and makes the long term master the good master be comparison with the bad master who originally captured and enslaved the slave.
This brings to mind a running gag in Arthur Conan Doyle’s historical novel *The White Company*, set during the Hundred Years’ War where one of the characters is introduced with his pack train of loot in tow, including a feather-bed. At one point he is recounting his experience of the battle of Poitiers, in which the status of said feather-bed features prominently.
” ‘Tell me, master Aylward,’ cried a young fresh-faced archer at the further end of the room, ‘what was this great battle about?’
‘Why, you jack-fool, what would it be about save who should wear the crown of France?’
‘I thought that mayhap it might be as to who should have this feather-bed of thine.’ “
“How are you going to turn it into cash?”
A few ways:
1) Sell it to someone. You don’t need a merchant, and loot was part of war, so there was infrastructure for this. Maybe the local noble wants the thing, and you can sell it to him. Or maybe you use it to pay for transportation and food on a pilgrimage. It may not be for coin, but it would be treated as coin.
2) Trade it with someone. You may not have a use for the thing, but your neighbor does and your neighbor has that bull you’ve been eyeing. So you give the looted thing to the neighbor and they give you the bull (or whatever, the bull is just an example).
3) You gift it to someone. Remember, most of the economy runs on gifts, and even as a peasant it’s useful to be able to give someone a gift now and then. For example, you get some silk and give it to the man you hope will be your future father-in-law. Or someone’s helped you in the past, so you give him that book you looted from the castle. Gift-giving was an essential part of social life (read: survival) at the time, and having a really nice gift to give someone was a HUGE social advantage.
4) You alter it. Books were frequently erased and re-written. Anything metal can be made into something new. Cloth can be made into cloths (not a small thing–remember that 50% of ALL economic activity went into making cloths). And once you’ve melted that big gold thingy into coins, a fairly common thing, it’s a LOT easier to move. There are countless examples of items being repurposed. For example, metal protective bits on books (common at the time) were frequently made into jewelry.
Point is, you’re not at home, you’re somewhere in Germany. You can sell it to the people in the army (which yes, includes merchants following around specifically to buy that stuff) or you can lug it with you and hope you can sell it when you get discharged. (which might take years)
This is where camp followers come in handy. YOU may not be able to see it (though you might; Latin was a lingua franka throughout Christiandom, after all), but the guy who tends your horses might. The girl who washes your shirts might. The guy who’s already haggling with the local folks for grain might. Camp followers often acted as an intermediary between the army and the local population, which provides plenty of opportunities for trade. (It’s better for EVERYONE for this to be the case–the army gets to negotiate food/goods, and the people of the area make some money and get to live.) Even if you take a 50% loss, converting that fancy box with gold accents to coins is going to make it a LOT easier to carry around. (And given banking practices at the time it probably would still be better for you thank a bank would.) There are competing incentives here–the camp follower needs to get paid, the person getting it needs to make a profit (or at least think they’re making one), and the person selling it wants the best price possible–but it’s a basic economic problem that would quickly resolve itself (almost certainly at the expense of the soldier).
Remember, it’s benefiting the people of the community to do this as well. It lets them make some money/get some goods they otherwise wouldn’t be able to.
And it’s not like all of the loot was huge. Rings, necklaces, and other jewelry are easy enough to transport. I’ve read that sailors used to store money that way–they’d wear gold earrings to defray funeral costs in the event they died away from home.
You’re also not lugging this stuff yourself. There’d be a wagon for every so many people (Romans had a wagon for every 8 as I recall), and folks would no doubt negotiate room on the wagon for personal effects. You see some great examples of this on the show M*A*S*H, but the concept is as old as the hills. A common soldier probably can’t negotiate the room for a massive dresser or a full suit of armor, but they probably can get a cubic foot or two if they share the wealth with the driver.
“I’ve read that sailors used to store money that way–they’d wear gold earrings to defray funeral costs in the event they died away from home.”
This explains the cliché image of pirates having earrings. Of cause sailors would not start to dress that much differently just because they became pirates.
With rare exceptions like Hârn, King of Dragon Pass, or maybe Battle Brothers, you won’t find games trying to emulate something as unheroic and narratively deadening as realistic military economics. You might as well ask novelist to chronicle the ordinary life of an average person for one day. But check out King of Dragon Pass for sure, although set in the RuneQuest universe it does an admirable job showing a cattle-thieving economy of Dark Ages clans.
I’m kind of interested also in this side of things, for a few different reasons, but one of them is the fact that I support the revival of the American entitlement-principle militia as a political project.
It’s sorta notable that it seems like historical military assets seem to mostly come in “cheap” (light infantry), “cheap-ish” (heavy infantry select levies of peasants or burgher entitlement-systems people), “expensive” (knightly cavalry), and “massive state assets” (naval assets, fortifications). Postindustrialization has squished a lot of the individual kits into pretty cheap territory, while I don’t think many of our modern-day Big Men would be in a position to cough up a fighter jet (and their high support footprint and limited military application means that doesn’t equal nearly as much political leverage) and for stuff like an IFV or one of the interminable command and control assets… who even knows. Meanwhile the baggage train got humongous.
I come to it from a different direction – at this point the tooth-to-tail ratio of modern armies is so enormous that I question to what extend it makes sense to build a system of reserves/levies for those logistical jobs, instead of talking about general military service as dragging everyone through boot camp and teaching them how to clean and shoot a rifle.
To illustrate, take Patton’s famous speech, in which he lionizes the valor and importance of truck drivers and a cable repair man. America has loads of civilian truck drivers and cable repair men (and frankly should be lionized from time to time, too. Or at least paid better) – couldn’t they just do their military service by doing the job they’re trained for anyway?
I think Finland is currently doing something like this but I don’t know the details.
All this makes me wonder how Angmar was able to raise, feed, and equip enough Orcs to be a credible threat to Arnor. The Angmar valley seems to be located in the frozen ass-crack of Middle-Earth.
Seeing as the origin of orcs was Utumno, a frozen hellpit, they probably don’t mind the milder Angmar. It probably reminded them of Angband, which was warmer than Utumno, but still well into the north. When it was above water, anyway.
Especially since the western goblin (non-Mordor Orc) seems to be mostly subterranean, the Witch King could mass them out of their caves and then laugh when they complain, since Angmar was mostly used as a tool to beat the Arnorians to death.
The cold of the truly frozen areas of Middle-Earth -is- the cold of Utumno.
If Angmar is only mentioned in the Silmarilion there is probably more than one reason Ronald Tolkien never published it in his lifetime. It was published posthumously by his son Cristopher.
Most of the description of Angmar is from the appendices in The Return of the King.
It was stated to be well populated (“many evil men, and Orcs, and other fell creatures”). The cold areas are Forodwaith, frozen due to Morgoth’s lingering influence, not from being that far north.
Forget Aragorn’s tax policy, I want to know Sauron’s fiscal policy. (For that matter, how widespread is the use of money in Middle-Earth given Tolkien’s variety of models for different areas of it?).
Mordor was largely fed by slave labour, the Nurien agricultural area.
I think it’s a safe bet that Mordor is run as a palace economy, where the agricultural produce from southern Mordor and the tribute from the client kingdoms in Harad and Rhun are brought to Barad-Dur and then redistributed to his standing army.
It’s however unclear how exactly Minas Morgul is supplied – it’s apparently capable of hosting a tens of thousands strong army, but it’s not surrounded by any farmland (the Morgul Vale is poisoned and Ithilien is abandoned) and the only pass to Mordor, via Cirith Ungol, is not suitable for carts.
Gollum describes Cirith Ungol as “a path high above the main pass”. According to him, that pass is a proper road going through the mountains as well.
Thanks, I guess I missed that blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference. Still, first ruling Angmar and then Minar Morgul, the Witch King must really like playing strategy on hard mode.
Maybe Sauron had his army dig a tunnel underground that comes out inside Minas Morgul, and that is suitable for carts? Perhaps on a track system, trolls pushing carts on rails would be iconic and suitable. It’s a bit silly but it would bypass the otherwise impassable heights that get in the way.
We have good evidence that Mordor has bureaucrats. The orcs both in Rohan (which included Mordor orcs) and Mordor itself continuously talk about being reported, being put on report, or otherwise having their crimes documented, in ways that are strikingly familiar to a modern ear. Contrast this with Rohan, where punishment wasn’t arbitrary, but was very much in the hands of a few nobles. Theoden didn’t fill out paperwork to exile Grima; orcs had to fill out paperwork to put Frodo in prison, including an inventory of what he had on him.
I would assume that Sauron was running something akin to a Roman system, where the farms were largely manned by slaves, but run by higher-ranking people in the society, with an army of bureaucrats keeping everyone in line. Given that Sauron is known to keep valuable material to himself (mithril, for example), I would assume it’s a tax-in-kind sort of system, where each farm is expected to produce X amount of Y materials, and if you fail (and the system is designed to ensure you fail) you move to a very low rank yourself.
I think Sparta would be a good way to think of it. It’s a system where 90% of the society is slaves, and the 10% that’s not is constantly trying to push each other out of that 10% so they can expand their own power. Those with power are encouraged to use it to brutalize those below (“Where there’s a whip there’s a way”), and anyone who falls behind goes into a death-spiral until they are quite literally eaten. Unlike Sparta, there’s no pretense in Mordor that everyone in that 10% is equal. And atop it all is a literal immortal, ultra-powerful being that considers everyone below him to be his slave.
As for supplies, I think it’s a mistake to take the Fellowship’s route, and especially Frodo’s, as typical. Remember, they’re on a secret mission where stealth and not being seen is critical; they’re intentionally avoiding main routes (as discussed at the Black Gates). Aragorn’s army marching on the Black Gates has no trouble doing so (which made many very nervous), and those sent off to various other missions didn’t consider the logistics of moving large numbers of armed men around the area to be insurmountable or even problematic. One could argue that Aragorn is going on a suicide mission so can travel extremely light, but still, any road capable of handling a few thousand men can handle carts and wagons and transportation.
I think the word “helot” is more closely translated to “serf”.
There is an entire series of essays on this website detailing precisely why this is wrong. And I will not get drawn into another pointless semantics debate.
The fact that someone, somewhere chose to define the word inappropriately (serfs had more rights than helots) is not relevant to my argument. Greeks in general used slaves on farms–I’ve read an Athenian book on the care and feeding of farm slaves, for example. Obviously there was a lot of variation, and the writer was addressing the wealthy elite not the yewmen farmers, but it remains a fact that slavery, as Greeks understood it, was wide-spread in the Greek world in the past.
Sparta, being the most systematically brutal of Greek city-states in terms of culture (regardless of any semantic arguments you wish to make; it made other slave-owning societies say “Seriously, that’s a bit much!”), gives us an upper limit on how brutal they could be and still have a semi-functional society. Call them slaves, call them helots, call them serfs, call them wookalars for all I care; it’s the treatment of these people that’s relevant to a discussion of Mordor’s economics. Since we’re dealing with a literal Dark Lord, the most hellish society that still marginally functioned is a good starting point.
I agree that the boundary between serfs and slaves is not always sharp. The “helots” of Sparta was such a border case.
“The “helots” of Sparta was such a border case.”
Even if I concede the point–which I do not–I struggle to find any relevance to the current discussion.
I am sorry for picking a word.
The old MERP modules actually put some thought into this. Given the lack of fertile land, Angmar was portrayed as in many ways reliant on outside support from Easterlings from Rhovanion and the Necromancer of Dol Guldur (with the Necromancer being careful that so that any discovery of his involvement would appear as if he was offering tribute to the Witch-King). Eastern Angmar (a land that would later became the home of the Éothéod) also served as a breadbasket for the more barren, core lands west of the Misty Mountains. While not the most fertile land of Arnor, Rhudaur was also an important source of food.
Even so, except when they called the Easterling and Orcs tribes from outside of Angmar’s territory, their numbers were portrayed as rather limited compared to legions of Mordor. The Mannish population in 1650 is described as being between 50,000 to 60,000. Even so, they are highly militarized. Most adult men were part-time solders, with full mobilization creating an army of 13,000 (of which only 4,000 were active at a time). Angmar’s numbers also swelled during major campaigns, with a total of 250,000 Men and Orcs during the two largest offensives.
I am not sure how realistic this is or if fits what Tolkien envisioned, but it is nice the the writers did try to figure out how an evil, ice themed kingdom like Anmgar would actually work in practice.
The Middle-earth Role Playing (MERP) books from the 80s and 90s put some thought into this. I am not sure how realistic it is or how well its fits whatever Tolkien envisioned (MERP often deviated from Middle-Earth’s tone), but it is the most detailed look into how Angmar could have worked.
Much of the core of Angmar was capable of agriculture, though the short growing season meant that local farming was insufficient to supply much of the Witch-King’s army. Instead Angmar’s breadbasket was Rhudaur and its land east of the Misty Mountains. It also received supplies from the Easterlings and the Necromancer of Dol Guldur (who was careful to make sure his support appeared as tribute to hide his involvement).
MERP’s version of Angmar has a population of just 50,000 to 60,000 (excluding Rhudaur and/or the lands east of the mountains?) and usually had an army of about 13,000 Men, of which only 4,000 were active at a time. The majority of part-time soldiers called in for one or two month, farming or engaging in trades to support themselves the rest of the year. The Orcs were twice as numerous and absorbed the greater burden of defense.
During campaigns Angmar called upon outside warriors and vassals and could also draw upon its Mannish veterans. During its largest campaigns it had five times its typical population, but the seems to have only been possible after long periods of storing supplies. While not barren, Angmar was heavily dependent on outside support to maintain its population, which explains why it is uninhabited during the War of the Ring.
Although this was written by others after Ronald Tolkien’s death it does work with his worldbuilding.
Worth noting is that Angmar was only able to take down Arnor after it split into three squabbling smaller kingdoms that frittered away their strength by fighting each other.
“Alexander took all of the wealth, built up over two centuries, of the Achaemenid Empire, one of the largest conquest-windfalls ever managed and by all indications he was at least in sight of running out of money – if not already out – when he died.”
Kind of ironic, considering how much reputation his father earned by demonstrating that very issue to a bunch of blasphemers.
>it is very rare that a “war will feed itself”
Should we then be suspicious about the stereotypical “raiders”, like vikings, Barbary slavers or golden age pirates? Are they the exception to the rule? Or should we suspect that there’s more going on below the hood than “the vikings pillaged Lindisfarne because there was good loot”? Or are raiders outside the scope of “war”?
I would say that raiders are not outside the scope of “war”, but they are rare cases, on the average. It can be profitable only if the raided cannot effectively raid back. So there have to be special circumstances that prevent the raiders from counter-raiding.
Notice that all of your examples are on ships, which means they have intrinsically much more capacity to transport the loot.
All the examples I can think of where relatively large-scale raiding was done entirely on land are the stealing of herds of cattle (or horses or sheep or whatever). It’s hard to get away with your loot if it’s all loaded onto carts.
Huns and Magyars and Avars and Tatars managed it. Of course most of the loot was self-propelled, albeit unwillingly.
@PeterT,
This is a kind of grim speculation, but I do wonder if part of the reason the slave trade became such big business in Africa specifically (not just the trans-Atlantic but also the Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan routes) was because of the transportation difficulties for other commodities. Horses and oxen are vulnerable to disease (and in the case of horses, weather as well), and of Africa’s five largest rivers, none of them is navigable along most of its length all the way to the sea- they all have rapids relatively near the ocean. Slaves could be forced to walk their way to the coast, so transportation wouldn’t have been as much of an issue as for other export commodities.
Yes, horses get problems with diseases in much of Sub-Saharan Africa. I think they are only well-adapted to temperate grasslands. Cattle have a more efficient digestive system meaning they can eat a wider variety of plants. This in turn allows them to live in a wider variety of environments. Aurochses managed to reach Sub-Saharan Africa during the African Humid Period. For some time after the end of the Last Ice Age the Sahara was reduced to five small areas to the north. During this time period aurochses could pass between them to a northward-shifted savannah. This would have given them considerable time to adapt to Africa’s northern savannah belt. Sanga cattle are the result of West Asian cattle interbreeding with such aurochses.
However, I agree that shortage of sailable rivers hampered trade throughout Africa. The Nile is only sailable up to Aswan and the Congo River up to Kinshasa (which is why this city exists). I don’t know how far upstream the Niger River is sailable. Is it upstream of were it is joined by the Benue River this would still provide some opportunities for trade. Which in turn could explain why Igbo culture encourages people to be business savvy. The Igbo live primarily right upstream of the Niger River delta.
“The Nile is only sailable up to Aswan and the Congo River up to Kinshasa (which is why this city exists). ”
No. Congo is emphatically NOT sailable up to Kinshasa. Congo is only sailable up to Matadi.
Congo is sailable DOWN to Kinshasa, which is why Kinshasa and Brazzaville exist.
Then I have misunderstood why these cities were founded by colonialists.
Then I have misunderstood why these cities were founded by colonialists.
It’s for exactly the reason @chornedsnorkack indicates. The Congo is actually navigable over much of its length, which is why I specificed navigable to the sea. There are rapids just west of Kinshasa/Brazzaville, but from Kinshasa-Brazzaville you can take boats a vast distance into the interior, and transport lots of trade goods. You just can’t take boats from there outside Africa without arranging overland transport between Kinshasa/Brazzavill and Matadi.
The Niger likewise historically was an important trade conduit regionally, you just can’t navigate it all the way to the sea and thereby leave West Africa.
For that matter some other major rivers outside of Africa, like the Volga and a few major Central Asian rivers, don’t have any outlet to the sea either.
The Volga empties into the world’s largest lake which still gives some trade opportunities. The Amur Darya and the Syr Darya both empty into what was once the world’s forth largest lake. It is now reduced to several smaller ones with most of the former lakebed becoming salty desert.
@Lena, Outside of Europe and the Amazon Basin it is normal for major rivers to be a series of ‘sailable’ bodies that are each large enough to support local minor shipbuilding, but have rough places between them that can only be crossed by either moving goods overland to different ships or by hauling the craft out of the water and carrying them loaded to the next part of the river. Kinshasa is a terminal port on one of those inland parts of the river.
Africa tended towards the separate fleets model; in North America cultural practices instead led to the development of ten-plus meter long canoes that were designed to be carried on the shoulders of their rowers.
The Vikings transported smaller boats overland by sticking a tree trunk underneath the keel and use oxen to pull it. This way they could efficiently use the great rivers of Eastern Europe for trade despite the water dividers between them. I don’t think there were any significant numbers of canals in Europe before the High Middle Ages. By then we were more technologically advanced than Sub-Saharan Africa was before colonialism.
I have heard the two rivers considered to define the borders of the Korean Peninsula are both sailable quite far upstream. If so this would explain European explorers mistaking Korea for an island. Also, I think China’s main rivers are more easily connected through channels than those of Europe.
“@Lena, Outside of Europe and the Amazon Basin it is normal for major rivers to be a series of ‘sailable’ bodies that are each large enough to support local minor shipbuilding, but have rough places between them that can only be crossed by either moving goods overland to different ships or by hauling the craft out of the water and carrying them loaded to the next part of the river. Kinshasa is a terminal port on one of those inland parts of the river.”
In Europe, too. Don´t forget lakes.
Stockholm is there because of the rapids of Norrström. You can sail 120 km of Mälaren, from Köping or Uppsala, all the way to Munkbron – and then you have to unload your goods and haul them the few hundred metres over Stadsholmen to Skeppsbron on Saltsjön. And you have to build your ship somewhere on Mälaren because your ships would be stuck on the reefs of Norrström and even if it were shallow bottomed enough to ride the rapids, could not sail up Norrström from Strömmen to Riddarfjärden. Stockholm is in a position a bit like Kinshasa – though a bit confusing factor is that the navigable waters of Riddarfjärden are so close that Stockholm is on Saltsjön as well. On the European side of Sweden, Vänersborg is in accordingly more similar position to Kinshasa – Göta has three impassable rapids, the big Trollhättan falls but also the impassable enough rapids at Vänersborg and Lilla Edet. So on one side you need a port on Vänern and on the other side something below Lilla Edet, like Lödöse.
I was actually tempted to write something like this on the comments to the blogpost about the Late Bronze Age collapse. (I grew up in Stockholm myself.) There were actually two rapids formed during the Middle Ages due to positive isostatic rebound, one north and one south of Stadsholmen. The northern one is still a rapid called Norrström. The southern one was turned into a lock in the 17th century. But by then Stockholm was already established as Sweden’s capital.
The Danube has the problem of lacking consistent sailability too. Downstream of the Pannonian Plain it passes through an area of highly fractured terrain forming a gorge named the Iron Gates. It has historically been hard to navigate and now has a hydroelectric dam.
I was thinking of cattle as well. I know the Scots did a lot of cattle rustling–it was a way for peasants to increase wealth, and for nobles to attack each other without actually declaring war.
That said, in a way some Medieval battles could be considered raids. If you captured a high-ranking person you could ransom them to the enemy for a fair amount (how much was determined by rank, how badly the enemy wanted them back, how badly the enemy wanted other nobles to know they’d be ransomed, what condition the nobleman was in, etc). And people, especially warrior-nobles used to the rigors of campaign, are even better at walking and being transported than cattle are.
Raiding is 100% warfare. The big difference is scale.
If you compare a Viking raiding party to a Roman Consular army, the army is roughly a hundred times larger, stays in the field way longer, is much more complex, and is planning on fighting other fully equipped people instead of targeting unprotected coastal settlements and leaving before anyone who can actually fight back shows up.
I think we can say the Vikings are the exception that proves the rule. Consider they had the following advantages:
– They had ships to carry the loot to a market.
– The loot they found was easily fungible (note all the discussions above concerning how hard it might be to off-load a suit of armor)
– Both their own society and the societies they raided did not raise large armies but had predominantly small-scale warfare.
– Because of the cultural norms of the societies they raided, there were places where a lot of valuable loot was gathered and not well-protected, as it was exempt as religious from being attacked by people of that culture.
And even despite all that, the Norse transitioned from raiding to conquering after some time, establishing a (intended as-)permanent presence in England in the form of the Danelaw.
I think the main reason the Vikings stopped raiding was them developing governments of their own.
Going Viking stopped being so attractive after Clontarf, the Baldwins getting a grip on Flanders, ditto in Normandy and Stamford Bridge. The odds had shifted rather markedly.
I think it is misleading to conflate three battles, meaning contests between armies, with three fights, meaning contests between armed men. The vast majority of fighting in war is raiding, skirmishing, and besieging, not battles, which is also the case in RPGs. The Black Prince’s grande chevauchée in 1355 had no battles, but significant fighting and immense plunder. Accounts written by historical soldiers describe regular small engagements involving dozens or hundreds of men which simply do not rise to the level of a battle, but which are nonetheless a major part of soldiering. There were also sieges big and small, and while the historical record generally passes over them in brief unless they were pivotal, they could and did involve a fair amount of fighting. Sixteenth-century English mercenary Humphrey Barwick claimed to have personally seen twenty thousand men killed by gunfire, yet by all appearances he participated in no set-piece battles, as his whole career was the bloody work of raiding, skirmishing, and besieging. This is more or less true of your typical adventuring party, they raid and they skirmish, they could even be said to siege when they assault dungeons, but they do not take up positions amongst a field army for battle.
“devolution provides a means of shifting military costs directly onto those economics actors.”
-> economic actors
If I understand it correctly the combined rates of taxes and fees in France 1783 – 89 became unsustainably high. Helping the US became independent had been ruining to France. Its government seem to have avoided trying to decrease its costs and instead only increase its incomes. Was this official policy from an incompetent absolute monarch? Or was it widespread power abuse by its nobility?
AFAIK, the main problem for the government of Louis XVI was not that taxes were unsustainably high, but that France did not even have a single taxation system — tax rates depended both on geographic region and on social class in a crazy quilt of ancient privileges. The system was inefficient and corrupt, revenue was unpredictable, and because bankers did not trust government finance the interest on debt was very high. Potential revenue streams from the growing trade and industry could not be efficiently mobilised. All this put France at a severe disadvantage to Britain, which also ran a large deficit during wars, but could far more easily finance it.
It literally took a revolution — and Napoleon — to sweep away the old system and rationalise government finances.
In the 1780ies Britain was wealthier than France too. It had established more efficient agricultural methods and had more complex technology. This on top of not having France’ over-burdened patchwork of economic legislations.
With rare exceptions neighbouring countries know about each other’s technology. However, I am under the impression many methods and technologies already established in Britain were not used in France to any significant degrees.
France in 1789 was lightly taxed in comparison to rivals – Britain, the United Provinces or Prussia. It was also very inefficiently taxed, with numerous tax regimes, lots of exemptions, a large ‘official’ class who had paid for their offices but did nothing and so on. Every try at reform was blocked by the interests involved, and there was no general mechanism to hash it out.
I may have gotten the idea of unsustainable taxes and fees from an author who is not trained as a historian. Then I will use the combination of dense population and inefficient agricultural methods to explain the non-privilege’s low standard of living at the time. It is true that the French nobility did consist more than 1% of the country’s population. At the outbreak of the French Revolution about 400,000 people were registered as nobles. This on a population which likely did not exceed 30 million.
Of cause there were commoners in 1780ies France which were middle class or even wealthy. (Many of those getting famous during the following 30 years had been middle class commoners.) However, I think something like 90% of the country’s population lived in what would now be considered absolute poverty. These would all have been commoners since even the poorest nobles would have been middle class. If 90% of France’ inhabitants were poor this means an even higher fraction of the commoners were. We are talking about people running considerable risk starvation. This is just what happened at a large scale in 1788 – 89 triggering the French Revolution.
See for example “Domestic enemies”, Table 2 on Page 8. Capitation rolls of Toulouse, 1695.
16% of poorer nobles were assessed under 10 livres (and that was a tax they did pay, it was taille they were free from). The richest 16% of artisans were richer than the poorest 16% of nobles.
Noble status was not automatically lost by poverty in France. And neither was it automatically lost by poverty in Sweden or Finland. See the Cavaliers of Ekeby – Gösta Berling was a defrocked priest and not himself a noble, but apparently a lot (or most?) of the rest were. Margareta Celsing was giving charity, but surely there were more nobles needing charity across Sweden than the dozen of Ekeby, as well as nobles needing charity in France.
The French example you have is within the period when France was an absolute monarchy (1653 – 1789). However, you have to remember the difference between Roman Catholic and Protestant priests. Roman Catholic clergy are not allowed to marry meaning their positions are not juridically hereditary.
When I think about it “owning land taxed less than £10” does not equal “living in absolute poverty”. Unless nobles got so poor they could not provide their children with basic education I would still consider them middle class. An education – even a basic one – meant you could get a job well-paid enough not to worry about survival.
“Gösta Berling’s Saga” takes place at a time when Sweden still had noble privileges. You could voluntarily leave nobility but you did not automatically lose noble status because you were broke. I have looked up the word “kavaljer” on the Swedish-language version of Wikipedia. It says the word may refer to an adult man without a steady job living on the expanse of others.
‘Noble’ in France gave some privileges, but a lot of nobles were basically not much above rich peasants. As Arthur Young noted, some parts of France were on a par with southern England, others as poor as Scotland. It was very various.
Regional differences in available wealth could explain why the Buonapartes were in practice middle class. Corsica had been bought by France from Genua in 1768. So this island would not have been so much affected by competent administrators being ennobled forcing those of pre-absolute monarchy noble descent out of the elite.
Excellent, thank you!
I am reminded of a ditty attributed to the soldiers of Scipio Africanus, source unknown to me —
Publius Cornelius says
All the gold is for the centurios
All the silver is for the triarii
And all the hot chicks
Are for Publius Cornelius
But I wanted to ask about the relative importance of a few other sources of “revenue”. One being the ability to enslave prisoners of war and the enemy civilian population, or (if the army leader wanted quick cash) to sell them as slaves. This appears to have been one of the major spoils of war in many premodern societies.
The second being the opportunity to plunder or ransom enemy cities. I understand the spoils of a field battle could be limited (unless the supply train was captured) but cities would appear to be far more profitable.
The third being “tribute” paid by states or non-state entities on your borders to be “protected” from attack — essentially blackmail, which seems to come at a much lower cost to the blackmailer than actual war.
Loot could certainly be very profitable to military commanders. One case I know about is the Swedish commander Carl Gustaf Wrangel. During his involvement in the Thirty Years War he went from rich to super-rich. This after his father erased him from the will because he had married a gal who had lost everything in the war.
>> If your peasantry do not use coinage, you will have to tax them in agricultural products (called “taxation in-kind”) which are a lot harder to move around and store than coins.
As opposed to “taxation in-kine” which is easier move but even harder to store.
I’m going to take this opportunity and paraphrase Caesar the Dictator on the funding of an army: “Raise the money to buy men, then use the men to get more money”.
Fascinated to learn about trierarchs – thank you!
trierarchs were also responsible for making sure they had a full crew (even if the state paid them), which could mean additional costs getting or retaining rowers.
A situation which continued right up to the 19th century – one of the duties of a captain in the Navy was to crew his ship, which included running his own pressgangs if necessary, paying out of his own pocket to have recruiting posters printed, and so on. Sailors (rather than officers) didn’t join “the Navy” – they joined a particular ship under a particular captain, and when that commission was over because either the ship was taken out of service or the captain was moved to another post, their term of employment was over.
Unless you could drag your ship up a beach or possibly place it in dry dock for extended periods it would not remain useful for long. I think these wooden ships only held for less than a decade but I don’t remember the exact numbers.
Triremes were very lightly built. They were beached to dry out whenever possible, stored on slips and even then did not last too long. An 18th century wooden ship could last decades in service.
I know the ships used by the Ancient Greeks and Phoenicians were held together by ropes. The Phoenicians added wooden dowels to their shipbuilding methods. Apparently, triremes incorporated such in their design. The reconstructed trireme Olympias has a displacement of 47 tonnes. I think their ships did not grow much bigger than that.
What I have heard about the durability of wooden ships applies to European ones built during the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era. These were held together by iron nails. What I remember is Early Modern warships being used for just a few years. Then they were sold to private shipowners using them for another few years. After that they were to worn to be useful. But being specifically used as warships may have worn them out prematurely.
Ropes were always part of ship-building, but in the Mediterranean not structural (although ropes could be wrapped around the hull to strengthen a trireme). Ancient ships were built hull-planks first, with mortise and tenon joints, then ribs and other frame timbers inserted. Wooden pegs were preferred for under water fastening because iron rusts, especially if there is any bronze or copper about – ships like the British Victory – built in 1759 – had their planks below the waterline fastened with pegs (“tree-nails”).
Viking ships were built the same way. Late medieval ship building went to frames first, then planks.
Galleys much bigger then triremes were built – five per bank were common, ten and twelve used at Actium, and the Ptolemies built a 40-er (display only).
btw you can ‘sew’ planks together, in clinker-built ships, although you still need other fastenings. Dhows are built this way.
Viking ships and boats were held together with iron nails. At least they contained enough of them for their shape to be reconstructed based on archaeological iron nail finds. However, these boats and ships were also light and shallow enough to be dragged up beaches. (They did not need a harbour.) This could have been used to minimise exposure to salt water.
Tried commenting before but it seems wordpress ate the post.
D&D doesn’t generally model “mercenaries” or indeed any sort of “soldiers” in the main modes of play for most editions.
“Old School” D&D parties were basically Heist teams. Your model is not “a big man and his retainers in psuedo-medievalia,” it is “Fantasy Ocean’s Eleven.”
Newer editions tend to be more in the line of “Super Hero Team-up”
In neither case does the game run on mercenary economics, because that’s the wrong genre.
See: https://www.tumblr.com/prokopetz/155035042627/why-did-the-guys-that-wrote-up-things-like-the-bag