This is the fourth 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 organized. We’ve talked about how armies are recruited, equipped and paid for. In particular, as we’ve seen so far, the structure of recruitment, organization and payment (such as it was) is heavily dependent on the underlying civilian structures, often mirroring them quite closely. Armies cannot help but recreate their civilian social structures on the battlefield.
The same is absolutely true for leadership and cohesion, essential for getting an army to fight effectively. Now we need to clear up some definitions here at the start between the three ideas we’re going to focus on here: we’re breaking up a multifaceted idea (‘combat motivation’) into component parts because, as we’ll see, effective combat motivation is something of a ‘three-legged stool’ that needs all three legs to stand effectively. Those three legs are leadership, morale and cohesion; the first of which will be our focus this week and the last of which will be our focus next week.
Leadership refers to the to the command structures of an army, which as we’ll see certainly do have a motivation component. This is a top-down sort of combat motivation: good leaders might cultivate the respect or admiration of their troops, might find ways to motivate them in difficult times, might lead by example or otherwise ‘perform’ generalship and so on. What we’re going to focus on here is where leaders come from because, as it turns out, most societies have pretty strong ideas about where military leaders are supposed to come from, what backgrounds they’re supposed to have and (no surprise) they tend to mirror civilian leadership structures.
Meanwhile morale refers to the bottom-up motivation of the combatants. Specifically, I tend to use this to mean their attachment to the cause, both their loyalty to it and also their belief that it can be achieved. We aren’t going to deal too much with morale here because it is often very conflict-specific: different causes come with different morale implications. However, I do want to stress an important idea here: morale is what gets soldiers to a battlefield, not what keeps them on it (generally).
Finally cohesion is a side-together sort of motivation: the ability of a unit to cohere under pressure, to ‘hold together’ rather than breaking up when things get difficult. In the terror of combat, the high sounding reasons for service (the foundations of morale) are hard to keep in mind and combatants need something a bit more primal to keep them in the ranks: that is cohesion and it is generally based in some kind of strong attachment to the other fellows in the ranks next to them. As we’ll see, just like leadership systems tend to mirror civilian leadership structures, the options for fostering strong cohesion among soldiers are heavily dependent on what a civilian society looks like. We’ll treat cohesion principles next week.
By way of clarifying contrast: a force with low morale might melt away from desertion even when there’s not fighting going on, because no one is invested in the cause. A force with low cohesion (but high morale) might panic and disperse in a battle but reform later to fight again: they remain committed to the cause, but unable to handle the terror of battle collectively. A force with bad morale but high cohesion is very dangerous to a general, because that is the raw material for mutinies: the men will hold together against you as quickly as for you.
Naturally, most military systems that have existed for more than a single campaign have some effective system for arranging leadership and ensuring cohesion on a repeat basis. And that is what we’ll be looking at this week: how the structures of societies shape and constrain leadership and cohesion of the armies they form.
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).
Where Leaders Come From
Polities have a bewildering array of ways that they chose military leaders – some are determined by hereditary positions, others by professional career tracks, other elected and so on – but the general rule to understanding all of them is this: the same sort of people who exercise positions of authority to organize civil society also lead the armies and navies of that society. The biggest distinction between leadership system is often just the question of if the civil leader are the exact same people as the military leadership, or different fellows drawn from the same class. Those who lead in peace, almost always lead in war.
So from the worldbuilding perspective, before you can think about your ‘officer class,’ you need to think about the ruling class of your society. This isn’t quite the place to get into every possible permutation of ruling class a pre-modern society can have, but we can make do with a few examples to give a sense of how these notions connect. One thing I will note: in pre-modern societies, professional leadership classes are extremely rare – even as they are very common in modern societies. So while your instinct may be that ‘to be a general, someone just goes to ‘general school’ and then works up the career ladder’ that is almost never the career path for pre-modern military leadership. To the degree these societies have professional classes, they are usually politically marginal and politically marginal groups do not get to lead a society’s army.
Instead, as a rule, the aristocrats who organize large institutions and groups in peacetime assume, as a matter of course, that they have the necessary skills to organize the same large groups in war time. Coming from a modern viewpoint, with our emphasis on ‘scientific’ leadership approaches and specialist knowledge, the idea that experience at large-scale farming or Confucian philosophy fully qualified one to lead armies seems strange, but those historical aristocrats are generally untroubled by the idea that their training might not prepare them to lead. After all, the skills of the aristocrat – whatever they might be – are the large-scale leadership skills of the society and it usually takes quite a sharp and humiliating experience of defeat to cause any aristocracy to reconsider that (and often not even then).
So let’s look at some connected civilian-and-military leadership structures to get a sense of how they can work, keeping in mind that we’re not being exhaustive.
The most common system by far is some form of military-aristocracy: a hereditary or nearly hereditary class that wields military leadership as its prerogative. In complex, agrarian societies, these are almost always leisured large-landholders who live off of the rents of their lands. There is thus often an inherent tension in how a leisured class justifies its role of power and privilege in society by pointing to its military leadership role. One of the classic summations of this was the medieval European division of society into “those who work (the commons), those who pray (the clergy), and those who fight (the nobility)” – it is the role as ‘those who fight’ (or who lead the fight) which justifies aristocratic privilege and wealth.
Crucially, I want to stress: the aristocrat earns their position of command by wealth and birth, they do not earn wealth and birth by martial excellence. These aristocracies are ‘rich mens’ clubs’ not ‘good fighters’ clubs,’ and they are buttressed with ideologies that assume people born from the lower classes make poor soldiers and generals by their very nature. Pre-modern societies are, by modern standards, extremely low in social mobility and so they create cultures and customs which justify and normalize those systems.
But – as I’ve been alluded to this whole series – not all military aristocracies are the same. In particular, there is a marked difference between warrior-aristocracies and what I am going to call (very roughly) officer-aristocracies – the core difference is the precise martial skill that justifies aristocratic power, but that has all sorts of ramifications with how these fellows behave.
In a warrior-aristocracy, a core part of being an aristocrat is mastery of a specific style of personal combat, most frequently cavalry combat (or chariot combat, before the advent of true cavalry). Part of this is simply the expense of it – you have to be rich to have access to horses from a young age to learn to ride well – but there is also a heavy skill component, in that it is very hard to learn to be a truly excellent horseman if you do not start early. The thing to keep in mind is that because warrior-aristocrats’ social position is contingent on performing a specific kind of warfare, they are going to want to be visible performing that sort of warfare. As a result, these fellows are often socially constrained to lead from the front and to fight personally even when it might be wiser not to.
Warrior-aristocracies cover, as best I can tell, the great majority of complex, agrarian non-state societies and it isn’t hard to see how all of the systems fit together: the warrior-aristocrats, their retinues of lesser warrior-aristocrats and common-soldier retainers, the fragmentation of violence in the society and the leadership role of those warrior aristocrats. Naturally, the most senior (by wealth, generally, because this is about power within a society) warrior-aristocrats will lead the army in battle, with more junior warrior-aristocrats leading common soldiers in a retinue-of-retinues army structure: the biggest Big Man leads the army, with the retinues of his subordinate Big Men beneath him and so on, down to the common soldiers at the bottom of each of these retinues.
As a society gets more complex and a state emerges, the state often comes with new kinds of non-military, non-aristocratic civilian leadership roles (note that religious leadership roles invariably pre-date the state – but priests and the state is a topic (voted on by the Senate) for another day). That opens up new forms of military-aristocracy but also new forms of civil leadership – the interactions between them are complex.
On the one hand, the form of military leadership might change, from warrior-aristocrats to what I am calling officer-aristocrats. In this second form, military leadership remains largely hereditary, limited to large landholders, but they understand their military role not as personally fighting in a given way, but as leading or organizing. The Roman aristocracy functions this way: Roman generals are invariably aristocratic senators, but their model of leadership is not based on the demonstration of personal combat ability or even necessarily personal physical bravery. They are thus free, as a matter of social expectation, to ‘command from the rear’ – a Roman general can get ‘stuck in,’ but they do not have to and it is rarely the wise thing to do so they don’t do it often. Instead of performing personal fighting, these fellows are often expected to be performing organizational and logistical leadership. I cannot see any specific reason why this form of leadership couldn’t emerge in a non-state society, but I struggle to think of an example – even Chinggis Khan and his heirs had to demonstrate their martial bona fides in riding and hunting to maintain legitimacy within their aristocracies, in a way that no Greek strategos, Roman general or Chinese general seems to have had to.
The other quirk for increasingly complex aristocracies is the relationship between budding civil administrations and older military aristocracies. Often, even as the civilian administration is taken over by an educated sub-aristocratic class (professionals, burghers, etc.) the command of armies remains in the hands of the old aristocracy. The classic example of this was the distinction in Ancien Régime France between the noblesse d’épée (‘Nobility of the Sword’) – the old nobility, which still exercised most military command – and the noblesse de robe (‘Nobility of the Robe’), a newer nobility that generally held administrative or judicial positions, but not generally military ones. Likewise, the old Prussian aristocracy, die Junker, maintained a clear presence in military posts in the German army through the Second World War.
In other cases, the rising civil administrative class and the military aristocracy remain the same. The Greek polis and the Roman Republic both provide paradigmatic examples, where the assumption clearly was that the same sort of skills that prepared a man to lead in peace also prepared him to lead in war. To greatly simplify, in both Greece and Rome, there was generally a hereditary landed aristocracy of elite families in any given community and often the function of voting systems was to choose which of those hereditary elites would exercise power (by holding this or that office) at a given time.
The other major option for states are to forgo a military aristocracy more or less altogether and professionalize their officers. Because this is how most modern militaries work, I think it is what people reach to first, but I have put it last because it is so incredibly rare. Vocational leadership classes – our military aristocracies where men are born into command – are very common; professional leadership classes, where men are selected and trained for the task, are very rare. This runs counter to most folks’ expectations, but it remains broadly true: the enlisted ranks (the ‘common soldiers,’ though by the time we’re talking about them as ‘enlisted ranks,’ we’re obviously talking about quite well established states) are professionalized long before the leadership class is. The Roman army by the first century AD is fully professional in its ‘enlisted’ ranks (through the centurions), but retains its senatorial military-aristocrat command class. Likewise, European armies in the sixteenth and seventeenth century increasingly consist of professional soldiers, supported by an increasingly professional civil bureaucracy, lead by the same old military-aristocracy as the Late Middle Ages. Professional soldiers often come before – and often simply without – professional officers.
That said, the Chinese state bureaucracy, particularly as it comes to be dominated by the civil service examination system during the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and subsequently does represent a kind of professionalization of military leadership, albeit professionalized not around military skills but rather around skills in writing, literature and philosophy. If that seems shocking, remember that Roman aristocrats got formal training in philosophy and rhetoric, not command, as boys too. We’ll cover in a moment how military leadership skills were communicated. Nevertheless, these scholar-officials show up pretty often in military leadership roles.
Leader Selection
Now briefly, we should also talk about how these leaders are selected. After all, a society has more potential generals than armies, so there must be some way to decide who gets command. In non-state societies, where the potential generals are also military-aristocrats with their own retinues, chieftains and kings often have very limited options on who to put in command: if the king is present, the expectation is that he leads the army (that’s what kings are for), but if he isn’t, then often there’s a strong impulse for the biggest of the magnates to do so. After all, if you snub Duke so-and-so for command despite his bringing the largest retinue, he might just leave and take his retinue with him.
Indeed, for many non-state polities where military power is highly fragmented and fluid, the answer to ‘who leads the army’ is often ‘whoever can.’ In pre-Roman Spain and Gaul, the pattern we see in our sources looks fairly fluid, with charismatic or capable warlords emerging – invariably out of the warrior-aristocracy, these men are not peasants – to knit together large coalitions and thus large armies through personal leadership and charisma.
By contrast, as the state grows stronger, it can exercise more choice on who gets command. For monarchies, that often means royal selection, which may be quite personal (if the aristocracy is small) or, in large bureaucratic states, institutionalized and impersonal. Often the lower ranks have an institutional system of advancement (as we’ll see below), but major commands need to be signed off on at the center of power, simply because generals and admirals represent substantial risks to central authority and must be vetted for loyalty even more than for ability.
Republics are comparatively rare, but they tend to elect their generals and often elect lower officers as well. For states which structure recruitment through contractors, those contractors generally become the officers who lead units, typically led by a general chosen by the king. But those colonels (the contractors) and the general are almost invariably drawn from the same military aristocracy that would have provided them in a vassalage-based system (though in some cases the captains beneath the colonels may come from lower social backgrounds, in which case their career path may be different and may reach its ceiling earlier).
Crucially, the ‘roster’ from which the state – be that a king personally or a bureaucracy generally – can select from tends to remain limited to the tradition, generally hereditary leadership class. After all, a king who tried to fill his posts with commoners would find all of his other key stakeholders – who are military aristocrats – swiftly moving against him. There are occasional exceptions, of course, but they remain occasional because the state, in whatever form it is, needs these magnates in order to function and so it cannot simply sideline them. Of course eventually the modern administrative state emerges which no longer needs these fellows and thus may dispense with them, but that is quite explicitly a modern creature and in any case it merely creates a new leadership class.
There is, after all, a reason that modern armies are led by college-educated officers, often with advanced degrees in the higher ranks, drawn from the same system of elite education that produces our presidents, prime ministers, senators and MPs. Because no army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield, so a society where the divide is no longer aristocrat and peasant, but blue-collar and white-collar has blue-collar soldiers and white-collar officers.
How Leaders are Trained
Now generals, admirals and other officers are not, in fact, born ready to command, whatever the social mythology of a ruling class may think. Armies – even smaller units within armies – are complex creatures that require a fair bit of knowledge and skill to control properly. As important, leadership is a skill itself: it is a performance, the exact elements of which will vary from one culture to the next, but it has to be learned. So clearly there must be some way in each of these societies to teach the fellows who will lead.
Here is a spot where I see worldbuilders who aren’t necessarily familiar with historical systems err quite badly, because they import the assumptions of how individuals are prepared and selected for leadership from modern societies. Sometimes the assumption is that command preparation works more or less like an idealized becoming the manager of a small franchise: one starts as the cash register and works upwards. But that absolutely does not work: these societies have low social mobility and a military leadership class which is jealous of its privileges. Service ‘in the ranks’ may or may not be an expectation of command preparation for that military leadership class, but even for societies where it is, no one expects to simply ‘work their way up’ from the ranks. Instead, in pre-modern armies as in modern ones, there is generally a sharp and rarely bridged (in pre-modern armies, often flatly unbridgeable) divide between officers and senior enlisted personnel, because there is a class difference being expressed.
The alternative assumption is to assume that pre-modern command preparation must look rather a lot like modern command preparation or at least some version of modern education: there has to be a ‘generalship academy,’ with classes and competitive exams and so on. This tendency is, I think, heightened in a lot of fiction where the audience are young adults and so the core conceit is basically, “what if high school and college was all facets of life?” because high school and college is the social structure the reader knows and cares about. So you get the military academies of Fire Emblem: Three Houses or Trails of Cold Steel or Final Fantasy VIII (a trope that clearly started in Japan but feels like it has worked into English-language young adult fiction over time as well). Pre-modern societies functionally never have these formal institutions for officer training. The only major exception here is the aforementioned Chinese civil service system, but that didn’t train command or military skills, which were left to be acquired through experience and apprenticeships.
But of course leaders must be trained. These societies engage in quite a lot of warfare and they cannot afford to simply be bad at it, so leaders have to be prepared.
The most common answer by far is some form of apprenticeship system: young potential leaders (from the right social class) are trained with a mix of informal tutelage (at the hands of more senior leaders) and experience, often in a sequence of experiences and roles that is quite clearly and often rigidly defined. Not always so, mind you – the path by which became a general in ancient Greece was often a lot less predictable, for instance – but frequently so.
So, for instance, the Roman cursus honorum, the sequences of posts and offices a Roman aristocrat embarking on a political career might hold, has a pretty clear bent towards military preparation. A young man would first serve a few years ‘in the ranks’ (typically as a cavalryman, because he’s rich), before trying to obtain a post as a military tribune (essentially a staff officer), where the expectation was that the commanding general he served under (a consul or a praetor) would take his tribunes under his wing. Military tribunes also had some command duties, generally lower-stakes and usually accomplished in pairs. Then came the quaestorship, a financial and administrative office which often meant handling logistics for an army (or the finances of the whole state), again under the watchful eye of more senior magistrates. Then the praetorship represented the first independent opportunity for command, but generally with a small force in a largely pacified region. Only then might a Roman aristocrat, now approaching the eligibility age of 42, consider the consulship and real field command – which of course came with it an expectation of tutoring the next generation of military tribunes and quaestors and so the process repeated. In short, the career path is a series of ‘command apprenticeships.’
The education of a medieval western European knight started even earlier, but was also structured effectively as a series of apprenticeships, although in this case focused as much on personal combat skills (because this is a warrior-aristocracy, unlike the Roman one) as leadership.1 High-born boys would be effectively apprenticed to another noble house as a page at age seven to serve and also be trained in the necessary skills of his rank, including combat and leadership. At fourteen, that boy would graduate into being a squire, a knight’s on-the-field shield-and-armor bearer, learning the skills of the warrior-aristocracy first hand, ideally becoming a knight himself in his early 20s. Even then, he is probably not going to be handed a large unit, but rather be expected to lead his own small unit, while the more senior (by both age and wealth) members of the nobility lead larger retinues.
As an aside, popular depictions of knights miss a component of this because they tend – the recent Knight of the Seven Kingdoms does this, albeit with a plot excuse that the main character is a very poor knight – to have a knight on his own with just a squire or a page. But in practice even a relatively humble knight was expected to lead a small unit (a ‘lance fournie‘) of at least a half-dozen men. Of course the kind of boy who might, by dint of birth, expect to end up commanding much larger retinues would probably squire for a lord who also commanded much larger retinues.
Alternately, we might even jump well into the early modern period and look at the career path for an officer in the French army of the 17th century.2 Aspiring officers, drawn from France’s old knightly and noble classes, first served a couple of years as a regular soldier (either as a cadet or as a volunteer serving with a relative), before being pulled into service as one of the very junior officers (ensigns and sous-lieutenants). Service at that level qualified a young man to seek to purchase a commission as a captain to lead a company, where he served under a colonel. In each step, a young men relied substantially on patronage and support from his superiors and so young officers were encouraged to attach themselves to more senior ones both to try to learn and to try to impress. Captains who came from wealth could eventually purchase a commission as a colonel, while those who lacked it might instead advance to the dead-end administrative post of major. The king then chose the officers above the post of colonel, but generally from men who had processed through this system. Lynn openly describes the system as one of “military apprenticeship.” The period’s navies worked much the same, except that the highly technical nature of naval warfare meant the apprenticeship was longer and involved more formal learning.3
In literate societies, these apprenticeships might be supplemented with written guidebooks, military manuals of various kinds. There is an odd tendency in modern fantasy fiction to pooh-pooh this sort of thing – Game of Thrones (the show, in particular) goes out of its way a few times to cast aspersions on the usefulness of such works – but the fact that societies with literate military aristocracies produce and preserve these kinds of works with regularity suggests that the fellows who would know best – the one’s actually leading armies – found them useful.
In the pre-modern era, however, such military manuals are rarely strictly technical in nature – they are not very much like a modern field manual. Instead, they tend to be framed more like a work of philosophy, laying out general principles for command, compiling lists of strategems or famous examples of tactics and so on. Often they extend beyond what we might consider strictly military matters, to include general advice on rulership, blending into a genre we call ‘mirrors for princes,’ guidebooks on how to rule well. The key thing to keep in mind is these manuals were not intended as textbooks for classics, but often works for reflection, intended to be read (and re-read) alongside a man’s trip through his military apprenticeships. Purely technical ‘reference’ books existed as well (Vitruvius’ De architectura is a paradigmatic example), but seem to have been more rare; they get a lot more common after gunpowder, when a command of engineering and mathematics (for ballistics) suddenly become a lot more important.
However, for someone looking to come to grips with the leadership culture of a pre-modern society, I would encourage you to see military manuals and mirrors for princes operating within a continuum of other literary works: histories, epics, religious texts and so on, all of which are telling aristocrats how to be aristocrats. These men, after all, are not generally professionals trained in a school, they are members of a permanent, hereditary (or semi-hereditary) military-leadership class and so excellence at command for them often consists of the refinement of the manners and habits of their class. That might include careful logistics or sound tactical planning, but equally it might include poetry, courtly manners, the habits of a good patron and so on. The delineation we expect between the professional skills of ‘military science’ and the social skills of the professional managerial class (to which most modern officers belong) simply does not exist for pre-modern societies where military leadership is not professionalized.
Thinking About Leadership
For the worldbuilder then, thinking about fictional armies (or the student of history thinking about real ones), be sure to think about the entire military-leadership life-cycle. After all, when the important council of war gathers, it isn’t just going to be the top generals involved: those generals have their own subordinates (who are also their apprentices), who may have their own subordinates (who are their apprentices) and so on. One thing that is often missing in these sorts of stories are the host of junior officers we know would normally be present, observing the decision-making process – even if, because they’re more junior in age or rank, they aren’t expected to say anything.
So the first question should be “where does the ‘officer class’ as it were, of this society come from?” Some kinds of armies can get away with fairly minimal numbers of officers and relatively amateurish ones, but most more sophisticated kinds of warfare demand a fair bit of organization. Keep in mind, when thinking about this question, the sharp limits on both information gathering and on issuing commands, which is going to mean that leaders even relatively small distances away from the ‘center’ (whoever is in overall command) are going to be exercising a lot of independent leadership. As a result, there are probably a fair number more fellows involved in leadership and decision-making than you might expect for even a very modest army.
Next, think about what kinds of peacetime life habits the officer class might have. Since they’re unlikely to be professionals, chances are they are large landholders, or (in a pastoral society), large herd owners. The war leader is more often the fellow who wields the most influence within a society – on account of wealth, charisma, family connections and so on – than the best fellow at commanding, so think about what kinds of power matter within the aristocracy and what latitude the social system has for advancement based on merit. But also think about how these fellows interact with subordinates in their peacetime role, because that is likely how they will default to acting in a military role – it is the ‘leadership skillset’ they are learning even when they are not in the saddle. Roman command behavior, I’d argue, flows very directly out of Roman patron-client relations and their habits. Likewise, it is hard not to see medieval leadership language conditioned both by the war aristocrats related to fellow aristocrats in their household (the knights in the retinue of a lord, for instance) and also the far more domineering way they interacted with their peasants (who might be their common soldiers).
Above all: these men are attempting to perform generalship. They are not so much moving pieces on a chessboard as they are playing on a stage, attempting to look the part of being a general because that is actually what often mattered the most.
Finally, think about how these men advance – not merely who decides who gets to be the general, but also who gets to decide who advances through more junior offices. Systems will, after all, select for the skills which ensure advancement and a system of elected generals is going to work quite differently from a system where advancement has more to do with patronage from senior officers to more junior ones, which in turn is also going to be very different from a system where state power is so weak that ‘advancement’ just means having the largest private army within a larger retinue-of-retinues force.
Next week, we’ll shift our focus from leadership back to the common soldiers to look at how to think about the cohesive principles of a given force, since different armies rely on different systems to generate that all important cohesion.
- On this next bit, see Rogers, Soldiers’ Lives Through History: The Middle Ages (2007) and Verbruggen, The Art of War in Western Europe during the Middle Ages (1997). Popular culture depictions of knights tend to be both quite common and also quite bad despite the fact that there is a lot of really good public scholarship available to help getting these things right.
- Working from Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army: 1610-1715 (1997).
- On this, see N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World (1986).
China did have a parallel military examination system starting in 702 during the reign of Wu Zetian, with the literary side focusing on their military classics, along with tests of mounted archery, halberd exercises, and raw strength. The Tang general Guo Ziyi (who recaptured Chang’an from An Lushan) was one of the graduates of that path who rose the highest, as military exam graduates tended to fill lower officer positions with civil examination graduates holding overall command. At the risk of overly simplifying things to fit into the paradigm of the article, the civil examination produced officer-aristocrats while the military examination produced graduates closer to warrior-aristocrats, with very rare movement from the latter group to the former.
Or the military examination produced a professional NCO/senior enlisted corps.
The vast difference between enlisted and officers in Anglo-Saxon militaries blinds us easily to the finer distinctions inside the officer corps. And those do exist. In particular, I would like to raise the Continental difference between general staff officers (Offiziere in Generalstabsdienst) and everyone else. Typically, the acceptance into the general staff officer corps takes place at the stage where you are a captain, as acceptance into the war college. You are never going to command a brigade without being a general staff officer. In larger armies, there is often even a further qualification of military academy, where you go as a colonel or major general, after even a couple of further rounds of culling.
In the Continental systems, especially where the military model is (or was historically) based on the mobilisation, there is no “up or out” but a career officer serves until orderly retirement. Thus, most officers will never be general staff officers but will grow old as majors or lieutenant colonels, doing staff work in various echelons that would have real troops (or at least real troops corresponding to the officer strength of that echelon) under their command only during mobilisation. (As far as I understand, this career group exists nowadays also in the US military: officers passed over for promotion but retained for the interests of the service. But they are not talked about much, because the very existence of the personnel group is an embarrasment.)
So, considering that the graduates of the Chinese military examinations were, in the actual fact, quite few, you don’t need to try to find parallels in senior NCOs but in these more career-limited types of officers who are going to serve for life, enjoy full privileges of an officer but are never going to make general.
Does this happen in all European countries? The fact that it’s called “Offiziere in Generalstabsdienst” seems to indicate it’s inherited from Prussia specifically.
Although perhaps most countries ended up imitating them; I’m hardly an expert.
The protection from “up or out” seems to be pretty slim in the US.
– 18-20 years service, just to get them to 20 which gives them a full pension,
– “critical specialists”, mostly medical until recently, probably because the civilian remuneration is so much better,
– flag officers, who started out as high nobility and have almost always been by seniority,
– warrant officers, who are specialists and are a sort of halfway officer, designed back when an officer wasn’t expected to be technically proficient.
I think the “up or out” rule was designed for several reasons:
1. Officers are supposed to be hungry to do well and lead. If you’re not hot to lead ever larger units, are you really fit to be an officer at all?
2. It also gives you a set of civilians who are supposed to have the skills. Which is useful when you go to war and you have a sudden need for more officers.
3. It might keep generals from gathering a huge flock of ensigns around them who are scions of families capable of patronage but are completely useless at being an officer. If you have “up or out”, eventually they have to be sent out to lead some unit and be promoted or be kicked out. Or die, I guess. Hard on the unit that they lead into a disaster though.
During the Vietnam War the US tried to drastically increase its number of officers. This only resulted in the American armed forces acquiring loads of incompetent ones. Oftentimes these incompetent officers got killed by their own soldiers. There is a TV trope for such occasions in fiction:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfriendlyFire
See also “fragging”, named after the widespread practice of using hand grenades to kill or wound officers. And it was widespread, hundreds of cases are known. Also “Fodding”, where soldiers would damage their equipment, such as by throwing paint and screws into gears on a ship.
Though a more in depth discussion of that can likely wait till Bret talks about cohesion. It wasn’t really directly indicative of the officer bloat, but rather not were caused by the fact that the cohesive principal broke.
In (at least professional) militaries you achieve cohesion by mixing vertical bonds to superiors with horizontal bonds to peers. The horizontal bonds get units to cohere together, and the vertical bonds let you command them to do things they’d normally not want to do. The vertical bonds are like a leash you use to pull the army to where you want. It’s why leadership is so important, particularly in offensive operations; you can get weakly led men to guard a position, it’s nearly impossible to get them to advance on a guarded one.
If your horizontal bonds break the unit dissolves, but if the vertical ones break it mutinies. Adding more officers is or can be an attempt by the top brass to get a firmer grip on the unit, but if there’s a fundamental disconnect between what the brass wants and the population writ large wants no amount of added officers will help; leverage isn’t the issue, the actual strength of will is.
Vietnam was a complete social breakdown. Politically what the ruling class and the working class wanted diverged. So everything about the military started to break. All issues were downwind of that.
I think there was misapplication of previous experiences too. Peter Englund has described it as:
“They looked out over the jungles of Vietnam and only saw the beaches of Normandy.”
He might not have expressed it exactly like that. But this is at least my translation of how I remember he expressed it.
Two answers: as far as I know, the life-long officer career that, for most officers, stagnates, is a feature of most European militaries, whether they were NATO, neutral or Warszaw Pact, do this. And this is typically tied to the Prussian-derived system of having an professional elite of specially trained general staff officers who have the monopoly of higher positions.
This ties also to somewhat different mentality of officer’s role than you have: a military officer is, first and foremost, a servant of the nation, whose calling is to put his life, happiness, fortune, day’s work and night’s rest on the line to serve the nation. The idea that the officer would be pursuing career success single-mindedly is – at least in Finnish research – recognised as a typical hallmark of failing officer cadets.
Of course, this is also one point of not having an up-or-out system: as the stakes of failure are much lower, and frankly, an officer who doesn’t become a general staff officer lives much more comfortably and less stressed-out, you dare to take much greater personal professional risks. This improves innovation a lot, as you are ensured an acceptably nice career even if a bright idea of yours goes down in flames.
The points you make about the size of the officer corps make sense, but they are mostly relevant in militaries with a small reserve. When you plan to expand your peace-time establishment ten or twenty-fold in the mobilisation, like all many 20th century powers, the peace-time “glut” of field officers disappears very nicely into the command structures of the mobilised military, and almost all junior officer ranks are filled with reservists. (E.g. Finland trains yearly about 125 career officers, who are guaranteed life-long careers, with everyone making at least major, and perhaps about 1,300 reserve officers, who are only called up for refresher exercises and mostly remain lieutenants for their whole life, with a few making captain or major. This gives a suitable officer pool for a military with a peace-time strength of 30,000 and a mobilised strength of 280,000. It is quite easy to do the math and see how this works.)
The Warsaw Pact dissolved ten months before the Soviet Union. You make it sound like it still existed.
@Lena, the Warsaw pact is gone, but it’s not clear the shared military culture and organisation it had is entirely gone.
It seems that a least some of the senior Ukraine Generals are deemed to be still in that frame of mind.
@Lena,
Sorry, I should have naturally added “during the Cold War when all these militaries were based on conscription and war-time mobilisation of large reserves”. Of course, today, all former Warszaw Pact members are now NATO allies, except Russia (and DDR which is now part of a united Germany, a NATO ally).
Of cause a culture is not gone just because an organisation is.
I suspect another part of the reason for “up or out” is to ensure there’s always slots for new officers and you don’t have the new generation get stuck at a lower level for a while and then suddenly have a huge chunk of the upper ranks retire and need to be hastily replaced.
Until you reach GOFO rank. Funny that they don’t use that on their own…
“The vast difference between enlisted and officers in Anglo-Saxon militaries blinds us easily to the finer distinctions inside the officer corps.”
Anglo-Saxon militaries, as far as we know, did not have “officers” (or “enlisted”) in the sense that modern armies do. The Anglo-Saxon fyrd was a feudal levy and the big difference in an Anglo-Saxon military was really between the full-time household troops – huscarls – belonging to a king or local magnate, and the infantry levy of the fyrd itself, who were not nearly as well equipped.
Friedman in ‘On Operations’ says that the General Staff officer was Scharnhoerst’s response to Napoleon.
The military examination was supposed to provide officers.
We need to remember though that the majority of generals we see come from recommendations and emerged from the aristocrat class who were of military bent.
This will hold true for Song, even as they explicitly severed the civil and military element(to reduce coup risk ).
Ming dynasty would rely more on military examination and their academies that trained specific types of troops (in the early days post Gaozu anyway… Mid and late Ming changed ) said examination was on military history and strategy, then martial trials of horseback riding n weapons.
Now I’m thinking about how one can use this for exposition.
“Ah, but because the Exxys have Zees, we must Wi them.”
“We both know that, why are you saying it out loud?”
“Well my dumbass apprentice needs it spelled out for him, sorry about that.”
“Ah it’s fine, if he really needs it spelled out such, then let me say it for everyone to know…”
Or have the scene where the Junior officer in the back goes and whisper to his neighbour (or asks after the meeting):
– Why do we try Wi, what’s the point ?
– Well, our ennemies, the Exxys have Zees, hence we need to neutralise that before it becomes a problem… (later / after the meeting let me tell you a story…)
I suppose underlying this is the pragmatic problem that if the civilian leadership structure and the military leadership structure isn’t aligned, the military leadership will be inclined to take over the civilian. Like in 16th-19th century Britain the military didn’t carry out a coup because the military leaders were the sons/younger brothers/nephews of those they’d be couping.
Something I find interesting while being ignorant about is how the Soviet and Chinese Communist Parties kept control of their militaries despite their revolutionary nature.
That’s because “revolutionary” is not an actual ideology that people follow, despite what some “enlightened centrists” say about the ideology of the left. The communist armies were loyal to the state because they were convinced of the cause of communism. There is no need to overthrow a government if the government currently in place is doing what you want – and the military wanted communism just like the party leaders. First because they literally were the revolutionaries who had everyone removed from power who was against that vision. And then because these states of course selected new military leaders who were ideologically aligned with the state.
Such ideological alignment I’d suspect is present in every state (You don’t get to be a US general either if you want to overthrow the government), but of course both China and the Soviet Union were very totalitarian and went a lot further than that. If you were an avowed communist but displeased the Party Leader, you’d get purged from the military very quickly and replaced by someone who didn’t. As long as these purges don’t become too sweeping or too general, this can work for a surprisingly long time in buying the loyalty of an institution, because not only does every purged person serve as an example for the rest, but their job vacancy is an opportunity to advance for somebody else. So people are incentivised to go along with it.
As I recall much of the Soviet officer corps was shot on the eve of the Second World War, which does not look to me as though the political leadership was entirely convinced of their loyalty.
The question of “Does the party leadership trust the military” is not really part of the argument I’m making – my question is the reverse “Does the military trust the party leadership?” And if an attempt at a mass purge of military leadership gets you lots of people willing to shoot the officer for you, instead of trying to shoot you with those pistols (and rifles, and tanks and airplanes), then the answer has to be “broadly, Yes”.
Although I will not dispute the least that authoritarian regimes very quickly slide into paranoia in their search for disloyalty, and end up purging everyone who looks competent in their job, to their own eventual detriment and of course unnecessary human suffering.
“It is not paranoia if they are really out to get you.”
Authoritarian regimes that face a significant risk of coups and revolutions — one indicator being that the current regime itself came to power after removing a previous regime in such a way — are perfectly justified in acting on that knowledge. (In Paradox games, you have a nice, numeric score for legitimacy and/or stability.)
It can still be overzealous, however.
when ‘just shoot them’ is perceived as an acceptable way to get rid of your officer corps, there’s generally a bit of a blurry line between disloyalty and incompetence. Often with an explanation of ‘they must have been plotting against me because no-one could actually be that stupid’, when clearly these very loyal men really were that stupid. Throw in a side of ‘we should be just as capable at this as any other given nation because us guys in charge are just as smart as their guys in charge, if not more so, completely ignoring structural, geographical and economic reasons why we are very much less capable’ and people get purged for disloyalty when they were loyal, because the failure has to be a conspiracy, not a result of bad luck and poor planning.
Of course some rulers will just openly state ‘yeah he was loyal, but he made a big mistake and now i’m telling him to literally fall on his own sword’, but the expectation of self-impalement generally seems to have needed to be quite well established to stop the guys just saying ‘nu-uh’ and taking off at a dead sprint.
Fanatics can’t imagine the possibility of their own methods not working. So when things don’t go as intended they take sabotage for granted. That in turn leads to people being killed for crimes which never took place. Hence the extreme cruelty of totalitarian regimes.
@ad9,
I think that had more to do with Stalin’s personal….issues though, and less to do with general sentiments in the party as a whole.
… Sort of. There’s been a general tendency lately in scholarship to point that while Stalin certainly starte the purges and was in overall control there was quite a bit of bottom-up and side-to-side stuff going on: People taking the chance to get rid of rivals, or even just genuinely people they thought were dangerous. The purges were, in a sense, a mass movement and not neccessarily *entirely* top-down directed.
This is, partly, true, but it is an oversimplification. The Red Army had a lot of tsarist officers, who joined it either for opportunistic reasons or because they honestly believed that bolsheviks offered the least evil choice for Russia. In addition, the Red Army started professionalising almost immediately after the Civil War, because a conscription-based mass army absolutely needs a cadre. And even the working-class, bolshevist officers who had risen during the war tended to become first and foremost military men instead of being bolsheviks, because service in armed forces tends to produce a different mindset than service as a political functionary or civil administrator. In addition, the working class officers were heavily, even desperately, schooled at all levels during the 1920’s to produce educated officer cadres – which, despite political indoctrination inherent in all Soviet military education, tends to perpetuate certain military-technical mindset.
The keys that the Soviet leadership used to control the army were
1) political officers (politruks) who most typically had a veto over commander’s decisions.
2) deep and wide infiltration of the Red Army by the Cheka-NKVD-OGB-MGB-KGB-FSB continuum.
3) massive purge of the officer corps, which meant that in 1939, about every non-purged Soviet officer was working two levels of command above their formal competence.
Later, during the Cold War, the Soviet Army was a very professional body that was very pliant with regard to political leadership, and the role of political officers was mainly comparable to chaplains, but this was mainly because the leadership was very much a mirror of the political one: the senior officers were people who had begun their careers under Stalin and who had performed well in the WWII, and were now enjoying all the perks of being part of the peace-time nomenclatura. And younger ones were products of the Soviet educational system, just like their civilian peers in the civilian nomeclatura.
That’s a fair point to make. As my first sentence might indicate, I had a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to what to me appeared to be the premise of the question. So I over-emphasized that these were not revolutions for the sake of having a revolution, but for the sake of implementing an ideology. Reality is of course always messier than that, and a state is made up of lots of people with different motivations.
It’s probably just as valid to answer the question of “Why did the military give up power by allowing the establishment of political officers and secret police oversight?” with “Because the decision makers at the time were ideologically aligned and thus trusted civilian leadership” and with “Because the decision makers did not want a military counter-revolution coup and that meant re-establishing strong civilian leadership control over the military.”
The Bolsheviks which founded the Soviet Union cam to power by kidnapping the Russian Revolution. Which in turn had broken out spontaneously as a reaction to Russia’s inability to defend itself during WWI. The Chinese Communists cam to power by winning the last round of Chinese civil wars.
There’s an interesting book (Jonathan Fennell – Fighting the People’s War) which drew on the the large archives of soldiers letters for the Commonwealth forces (Britain, Australia, Canada, NZ, India, South Africa). From these and looking at battlefield performance, there is a close connection between the cause, the commitment of the political leadership to that cause and performance. In short, the more the soldiers saw their own ideological commitments reflected in their leadership, the harder they fought. The reverse is also true – one does not need to mutiny, just not put the effort in for a cause that’s not yours.
This is very apparent in the Chinese case – the KMT’s lack of connection meant that their troops often just gave up in the event of setbacks.
“Such ideological alignment I’d suspect is present in every state (You don’t get to be a US general either if you want to overthrow the government)”
I don’t think this is strictly true everywhere; the Latin American militaries who performed coups d’état were often able to get promoted despite wanting to overthrow the government. But it is probably at least true enough that it makes the stereotypical coup plotter a colonel rather than a general (cf Nasser, Gaddafi)
I don’t think this is strictly true everywhere; the Latin American militaries who performed coups d’état were often able to get promoted despite wanting to overthrow the government.
I think that’s right. And then of course two other factors are:
1) in countries with pluralistic, election-based systems, the party that was in charge when a general was promoted may not be the party that’s in charge *now*, and if your loyalty is to the party rather than the system, then it might not transfer over to the new government, and
2) in times of ideological ferment (and Latin America during the mid 20th c was definitely in a state of ideological turmoil), a general’s opinions and ideological beliefs can change over time, and their loyalties might subsequently change too.
I think it’s definitely true that the classic, and most common, coup plotter is a colonel rather than a general. Though there are 20th c cases where even quite low ranking officers like Sergeants have overthrown governments.
part of what’s happening there is also that “civilian control of the military is weak” tends to be self-reinforcing, because a civil leadership that already fears the military intervening against them or otherwise undermining them is potentially going to be reluctant to interfere with the military’s internal hierarchies and promotions because the result of not promoting the disloyal guy who the army likes might well be “the army finds someone to replace you and promote the guy” (or less dramatically, weakens an already weak grip over the military by angering them)
Three that I’m aware of, although one deserves an asterisk.
The two straight-forward ones both occurred in 1980, one in, when Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe overthrew William Tolbert, and the other in Suriname where Sergeant Major Desi Bouterse overthrew Henck Arron. In Suriname’s case, the military had 8 officers and 100 NCOs, plus 500 conscripts. The officers were all relatively new because prior to independence in 1975, the colonial military had had Dutch officers and Surinamese NCOs. Bouterse was also aware that the officers weren’t particularly loyal to the government and were unlikely to intervene and put themselves at risk in the case of a coup.
The “sort-of” one is Togo in 1963. The coup leaders, Gnassingbe Eyadema and Emmanuel Bodjolle, were NCOs, but they were French NCOs that the newly-independent nation of Togo did not accept into Togolese service. A group of these soldiers whose service was declined by the new government overthrew that government. Eyadema’s second coup in 1967 doesn’t really count because by then he was the Chief of Staff to President Grunitzky.
So, two of the three cases of NCOs leading coups were nations coming out of a colonial era, where NCOs who had served under the colonizing power felt themselves disadvantaged by changes the new governments had put in place, and the small countries were vulnerable to a coup organized by experienced soldiers at much lower ranks than usual.
As far as the propensity for colonels to rebel rather than generals, there seem to be a couple reasons for that. Generals are typically treated fairly well by the standards of whatever country they’re serving. Their prestige, comfort, and wealth are tied to the existing regime. Colonels tend to be highly-ranking enough to be involved in politics, but without the prestige and power of the generals. Colonel also tends to be the last rank with (mostly) objective promotion standards, with promotion to general being a political decision and one where loyalty to a country or a regime is a significant part of the decision (or membership in the right ethnic or familial group in some countries). Basically, a colonel is the highest rank that isn’t selected for political loyalty, and doesn’t have the same level of perks as a general. Someone who knows he won’t be promoted above colonel might see that as incentive to take the entire country by force.
It’s also not entirely uncommon for generals to lead coups. Dorothy Ohl and Evgeny Finkel looked at coups from 1950-2012 in a 2013 paper, and found that 43% were led by generals, 30% by field grade officers (colonels, lieutenant colonels, and majors), 9% by company grade officers, 2% by NCOs, 1% by enlisted soldiers, and the remainder by either civilians or an unclear mix of people. Colonels do have an unusual propensity for leading coups, with only full generals outnumbering them – colonels are more likely to rebel than brigadier generals, major generals, or lieutenant generals.
Apparently Nicolas Grunitzky was a mulatto. Which explains his geographically unexpected surname.
@Steve K,
Thanks for providing additional context! I was thinking also of Batista in Cuba in the 1930s.
The most interesting thing about the 1980 coup in Liberia, to me, is that it happened right after the regime had liberalized, at least to a degree, after about 100 years of right-wing oligarchic quasi-one-party rule. We often think of reform as a way to avoid revolution, but sometimes it can pave the way for revolution instead.
@Hector While there had been some liberalization under Tolbert, the government still heavily favored Americo-Liberians over indigenous people. The reforms were too fast for Tolbert’s supporters and too slow for everyone else.
About a year before the coup, Minister of Agriculture Chenoweth proposed increasing the (subsidized) price of rice from $22 per 100 pounds to $26 per 100 pounds. This led to protests because Chenoweth and Tolbert both owned large rice farms and were seen as lining their own pockets. It seems to have hit particularly hard because this was a period when Liberia’s economy had been depressed by a low global price of rubber to the point that Libya and Cuba were offering economic assistance to the country.
The protests deteriorated into violence with dozens of protestors killed, and Tolbert tried to restore order by arresting opposition party leaders for sedition. Early the next year he banned the sole opposition party and arrested its leaders for treason, devolving back to one-party rule the month before the coup (of indigenous soldiers) overthrew the Tolbert government.
So yes, it was after a period of liberalization, but also after an even more recent period of backtracking on that liberalization with a side of naked self-dealing thrown in.
I think there are two major factors here.
1) in developing countries, it may well be that the military is actually the best-educated and most politically enlightened part of the society (e.g. Decabrist movement in Russia, Young Turks in Ottoman Empire, Nasser in Egypt, Baath party in Syria and Iraq etc.) In such case, making a military coup to get a nationalist, liberal or communist (whatever may go for “enlightened” in that time and place) government is simply a result of the fact that there is little political discourse outside the military, while the military needs to give and allow its officers a better education than civilian institutions. This makes the military officers the natural political avant-garde.
2) In countries where the political system is changing, the military may be dominated by the members of previous regime. In such case, the military remains a constant potential source for a reactionary coup. (E.g. Turkish army in defence of secularism, South American militaries against socialism, many European militaries in 1930’s against democracy.) The situation is even worsened if there is a tradition of the military leading social change with coups, stemming from point 1). This situation persists until the government manages to instill the military with the supporters and the ideology of the new regime. (E.g. Turkish military against Gülen)
@Finnish Reader,
I think your point #1 is really well taken, especially in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa. When Thomas Sankara staged his revolutionary, communist-aligned coup in 1983, for example, it was in a country that was 90% rural and hadn’t had a single university until 10 years earlier (so much for the French “civilizing mission”, I guess). There wasn’t much of either an industrial working class or an educated professional class to speak of, so if a revolution was going to happen, the military was really the only force that could enact it. That is an extreme example since we’re talking about what was then and now one of the poorest countries in the world, but I think the general pattern holds in a lot of developing countries.
Peru in the late 1960s is another example of the military taking on a revolutionary, left wing role. They did have educated civilian classes at the time of course, so I think part of what was going on there is that for different reasons, the military officers in question felt that revolution was necessary but didn’t trust the civilian left wing parties, either communist or social-democratic, to carry it out. Also if you’re in a situation where revolution from above seems like the only way to avoid revolution from below, then the difference between order and revolution can become murky.
@Alien,
That’s exactly right, thanks for pointing out. I find it really grating when people (typically self-styled “centrists”, as you point out) try to reduce ideologies like communism, socialism, nationalism, etc.. to psychological temperaments instead of to sets of ideas to be taken seriously on their own terms. Particularly since these supposed psychological explanations really break down when you try to extrapolate them across societies.
The kind of people who are attracted to communism or socialism when they are the dominant, hegemonic ideology of society, or even more so the kind who are attracted to them in societies which used to be communist/socialist in the past but are not today, aren’t going to be the same kind of people who are attracted to them when they are radical new out-of-the-box ideas. At least, they aren’t going to appeal to the same sets of psychological traits.
With the weird result of people longing back to something created by left-wing extremists.
This is one of the more frustrating/amusing brain-bugs about progressive politics, the way it somehow never gets credited as being maybe a good idea those leftists had.
Bismarck: “I shall make sure those socialists shall never be politically relevant!”
Me: “How will you do that?”
Bismarck: “By instituting state-funded pensions and welfare programs. Then they won’t have any policy goals to fight for.”
Cold-War NATO Europe: “We shall make sure that capitalism triumphs over socialism!”
Me: “How will you do that?”
Europe: “By regulating markets and using taxes to fund welfare programs. Then people won’t have any reason to try and emigrate to Soviet countries.”
If I understand it correctly the first welfare state was created out of self-preservation. It could well have been under Otto von Bismarck who was the most famous person with this family name.
I would take an exception to your statement about the British military not doing coups. In my opinion, there were two:
1) Lord Protector Cromwell quite explicitly rose to power as the commander of the New Model Army and dissolved the Long Parliament with a very open military support. His subsequent rule was probably the first modern military dictatorship.
2) The “Glorious Revolution” was a Dutch strategic strike where a foreign power bribed the leaders of the British military to stand aside while the capital was occupied with a fast invasion and then the coup finalised with the subversive elements of the parliament used to rubber-stamp the result of the military strike.
So, the British military was extremely subversive element during the 17th century, and only became a reliable tool of classes in power after the landed aristocracy (i.e. the Parliament) was able to cement its political pre-eminence.
I doubt Oliver Cromwell could think outside the box. He may not even have been aware there was a box to think outside. To me the ability to think outside the box is the difference between a military dictator and a traditional monarch.
Oliver Cromwell to the Scots Presbyterians: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, consider it possible ye may be mistaken”.
Sounds as if he was well aware that thinking outside a box might be possible. And did you know that when Archbishop Ussher died, Cromwell gave him a funeral in Westminster Abbey, according to the Anglican liturgy, at Government expense? Way outside any normal box, for one in his position.
Thank you for the quote. It indicates he was not as fanatic as I imagined him. Also, he may have thought about James Ussher as a worthy opponent.
In the case of the USSR, they actually experimented substantially in the 1920s and 30s with attempting to abolish rank and attendant hierarchy as such and replace it with one purely contingent on assignments and temporary positions. That this was largely ineffective and ended up solidifying after WW2 into a system where very little authority was devolved to NCOs and commissioned officers ended up taking many of the responsibilities NCOs have in modern Western-system militaries suggests strongly that this was a more accurate reflection of Soviet society, where even the modest social integration necessary to become a junior lieutenant was critical to being trusted with authority. (Or to put it in other words, the USSR did not produce a society without a social elite, they produced a society in which membership in the social elite was inflected by conscious expressions of ideological alignment as well as by family connections etc.)
And of course, this process also ended up killing a great many people who adopted that ideological alignment at the early stages while being members of the former social elite, right around the time the early experiments became clear failures…
Russia has virtually replaced its elite twice in less than a century. This pretty much killed off the idea of a hereditary elite being born to rule. Unfortunately the Soviet regime and its ultimate failure did not kill off other pre-modern myths on how people in general work. At least this is my best explanation for so many present-day Russians showing attitudes which seems to belong to a Feudal society.
I’m not sure mid-17th-century Britain (England) is your best example here!
England and Scotland were officially merged into Britain in 1707. Wales had been conquered by Feudal lords already established in England during the middle ages. Ireland had been conquered by Henry VIII but was in practice treated as a colony.
Hence the brackets – though I will point that Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales were ruled as a unitary state, the Commonwealth, from 1653 to 1659. For half of that by a military dictatorship, instituted by a (series of) coups, which is rather my point.
Zampolits in every unit, lots of executions and much exile to worse conditions.
The initial Soviet takeover was interesting because e.g. Lenin was not in the military. Mao was a military leader (guerilla). Both took over where the state had failed. Russia fell apart while fighting WW1, China was torn apart by fighting the Japanese, which spiraled into the whole country ending up in the hands of warlords.
the Chinese military is under the direct command of the Party, through the Central Military Commission – which is a Party office – led by the General Secretary, instead of any High Command/General Staff/War Ministry. Basically a Party’s own military, not a national one.
Yes, and this was the explicit point (for its supporters) of purchase, which made it much more difficult to become an officer, especially a senior officer, if you weren’t rich. In 18th-19th century Britain, if you were very rich, you were, by nature, conservative (small c). You had a position in society, you had a large network of relationships with other rich people that gave you status and power, you owned a lot of land. And this meant that you wouldn’t want to start a revolution, because you had much more to lose than to gain. But if you’d come from nothing and ascended to command through pure talent, well, you might start thinking: why shouldn’t I have a big house and an estate? Why shouldn’t I, in fact, be king? Or Lord Protector at least? “The world’s our oyster”… and to continue the quote to the second, less well known part of the sentence “…which we with sword shall open”.
The Navy didn’t have purchase, because while military coups are common, naval coups are pretty much unheard of.
Pure talent is a myth. It needs to be trained too!
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/The-myth-of-inborn-genius#wbb1
Sorry, you’ve misread that blog post. It’s arguing that *inborn* talent is a myth. Talent itself is not a myth. And if you read my comment carefully you’ll see that I am contrasting people who succeed through “pure talent” with people who succeed because of social position and wealth. I didn’t say anything about where the talent came from – inborn, training, upbringing, practical experience, or a combination of all four.
The expression “pure talent” can be misunderstood as not having to be trained. Of cause some people have easier to learn certain skills than others. But they still need to be taught them.
The purchase system was an outcome of the Commonwealth, when the Presbyterian officers of the New Model overthrew a parliament of nobility/gentry. It was explicitly aimed at reserving (home) military office to the conservative classes. Note, however, that purchase and high expenses did not apply to the Indian Army, where promotion was a mix of seniority and merit.
Patronage was an essential part of naval politics, kept in check by the Admiralty’s insistence on basic competence as a pre-requisite.
“Note, however, that purchase and high expenses did not apply to the Indian Army, where promotion was a mix of seniority and merit.”
Exactly – because the Indian Army wasn’t a coup risk, because it was in India.
In most of the period we’re talking about, the Indian Army wasn’t just the bit of the British Army that was in India; it was an entirely separate force, recruited and paid by the Company. And it may not have been a coup risk to Britain but it certainly was a coup risk to India, as demonstrated in, most obviously, 1857.
Coup-proofing measures included having an entirely European (not entirely British, but entirely European) officer corps, who obviously had no reason to promote a coup in which they and their families would be immediately killed; having some entirely European regiments, to whose officers and soldiers the same would apply; and limiting artillery to European units only. A coup in India in which the plotters could have credibly promised safety to the European officers and their families would have had an excellent chance of success, but no such credible promise could have been made.
The senior officers were British, the junior officers Indian. The Indian Army (actually three armies – Bengal, Madras and Bombay) did have artillery until the Mutiny. Which was defeated by Indian army units which stayed with the Raj (it was mostly Bengal army units which rose up – Madras, Bombay, Sikh, Gurkha and Pathan troops did not join). There was a circulation of officers between the British and Indian armies – eg Wellington, Lake, Coote)
Peter T: yes, good point, I should have clarified that removing artillery was a post-1857 measure and therefore didn’t apply to the Company armies.
@ajay,
The idea of purchasing military command always struck me as incredibly asinine, in a “what were they thinking” kind of way, but you actually do a good job of explaining why it made sense on its own terms.
Thank you!
“I will prioritise my political allies over talented non-allies for positions of high military authority” is very very common in coup-prone states like 18th century Britain, 19th century Russia, 20th century Iraq etc (maybe even 21st century US) but normally it’s done in a more ad hoc case by case basis, or by drawing from an established aristocracy or extended family network. 18th century Britain was unusual (I think maybe even unique?) in using an explicitly and purely financial system, but a lot of other states did something that had much the same effect.
The US does pretty much have an explicit system of purchase, but not for military positions – for diplomatic positions. If you give the president enough money, he will make you an ambassador to somewhere. The justification for this is not coup-proofing but personalist politics – the value of an ambassador, to the host nation, is that he has the president’s ear, and the US political system involves a general rule that large donations get you attention. In theory, countries should be happy that their US ambassador is an unqualified millionaire, because his value depends on his function as a channel to the president.
This reminds me of something I’ve been wondering about for awhile: what was the deal with Maximinus Thrax? I am not so much puzzled by the idea that he could jump from commanding a legion to being emperor, and more puzzled by the idea that he supposedly rose from being a common soldier of low birth to commanding a legion. Did the army of Imperial Rome transition to being exceptionally meritocratic by pre-modern standards at some point? Had the cursus honorum broken down? Or should we dismiss the idea of him being a common soldier of low birth as a slander invented by his enemies?
(I think there are similar questions about some of the other 3rd century emperors, though some of the so-called “barracks emperors” seem to have had more normal Roman aristocratic careers.)
I would really take the descriptions of “low birth” with a pinch of salt. Even in the Late Republic, many political new-comers were domi nobiles, local big men. Considering that you needed to have a certain basic education to function effectively at the higher military offices, it is quite likely that these “low-birth” emperors were actually from quite privileged backgrounds, simply becaue they were able to get a basic schooling. Maximinus Thrax, if he started out really as a “shephered and bandit leader”, was probably a local big man, because that is how you become a leader of a bandit (i.e. rebel) group. However, they would have been considered “low-birth” by our historians who were from the old Roman aristocracy.
A bit like Obama or Vance: men who are often considered examples of how one rises from nothing to the political summit of the USA, but whose family backgrounds are, if you look more carefully, quite wealthy and allowed them very good educational opportunities.
there’s also a tendency of aristocracy to be rather snobbish about people they regard as ‘new money’, no matter the exact circumstances they ended up being ‘new money’, which in some cases is literally just ‘they were from a rural area distant from the capital, and the last couple of generations of their family were, despite prodigious wealth, a bit antisocial so now we’ve forgotten where they’re actually from.’ One funny example is the dukes of devonshire in england, given the cavendishes were already spectacularly wealthy when the duchy was created, but someone in attendance wasn’t too familiar on where derbyshire was, or whether it existed, so put the wrong region (devon, in the south west, rather than derbyshire, in the east midlands) in the title of the peerage.
I guess I’m more interested in the “common soldier” part than the “low birth” part. Like sure any Roman citizen could in theory become a quaestor and proceed up the cursus honorum. But… did he? Was he most likely a quaestor at some point, making him eligible to become a senator (even if the other senators looked down on him), or did he somehow make the jump straight from centurion to legate?
Checking back to the Afterlife of the Roman Republic article, the legion-leading legates (not to be confused with province-ruling legates, who were their bosses) weren’t required to have ever been senators. This isn’t mentioned here because the office didn’t exist in the Republic; Republic legions didn’t have fixed commanders, and if the consul or praetor in overall command wanted to split one off they’d detail a tribune to command on a temporary basis.
Also, it would not be at all strange for a quaestor to have been a common soldier; substantial military experience was required to run for office, and while you could serve as a military tribune there weren’t a lot of slots, and a lot of them went to associates of the commander, so if you weren’t a client or relative of a consul/praetor this year you’re not getting one of those. Some of them were elected, but there’s a bunch of other potential future quaestors running for those positions and the voters (who the tribunes will potentially command in battle) probably would prefer a guy who’s been a centurion. And centurions are usually expected to have had time in the ranks.
@Bret, this series is labeled as ‘for Worldbuilders’ but there’s no link to it on your Resources for Worldbuilders page, seems like an oversight.
One thing I feel the article could be clearer about is the spectrum between a Hereditary Leadership Class and a Professional Leadership within a larger Propertied Class in places where there is a certain amount of split between “Military” and “Civilian” careers.
To illustrate what I mean, look at Carthage – both their war leaders (rab mahanet) and their civilian leaders (shofetim) came of course from wealthy members of their citizen class, but not only did advancing in one career lock you out from another, but at least for the Barcids, it seems that being the child of a war leader makes you considerably more likely to also choose a war leader career. So somewhat like having a hereditary Military Aristrocract sub-class within the larger class of Propertied Notables.
Compare that to the example he gives about the modern state. Yes, both generals and politicians are drawn from the (not closed but still likely to self-replicate) academic class. And there’s also not often an overlap – successful generals don’t generally quit to run for Congress of vice versa. But the children of generals don’t automatically also become military leaders. They chose their own academic path and might become politicians or even tenured professors.
Or somewhat in the middle of the spectrum sits the two-track Imperial Examinations @Steve K mentions above – to be able to afford to prepare and sit through the examination you had to be a member of the propertied class of scholar-officials. While there was no requirement to choose the same exam track as your father (in theory, the examinations were open to all), of course your family background would prepare you better for one track than the other – a child of a general has more opportunities to learn horse-riding and archery than that of a magistrate.
” successful generals don’t generally quit to run for Congress of vice versa. ”
They sometimes do run for President though. Of the 47 US presidents, ten have achieved general rank.
Who, of course, were really only 45 distinct individuals.
Oh damn we had a whole half-century period from 1840-1888 where half our presidents had achieved the rank of general? Different time.
It’s also worth noting that lots of officers leave the military and go into politics. Fun bit of trivial that every single Cold War era US President was a former military officer, every single one of them part of the military chain of command in WWII (in Truman’s case, of course, this was by virtue of being Commander in Chief, though he’d previously attained the rank of Colonel).
Nowadays military officers are less dominant in US politics, though George W. Bush was an officer (even if he was attacked for having had a cushy Air National Guard spot rather than something likely to get him deployed to a combat zone), and there are still at least a few officers serving in Congress (Google says 100 veterans, I suspect heavily skewed towards officers though I’d be surprised if there weren’t a few enlisted and I can’t find an exact breakdown).
Another interesting fact I remember hearing during the 2024 election (in the context of Tim Walz’s service record) is that we’ve had NCOs become Vice President, but never President.
George Walker Bush is an idiot, at least politically. During his two-term presidency he got globally infamous for saying the most idiotic and poorly though out things. His only advantage over Donald Trump is him being less hateful.
GWB killed more innocent civilians, though.
The United States used to wage war with more immediate consequences to its population. There was practically continuous war between the colonists/UnitedStates and the native population from 1603 until 1890, and many of those wars were exceptionally violent. The general who won the battle of Tippecanoe would be immensely important to the lives of everyone in the Midwest U.S. Likewise the generals in the Mexican War, or the Civil War. I don’t think it is accidental that the last general to become President was the winning general in World War II; that was the last war with such society-wide impact. So my half-formed idea is that generals routinely became President because war was much more fundamental to life experiences of average people from 1603 to 1945 than it has been since.
“Yes, both generals and politicians are drawn from the (not closed but still likely to self-replicate) academic class. And there’s also not often an overlap – successful generals don’t generally quit to run for Congress of vice versa. But the children of generals don’t automatically also become military leaders. They chose their own academic path and might become politicians or even tenured professors.”
Really? In the US it seems quite common for military officers to quit to go into politics. There are a hundred in the current Congress. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/01/02/breaking-down-the-number-of-veterans-in-the-119th-congress/
I suppose that none of them are former generals or admirals – but that might just be age. By the time you make general you’re normally late fifties and probably looking forward to retirement. The post-Civil War wave noted above was, I think, partly the result of the massive and rapid expansion of the US army, which meant that by 1865 there were a lot of generals and colonels who a) couldn’t stay in because the war was over and the army was shrinking, and b) were still quite young. As an extreme example, Custer was a brevet brigadier-general at 23.
And my impression is that the children of senior military officers don’t automatically join the military, but they’re still much less likely to do so than the average.
George Custer was called “the boy general”. I always assumed it was because he became a commander at 25 at most.
Should also be noted that we often get ex-generals in the civilian side of the national security complex; Secretary of Defense is often a general even though there’s a rule against appointing someone who’s served as a general recently (basically meaningless because it can be waived by the Senate, who have to approve Secretary of Defense appointments anyways). Likewise you get some in intel and the procurement side of DoD, and they’re headhunted by defense contractors. Of course, you could say that’s not a meaningfully distinct class from the military.
“Naturally, the most senior (by wealth, generally, because this is about power within a society) warrior-aristocrats will lead the army in battle, with more junior warrior-aristocrats leading common soldiers”
That ties to the ambiguity about the word “senior”.
Because it also has the common meaning of “older”.
There are other words available. Like “higher/superior”, or “better”, which sometimes got used. And yet a lot of societies insisted on conflation between social position and age, despite their obvious conflict. That includes the screaming oxymoron of “Senorita”.
If the wealth and position was normally held for life, any warrior aristocracy had to deal with fathers who were for a prolonged time distinctly less physically fit to fight than their adult sons or their rank and file followers, and yet continued to hold the wealth and status above the sons and followers.
What were the fathers doing in war? As Memnon said, killing an old man brings little honour.
Remember that the aristocrat earns their position of command by wealth and birth, they do not earn wealth and birth by martial excellence. If the father can’t fight, he still retains his wealth and status. And while warrior aristocrats are expected to lead their followers in battle, if you have a good reason for not fighting, a son is usually an acceptable substitute.
Or, the old fathers fight anyway. John of Bohemia died at the battle of Crécy, fighting for the French at age 50 and having been blind for many years. He wanted to die in battle. Jean de Vienne and Enguerrand de Coucy fought (for the French) at the battle of Nicopolis both aged 55, one dying in battle, one captured.
I would consider those examples middle-aged. When you use the word “old” I think of people over 60.
Those people would definitely be considered old in the middle ages. Not neccessarily *extremely* so but still old.
While high infant mortality does tend to skew the results a lot more than you might think, people still generally died a whole lot earlier: So in a sense people just didn’t have time to grow old the way we do.
You are right in that even those reaching adulthood did live a bit shorter than we do today. Living to more than 80 – which is common nowadays – would have meant you were very lucky in pre-industrial times.
Case in point, no King of England made it to 70. Unless you count Phillip of Spain.
“Case in point, no King of England made it to 70. Unless you count Phillip of Spain.”
Funnily enough Sweden has three medieval kings who lived to be 70… (Albrecht of Mecklenburg, Eric of Pommerania and Christian II) all of which were deposed though and ended up getting that old elsewhere.
(a couple more get into their 60’s, and then we get to the 19th century and onwards and the Bernadottes mostly are at least 80, with Gustav V dying at 92… There’s a fun incident there as when he was born in 1858 his great-grandmother Desireé Clary attended his birth. Said Desireé had once dated Napoleon. Gustav V died in 1950. Those two lives intersecting spans across a *fascinating* amount of time)
Your examples of pre-industrial kings of Sweden living to 70 or more all reigned during our time of frequent civil wars. The Kalmar Union was doomed to fail once its accidental founder was dead.
I think the legend of Bernadotte’s long lifespan is partially hybrid vigour and partially selection bias. Jean Bernadotte (1763 – 1844) and his wife Desirée Clary (1777 – 1860) both grew up as middle-class commoners. The only child they had with each other was their son Oscar (1799 – 1859). He married Joséphine de Beauharnais (1807 – 76) who was the granddaughter of the more famous woman known by that name. Her father was born a nobleman and her mother born royal. Their most long-lived child was also named Oscar (1829 – 1907). He in turn married Sophie von Nassau (1836 – 1913) who had three royal-born grandparents (the forth one was a noblewoman). So the younger Oscar’s sons were of only half royal descent if you count by grandparents. All lived to 80 or more which may have created the legend.
Correction:
Only half of Gustaf V:s GREAT-grandparents were of royal birth. I am always trying to get degrees of relationship right because these really matters genetically.
The generally poor medical care available in this era and the lack of, for example, modern scientific physical therapy grounded in scientific studies of anatomy to help you recover fully from injuries meant that the typical person who lived to fifty was in considerably poorer health than the typical fifty-year-old today. If they had a chronic illness it was vanishingly unlikely to be receiving effective treatment; even if they did not it was overwhelmingly likely that various brushes with injury and disease would have, as it were, undermined their constitution.
While a fifty year old under such conditions would not generally be decrepit in the sense of, say, “would physically struggle to climb a flight of stairs,” they are very likely to be ‘old’ in the sense that the aging process has affected them to the point where strenuous prolonged physical activity such as “work all day in the fields” is quite noticeably more difficult for them than would be normal for men in their twenties or thirties. Similarly they may struggle with prolonged rough conditions such as sleeping under canvas or under the open sky in an army camp, or in fighting a pitched battle which tends to exhaust people very quickly.
Everything at work here is in purely statistical terms, but it is by no means unreasonable that medievals considered a fifty year old man to be “getting old.” Dying in your early sixties was then a “ripe old age” whereas we would now consider it “dying young.”
I think it was worse living conditions more than poor medical care. As my dad once put it:
“You don’t keep entire populations alive with medications.”
Public health is not about treating or curing diseases. It is about preventing people from becoming ill in the first place. The only medical interventions to have a significant effect on life expectation are vaccines:
https://www.ifraagasaetterskan.se/Blogg-p%C3%A5-svenska/Varf%C3%B6r-jag-%C3%A4r-f%C3%B6r-vaccination/#wbb1
Still, I think the lower classes in Medieval Europe would have aged even faster than the elite. Archaeologists have found traces of all kinds of nutritional deficiencies in skeletons from agrarian societies. Members of hereditary elites would have gotten a significantly better start in life than those growing up in absolute poverty. (The middle class would have been very small in most of these societies.) They would have gotten a more varied diet and would not have risked starvation. I think malnutrition and the resulting weakness to diseases was an important factor for the high childhood mortality of this time period.
Sorry, I liked to my blog post in Swedish. Its English translation is found here:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/Why-I-am-for-vaccination/#wbb1
In England, it was typical for men to marry around 25, and ‘retire’ (leave the heavy farm work and just do light duties/child-minding) in their early 50s. Carolingian royalty almost all died in their 50s , leaving their position to healthy mid-20s sons (Louis the German lived into his 70s, which had negative effects on his line).
Regarding health I still think the rich (and the middle class to the extent there was one) would have lived and worked a few years longer than the poor. Thanks to a more varied diet and better food safety they would have gotten a better start in life. Moreover, training for a warrior would not have been quite as hard to your body as hard manual labour. The elite would have lived riskier lives, however.
John of Bohemia died at the battle of Crécy, fighting for the French at age 50 and having been blind for many years
I recently learned about him on Eleanor Janega’s history podcast (she calls him “John of Luxembourg”): if the stories are accurate (and the sources mostly seem to agree), that is one amazing story, about him charging into battle tied to other knights.
I suppose he desperately wanted to die in battle.
There weren’t as many people who got too old to really fight yet were still alive as you might think, due to lower life expectancy. Sure, a guy in his fifties is not in the same condition as when he was in his twenties, but an extra thirty years of training and combat experience go a good way to making up for that. If he makes it to 70, he is really too old for the line of battle and probably has passed his expensive armor and horse onto his son. Or maybe he’s still with the army dispensing sage advice or possibly even commanding overall but no one expects him to actually ride into the thick of it.
The concept of life expectancy is oftentimes misunderstood:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-ancient-people-live-life-span-versus-longevity
Our host’s thesis–military structures mirror civilian structures–is spectacularly supported by the examples of Switzerland and Israel. In these countries, the mirroring exists at the individual level. Both countries rely on large and well-trained reserve forces. The reserve officers have civilian day jobs. There is a very strong correlation between the SES of the civilian day job and the military rank of the reserve officer. If you’re talking to an Israeli colonel, you’re probably also talking to a senior corporate executive.
The match is not precise – there are many people from a high SES that are grunts in the reserves. But, since the Army is professional, you need to be a good manager in order to get promoted to a Colonel, which means that you can likely find a good-paying job in the civilian world.
From my (second hand but close up) experience, the Israeli system in practice is not a replication of civilian social structures in the way our host means: the people being commanded are not that executive’s employees, they’re random other blue collar stiffs. And the correlation between peacetime and military status is not strong at the small unit level.
Rather, it’s a halfway house to the fully deracinated professional military. (This is also my understanding from reading about the Wilhelmine German mass mobilization system.)
Young men are pulled out of their civilian lives at a young age and thrown together with a random assortment of their age cohort. For 2-3 years, they undergo the full deracination experience of a professional military, breaking down social bonds and replacing them with a new parallel social hierarchy.
After their full time service, they are released into broader society… but are still brought back to the army in peacetime for reserve duty for a week or three every year. The point of this reserve duty is in part to keep them refreshed on skills and trained on new equipment, but as important is its function in maintaining a parallel social structure: peacetime reserve duty so that units do their reserve duty together, not separately as individuals. When war comes, the soldiers in a unit are not just the equivalent of the Western educated classes’ college acquaintances, but “comet” friends: dealt with infrequently but very intensely and at regular intervals.
People who participate in these systems very frequently describe them as rather different parallel societies from civilian life, and their peacetime participation in them as a removal (welcome or not) from civilian society rather than a replication of it.
Israel has mandatory conscription for women too. But I think it is shorter for woman than for men.
Good point. The experience is much more common for men (they are wildly overrepresented in the kinds of combat positions where this kind of reserve system dominates) but it is not gender exclusive.
Possible typos:
“one starts as the cash register and works upwards.”
Did you mean “at the cash register”?
“manuals were not intended as textbooks for classics,”
Did you mean “textbooks for classes”?
You never had a retail job where you stood around and held money, shouting DING before handing it to the cashier?
I think it’s probably a mistake to class the use of tropes like “officer academies” is a statement of a belief of how it was. Fire Emblem, Tales, and Final Fantasy are not attempting to convince you of the historical truthiness of their setting; they’re doing it for instant emotional resonance with the audience who are familiar with being at school and feeling like an outcast, feeling like your life is leading up to some painfully high stakes tests. I doubt anyone was consciously thinking of the function of premodern routes of aristocratic education when they were designing the plots of these games, except perhaps as aesthetic influence.
And in any event the setting of Final Fantasy VIII is a pseudo-modern one, where we do actually have military schools (albiet with fewer gunswords, 19 year old teachers and giant monsters living in caves used for midterms).
I know you’ve got a lot of sunk value in this IP address, but I can’t help but think how much easier it would be to discover ACOUP, purchase memberships, and log in to comment if it were on Substack instead of WordPress. Please give it some consideration; WordPress just isn’t the go-to platform anymore.
I honestly think not being on substack has significant values. It is worth remembering subtstack actively platforms fascists.
Bret has a lot more control on his platform the way it is now, with Patreon being the money funnel, decoupled from the website itself.
And I also feel the infrastructure he has now is more adapted to his goals than Substack would be. Acoup gets known by word of mouth in quite a decent way, I don’t necessarily think Substack would bring him the right audience, one that has the interest in reading massive walls of texts.
“It is worth remembering subtstack actively platforms fascists.”
Translation: Unlike certain platforms, they actually take the position that they are a common carrier rather than a publisher.
Promoting things through a promotional algorithm is clearly a publishing decision.
Yeah nah, that ain’t the case at all, and you know it.
I though that Substack’s whole point was wall of texts. Like all the content from Substack I’ve read there had been articles of varying length, so I don’t see how the audience point would work there. Though I agree that OGH should stay here, now that he’s made his name and reputation.
Strong anti-vote for Substack.
The big obvious elephant in the room problem is the Nazi one, but even leaving that aside: Bret has currently built a very solid blog, brand, and readership around a site and hosting he has total control over. Dumping that entire project to subsume himself under Substack’s identity because they’ve got a popular page right now would be colossally short-sighted.
Also, many people will assume any Substack link is paywalled. They don’t have to be, but in my experience most free Substack posts are teasers to get you to subscribe. Nothing wrong with that, but it reduces the odds I’ll make that vital first click.
Also substack is spectacularly badly programmed. It manages to require javascript and use vast amounts of my memory in order to accomplish a task (being a blogging platform) which was a solved problem back in the 90s.
having never heard of the site, i’ve searched for it and oh god please no. Even outside of its users, the Twitterass design is just *bad* for blogs or those kind of longform content. Even assuming WordPress is too primitive for today’s All-New Web 5.0 Name Subject To Change TM, the answer isn’t to have even *worse* layout.
“Armies cannot help but recreate their civilian social structures on the battlefield”
“the same sort of people who exercise positions of authority to organize civil society also lead the armies and navies of that society”
“Pre-modern societies are, by modern standards, extremely low in social mobility and so they create cultures and customs which justify and normalize those systems.”
I don´t notice you commenting on a major exception. The slave armies.
Which were not the only type of forces present in their societies…
Mid-16th century Turkey had the largest branch of forces as sipahi cavalry. These were somewhat “normal” warrior aristocracy – freeborn Turks who held lands and who could bequeath their position (but not specific lands!) to their sons. Sipahi numbers approached 100 000…
but then there were the infidel slaves.
The slave armies included Janissaries (about 12 000 foot) but also Household Six Divisions cavalry who were also slaves (about 5000 horse) and a number of officers.
Looking at the top, I seemed to count 26 men who served as Grand Vizier between 1500 and 1600 (distinct persons – some served multiple terms). Of these 26, 4 were of sipahi background – freeborn Turks.
The rest, 22 out of 26, were infidel slaves.
How did an infidel slave boy get picked to become Grand Vizier rather than live his life as a rank and file Janissary? There were something like 20 000 slave soldiers at any time, and fewer than 10 were the ones who would some time in his later life be the Grand Vizier.
Some of the Turkish commanders made a career because they had been noble in the infidel society before getting enslaved. So the Hercegovices. But my impression is that they were a minority, and most Grand Viziers had been of humble birth.
Note that there WERE different sorts of leadership in civil life compared to the slave Viziers and Pashas. A substantial part of sipahi officers were themself sipahis, and the civil life also had a role for qadis and mullas who were freeborn Turks.
And then there´s the Kingdom of Soldan. In Turkey, most of the upper class were slaves, except the Sultan (but his mother was a slave, too). In the Kingdom of Soldan, everybody in upper class was a Mameluke slave, and there including the Sultan.
How “modern” do you call the slave armies?
The Ottomans (I am less familiar with the mamlukes and others) is a very early modern state. (arguably one of the first)
My understanding is that Janissaries were sorted through a kind of meritocracy (though as usual there was a lot of patronage, “catching the eye” of a superior etc. going on) they were first sorted as recruits and sent to basically live among turkish families, forced to learn turkish, convert to islam, etc. Then they were sent to the Enderun Schools (I think they were all in Istanbul?) where they got the actual soldier training. Some of these were sorted to become officers or administrators depending on if they cuaght the eye of a superior, etc.
In the 16th century, about 100-200 Janissary recruits per year were sent to royal schools to study literature (Turkish, Persian, and Arabic), rhetoric, horsemanship, archery, etc. After a few years, the ones sent to the royal schools would be tested, and around 80 would be sent to the Enderun School at Topkapi Palace. The remainder would be sent straight to the Janissary Corps. Those ~80 would be trained to be the administrators and officers of the Corps.
The remainder of the 5,000-6,000 recruits were hired out to villagers as labor for five to seven years to learn the Turkish language and customs. As positions came open at the training school in Gallipoli, they’d move into learning skills as infantry, gunners, engineers, etc, while also serving as labor for industries supporting the military, such as the dockyards or imperial kitchens.
This stage of training lasted around six years, but could be shorter or longer based on how many new soldiers the Corps needed. If the Janissaries deployed, the “cadets” served as police and firemen in Istanbul (this was something the Corps usually did when it was in barracks). Once training was considered complete, they’d be promoted to the Corps when a slot opened up.
So, long story short, we have another one of those splits where a small number of high-potential recruits are extensively educated to be scholar-official-officers, while the majority are given training more focused on combat skills and military effectiveness. Tests along the way would give additional layers of filtering, so the high-potential guys that didn’t pan out would drop to a lower tier, and the low-potential guys that turned out to have brains would be taught extra skills. In the end, somewhere around 1.5% of the recruits got the highest level of education.
The name “Herzegovina” means “Duchy” in the local language. I have not found any “Kingdom of Soldan” on English-language Wikipedia. Is it more known under another name?
Mameluke state. Note that it included both Egypt and Levant. (“Kingdom of Soldan” is the name used in “Prince”).
I have heard of the Mamelukes seizing power in Egypt only to get an unpleasant surprise when the French turned up.
For a world-building post about leadership, the societies with slave armies aren’t really any different from those around them.
The original Arabic-ish states in the early medieval period employed slave soldiers, ghulams, and this spread throughout the middle east and central Asian states. They also had viziers and other humble born officials who gained high rank – as favourites of the hereditary warrior aristocrat Caliphs. European medieval kings and emperors also sometimes raised favourites into positions of power.
But note how many viziers and royal favourites get executed by the ruler when they do something wrong, or are assassinated by jealous aristocrats, or executed by the next ruler when he inherits. This is a very low percentage way to enter the ruling class, and the existence of viziers and whatnot does not change the way the society operates and selects the vast majority of its military commanders.
The exceptions are where the slave soldiers become strong enough to seize power themselves, such as the Ghaznavids and the most famous Mamluks of Egpyt. And then they promptly turn themselves into a hereditary warrior aristocracy. For the vast majority of the population, and the soldiers, who lived through the Mamluk seizure of power in 13th C Egypt, the only difference was that the new Sultans spoke with a different accent.
That depends a bit. One of the things Bret sorta gestures at is that you often have nested power structures and such coexisting. For the ottomans the Jannissaries were basically a way to bypass (at least to some extent) the traditional turkish aristocracy: Creating exactly the kind of low-born bureaucracy that becomes the backboneof early-modern states. Now the Jannissaries eventually for various reasons turned into basically another heridatery caste, but they were basically an early (and for a while, successful) attempt at bureaucratization.
Basically the ottomans end up reproducing *in paralell* the traditional warrior-caste and a more (while primitve to our eyes) “modern” bureaucratic state with officers and leaders promoted throguh at least theoretically, merit. (though in practice of course, like with many meritocracies, personal connections matters a LOT) And both of those “tracks” had civilian and military paralells.
This is something I think these kinda schematic overviews can often miss: Societies are often complex and have multiple overlapping and contradicting power centres. The same state could rely on *multiple* different methods of recruitment, leadership, etc. because they often contained multiple elements. *Mixtures are common*.
My educated guess is the Ottoman warrior-aristocrats were the patrilineal descendants of the original Turkic-speaking conquerors. As so many times throughout history the conquerors did not biologically replace the pre-existing population. I think the population of present-day Turkey is around 3/4 White. More brown people consist minorities in the south and southeast with no significant number of East Asian or Eurasian people.
@Lena,
Depends on what you consider “White”, but the estimate i’ve seen is that Turks today are only about 10% descended from the original Turkic steppe conquerors from Central Asia.
The turkish aristocracy is actually several differnet waves (from what little we can tell the Osmanoglus themselves came relatively late, with the mongols)
That said the Ottomans are almost certainly *less* turkic genetically than the average turkish aristocrat, simply because of their marriage patterns.
Anatolia has been conquered at least three times in the last couple of millennia. First by Ancient Greeks, then by Romans and finally by Turkic-speakers. The last of these three groups now culturally dominate Turkey. Their language is the native one for at least 70% of the population. This country’s largest minority is the Kurds which I consider intermediate between Whites and South Asians. Same thing with their second largest minority which is the related Zazas. Then we have various cultural groups like Arabs, Circassians, Bosnians, Albanians, Georgians and Bulgarians. I consider them all White except the Arabs. When my daily newspaper appointed Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “the world’s most easily offended white man” I considered it a sign of progress that ethic Turks were now considered While.
My point is that no-one of the pre-modern conquerors of Anatolia were able to whip out its pre-existing population. They just installed themselves as the new Big Men. Even with the Big Men having more children due to polygamy or just having more surviving ones only a small part of the population would be biologically descended from the conquerors. This is not understood by adherents of a lot of pseudohistory.
This country’s largest minority is the Kurds which I consider intermediate between Whites and South Asians.
I’ve generally seen the boundary described as “Pashtuns are the farthest north South Asian people, Tajiks are the farthest east Middle Eastern people”, which would put the boundary somewhere around Kabul.
There are no sharp boundaries in the genetics of human populations. When I feel the need for any approximate ones I follow cultural boundaries. Anyway, I only use the “races” as shorthand for looks. (I prefer to call them “populations” to distance myself from racism.) Most Pashtuns appear “multiracial” to me. But this probably applies to a lot of people native to the foothills of the Himalayas too. My brother is in Nepal right now. Maybe he can show me some photos including the locals later?
You’re gonna need to be more specific than “White”. Very few people of Anglo-Saxon or generally Western European descent in Turkey, which are two fairly common meanings. It’s a remarkably useless term in non-USA context.
Closely related to the population of Iron Age Anatolia (if true) would be a better phrase.
If I understand it correctly West Europeans consist several genetic clusters. Lumping them all together while separating them from East Europeans seems be an American thing. It is like arbitrarily dividing Europeans in North, Central and South like the eugenicists did. They also assumed the first to come around to be typical for an arbitrarily delined home district. Which lead to random variation being mistaken for geographical. As I have pointed out before there are not sharp boundaries. I don’t think ethic Turks differ that much in looks from ethnic Greeks. Since Greeks in general count as white most Turks should be considered white too.
Then I remembered this global map of genetic clines:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/File:Cline_Concept_Explained.png
The additional inserted map of Africa is because Sub-Saharan Africans have more genetic variation than the rest of humanity combined.
@Lena,
I think what that quotation about Pashtuns being racially South Asian is alluding to, is AASI ancestry. These would be the first wave of people to populate the subcontinent, around 50k years ago, and aren’t closely related to other major groups. All South Asian groups have some AASI ancestry, though the proportions vary from over 80% to as low as 10%. Pashtuns have some of that ancestry, though not a lot, which is why you might think of them as a South Asian group.
That said, as you allude to, these lines aren’t actually as sharp as all that, and it does seem like Tajiks have some indigenous South Asian ancestry as well, though even less than Pashtuns. Probably due to slave imports following the Afghan conquests.
I knew our species first reached South Asia by the same wave as gave rise to the Australian Aborigines and the Papuans. This explains why some physical traits common in Aborigines occur a lot in at least some South Asian peoples. When agriculture first spread from West Asia to South Asia early farmers had to interbreed considerably with the pre-existing population. It would have been necessary to adapt to a different physical environment. Genetic admixture can be used to trace historical population movements. However, the “one drop rule” is genetically meaningless.
“The exceptions are where the slave soldiers become strong enough to seize power themselves, such as the Ghaznavids and the most famous Mamluks of Egpyt. And then they promptly turn themselves into a hereditary warrior aristocracy.”
In case of Mamluks, no, they most definitely did not.
Take the list of Mamluk sultans for their last century, 1412…:
1) al-Mu’ayyad Shaykh, usurper, 8 years, natural causes
2) Al-Muzaffar Ahmad, toddler son of 1), 7 months, deposed and imprisoned for life
3) Sayf al-Din Tatar, usurper, 3 months, natural causes
4) Al-Nasir al-Din Muhammad, 10 year old son of 3), 4 months, deposed
5) Al-Ashraf Sayf ad-Dīn Barsbāy, usurper, 16 years, natural causes
6) Al-Aziz Jamal al-Din Yusuf, 15 year old son of 5), 3 months, deposed and imprisoned for life
7) Sayf al-Din Jaqmaq, usurper, 14 years, natural causes
8) Al-Mansur Uthman, 18 year old son of 7), 1 month, deposed and imprisoned
9) Sayf al-Din Inal, usurper, 8 years, natural causes
10) Al-Mu’ayyad Shihab al-Din Ahmad, 31 year old son of 9), 4 months, “abdicated under pressure” and imprisoned
11) Sayf al-Din Khushqadam, usurper, 6 years, natural causes
12) Sayf al-Din Bilbay, usurper, 2 months, deposed and imprisoned
13) Timurbugha, usurper, 2 months, deposed
14) Qaitbay, usurper, 29 years, natural causes
15) An-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qaitbay, 14 year old son of 14), 2 years, assassinated
16) Abu Sa’id Qansuh, usurper, 2 years, deposed and killed
17) Al-Ashraf Abu al-Nasir Janbalat, usurper, 7 months, deposed and killed
18) Tuman Bay I, usurper, 3 months, deposed
19) Al-Ashraf Qansuh al-Ghuri, usurper, 15 years, fell in battle against Turks
In 104 years, 6 sultans of 19 had inherited the throne, but none of the 6 lasted over 2 years, and the 6 reigns combined were under 4 years out of 104.
Seems like there were loads of violent power struggles in Mamluk-led Egypt. Were the usurpers from the same group as their predecessors?
Same group as previous usurpers (who held power all time except under 4 years out of 104). Leading Mamelukes.
Compare some of their neighbours for roughly the same period:
Grand Masters of Hospitallers, 1421-1521:
1) Anton Flavian de Ripa
2) Jean de Lastic
3) Jacques de Milly
4) Piero Raimondo Zacosta
5) Giovanni Battista Orsini
6) Pierre d´Aubusson
7) Emery d´Amboise
8) Guy de Blanchefort
9) Fabrizio del Carretto
all natural deaths, none deposed, and no surnames repeated
Popes of Rome, 1417-1521:
1) Oddone Colonna, of Rome
2) Gabriele Condulmer, of Venice
3) Tommaso Parentucelli, of Genoa
4) Alfons de Borgia, of Valencia
5) Aenea Piccolomini, of Siena
6) Pietro Barbo, of Venice
7) Francesco della Rovere, of Genoa
8) Giovanni Cybo, of Genoa
9) Rodrigo Borgia, of Valencia
10) Francesco Piccolomini, of Siena
11) Giuliano della Rovere, of Genoa
12) Giovanni di Medici, of Florence.
all natural deaths, none deposed. 3 pairs of uncle and nephew, no father-son pairs. (It was and is legal for widowers to join Church, but the last Pope of Rome to be a widower was in 13th century). Also, just 1 of the 12 was a Roman.
Doges of Venice, 1414-1521:
1) Tommaso Mocenigo
2) Francesco Foscari
3) Pasquale Malipiero
4) Cristoforo Moro
5) Nicolo Tron
6) Nicolo Marcello
7) Pietro Mocenigo
8) Andrea Vendramin
9) Giovanni Mocenigo
10) Marco Barbarigo
11) Agostino Barbarigo
12) Leonardo Loredan
No violent deaths, one deposition (Francesco Foscari), died natural causes a few days later. Marco and Agostino Barbarigo were brethren, Pietro and Giovanni Mocenigo likewise.
I suspect that the reason for the constant usurpations in Mameluke state was that unlike Rhodes, Venice or Rome they failed to adopt any way of peaceful election.
In other words they had no systematic way of deciding who was going to rule.
Mamelukes did “systematically” have inheritance… 6 out of the 7 sultans who died natural causes was succeeded by his son… who was promptly overthrown.
Note that Mamelukes were “a different sort of men” compared to their subjects and civilian leaders. And compare them with their two different neighbours, who were also different sorts of men.
The Order of Malta was also aliens on Malta and Rhodes. And their native subjects included some level of civilian leadership.
Whereas, by 15th century, the Popes and cardinals were mostly aliens in Rome. There were some Roman cardinals, and sometimes Romans elected popes, but in the period 1417-1521, only one of the Roman popes (Oddone Colonna) was native to the area he had secular power over. And the Popes and cardinals were civilian leadership – they were forbidden to fight even as commanders so their army commanders were laity, largely native.
Both the Roman Curia, who were civilians, and Order of Malta, who were soldiers, were a leadership whose cohesion was based on their being a *different sort of men* than their subjects. And neither normally practiced succession from father to son because they were forbidden from having children.
Now the Mamelukes were also a different sort of men from their subjects – and that was a basis for their cohesion. They were infidel slaves.
Unlike the Knights of Rhodes, the Mamelukes were allowed to marry… but sons of Mamelukes were not allowed to become Mamelukes. They actually benefited from their fathers´ status… they were directed to the civilian leadership of Mameluke state, of ulama and civil officers, alongside the native elites.
The cohesion of Mamelukes would have been damaged by allowing sons of Mamelukes to serve as Mamelukes along the infidel slaves.
This worked for the lower ranking Mamelukes but got problematic with the Sultan. Mamelukes did not have a working mechanism to elect a new Sultan qualified as Mameluke and let the sons of previous Sultan retire as noble citizens, like the sons of Doges of Venice did.
@chornedsnorkack,
Weren’t the Mamelukes technically former slaves, not slaves? (And for that matter, former infidels as well). Like, weren’t they formally free Muslims at the time that they were serving in the military and/or exerting political power?
I agree with you that their distinct social and ethnic origins would definitely have given them a sense of cohesion among themselves.
The papal states controlled and area roughly corresponding to present day Lazio, Umbria, Mache and the eastern half of Emilia-Romagna.
This guide (and the others) are good for worldbuilding – if you’re doing historical fiction. If you’re doing fantasy, any sort of magic that’s at all common would an effect on all of these guides.
The effect varies from “almost none” to “throw it out and think your system through” though, so I guess advice is going to be much less useful.
One of the reasons LOTR battles work, in the sense that you can reason from our world to that and say “Yes, this seems like it would work” is that magic is pretty rare and confined to certain events.
On the battlefield, you have the explosion of the wall, and the morale effect of Sauron’s will (and later the effect of losing it). I suppose the flying mounts for the Nazgul could count as magic, since they couldn’t exist in our world as well.
But the magic doesn’t help recruit troops, there’s no wizard corps. It’s even a bit vague as to whether Anduril is actually magical, as opposed to just being well-made.
If your magic manifests more than this rarely, then you have to think pretty deeply on how it actually effects things in your world.
To give one example that’s cited reasonably often, if flight is relatively common (3rd level spell in the latest D&D, and levitation is 2nd – how many casters like that are there?), then do castles actually work? Even if they do, the walls are likely to be rather different than in our world (probably much higher, and so much rarer).
Is there a spell to feed the troops? Even tasteless food will extend their range a lot.
Is magic common enough to be used in battle? If so, why is there a non-spellcasting nobility? Land and riches, but why do they have that land if there are e.g. spells to increase the fertility of land?
What keeps the spellcasters from taking over if they’re better at fighting than the non-spellcasters? Which in many fantasy worlds, they are.
>What keeps the spellcasters from taking over if they’re better at fighting than the non-spellcasters?
In a lot of cases that is because spellcasting has other problems. It might require so much work and study that you effectively *can’t* do other stuff. It might come with its own share of handicaps. (demonic possession, random chance to explode, etc.) that makes keeping a “civilian” leadership position basically impossible, etc.
(and for all that we talk about linear warriors and quadratic wizards in D&D a wizard is not so dangerous that a fighter isn’t a threat: Or at least not a couple of fighters)
(there’s also the quip from, I believe Feist’s Shadow of a Dark of Queen where Nakor describes the role of wizards in war as “First wizard casts spell, second wizard casts counterspell, third wizard tries to strengthen first wizard, fourth wizard trie sto help the counterspell, then army comesalong and chops up all those wizards standing around”) The basic point being that wizards are terrifying when unopposed, but tend to cancel each other out.
>(and for all that we talk about linear warriors and quadratic wizards in D&D a wizard is not so dangerous that a fighter isn’t a threat: Or at least not a couple of fighters)
This does depend on edition. Back in ADnD and 3.5 the power scales were absolutely bonkers. High level ADnD wizards could turn themselves fucking *two dimensional*, straight out of looney toons, and otherwise jump outside of reality and casually start pulling people apart. 3.5 Wizards had numerous ways to create indestructible walls around you and then kill you inside of them, and half a dozen ways to render themselves reflexively impervious to any harm.
More basically Wizards and other magic users tend to have an effect of countering multiple weaker fighters very well, while a strong fighter is not much more dangerous to several other wizards or even several other fighters. A 20th level fighter can almost certainly kill a fighter of 10th level or under as a full round action in 3.5, but likely only 1-2 at a time. A 20th level wizard could casually kill a hundred 10th level fighters in a single round, then do it ten more times before brunch, while remaining casually impervious to any attack. This has pretty serious implications for the constructed social hierarchy-it makes gatekeeping of power easier for powerful wizards, for instance, because they can more easily negate multiple lesser threats.
This also fits with the fact that in DnD *knowledge* is what makes a wizard or priest. If you can limit the spread of this knowledge you can limit the powers available to challengers, and powerful states can thus be expected to be gatekeeping magical knowledge. This argument should absolutely be used by warlocks and dark cults looking to recruit, by the way.
This is all pretty specific to DnD though. In the most generic sense superhuman powers can be expected to change the pattern of dominance hierarchies. Women typically have access to these powers as easily as men, which causes significant strain to gender hierarchies, and in some settings superhuman powers exist outside of traditional wealth or dominance hierarchies, which disrupts political power. DnD actually isn’t fully one of those, because you *can* use wealth and labor to produce or utilize magic, but some superhero genre’s with random powers are.
“A 20th level wizard could casually kill a hundred 10th level fighters in a single round,”
That’s… Probably not the case? Incapacitate? Maybe. But not kill. (at least assuming standard PHB spells) A lot of the real power of 3rd. ed. wizards are in Save or Die or Save or Suck spells, and they usually have somewhat more limited targets. (most save or die spells are either single target or have HD restrictions, or some combination thereof)
Don’t get me wrong, a wizard can probably win against that number of 10th level fighters (largely because they can make themselves basically unreachable) but killing them in a single turn? Eh.
Symbol of Death has 150 HP limit, Power Word: Kill has 101 HP limit and is single target. Circle of Death maxes out at 20 HD. *Weird* doesen’t have a HP restriction but has an AOE restriction. (all of the target has to be within 30 feet)
And remember even with Time Stop (which by 3rd. ed. doesen’t let you cast offensive spells, sadge) so there’s an action economy going on here.
Spells like Holy Word *would* work if the fighters were level 9 and of the correct alignment (and all conveniently stood within 40 feet), but funnily enough that’s a cleric spell.
Part of it is just that D&D rarely gets into really large fights for bookkeeping reasons (well, except for Battlesystem (TM) back in 2nd. ed.)
Like you can probably come up with *some* combination of stuff that lets a wizard do that given some particularly exotic interpretation of the rules, but it’s definitely non-trivial. (and presumably would require as they say, prep time)
Save or die spells are largely irrelevant here, because of aforementioned caster level. If you’re trying to kill that many people you can just use a variety of tricks to jumbo size a fireball. Widen spell, maximize, empower gets you a 40 foot radius that does 90 damage, and enough tricks exist to add more damage or reduce meta magic costs that it’s pretty easy to engineer an even more guaranteed army killer. But just with that you’ve got save or die for the typical level 10 fighter and enough area to cover a typical Roman century.
It’s relatively easy to double to area a couple more times, but it’s not costless and requires prep or a specific wizard build. Similarly there are bigger and stronger aoes, but fireball is ubiquitous.
The fact all these are meta magic means it’s not a huge opportunity cost to do this. A greater widen meta magic rod and some basic blasting feats will do it, and all of those are pretty generic tools for a wizard.
Plus, weird is there. Radius isn’t trivial to increase but it’s possible, so you can end up with a sizable save-or-save or die for hundreds of people. There’s other fun tricks (chain spell+detonate) but you get my point, with relatively common meta magic it’s not hard to figure something out.
>Widen spell, maximize, empower gets you a 40 foot radius that does 90 damage
The average HP of an 10th level fighter (assuming 14 CON, and no magic items, though it should be noted a fighter at that level *should* them, and the budget is enough for, for instance, a *Ring of Fire Resistance* for all of them, or even a ring of counterspells…) Is 12+(7×9)=75. Now fighters have poor reflex saves, but that still means 1/20 (or 5 fighters on average) or so is going to save and live.
And again, that’s assuming the fighters are bunched up, they don’t *quite* have to stand shoulder to shoulder (or well, 5 ft. square to 5 ft. square) but almost for a 40 ft. radius to cover all of them.
Again, even in a white room scenario killing 100 10th level fighters in one round is decidedly non-trivial. Again, a 20th level wizard can absolutely kill that many fighters, it would probably take more than one round though.
It’s 3.5, you can bypass resistance to fire damage with another cheap metamagic (Searing spell or Energy Substitution) and even protect yourself against being counterspelled with common tactics (I don’t know if it works against the ring, but greater invisibility protects against normal counterspelling). For the survivors you can follow up with a quickened fireball, potentially using another rod.
I think I’ve illustrated my point, though, which is that this is a trivial expenditure of resources and preparation. Nothing I’ve provided the wizard here is unusual, and only dealing with complications or edge cases requires expenditure of effort. It’s very nearly an engineering problem, easy to solve with understanding of the tools and math involved. This isn’t because the tactic is only relevant to a specific situation, outside of the ideal it’s still broadly applicable, it’s because the tools provided to a Wizard for combat are just that much of an overwhelming advantage.
The problem is that numerous ways exist to bypass any static magical defense, and to do so en mass, while any static defenses only protect against one specific threat and usually only protect you. And the stated goal of killing all the 10th level fighters in a room is not strictly speaking necessary to have the effect on society I’m pointing out, it’s just a good indicator that this effect is expected.
Of course this isn’t only true with spellcasters. A Dragon is similarly capable of wiping out entire armies, albeit it’s easier to defend against their specific attacks (and harder to actually stop the attacker), and should have similarly extreme effects on societies if they commonly interact with each other. It’s just that Dragons are inherited power and magical knowledge is transferred, which influences how hierarchies develop.
No, the point is that you’re giving the wizard access to resources and denying the same expected resources to the fighter. (which yes, will be less, because there’s fewer of them though 100 fighters will have significantly more budget than a single 20th level wizard)
You keep doing the thing where you’re giving the wizard time to prepare (in which case it’s not “kill in one round” is it?) etc. but not giving the fighters the basic countermeasures. Wizards are stronger than fighters. A 20th level wizard can probably kill 100 10th level fighters fairly easily (A 20th level fighter can probably do it too, but it takes longer) but it’s not *trivial* to do so in one round, unless you consistently stack the deck in favour of the wizard.
>but greater invisibility protects against normal counterspelling
In which case you need to cast it. Which you can finagle with contingency, a ring, or similar stuff but still is a strain on your potential action economy.
Note also that metamagic rods are use-activated and so take a standard action to use.
>No, the point is that you’re giving the wizard access to resources and denying the same expected resources to the fighter. (which yes, will be less, because there’s fewer of them though 100 fighters will have significantly more budget than a single 20th level wizard)
6.5 times the budget only, actually, going by the table. The 20th level wizard has expected of 760000, a 10th level fighter 49000. But that’s not the point.
I’m not denying the same resources to the fighters, the problem is that their resources cannot compensate for the resources the wizard gets automatically, nor can they protect against the wizards attacks consistently.
I explained this, the Wizard has offensive capabilities that cover a wide net of possible defenses and require extremely specialized countermeasures, while the Wizards countermeasures to those defenses require a round of preparation.
If you give the fighters the specific correct items they can maybe survive a round with the Wizard if they use the tactic those items protect against. If the Wizard uses a different tactic their protections fail. What if the 20th level Wizards opens with a quickened Shapechange spell into a White Dragon, and the fighters all had rings of fire resistance and rings of counterspelling? And they spent a career accumulating those defenses. Crafting the items took time if you go that route, commissioning them just shifts that time to others. It’s not a counter argument that the Wizard has to spend six seconds assessing that their opening didn’t work and modify it.
It’s not even really an argument that they needed to retreat and spend a *day* reassessing to prepare different spells or cast buffs, which is where this goes next. The ultimate conclusion is the same. A day to counter years of preparation is trivial, six seconds is insultingly so, and it’s reasonable for the Wizard to counter defenses in seconds.
It’s an incredibly asymmetrical fight.
There might be some item or tactic that does always works-maybe you could find an antimagic effect-but then we actually are cherry picking. A tactic that works only against spellcasters and required massive investment for that specific task does not match tactics which are generically useful in many situations.
Against a 20th level fighter, none of this is true. First, they can’t defeat a meaningful number of their opponents quickly enough to disrupt mass action. It takes minutes for them to kill hundreds of people, which is objectively impressive but not fast enough to stop their opponents from executing a plan, or even coming up with one. Second, it takes weeks to months for them to come up with novel countermeasures-training and commissioning or acquiring new items. They are orders of magnitude worse at this.
This speaks to the larger point, which is that this all strongly rewards gatekeeping of resources by Wizards in society. The original point remains that the Wizard can control society through defeating many non-magical rivals, which should result in small or large scale magetocracies.
> Note also that metamagic rods are use-activated and so take a standard action to use.
Use-activated means you activate it as part of another action, here spellcasting. It doesn’t take an action in addition to the spell being cast. Quicken rods are used as part of the free action, and arguably all rods fall under the exception where they don’t use any action because there is a delay before a magical effect happens (which is the casting of the spell the rod is modifying, which uses actions as otherwise normal).
That’s were an Ars Magica arch magus walks in your wizard and cast a devious spell that just teleports massive granite slabs on all the DnD wizards heads.
(Ars Magica magi are just over-powered compared with the mundanes, but the cosmology of that system actually has clever limits set on them:
– God is thing in this setting (the same God for all three monotheism actually)
– God is all-powerful and can just nope wizards if He so wishes.
– If you mess too much with mundane politics, the Church might get offended and start a crusade against wizards with the backing of God
– Hence the Oath all those wizard swear include non-interference with mundane politics, and wizards will hunt down offenders themselves.
– Additionally wizards are a few dozens per 10000 people
This all results in note messing too much the medieval world.
Wizard small forces tend to still incorporate mundane soldiers to protect them against wandering arrows etc).
“It’s an incredibly asymmetrical fight.”
That’s not the point. You made a *much* more specific claim than that, that it was trivial for a wizard to kill 100 10th level fighters in one round. It just isn’t.
In fact, if you have 100 different fighters specialized against 100 different threat vectors (okay, that’s a bit much…) you can probably eveade that one round pretty easily.
> You made a *much* more specific claim than that, that it was trivial for a wizard to kill 100 10th level fighters in one round. It just isn’t.
It is and I proved it. You’re literally just cherry picking my sentences to fund something to latch onto now. It’s clear you’re not interested in being convinced.
Look, maybe you’re being tripped up by the vague survivability of this situation. Fine, switch to chain detonate. 20 (or 21, depending on how you parse) targets save or die, and all of them then explode in a fiery explosion, each creating overlapping 20 foot bursts dealing 20d6 damage each. That’s rapidly unsurvivable for anything not outright immune to fire and which isn’t targeted by or successful against the original save or die. The chance anyone lives is miniscule.
And yes, detonate targets one create and has a range greater than touch, you can chain spell it. The secondary explosions don’t target, and don’t restrict the meta magic. That’s not an uncontroversial assertion, but it does parse.
I don’t have a complete knowledge of spells in 3.5, so that’s not necessarily the best option. I know there are others, spellcasting is utterly broken at that level, but it might be more complicated or require more than just knowing basic spell or metamagic. But I’ve already provided two simple ways to accomplish the stated test, so we’re done here.
> In fact, if you have 100 different fighters specialized against 100 different threat vectors (okay, that’s a bit much…) you can probably eveade that one round pretty easily.
Then it’s very likely that 99 of those defenses will be irrelevant to the opening and that the remainder is killed by a quickened spell.
> That’s were an Ars Magica arch magus walks in your wizard and cast a devious spell that just teleports massive granite slabs on all the DnD wizards heads.
What is God but the ultimate wizard? Or so sayeth the diabolist.
There are certainly settings and magic systems with institutions that avoid magical takeover, albeit imperfectly. Ars Magica effectively manages it through a biggest fish system, where no matter what little fiefdom your wizard establishes God has Dominion in the end. But settings like the wheel of time accomplish the same through institutions. The Aes Sedai explicitly exist to limit the power of the mage equivalents, male and female. Dragon Age has the Templars, Warhammer the Witch Hunters (and magic colleges, for that matter), and representing DND settings Grim Hollow has the Arcanist Inquisition.
So just because it seems natural that makes should dominate doesn’t mean they do. It’s just that the tendency and temptation towards power exists.
““First wizard casts spell, second wizard casts counterspell, third wizard tries to strengthen first wizard, fourth wizard trie sto help the counterspell, then army comesalong and chops up all those wizards standing around. The basic point being that wizards are terrifying when unopposed, but tend to cancel each other out.”
See also “The best air superiority weapon is a tank sitting on your enemy’s runway putting shells into the hangars and the pilots’ mess.” As happened in 1973 – what finally brought down the extremely impressive Egyptian IADS was not fighters and missiles, but Israeli tanks reaching the launchers and radars.
This is a good analogy if fictional wizards are rare and/or requires a lot of training.
It would be quite fun to write a high fantasy novel in which wizards are extremely common – in fact, armies are generally composed of thousands of wizards plus support and logistics – but accomplished swordsmen are very rare and therefore treated with fear and deference.
Magic in Tolkien is really different from other fantasy magic systems. He was not much of a fiction reader, and didn’t tend to get ideas from the living world. Tolkien magic is mostly like inanimate objects having extra morale, as nonsensical as that sounds; sometimes something, especially living somethings, imbued with that extra quality can have that quality perverted and shaped and controlled. Even that doesn’t get into conversation with other fictional magic systems although it does occasionally inform them.
“[Tolkien] was not much of a fiction reader” seems to only be true if you only treat “fiction” as being solely contemporary fiction, given that he was literally a professor who studied ancient epics. Unless you’re arguing that _Beowulf_ described historical events…
It was recorded by people who believed it, and that is not fiction in the modern sense.
Even disregarding Beowulf Tolkien was an avid reader: He’d read Dunsany for instance, as well as a bunch of 19th century novels etc. It’s not *all* ancient myths, but he was fairly well-versed in various proto-fantasy writings.
He also mentioned liking “Azimov”(sic), which points to likely familiarity with some other SF of the period.
It has been indicated the name “Asimov” is a mistranscibation. Being a linguist he may have considered “Azimov” a better transcibation.
There wasn’t much fantasy fiction to read at the time, so it’s hardly surprising that Tolkien didn’t tend to get ideas from the living world. But Tolkien had read Andrew Lang, and he was good friends with CS Lewis and they talked about their work, and he wrote non-fiction articles about both past and present fantasy… This is not someone ignoring what’s going on in the literature of his time.
Yeah, he also read Dunsany IIRC, as well as historical fiction and a bunch of other stuff. The notion that Tolkien was *solely* this mythology nerd who had no clue about what was going on in literature is a bit of a caricature.
Ronald Tolkien was at least a pretty good worldbuilder. He may well have limited magic so as to not disrupt the Feudal society he wanted.
Even more simply, the idea that fantasy works need magic “systems” is anachronistic back-projection when applied to Tolkien.
I think it is more a problem of authors not understanding the consequences of their magic. Having a magic system makes it easier to reflect around.
I suppose it depends on how you read the stories. In a certain sense the stories are full of magic–it’s just subtle. Tolkien does do the “Wizard casts fireball!” thing (before the Fellowship gets to Moria he kills a bunch of wolves that way, for example), but in general the magic is much, much more subtle. Sauron’s manipulations of Denethor and Saruman, for example.
Aragorn is a good example of this. Sure, he’s a good fighter. But he’s also the destined king and this has physical manifestations. He’s able to use kingsfoil in a way that no one else could. He called Eowyn and Merry back from the brink of death. His right to the Seeing Stone, along with his willpower, allowed him to take control of it from Sauron. He commanded the Army of the Dead. His gift of prophesy manifested in several ways. All of this is subtle–Aragorn isn’t out there shooting lightning from his fingertips–but all of it is magic as modern fantasy readers understand the term.
There’s also the wind. If you’ve read the Silmarillion, you know that the wind is Manwe. The wind blowing away Sauron’s magically-created darkness was the Valar taking a hand in things. Same with the West Wind blowing away both Sauron and Saruman’s ghosts when they got killed.
There are also ents, trolls, orcs, various types of undead (including vampires and werewolves), shape-shifters (Beorn), and other beings who are inherently magical. There’s the river at Rivendale that Elrond and Gandalf could magically control–even if it was a dam being released, the two mages made it more powerful. The High Seats, which Frodo and Aragorn sat upon. The White Tree (a descendent of the Silver Tree killed by Morgoth). The Phial Galadriel gave Frodo (really captured light from a Silmaril worn by Elrond’s father). The snowstorm on Redhorn Pass.
I’d argue that LOTR is absolutely full of magic. The magic isn’t even very subtle in many cases. It’s just that it doesn’t fit neatly into a concept of magic that’s focused on Damage Per Second, so many people miss it.
There is a thing that the D&D ranger. (complete with spellcasting) is pretty explicitly just “Aragorn, the class”.
I remember someone on RPG.net having athread where they read through LOTR (though IIRC, they never completed it) and noted every instance of magic, and there’s *a lot*. Just in the first few chapters of the Hobbit there’s stuff.
There are wolf-like beings functioning as mount for some orcs which are indicated to able to talk. Are they undead or shapeshifters? Similarly does the undead requited by Aragon count as vampires? I think they should get their energy from something like blood or life force to be considered such.
The wargs appear to be physical beings. Talking animals occur from time to time in Tolkien’s universe–there was one with Beren and Luthien, for example. And the undead army Aragorn commands is undead (well, dead but not quiet) due to a curse.
The things in the Burrow-Downs are more traditional undead, as are the things in the Dead Marsh. And the Nazgul themselves (which refers to the ring-wraith, not the mount).
The shape-shifters are more Beorn and his ilk, as well as Maia and Vala, who treat bodies like you or I treat clothing. The vampires don’t appear in LOTR but are mentioned in The Silmarillion. Sauron was their captain.
Then the undead could as well be called zombies like Gorge Martin’s white walkers. I was thinking about Chinese “vampires”. They are more like jumping zombies who absorbs people’s life energy to continue jumping. This in order to get to the place where they would have wanted to be buried.
“Then the undead could as well be called zombies like Gorge Martin’s white walkers.”
No. They are completely different.
The things in the Burrow-Downs were as different from White Walkers as WWs are from infected spiders. The cursed army is totally different from either. The Nazgul are totally different from any of those others. I’m not entirely certain what the things in the Dead Marsh are–they may not even be undead (the spirits of Elves go to the Undying Lands, so they wouldn’t be hanging around the Marsh). Calling any of these zombies would be a gross misnomer and serve primarily to obfuscate the nature of these beings.
This insistence on trying to pretend Tolkien was some other writer than he was–that he was Martin, or Gygax, or something like that–creates a lot of problems, including the idea that Tolkien doesn’t have magic in his world. You really need to read Tolkien as he wrote it, and not try to fit what you’re seeing into boxes created by other authors.
I think it’s also a mistake to think of Tolkien’s magic in terms of energy. Gandalf doesn’t have a status bar, and there’s no evidence that any external power source is needed for any of the undead. There’s strong evidence that there’s not, in fact–Morgoth and Sauron can’t make anything, only corrupt it. Ultimately life comes from the Secret Fire, which only Eru Iluvitar holds. We don’t get a lot of detail about vampires, but I always got the impression Tolkien treated them more as things that kill out of hatred for living things more than things that need to feed on the living to sustain themselves. Sauron is never shown drinking blood.
Of cause Ronald Tolkien was different from Gary Gygax and George Martin. Using magic subtly is an art in an of itself.
“The Road to Middle-Earth” has some interesting background on wargs. (Going from memory here so please excuse mis-spellings.)
Tolkien noted that there were two words for “wolf” in Old Norse. “Ulfr” just means “wolf” (it can also be a man’s first name). “Vargr” also means wolf, but it is also used to refer to human outlaws. So, Tolkien wrote, it’s possible that the Norse had a concept of two sorts of wolf – the normal kind, and a kind that was somehow wrong or outcast.
“Ulfr” of course came into English as “wolf”, and “warg” is what Tolkien thought “vargr” would have turned into, had it also made the journey from Old Norse to modern English.
And, he went on, warming to his theme, perhaps this is where we get the idea of a werewolf. The normal derivation is that this is Anglo-Saxon wer+wolf – it’s literally “man-wolf”. But perhaps instead it’s from “vargr-wolf” – that outlaw wolf (maybe because it’s a man-eater?) that the Norse knew about, and the false wer-wolf derivation then led to the legend of the shapechanger.
There is a common Indo-European idea of associating outlaws with wolves and/or dogs. (They are all biologically the same species. The large physical variation between dogs is due to a combination of a high mutation rate and selective breeding.) Ulf is still used as a male name in parts of Northern Europe. My only male first cousin is named Ulf.
The word for “wolf” in present-day Swedish is “varg”. Equivalent words in the other Scandinavian languages are all derived from Old Norse “ulfr”. Danish and Norwegian use “ulv” while Faroese and Icelandic use “úlfur”. The word “ulv” has historically been used in Swedish too but has now fallen out of usage.
One important reason to read material like this for your worldbuilding is that it gives a you benchmark from which you can more accurately understand what departures from reality should look like. Many, many fiction-writers fell down, not because they failed to understand how fantastic elements in their setting would alter the social fabric of the societies they portrayed, but because they failed to understand what the social fabric even looked like before the alterations.
Not understanding just how limited past societies were in their resources is a common problem.
If the spellcasters in your world have so much more power than everyone else, then either:
1) They will take over society, and the structure of the army will follow from the structure of the resulting society (e.g. officers are all magi or the children of magical families, army structure follows the structure used by the magical society)
2) The existing power structures will adapt to include wizardry (same as they adapted to include technology, with the upper class holding officers’ ranks in a more professional army).
In either case, the same underlying mechanics apply as Brett is laying out here: militaries are built from their societies. E.g., if the wizards become local big men, that doesn’t automatically grant them the educated bureaucracy and state purse to support a professional military. If wizardry is something everyone learns as part of their livelihood, what ties those wizards together at levels higher than the clan?
This isn’t about technology (which is all magic is in most fantasy — technology that only a few can use), it’s about human organization.
In Glen Cook’s Garret/Tunfaire novels, powerful sorcerers like Stormwardens and Firelords have indeed become de facto wealthy nobility up on The Hill. Along with the royalty and the wealthy but powerless remnant of the the old Imperial family.
Yeah, throwing fireballs and lightning around is a Glen Cook thing. See the Black Company series. Persons of Mass Destruction can easily claim command but that doesn’t make them good commanders. Our host already took Saruman’s “generalship” apart in an earlier article.
I like Cook’s novels because he tries to illuminate the POV of the PBI trying to survive on the same battlefield.
It makes a big difference how the magic users become magic users.
If it’s something you can learn through practice, or via your parents, it’s basically the same as learning to be cavalry.
If on the other hand it needs literacy and lots of book learning (“wizard” apparently comes from a word meaning “wise”, which isn’t always the same as literate), then you have a big class of very literate people – everyone who’s a magic user.
Mind you, maybe no magic user is going to willingly clerk for another, so perhaps it falls back to who has the most magical talent (and materials, if magic uses those).
It does make a difference in a lot of cases from our world though, where it’s usually the ones with the most good land who command the armies. Note that’s not directly related to either fighting or command.
If you’re including magic, you’ll frankly be facing questions of *physics* first, from which the question of society and military history will be downstream of. I tried to write something in that regard once, although its unfinished (https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/w5rp3vnl8vhbj1o2osj7z/Fantasy-Warfare.paper?rlkey=kqzx9ppewrz99sign1f0ls6k2&dl=0).
To re-formulate the issues I raise in that paper: If mages have to cast magic from their own body energy, then they can’t actually do any of the things mages are classically associated with. With the same power that an archer is continuously firing a heavy warbow at the enemies, a mage could sustain a *candle flame* from their finger tips. Entire maniples engulfed in a fireball? Forget it.
And if they can draw their energy from somewhere else, then their battlefield utility is a footnote compared to the effect they have on the entire energy economy of the society (ref: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13). Basically, there will be an industrial revolution, and it has to be treated for world history the way it needs to be treated for our own world history, as a process which is still ongoing and does not show any signs of slowing down. The world we live in today is very different from the world of our grandparents, and that was very different from the world of their grandparents. You wouldn’t have a static state in the way most fantasy envisions it.
For pre-industrial societies, it’s possible to design a world “ex nihilo” under the assumption that the current social order has been like this for several centuries. For post-industrial societies, you can’t. And magic that uses an external energy source is post-industrial.
Again, it depends. Magic as a power source transforms society in all sorts of ways – demographically, socially, politically …but since it’s fiction, any number of paths can open up. In my own stories, ‘magic’ is asking the world to do something – so the boundaries are set by the world (no fireballs!) and the manner of asking.
Since no fictional world can be as complete and coherent as reality, a degree of latitude is baked in.
I think it is a good idea to have limitations to what a person can do with magic. Even if it does not follow the law of conservation of energy like you point out.
“I suppose the flying mounts for the Nazgul could count as magic, since they couldn’t exist in our world as well.”
They could and did exist in our world. Animals as tall as giraffes flew the Mesozoic skies. I’ve held their bones.
Tolkien allegedly based the beasts the Nazgul rode on pterosaurs. I’ve hard various arguments about whether pterosaurs could carry a full-grown human, but I’m inclined to think the larger ones could; they had to have some extra lift capacity. And a flying animal the size of a giraffe would fit the bill for a fell beast. How it would do in war is another question–they tended to be relatively fragile, but “relatively” is doing a lot of work, and any animal needs to be able to take a certain amount of physical damage and survive.
Add some selective breeding and you could easily get a pterosaur that would carry a person in war. Morgoth and Sauron both had plenty of time to do that, so it’s not unreasonable.
For my part, I dislike the whole portrayal. Pterosaurs were wild and weird and wonderful, and are one of the most under-rated groups of organisms. Most people rather drastically under-estimate exactly how strange they were. If one carrying a Nazgul flew over me I’d be too busy taking notes to be afraid.
Quetzalcoatlus was as tall as a giraffe but weighted only 1/4 as much. Animals this size could fly because they threw themselves into the air with their wing muscles:
https://markwitton-com.blogspot.com/2018/05/why-we-think-giant-pterosaurs-could-fly.html
“Animals this size could fly because they threw themselves into the air with their wing muscles”
There’s some controversy to that. Some paleontologists think they relied on updrafts, rather like a wingsuit user–they’d dive off cliffs with the right atmospheric conditions, then glide. Others think they were more active fliers. Still others contend that they couldn’t fly at all, and that the wings had adapted to other purposes. I find the last group to be unconvincing to say the least. Wings don’t tend to survive after flight is abandoned.
As for powered vs. gliding flight, I don’t think we have enough evidence to really differentiate, and it’s almost certainly a combination of the two anyway, just a question of which was preferable. Getting an animal that size off the ground is a major engineering task, but that’s just Argument from Personal Incredulity and Nature has given us so many shocks that I don’t consider it a valid argument.
To be blunt, without observing one in the wild I don’t think we CAN say how they flew. That they flew is pretty much a given as far as I’m concerned (until some major evidence to the contrary shows up, like histology suggesting increased weight being born on the wings), but after that….well, we’re dealing with bones, there’s a lot we simply can’t say.
As a dinosaur enthusiast rather than professional, I take this opportunity to recommend the book “Pterosaurs” by Mark Witton. (And to anyone else interested in pterosaurs.) It is popular science rather than academic, but he’s a good science writer and explains the various debates and reasoning rather than dumbing it down. Covers skin impressions as well as bones, flapping vs soaring vs gliding, the take-off debate, and lifestyles of various species.
Current thinking is that yes these super sized pterosaurs could take off and fly, although they’d prefer to soar. And while Witton won’t discuss whether a giant pterosaur could have a rider, he does think that they’d be capable of attacking and swallowing smaller humans at least. Technically that would be “carrying” a human 🙂
Agree with you that Morgoth / Sauron could breed a fell beast, and also that the portrayal, at least in the movies, is unfair. Pterosaurs apparently would have looked like they had short fur all over, and were probably not black, more likely having the range of colors seen in modern birds.
“Wings don’t tend to survive after flight is abandoned.”
Eh, plenty of flightless birds still have (vestigial) wings. So I’m not sure that’s the case. That said Pterosaur wings seem to be too large for that.
To scifihughf:
The book you recommend is written by the blogger I linked to.
Arilou, you voiced my objection before I could! You’re right, wings DO survive after flight is abandoned, they just typically get modified. Wings are fragile structures in general, and if you don’t need them to be that fragile it seems you quickly either essentially abandon forelimbs (as with many flightless birds) or modify them to be useful (as with some insects and penguins).
The counter-argument to all this, of course, is that we don’t have a lot of behavioral data on pterosaurs of any size. We can make good inferences from bones, muscle scars, histology, impressions, sometimes even stomach contents, but things like mating displays and other behavioral traits simply don’t fossilize. And every taxa has different trends in evolution. Therapods seem particularly predisposed to reduce forelimbs–Carnotaurus, one of my favorite dinosaurs, has arms that make the T. rex arms look lanky! Lizards have a habit of losing all their limbs and turning into things that look like, but are biologically distinct from, snakes. Mammals don’t seem to lose our forelimbs unless we go into the water. Point being, how limbs change over time seems to be taxon-dependent, and I just don’t know enough about pterosaurs to know how they deal with limbs.
As far as I know no aquatic mammal has ever lost its forelimbs. It is their hindlimbs which become smaller or disappear. On the other hand I agree with Arilou about the largest pterosaurs’ wings being too proportionally large to likely be repurposed. Ostrich wings don’t look anything like those of condors or albatrosses.
I would advise re-reading the guides and perhaps rethinking your position. These are actually spectacular for developing a magical fantasy as well and can be used quite handily to develop answers to your own questions such as “What keeps spell casters from taking over if they’re better at fighting than non-spellcasters? Which in many fantasy worlds, they are.”
Perhaps those other fantasy worlds could have used a guide such as this to develop their magical political structures more logically. It’s rather flippant to dismiss the whole series as only useful for historical fiction.
Magic would be introduced. People would adapt and integrate it accordingly based on wealth and power. Nothing in this series is useless to that end.
Understanding what makes people privileged makes you a better writer. Also, consistency is a virtue.
“Roman generals are invariably aristocratic senators, but their model of leadership is not based on the demonstration of personal combat ability or even necessarily personal physical bravery.”
They do *love* it though. Nothing get the romans all hot and bothered like a senator tearing his toga off to show off his scars (all in the front, so they can see he didn’t run away)
Yes, but they love it because it’s not a necessary pre-requisite. If it were, then it’d be a restatement that they are qualified, instead of an act to emphasize their personal actions.
Plus, if my memory serves right, there was a post by Bret wherein a senator shows off scars on his buttocks, so not necessarily only in the front.
I thought they wore a tunic underneath their togas. Or are we talking about different time periods here?
“a trope that clearly started in Japan but feels like it has worked into English-language young adult fiction over time as well”
Most of contemporary American YA works with tropes that have prominence in Japan, because Anglophone fan-fiction is a single conversation that includes everything big enough to get an English-language localization. The classic Utena Plot, where a transfer student of obscured (potentially secretly elite) background arrives and becomes both an agent of and catalyst of the destruction of the Absurdly Powerful Student Council (and does not supplant it) continues to echo through Japanese mass-market entertainment; but this is, obviously, Yojimbo, and the school is setting, the elite characters are elite regardless of coursework. Fall-Into-the-Cockpit Gundam Plots are arguably older, but these feature children born with some luck who are subsequently conscripted into warfare as schoolchlidren (usually an intentional exploration of Axis Powers’ real-world child enlistment practices and the fallout thereof). That ‘not technically a child military academy’ screen is only collapsed in late ’95 in Evangelion, which wrapped as Utena was first being written; Battle Royale was also written at that time, but couldn’t find a publisher for years.
Almost a decade prior, Lackey’s Arrows of the Queen places its heroine in a fantasy college-high-school, which is fully a training academy for a feudal-fantasy country’s elite. This college trains a select group of magical scholarship kids who are destined to fill all the cursus honorum government roles (traveling judges in peacetime, officers at war, councilor roles in the capital, and special book plot assignments) but is also socially compelling as a place for other elite children to gather for study ahead of taking over from their parents. The books hint that this institution is a reform of an earlier full-apprenticeship model for the magic scholarship kids, and that both systems ultimately originate with the population of extraplanar telepathic aliens that lives in the capital city. A decade before that, you have Ender’s Game with it’s Battle School.
I really think that the development of the militarized social elite school as a fiction trope requires some emotional distance from the experience of having your high school bombed that was hard to find outside of the USA in the 20th century.
“I really think that the development of the militarized social elite school as a fiction trope requires some emotional distance from the experience of having your high school bombed that was hard to find outside of the USA in the 20th century.”
And yet a lot of 19th and early 20th century social elite had studied in military social elite schools. Napoleon who studied in Brienne Military School. De Gaulle who was a student of Saint Cyr…
Mexicans actually had the experience of having their high school bombed AND taken by storm. Chapultepec Castle.
How much of the European or Mexican classical fictional literature is set in real militarized elite schools?
I confess I can’t say, but certainly Battle Royale (et al.) has had a global reach with horizons we still can’t see. I’m sadly not really conversant in most Latin American lit, even Mexican; similar failures with European stuff too, especially Continental stuff, although more old things from Europe leak through into general American consciousness. Sometimes naval history fiction takes its depiction of an apprenticeship model and stuffs the cast with so many juvenile midshipmen that you get a bit of a floating classroom.
While the british Boarding School Novel isn’t *strictly* militarized it is set in an institution specifically for educating the future ruling class (or at least people whose parents hope they’ll be that) which still had very much of an officer-aristocracy vibe.
Military schools (either directly for educating officers or preparatory, which may or may not be run by the actual military) is absolutely a thing. It’s just a 19th century thing.
The United States has the Reserve Officer Training Corps, a program that mostly gives one course’s worth of drill and uniform training in high schools but has access to any such school where there is interest in it, rather than operating stand-alone academies. That program continues into colleges where there is more subject matter studied and graduates expect to go into the military. At the high school level, any militarized boarding school is essentially a prison diversion program and is not expected to produce soldiers, although one did produce the current President.
You mean the big freaking idiot who seems to have as a starting point in life that he himself should have everything?
The “Special Military School” of Saint Cyr was and is a university for all intents and purposes. (The French simply use odd names for their best tertiary institutions.) When de Gaulle attended it, he had already graduated high school.
If you want an example of secondary schools training officers, you need to go on the other side of Rhine. Pre-WWI Germany, Austria and Russia had Kadettenanstalten, mainly for noble boys. You started at 10 years of age, and graduated at 18 or 19 as an officer. As those schools were bastions of extreme reaction, they were not very popular subjects of contemporary novels.
We had one such institution in Finland, active from 1779 until 1905, and it was apparently a hotbed of sadistic pennalism. The internal code of the cadet corps forbade a person from ever discussing the details of internal student life, but what former students mention in their autobiographies, is unanimously condemning.
To make things funnier, we now have to distinct entities called Saint-Cyr.
L’École Speciale Militaire Saint-Cyr at Coetquidan, in Britanny since ~1945, which is the military officer School (equivalent to a university), which trains Officers of the French Armée de Terre (the Army).
De Gaulle attended this one, when it was still near Versailles (it left in 1940).
Not to be confused with the Lycée Militaire de Saint-Cyr, at Saint Cyr l’École, near Versailles, which took over in 1966 facilities of the former, which had been abandoned since 1966. De Gaulle was quite instrumental in getting this to happen.
It is one of the 6 high-school institutions of the ministry of Defense, catering to children of military personals and those with scholarship (due to poor parents). These schools also include higher-education 2 years curriculum dedicated to prepare the officer school selective entrance examinations.
The Lycées Militaires definitely are somewhat militarised high-schools (at least in their organisation (I don’t think they actually get serious military combat training))
“Kadettenanstalt” is usually translated to “Cadet Corps”.
“If you want an example of secondary schools training officers, you need to go on the other side of Rhine. Pre-WWI Germany, Austria and Russia had Kadettenanstalten, mainly for noble boys. You started at 10 years of age, and graduated at 18 or 19 as an officer. As those schools were bastions of extreme reaction, they were not very popular subjects of contemporary novels.”
Turns out they were, as I expected:
https://helenroche.com/work/articles/2014/09/16/kadettengeschichten-exploring-the-prussian-cadet-school-story/
My understanding is that navies tended to professionalize and become more meritocratic earlier than armies due to the technical knowledge to required to sail or fight a ship.
That depends on what you mean by “navy”, there’s no real indication the greek navies or the ones used by the vikings were really any more proffesionalized than their land forces. It really does seem to be *artillery* more than anything else that’s the big thing that changes things. (the artillery is often very much at the forefront of professionalization and becoming a “scientific” discipline, even though for quite a bit people are still sighting by eye)
I think the age of sail is when (in the Med/around Europe at least) ships rapidly became bigger, longer-ranged and more complex, as well as no longer needing to be crewed by banks of oarsmen.
It would be interesting to compare the naval leadership in what is now Indonesia, which seems to have had developed vessels of that scale a few centuries before the Iberians did.
The “age of sail” in that sense is largely contemporary with the “Age of Artillery”. Note that medieval navies using sailing ships don’t seem to have been that much more organized than the land equivalent.
Considering agriculture had spread to present-day Indonesia by people literally sailing there this makes sense.
The artillery converts a floating land-battle (boarding) into a contest of manoeuvre (either keep the line or get into position to rake the enemy), which demands skilled seamanship. At the same time ships get bigger and much more complex in sail plans and rigging. So the old division – master mariners lay the ship alongside, nobles lead the fight – fall away as the fight is essentially about sailing (and morale etc). Which is why British naval officers went to sea in their teens, as it took several years training even in small vessels.
There’s an intermediate step – galleys with cannon mounted on the prow. Lepanto is an excellent example, and the pre-battle maneuvering was pretty complex. It also showed what happened when Turkish archers, famed for their bowmanship, come into point-blank range of heavy muskets.
By then handguns would have became more efficient than bows.
They did professionalize in a sense. I’ve read most about the British navy, between Elizabethan and Napoleonic times. So, much later than what OGH talks most about. But it’s still pre-industrial, and the way things work are much more similar than the way they work today.
The big difference is that I’m talking about the gun age. Post-gunpowder.
Pre-gun warships are mostly about ramming, or boarding. Boarding a galley seems quite difficult, and possibly pointless. At least if the rowers are not slaves. If you win you would have great difficulty manning the oars, so bringing it back would be really hard. Ramming probably sinks the other ship.
British navy organization:
Crew tended to stay with the ship. There were ranks, mostly based on skills. The higher ranks were specialized, you didn’t become both a topman and a gunner.
There were “warrants”, which were experts in the knowledge of sailing and navigation, or gunnery. Warrants also tended to stay with the ship.
Officers often moved around as they moved up the ranks, or ships moved in and out of service.
Among other reasons, ships needed very few officers. A frigate, a relatively small ship intended for cruising (this is later in the period) could have 32 (or more) guns (each requires a crew of up to eight), plus the men required for the sails. Altogether in the region of 150-250 men to be able to man the sails and also fire both broadsides without rushing from one to the other.
Yet there was a captain (master and commander), a first mate (lieutenant) and a second mate (lieutenant, less seniority than the first). There would be probably four to maybe six midshipmen (level of expertise from novice to “just needs to pass the exam to get promoted to lieutenant”).
Likely ten commissioned officers at most. For 250 men.
Compare that to e.g. the USS Burke class ships, which apparently need 20-45 commissioned officers for a slightly larger crew.
The requirements for an officer, especially for a captain, were loyalty and fighting spirit. That fighting spirit was generally the ability to fight the ship aggressively, and lead from the front in boarding. The best outcome for a battle was to take the opposing ship in more or less good shape, send it in to be repaired and taken into the navy as a new ship. The next best was to sink it, at least if it was an opposing warship.
Navigating was a requirement in a captain, since the captain wasn’t allowed to be wrong. But things like what sails were best for this ship in its current state at the current time, was something only really learnable by someone who’d been on the ship for a long time. So the captain would make the decision, but he’d often want to take advice in a tricky situation.
The loyalty was also key for when the ship is literally on the other side of the world. As opposed to a battle where you could actually see the lord in question over there.
A captain who was loyal wasn’t much good if he couldn’t also command the crew though. The crew would follow a captain who was a fighter – though he also had to be lucky.
Lords could be loyal. But the idea of using captains who owed much to the crown as being overall better at loyalty worked out.
This may have been taken from the French. In some periods (Louis XIV?) they were able to make commoners into high officials, who were more loyal to the crown because they couldn’t fall back on their own lands (not to mention the other lords wouldn’t come to their rescue if they fell out of favor). But this required the crown to be strong in the first place.
There are likely earlier instances, but I don’t know them.
From the breakthrough of naval artillery to the motorisation of the ships navies would have worked basically the same.
The part about Junior officers being present but expected to shut up kind of reminds me of the scene in Avatar the last airbender where Zuko open his mouth at such a council and basically gets disinherited over it.
I wonder how well ATLA actually picture its military. (And if applicable the reasons for its success or failure)
I am not an expert on Avatar: The Last Airbender, but my understanding is that this had less to with the fact that Zuko* spoke up during a council, and more to do with what Zuko said at that council, with the result that he severely alienated his tyrannical, intolerant, and increasingly villainously-insane father by triggering his father’s villain complex.
__________
*(who was basically the crown prince of the Fire Nation, as eldest child and only son of the reigning monarch)
I agree that what he said was part of those reasons.
And it worth noting that once rehabilitated, he sees madness in the war council, shuts up, and later leaves.
But anyway, I think its depiction of warfare is probably ripe for some ACOUP picking apart.
The Woke Struggles have hit ATLA scholarship the hardest out of all the online fandoms, there are no experts left. I would say that you are correct that the viewer is presented with the perspective that the problem was what Zuko said, because that is the view that Zuko has when we meet him and what he continues to believe through most or all of the series. But I think by the end the viewer should grasp that the problem is the Firelord, that Zuko could have said anything or nothing and eventually his father would have beaten him half to death and disowned him, that Zuko would always be too much like his mother and that ‘fascist dictator/abusive parent’ is redundant.
What exactly were the Woke Struggles exactly, and how exactly did they annihilate scholarship in that regard ?
ATLA fandom has always had a tense question: Are the characters people without relevant (IRL-)racial identity whose use of Asian-inspired cultural motifs legitimizes those cultural motifs in the mainstream, or are they racially Asian people such that casting non-Asian actors to portray them should have been avoided?
These are both kinds of ‘representation matters’ positions with varying levels of practical concerns, essentialism, and cultural appropriation; and for a long time a spirited defense of *either* position would draw sustained harassment. That’s different than most fandoms, where a fan interpretation is usually obviously bad or obviously good.
Of course, now that the production money is finally involved in Avatar again, after decades of running away, things are different. The money doesn’t understand delicate cultural-identity vs. racial-heritage-identity issues, so they just recast everybody except the bison.
As I recall, Zuko was not meant to be present at this meeting, so I suspect the Avatar writers were not thinking of this precedent, but they may have been, and it is still an intriguing scene.
1) General proposes to use the inexperienced 41st division in a deceptive attack on a point in the line held by a veteran enemy battalion “there is no better live bait than fresh meat”.
2) Zuko interrupts and protests against sacrificing their soldiers in this way.
3) Zuko is expected to fight a duel to atone for interrupting a meeting of his elders.
4) Duel turns out to be against his father, who was running the meeting.
5) Zuko falls to the floor in tears, begging for mercy and saying he meant no disrespect.
6) Disgusted father burns him, condemns him for “disrespect”, and exiles him.
7) Much later, at the beginning of the last act of the show, Azula, Zukos decidedly more able younger sister, tells their father than Zuko has fought heroically and victoriously against the title character, attributing her achievements to him, and their father promptly reinstates Zuko and tells him he is proud of him.
8) Zuko (verbally) attacks his sister for this and declares she must be plotting against him. But he does not tell their father the truth until he defects to the good guys.
It occurs to me that a division is a lot bigger than a battalion, so Zuko (and the audience) may be wrong in assuming the 41st to have been in much danger. At any event, I feels this shows why the inexperienced people were well-advised to stay quiet.
One of the key themes of the show is that Azula in *not* more capable than her brother, she is simply more like their father than Zuko is. Most of the rest of your analysis is defensible, though, and the timeline matches what I remember.
“Azula always lies.”
“Azula always lies” is a comment made by Zuko in an episode during which every statement of Azula’s that we can check, turns out to be true.
And she usually misleads people by telling them something technically true, when other characters – including all the good guys – would outright lie. “A princess surrenders with honor”, for example, which sounds so like saying she is surrendering with honor than no one notices she isn’t saying that.
Seriously, try to name of something that Zuko is better at than her.
In many ways Azula is like the crew of U-96 in Das Boot. It’s not that she lacks virtue: it is that all of her virtues are on the side of the Big Bad.
Zuko is a better friend, more compassionate leader, and more skilled at both defensive fighting and cooperative fighting. He’s also an interesting date and an accomplished conservationist.
Ultimately Azula only knows how to make enemies, and has applied her passion for direct violence into achieving some skill in that area, although to reiterate disastrously bad at defensive skills. As Firelord she could not have brought prosperity to the Fire Nation even if a purely spoils-based prosperity had been militarily possible (and the Earth Nation did possess fantasy-world resources so it should have been possible for a more capable leader).
“Zuko is a better friend, more compassionate leader, and more skilled at both defensive fighting and cooperative fighting. He’s also an interesting date and an accomplished conservationist.”
Endymionologist, to take these in order:-
1) The only friends we see them deal with are Mai and Ty Lee, there is only one episode where they interact as friends, and in that episode Azula shows more interest in, understanding of, and sympathy for, her friends. She ends the episode by cheering everybody up. Zuko spends most of it ordering his girlfriend not to speak to another boy they just met.
2) When Zuko had people to lead, during the first season, he told them that capturing the Avatar for the Fire Nation was more important than any of their lives, and responded to the Avatar’s capture by someone else by secretly releasing the Avatar so he personally would have a chance to recapture him and gain the glory himself. Earlier, one of his own officers was so infuriated by Zuko’s behaviour he challenged Zuko to a duel. At the end of the season Zuko calls his crew traitors because every member deserts him to follow Admiral Zhao.
Azula infiltrates the last major remaining power, allies with the head of the secret police to seize the throne and, when he betrays her too, steals his own followers away from him. Whenever she speaks to followers she starts with something they can be expected to care about. No other character does.
3) No character lands a hit on Azula except by surprise, and perhaps once when she is distracted by Zuko fighting next to her. She has thrown back a simultaneous attack by almost every major character. Conversely, it looks like she herself one-shot killed a demigod. Zuko himself has attacked her pretty often, and never landed a hit. Indeed, their only battle in which he fights defensively is their last. Which he still loses.
4) I am not sure what you mean by “better at cooperative fighting”. Can you demonstrate how? Certainly Azula and her friends can cooperate wordlessly in a fight.
5) I feel their desirability as a date is not too important.
The point of all this is: Zuko starts off in the show as a typical kids TV villain: violent, impulsive and always defeated by The Hero. He ends up the Hero’s friend and ally.
Azula, from her own point of view, is a conscientious, high achieving teenager trying to keep her family together; and from the audiences point of view a near-demonic creature who cannot be fought off, outsmarted or reasoned with, who rips apart every plan or fortification the Good Guys have and seduces Zuko back to the Dark Side exactly when they hope and expect he will finally join Team Good Guy. All the worse because she is entirely selfless and willing to fight against any odds for her cause and absolutely prepared to burn the world to ash for her Dad.
A really great villain.
The Roman case is interesting because promotion came from being elected by the people. Sure, there was enormous aristocratic influence over elections, but the people chose between different aristocrats. The one exception is maybe the most critical — the Senate assigned pro-magistracies, so could (and did) avoid placing aristocrats into roles they would be poorly suited for.
Loved the Final Fantasy VIII reference. Though I should point out that in that game, the academies aren’t training officers, they’re basically training elite mercenaries who use divine blessings to be a match for armies. They fight on the frontlines instead of commanding.
FFVIII is also one of the more modern of the FF’s just in terms of structure: It’s not really a premodern society at all.
Those SeeDs are defnitely more soldiers than officers, though they are clearly implied to undergo strategy training, have mission leadership with multiple ranks (as in Dollet), and they likely can function as well as anybody can as NCOs.
That said, the lack of a strong command structure gets inadvertedly addressed with the Norg subplot and later on when Cid makes his address and they have to come up with some organisation on the fly rather than just go ‘the protocol expects us to do X or Y in this situation’.
How does the Byzantine Empire under Justinian fit into this? He seems to have appointed very much low-born people (Belisarius, Narses (a eunuch!), but also Tribonian and John the Cappadocian) to high offices and generalship, where they performed very well (especially Belisarius). That seems to contradict the idea that those people must be drawn from the aritocracy, no? Or was Justinian an exception somehow, even for Byzantines? If so, how was it possible for him to ignore these rules?
This might have indirectly resulted from the volcanic winter of 536. During the northern hemisphere winter of 535–36 there was a colossal volcanic eruption somewhere in the tropics. Before the climate had entirely recovered there was another large eruption but not colossal in scale. This prolonged the volcanic winter worsening the agricultural crisis. As a result there would have been a lot of popular uprisings during these years. To hold on to his power Ioustiniános might have felt it necessary to appoint people on merits alone. Also, a considerable fraction of the population had died from plague in the 540ies although he himself survived.
The Byzantines under Justinian have the late Imperial Roman system where the generals are expected to come from the rich and upper class families. We don’t seem to have sources for the early life of Belisarius, but since the Byzantine historian Procopius was a reactionary type who never failed to mention when anyone else was of “low birth”, it’s unlikely that Belisarius was.
Narses is a personal favourite of Justinian, something that happens elsewhere in the medieval period when a ruler decides that they can’t entirely trust their rich and powerful upper class. He’s an exception, and like the other favourites who rise to power he’s promoted because he isn’t from the upper class and utterly dependent on doing what the ruler wants. (Narses happens to be competent, a lot of favourites are not.) And because he’s an exception, he isn’t that popular with any of the other Byzantine generals, who in Africa and Italy all seem to be upper class.
History is not physics. In the “hard sciences” a theory or rule has to be correct every single time. Historians are lucky to get something that’s true 9 times in 10. And a blog post aimed at a general audience does not have space to list every possible case where it didn’t.
This is a good moment to mention Justin Alexander’s rule of thumb about worldbuilding: “1. Create a system that makes perfect logical sense. 2. Create two exceptions: One grandfathered in from a previous system. One new-fangled and recent.”
(Src: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/40719/roleplaying-games/random-worldbuilding-creating-noble-titles)
That basically creates that hopefully-9-out-of-10 feeling to any historical “rule”.
This would provide a sense of the complexity of human societies. Their rules are far from always consistent.
“The Byzantines under Justinian have the late Imperial Roman system where the generals are expected to come from the rich and upper class families. We don’t seem to have sources for the early life of Belisarius, but since the Byzantine historian Procopius was a reactionary type who never failed to mention when anyone else was of “low birth”, it’s unlikely that Belisarius was.
Narses is a personal favourite of Justinian, something that happens elsewhere in the medieval period when a ruler decides that they can’t entirely trust their rich and powerful upper class. He’s an exception, and like the other favourites who rise to power he’s promoted because he isn’t from the upper class and utterly dependent on doing what the ruler wants. (Narses happens to be competent, a lot of favourites are not.) And because he’s an exception, he isn’t that popular with any of the other Byzantine generals, who in Africa and Italy all seem to be upper class.”
The question is, were “favourites” an “exception” or a rule?
Augustus´ principate did have a rule that most legionary commanders and governors of major provinces were senators… but not all. Egypt with 2…3 legions was run entirely by knights, and as a rule so was Praetorian Guard, size of about 2 legions.
Yes, a lot of knights were “domi nobiles” – from rich and well-connected families, just not well-connected enough to be in Senate. But not all… Take Nymphidius Sabinus. He was a bastard, of uncertain father, possibly of a gladiator. His mother was a bastard too – daughter of a slave father and of a hired, thus apparently free but humble mother. Nymphidius may have been *rich* – his slave grandfather eventually was freed and became a rich freedman minister of state, so it´s possible that his daughter and grandson benefited from his wealth, but it´s decisively *ignoble* status.
When you look at later Roman usurpers like Helvius Pertinax or Maximinus Thrax, you´ll find a lot of them are mentioned to have been of low birth – at least by some sources! There are two plausible explanations.
One of them is that historians opposed to the characters falsely reported low birth for their opponents.
But the other possibility is that the emperors promoted low-born men, with poor connections and a lot of enemies in upper classes, as a deliberate policy of coupproofing.
Since both options are plausible, it isn´t clear how much of each happened.
Justinianus himself was a peasant. His uncle Justinus had left the poverty of his native village with just clothes and bag of bread and enlisted in Excubitors – and while he was the commander of Excubitors by age 68, he was illiterate. Justinianus himself was well educated… because at some point of Justinianus´ childhood, his uncle, then about 40, had got rich enough to invite his nephew to capital and give the boy an education the uncle himself was too old to enjoy.
Oh, and Justinianus´ wife was a whore, too (confirmed by a source otherwise favourable to her). Justinianus did not use his position to make a marriage alliance.
Do you men she sold sex before marrying him?
Yes.
The more hostile source:
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Procopius/Anecdota/9*.html
“the path by which became a general in ancient Greece”
->by which one became
“this is now a fellow expecting to fight man-to-man on the field”
->this is not
I don’t know if you’re going to talk about morale more later, but I’ll ask here. In cases where the reason for having a war is more or less “we’re going to beat up those people and take all their stuff”, would “morale” simply represent a soldier’s belief that he, personally, will be enriched by the campaign? Or would there be some higher-minded ideological justification that the common soldiers would genuinely buy into?
This has nothing to do with the content of the blog, but I am here to bemoan how “agreatdivorce” seems to have got back together with his wife. I miss hearing these posts as podcasts.
The notion of military command structures mirroring the societal ones also makes me think of the Age of Sail Royal Navy (granted, everything I’m about to say is my impressions from reading Hornblower, not based on actual historical education, so I’m welcome to being corrected).
On the one hand you’ve got the seamen, enlisted or press ganged from commoners and the best they could work towards is Able Seaman. On the other you’ve got officers, invariably nobility but still having to start as Midshipmen and work their way up. And since it’s closer to a “modern” society and things like expertise and merit are beginning to be valued (I’d imagine both due to cultural changes and due to the technical nature of running a rigged ship), you get the *trappings* of merit based advancement but under the surface it’s still all about who you know. So Captains are promoted to Admiral based on how long they have been captain, which feels merit-based, except that your opportunity to achieve post rank at a young age is based on your social connections. Lieutenant is a big milestone achieved by an “examination”, but since it’s an oral questioning it would be very very easy for those conducting the examination to push you through or push you out based on whether you were well liked and related to important people.
Meanwhile in the “middle” you’ve got warrant officers who are “professionals” by necessity because they have advanced skills like carpentry and surgery, which I believe would mostly be drawn from what constituted the bourgeoisie since those are the people who would be able to get that education. I’m fuzzy on the details there because Hornblower himself seems to have little knowledge about them–the warrant officers always seem a bit like an alien element to the post officers.
“On the one hand you’ve got the seamen, enlisted or press ganged from commoners and the best they could work towards is Able Seaman.”
Not really. The Navy was notorious for officers coming in through the haus-hole, as they said. Captains could make–or break–warrant officers, including midshipmen. They had to; they expected to lose a certain number of them on a commission, and replacements were necessary. And often the replacement was a foremast jack, because that’s who they had at hand. And once you were on the quarterdeck there was a chance you could advance further.
That’s not to say it was likely. ANY promotion was unlikely. And often what happened was you got the official promotion but couldn’t find a ship so you sailed at a lower rank–midshipmen who passed for lieutenant but couldn’t find a captain so sailed as reefers, and midshipmen who couldn’t find a captain to take them and sailed as foremast hands. But it was possible to enter the Navy as a sailor and end your career an admiral.
Sailors could also be given various roles, like “captain of the foretop” or the like. They could be promoted to boson rank as well, making them a warrant officer (same as the gunner or surgeon). Pay was also based on the type of ship you were in; a sloop didn’t pay as much as a ship of the line, for pretty much any rank.
Likewise, officers didn’t need to be noblemen. It didn’t hurt, and at the time the Navy made no pretense about being egalitarian. Influence (read: money and birth) was absolutely a deciding factor in many cases, and there was always a tension between those who valued seamanship more vs those who thought an officer had to pass for gentleman as well as pass for seamanship. But there were officers who were of no notable birth as they reconned things back then.
Captains were a special case with regard to promotion. They were promoted based on seniority, meaning the next on the List had to be the next admiral. But you didn’t need to give the admiral a command. You could be Yellowed, as it was called–officially assigned to the Yellow squadron, which means you were assigned the rank and pay but had no official duties and (as I understand it) could not get an active command. So if the guy you wanted to command the squadron was sixth on the list, you’d promote all 6, putting 5 on the Yellow squadron and putting the guy you wanted in command. Cumbersome, but a way to get merit involved.
If you like Hornblower I strongly recommend the Jack Aubrey series. Patrick O’Brian spins a fantastic yarn, delving into the sides of seaborn life that Forester shied away from. One of the main characters, Steven Maturine, is a perpetual lubber and the author uses that to explain points that would otherwise be obscure to readers. Given O’Brian’s level of research his books nearly count as a secondary source of historical information (he’s fairly meticulous about things, and open about where he screws up), and the fan community has created a number of resources (such as “The Lubber’s Hole” podcast, “The Dear Suprise” website, and several books) that provide additional information and primary sources where possible. I once read that after reading Hornblower you feel you could command a ship (I certainly did!).
The way I like to put it is, Hornblower answers the question “What would a mid-20th century man be like in the Napoleonic Wars?” Aubrey answers the question “What was life like in the Napoleonic Wars?”
That’s really helpful, thank you!
Or read NAM Rodgers’ The Wooden World and then his magisterial three volumes on Britain’s naval history.
I would like to second this recommendation.
(Although in the last of those volumes, I feel the author has a bee in his bonnet about the USN.)
Or you gave the captain a posting as commodore, which was ‘temporary admiral’ rather than a permanent step in rank. Nelson commanded squadrons as commodore several times before making admiral on seniority.
“On the one hand you’ve got the seamen, enlisted or press ganged from commoners and the best they could work towards is Able Seaman. On the other you’ve got officers, invariably nobility but still having to start as Midshipmen and work their way up.”
I have read little of Hornblower, but I do not seem to recall his being a nobleman. Nor should he have been: the nobility in England was miniscule. There certainly were landowners, but though they might be local officials, they did not join the regular army or navy. Such a position would take them away from the property they administrated.
The people who did follow such careers were the younger sons of property owners, who could be expected to inherit nothing but their fathers address book and whatever education he could afford for them.
Admiral Nelson was the (sixth) son of a parish priest, Captain Cook the son of a farmhand.
I was using “nobility” imprecisely/incorrectly to refer more broadly to the elite landed. Hornblower is definitely what you described (younger son of poor(ish) property owner), it’s just that my brain sort of substitutes in “nobility” because he’s certainly not a commoner. I think of the Bennet family that way too, but my knowledge of the actual use of the term in Regency is basically zip.
Noble/Commoner is most useful as a Continental frame. For British contexts (when looking back from the present) the useful frame is Landlord/Non-landlord; in theory by the Regency you could have rentier-class people who exclusively own debt without any real estate, but I don’t think that really happened.
When you write “rentier-class” do you mean industrialists? If not what would the difference be?
@Lena Synnerholm:
Endymionologist *might* mean – correct me if I’m wrong, Endymionologist – people who own only financial investments.
Hornblower was the son of a doctor according to Mr. Midshipman Hornblower. May have been reconned; I don’t recall his parents being mentioned again in the series.
Bowen, Mitchell and Bligh all made admiral from the lower deck. Cook and many others made captain (including one in the Caribbean who was black and the son of a slave – which must have made for interesting port calls in Alabama).
It’s a terminology difference, most countries use “nobility” for both what the brits call Nobility (the high nobility) and the Gentry (the low nobility) in practice british gentry were treated as low nobility whenever they showed up on the continent socially, etc.
Normally, the nobility had legal privileges. The gentry did not.
Put another way – would you be happy if I called George Washington and Thomas Jefferson aristocrats?
I would prefer to call them members of the elite.
Lena, I agree.
The british gentry kinda did have legal distinctions, they had some remnants of feudal rights, certain titles, etc. and were distinguished (if imprecisley) from the yeomanry. And more importantly they were socially treated as equals by continental nobles.
Thomas Jefferson had been to France. My educated guess is he would have introduced himself as a landowner there. I have no idea of how the French would have interpreted this. Incidentally Benjamin Franklin had also been to France. I know he was present when the Montgolfier brothers first publicly demonstrated their hot air balloon. Since his previous job was as a printer (or possibly publisher) he would have been considered bourgeois there.
If James Cook was the son of a farmhand how did he get the opportunity to learn to read and write? In the 18th century this can’t be taken for granted.
Neither was it entirely impossible though. (especially given various notions of “read” and “write”) there were various forms of education (parish schools etc.) availible to even the poor, though their coverage was… spotty.
Still, By the standards of the day the vast majority (90%!) of swedes could read at least somewhat by 1800, for instance, and while that was abnormally high we’re still talking a good chunk of people who can. (it was a bit lower by mid-1700’s, but still 80%+)
Even today there are people being barely literate. They can read on signs and write a shopping list but not read a newspaper or write a letter.
Sailors were more literate than the average population at the time. Common sailors wrote to the Admiralty more or less constantly–and, surprisingly, the Admiralty attempted to respond to many of the complaints. Don’t get me wrong, being a scholar wasn’t universal, or even necessarily common (depended on the ship, among other things), but it was more common than on land.
Part of being an officer involved being able to read and write, and it would be easy enough to find someone to teach you. Consider the situation: Voyages could take months or years, and while sailors didn’t have tremendous amounts of downtime they did have some (especially when wind were steady or non-existent, either case rendering actual work minimal). It was mind-shatteringly boring. Books were a common form of entertainment (see Dana on the matter). The literate sailors would read to the crew, but it wouldn’t take much to teach someone to read as well. Both learning to read and teaching someone to read helped pass the time, so would be worth doing. If you were a midshipman half your job was to learn your profession, an there were often schoolmasters shipped to teach the young gentlemen.
Farmers may also learn to read. It wasn’t common, nor was it systematic at the time, but there were teachers available. It’s not like peasants were forbidden from reading at the time, it just wasn’t prioritized.
Dame school, then in the merchant marine – where he rose to master (skilled navigator), presumably being taught on the job.
It was the 18th century, not the 8th. Literacy was not universal, but not rare either. According to wikipedia, Cook was apprenticed first to a shopkeeper, then to the owner of a fleet of colliers. Presumably both masters would wish him literate and numerate.
Thank you, I only needed an explanation for how he got the opportunity. English spelling is hopeless and would not have been that much closer to spoken language in the 18th century. I am actually writing this in a word processor to make it easier for me to spell.
Yes, the English language has been weaponized to make it nearly impossible for foreigners to learn. Then the Welsh noticed this and decided to devise an actual, encoded language.
Learning to speak it is not that hard if you have a Germanic language as your mother tongue.
“Pre-modern societies are, by modern standards, extremely low in social mobility and so they create cultures and customs which justify and normalize those systems.”
I think the implications–that this is an artificial divide imposed upon society by the Big Men–are over-stated.
To be a good peasant (ie, to survive) requires a tremendous amount of knowledge and training. It’s not book knowledge, so it generally wasn’t considered knowledge, but we need not share the prejudices of the past; you’ve said yourself that peasants were survivors, and this requires intelligence. Trouble is, knowing what they needed to know (several hundred edible and medicinal plants, how to build homes, how to plant dozens of crops, how to handle dozens of species in a variety of settings, how to fish, how to poach [let’s be honest with ourselves shall we?], how to weave, how to sew, and all the rest) takes a lifetime to learn.
Likewise, rule takes a lifetime to learn. You need to learn PEOPLE–both as individuals, and in terms of how they interact. You need to learn how to get people to do what you want (otherwise you don’t have an army, you have a rebellion). You also need to know logistics–how to get your people from Point A to Point B. Given how much trouble modern, highly-educated people have understanding this (as evidenced by the thousands of words you’ve written on the topic), we can assume this is not easy.
Further, aristocrats rule from cities in the past. And the logistics of keeping a city alive are similar enough to the logistics of keeping an army mobile that the skills will be largely transferable. A nobleman who runs a town could reasonably feed an army of a similar size. This is doubly true for societies where the nobility is trained in managing armies from a young age. A knight won’t be trained in the same logistics as a king, but that’s fine, a division of intellectual labor lets each focus on what they’re good at.
Could a peasant learn to manage armies? Probably. But the realities of grain farming mean that they don’t have time. In order for everyone to have enough to eat people had to be trained at specific roles starting early, and that meant you were pretty much necessarily locked in at birth.
Did Big Men take advantage of this? Absolutely. Ancient societies often viewed the idea of egalitarianism or equity as heretical and blasphemous. But I think there’s a tendency in the modern world to over-emphasize the degree to which this division of labor was arbitrary. Because of how education worked (apprenticeships starting during childhood), and how food production worked (back-breaking labor starting at childhood), there HAD to be a division between those trained to manage (ie, rule) and those trained to do (ie, mostly to farm).
I think the work of peasants other than food production could be pretty divided too. A single person could not be skilled at all the handicrafts needed for peasant agriculture to work.
Too true! I know wheel-making, ceramics, metal smithing, and a few others were almost entirely outsourced. Even within a household, tasks were divided between people. The person plowing the fields can’t spin the wool, whereas the person watching the babies or cooking the food can.
So you’re absolutely right: Even within peasants there is clear division of labor, strongly suggesting that the mental demands were beyond what one person could handle on their own. Learning peasantry AND military tactics would be as impossible as becoming a master of all building trades AND a five-star general in the modern world.
Although a few have managed it. A baker’s boy from France trained and led the formidable Army of Hindostan.
Often when people do that it is because they “drop out” of peasantry and go get some other form of education (not neccessarily formal, just showing up and hanging around with officers can help!)
Seeing someone “switch tracks” like this while young is unusual, but not unheard of, but you rarely hear about 45 year farmers doing it. (though sometimes there are transferrable skills, someone being an importnat man in the local village, sitting at the head of village meetings, organizing tax contributions and the local militia etc. can get some transferrable skills… There’s differences between peasants and peasants)
A baker’s son would still be bourgeois rather than peasant.
I have made some attempts at ceramics myself although their poor quality was probably more due to my clumsiness and deficiency of practice. In other words I don’t think specialisation was strictly necessary. If you have access to usable clay and enough fuel to fire it you can make usable ceramics. That said making ceramics could well have been professionalized once societies got complex enough for such.
Did peasants do some of their own ceramic work? Probably, at least some of the time. We know they knew how to process clay from streams (certain pigments come from that). Same as they probably made basic repairs on wheels and pots and things. But there’s a gulf of difference between doing something a few times, and being good enough to, say, throw a pot good enough to cook in every day. Or an oil lamp that doesn’t set the house on fire (unglazed and poorly glazed lamps leak, and leaking oil plus flame equals a bad time). Or even making clay tiles consistently–stacking them so that they don’t get damaged is remarkably tricky, since a few will inevitably shatter no matter how careful you are.
I think the issue of use is the main issue here. Can I make a bit of ceramic that’s good enough to be used occasionally? Sure. I’ve done it a couple of times, and processing clay isn’t that hard. But people in the past used their cooking pots–mostly ceramic–every day. They had to stand up to repeated heating and cooling and survive for years. The glaze had to survive harsh cleaning methods–wood ash and sand, among other things. Can I make a pot that can survive that? Not on your life! It’s not just the clay and the throwing, it’s the oven and the glazing and the techniques that I’m not even aware of–those thousands of little things that differentiate the DIYer from the professional. I could make a plate or bowl without too much trouble, but when it comes to the pot my family will be cooking in for the rest of my life, I’m going to find someone who does this for a living! And at least some cultures in the past took a similar view.
I always assumed that bricks and tiles were cast in wooden moulds. Probably adobes too, when they started to “mass produce” them.
“I always assumed that bricks and tiles were cast in wooden moulds.”
Sure. But unbaked tiles have a tendency to shatter if you look at them too hard, and are ugly and porous. For some applications of tiles in particular that’s a plus, but for most you want them to be glazed and fired. Bricks tend not to be glazed, but outside deserts they tend to be fired. And that’s where the problem arises. You’re going to fire a few hundred to a few thousand bricks at once (depending on the size of the oven and the project), and a certain percent are going to explode as water and air heat up and expand. If you’re not careful this can create a cascading system failure–as one explodes it breaks two or three next to it, which each break two or three next to them, and so on until the batch is essentially ruined.
Knowing how to prevent that isn’t extraordinarily difficult, it’s all in how you stack them and in ensuring they’re dry before firing them, but it’s just one aspect that separates hobbyists from professionals For a hobbyist something like this is annoying; it could ruin a professional.
When I wrote “tiles” I was thinking about ceramic roof tiles. On the other hand I did not think about the stresses cocking pots have to withstand. What I know is the Eskimos making oil lamps and cocking pots from soapstone because they did not have enough fuel to fire ceramics.
“When I wrote “tiles” I was thinking about ceramic roof tiles.”
I’m not sure why you think this matters. You run into the same problems. Outside desert environments–ie, anywhere you have to deal with rain–simply drying the tiles isn’t going to be sufficient, you have to fire them. And if you fire enough tiles to tile a roof, you run into the risk of the sort of cascading failure that I mention. More complex shapes make this even more likely, as they are more difficult to stack and more prone to falling (which is one mechanism by which the cascading failure occurs).
Roofing tiles may not be glazed (though they may be!), but while that makes the process simpler it by no means makes the process simple.
Yes, I was aware of bricks and tiles normally being fired. In fact the standard word for the material they are made of in my native Swedish presupposes firing. Bricks intended to be used without being fired are specifically called “sun-dried”. On the other hand it uses different words for roof tiles and glazed wall/floor tiles. Some roof tiles have historically been glazed for decoration. However, the ones I can remember coming into personal contact with look more or less like this:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enkupigt_taktegel_2011.jpg
The Roman may well have made theirs to look like this to reduce the risk of failure:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Feurs_Mus%C3%A9e_Tegulae_Imbrices.JPG
@Dinwar,
I was thinking of someone like Emiliano Zapata who ended up commanding an army (until his unfortunate assassination), but maybe that actually strengthens your point, since it’s squarely within the modern era, where things like increased education/literacy levels and modern trade networks had started to make the differences between peasant and urban life less sharp than they had been for most of history.
There was at least one Roman emperor who began as a slave (I forget who, not really an era I’m hugely interested in). There are also enough stories in the Middle Ages of peasants realizing they were hidden nobility that it’s likely it happened from time to time. But it’s going to be an exceptional person in exceptional circumstances, maybe one in a few million. They’re also likely to be concentrated in specific areas of expertise, like artillery (a thing since the 1300s in Europe) and sailing (which is highly technical whatever the era). These exceptions don’t really disprove my point, though; this is a matter of sociology, not theoretical mathematics, so a few exceptions are to be expected.
You’re right about the modern era. Modern education and liberal values, including individualism and egalitarianism, mean that modern people have a better foundation for moving into more managerial/executive roles that were previously limited to nobility, and modern societies are more likely to recognize and reward such people. We can have an interesting debate about the intent of modern and Early Modern education, but the net result is that it’s no longe unusual for someone with blue-collar parents to become a white-collar worker, or even an executive.
An interesting thing about the Medieval era is the Church. It offered a way for lower-class people to move up the social ranks to a certain extent. Bishops and abbots are most likely going to come from the ranks of nobility, but they don’t NEED to, and some groups within the Church valued ability and actually believed what they preached (see the repeated reforms at Cluny). Like with the navy promotion as such is going to be rare, and most plumbs are going to go to children of noblemen or rich men, but at least peasants weren’t barred from rising in the ranks. And one major aspect of the Church was its emphasis on education–you had to be able to read (so you could read the Bible and other religious texts) and write (a major income source for some groups in the Church).
I went through the list of popes up to early modern times. About 10% were said to be of humble origins. In several cases this was due to recognised exceptional piety as better fitting for the job than administrative competence (these tended to follow particularly dissolute popes).
“There was at least one Roman emperor who began as a slave (I forget who, not really an era I’m hugely interested in).”
There were slaves which got educated so they could work like private teachers and the like. Slavery did not always mean hard manual labour in the Roman Empire.
There were also educated people who were enslaved. Rome mined Greece for educated slaves after conquering it.
If I understand it correctly Greece had a relatively high literacy rate at the time. So prisoners of war from there would have had a higher chance of being literate. Also, the city-state of Athens owned a few dozen “public slaves”. These worked as civil servants including some taxmen. This means already enslaved people with an education was not unheard of.
Regarding the “Lost Prince” narrative, this is the pre-modern equivalent of the modern action movie. Real Lost Princes demonstrating their noble blood through unusual competence and becoming recognized and accepted into upperclass society because of it were probably about as common as present-day people who learn to dodge bullets by just being really good at knowing how handguns work.
Seems like the similarities between Greece, Rome, and China is not because they’re more egalitarian or anything, but because they SUCK at horse fighting? I’d like to also add Carthage who actually relies more on cavalry but also never able to integrate into their fighting class. Contrast to Macedonia, Persia, and Gaul/Goth before and after Rome. There’s really no easy way to stand out while fighting as hoplite/legion, so aristocrats can never show off. So they have no choice but to be officer-aristocrats. In comparison, cavalry have a very easy way to show off their skills, even if it’s only because they’ve trained since little. So those knights can become warrior-aristocrats.
Also why is USA blessed with “docile” generals? Like they never coup or anything despite some disagreement sometimes. Business Plot and MacArthur shenanigans seem to be the exceptions that prove the rule. Though, generals do seem to be able to easily become president. Maybe USA is the army with a state all along.
The Gauls and Goths were not the same culture. Neither did the Goths culturally descend from the Gauls. The Gauls were a Celtic people and the Goths a Germanic one.
Aaaah by Goth I mean Celt. It shamefully take too long time to Google to remind me what name of that culture that’s simultaneously in Spain, France, Germany, and Anatolia.
I am a bit oversensitive to people lumping together geographically nearby cultures only based on superficial similarity.
well the Military–industrial complex in USA certainly echoes the situations in Imperial Germany and Japan, where capitalists and militarists went hand in hand.
German capitalists did not want the Kaiser to invade France. They did not want Hitler to invade Poland and France either. What they wanted did not matter, because they did not run German foreign policy, or its military.
Likewise, American capitalists did not want war with Iran, and Russian ones did not want to invade Ukraine.
Capitalists don’t matter much. All they have is wealth – the legal right to control certain assets. Control of law enforcement is what matters, and control of the army.
The capitalists will do what law enforcement and the army tell them, if they want it to continue enforcing their legal rights.
It is better to have money than not. But ask someone who has been mugged what good the money in a wallet did, against a mugger with power.
“German capitalists did not want the Kaiser to invade France.”
How do we know they didn’t? In any case, Rheinmetall, Krupp, etc… didn’t protest that the armed forces buy more stuffs from them for the war. And if Germany won WW1, I doubt that the German capitalists would protest that newly acquired colonies bring them more profit.
We know because it is one of the best documented events in human history. We have diaries, orders, official records, interviews and a host of extenuating memoirs in which the principles all try to blame someone else.
WWI arose from the interactions of one terrorist organisation and at least seven governments. Only one of these governments did really cooperate with the terrorist organisation.
“Capitalists don’t matter much. All they have is wealth – the legal right to control certain assets. Control of law enforcement is what matters, and control of the army.”
It’s like saying only the Kaiser mattered. The army and police could not give orders to themselves either.
Senior officers gave orders to junior officers, who gave orders to soldiers. The further up the chain of command you went, the more power any single individual had, until you reached the top with the Commander in chief. The Emperor.
Being rich gave you no position in that hierarchy.
The German military was a state within the state. The Army and the Navy were responsible only to the Emperor, and really proud of it. Socially, they were not really responsive to the wishes of the plutocratic elite, because the industrialist families tended not to be the recruitung basis of the military officers. Instead, they came from the land owner class, who were somewhat poorer, and much more conservative. The same applied, to great extent, to foreign service, which also tended to recruit from old noble families. A bright young man looking for a career would be likely to select some other path, if he didn’t have the requisite background, because the prospects would be limited, compared to equally respectable careers in industry, free professions, civil service or academia.
So, there really was an unstable situation where the military was not a very good image of the society at large, but a remnant of the past order, and Kaiser Wilhelm was actively empowering the military to remain so. And the decision to go to war was very much a cabinet decision by the Emperor, with the main inputs from the military and foreign service professionals. The Parliament and even the cabinet were quite sidelined.
@ad9 how about being the one paying taxes and producing weapons to feed the entire system? If the rich have no position then why didn’t the Kaiser confiscate all their properties and have the state produce everything like Stalin did?
Because he had no interest in the government taking over that much of the economy.
@Lena Synnerholm so capitalists did matter
It was more like the idea of the state trying to control the entire economy not being fully developed yet. The first planned economy was the Soviet Union with later planed economies being more or less modelled on that. (I hate five-year plans. They are perverse incentives which Communist regimes cling to out of sheer dogmatism.) Most of this development happened after WWI.
We have to consider Wilhelm II’s background too. He grew up with the expectation of inheriting the German throne sooner or later. That it happened sooner rather than later was because his father died a natural death mere moths after his grandfather. Moreover, Wilhelm II grew up among the nobility which was allied to his country’s capitalists. Members of the elite sometimes become some form of Socialist but this is rare.
The ‘marriage of iron and rye’. There were close connections between the Prussian ruling class and the Rhineland industrialists, with both inclined to aggressive expansionism. Also, Hitler had major industrial backers. If they did not want war they certainly forgot to read the large print. Likewise the very wealthy who are a large part of Republican funding do not seen to have grasped that the party they finance is very likely to lurch into war. Their displeasure at events is not reflected in their contributions.
Expecting to earn form something is not the same as actually doing so. Some people have so poor grasp of society their political actions become self-destructive.
This is true when ot comes to parliamentary politics. However, the power of the parliament was quite limited in Imperial Germany. When it came to the decision about the actual start of the WWI, the industrialists had very little actual say, as they were not consulted as a class, nor had any kind of representation in the narrow circle of decision-makers. The very marriage of rye and iron carried with it the idea that “rye” retained its traditional sphere of power in exchange for tariffs and politics that supported German jndustry.
Naturally, this arrangement was part of the overall European climate that built up a jingoistic system of alliances and plans which caused the European system of states to succumb to WWI, but the German industrialists do not bear a significantly greater responsibility for theFirst World War than their French, British, Austrian or Russian counterparts.
@Finnish reader the industrialists being the ones making decisions or not is not the point. The point is the military wanted the industrialists to get rich, and the industrialists wanted the military to win. As I said, they went hand in hand. Who actually was running the show, and who influenced their decisions, are more complicated.
In the USA the military is under civilian authority. This may seem like a minor thing, but in an organization that’s as hierarchical as the military, and among people who routinely interact with the civilian leadership and are clearly in a subordinate role, this matters.
Further, the average soldier, while they enjoy a few perks like discounts and priority seating in some situations, is mostly treated like an every-day working stiff. The military is viewed as an honorable occupation (which is a change from the early US, where it was viewed as basically make-work, and the whole Nam issue), but just one honorable occupation among many. Soldiers are part of the general population, and getting them to take over the country would require you to convince them to shoot their friends and neighbors and to abandon everything they’ve been raised to value. The military isn’t apart from the culture, it’s a part OF the culture, and that means any military uprising is necessarily going to destroy the lives of the people doing the uprising.
We also have a LOT of options for organized armed opposition. If a general did go rogue and try to take over the USA it’s quite likely that other generals and admirals would oppose them. They could call up the Reserves and their own troops, as can the states, and suddenly the rogue general is faced with an army that could trounce most nations.
The combination, along with other factors (this is a set of examples, not an exhaustive list, Bret went into detail a while back on military/civilian relations), means that you’d have to be a special kind of stupid to attempt a military coup in the USA.
As for why generals become presidents so easily, it’s pretty simple. They’re in the public eye, and name recognition matters a lot in elections. The presidency is viewed as a high honor and reward, so a successful general (like Grant or Eisenhour or Washington) can be elected as a reward. And a general is necessarily going to have the connections and money to put on a descent campaign. They know the palms to grease, they’re used to making deals with these people, and they’ve been negotiating with them for a while. It’s certainly not the only, or even best, way to get there–a background in business combined with state-level politics seems a better resume–but as a possible pathway it has much to recommend it.
“In the USA the military is under civilian authority. ”
On the face of it, in a Presidential system, as in the United States or Latin America, the military is under the ultimate authority of *one* civilian. The more obedient the military are to him, the more easily he can use them to overthrow election results. The less obedient they are, the easier it is for them to do so for themselves.
Note that the current President *has* attempted to overturn an election result, however half-heartedly, and the punishment for doing so was nothing. Might even have made him more powerful within the Republican Party. So given the high expected value of success, and the seemingly non-existent cost of failure, I am not convinced it is a stupid thing to attempt.
Fundamentally all you’re saying is “Systems are built out of people.” Of course they are. And if enough people want to discard any system they will. But you asked why that hasn’t happened yet in the USA. The answer is, fundamentally, that enough people DO NOT want the system changed–enough people want elections to decide the presidency, not the military–that we have maintained the system.
If your response to any explanation is “Well yeah but people could decide not to!” there’s really no point in discussing this. Once you remove culture from the equation you can speculate about any sort of arrangement you want and there’s nothing to constrain it. At that point, the song “Serious Steel” is as likely an outcome as anything you propose.
The insurrection was bad, I agree. I also agree that it could get worse in a few months. But there are a few things that hearten me. First, the reaction to the insurrection wasn’t as minor as you say. Trump may have gained some temporary power in the Republican party, but it’s long since spent, and the Democrats have a very powerful weapon to use against the Republicans. Second, the Republicans aren’t exactly united under Trump. There’s a lot of back-stabbing and petty squabbles and fractures; take Trump out of the picture without a clear successor and they’re going to be drastically weakened. Given the stupidity of some of the people Trump has put in office, and the almost comical failure of Trump’s war with Iran (we the people do NOT handle presidents losing wars well), and Trump’s clearly declining health, odds of a clear successor being able to get the sort of internal support Trump has are slim.
“The less obedient they are, the easier it is for them to do so for themselves.”
Not really. If generals aren’t obedient they are isolated. They have their troops (sort of, it gets complicated), and maybe the troops of a few supporters, but that’s ALL they have. By abandoning obedience they abandon legitimacy, both in the eyes of the law and the eyes of the troops. And interfering with election results as an isolated general isn’t going to get you much. Remember, we’re already at midterms. If a Democrat wins the presidency–or a majority in the Congress–or a significant number of states–they can make the life of a general who tried to manipulate elections quite miserable. Trump only has two more years to worry about all this (assuming his health allows him to serve out his term); a general has to think a bit more long-term.
Would not his vice-president succeed him? Less horribly incompetent but still an asshole.
“Would not his vice-president succeed him?”
If he dies or is incapacitated during his term, yes.
It’s when his term is over that things get more interesting. SOMEONE will be president after Trump. The problem is there is no clear front-runner for the position, and it seems that there can’t be one. Any front runner would be a target. And it’s also not clear that an endorsement from Trump would help–it may in fact hurt the candidate’s chances.
Fundamentally all you’re saying is “Systems are built out of people.”
Dinwar, that is a true statement, but not the one I was making. What I was saying is: “There is a reason there are so few stable presidential democracies”.
In a presidential system, the military’s commander in chief is the President, which causes problems when the threat to the system comes from the President. In a Parliamentary system, the Prime Minister is *not* the commander in chief, so it is spared that failure mode.
“What I was saying is: “There is a reason there are so few stable presidential democracies”.”
Ah, fair enough.
I still think the reason goes back to 1) the culture of the USA, including civilian and military interactions; 2) the generals being legally barred from holding office; and 3) providing a demonstrably viable avenue for them to hold office. Basically we’ve created a system whereby generals don’t WANT to take over the presidency–and if they do, they have a clear pathway that’s considered not merely appropriate but honorable and which has a reasonable chance of success.
Basically there’s no benefit from a military coup. Even if it succeeds it’ll be at a tremendous cost, weakening both the faction taking over and the nation as a whole. On the other hand, if you retire and run for office the worst that’ll happen is you lose, and if you win your enemies will try to prevent your legislation from passing, but even they will agree you’re right to hold the position.
Too much gerrymandering and you end up with a president not understanding the point of sharing power.
I think the Jan 6th insurrection is actually interesting because the *immediate* reaction was pretty universal condemnation, even from republicans. It took a few days ater the thing was dispersed for them to return to bend the knee.
@Lena Synnerholm:
“Would not his vice-president succeed him?”
That might depend on what, exactly, you mean by “succeed” in this context.
Of course *legally*, if something would happen to him today, Vance would be his successor as President. But Trump is not *just* President. He is also basically the personality at the center of a cult of personality. And it’s a lot less clear that Vance would be able to succeed him in *that* role. It’s uncertain if anyone would be able to become the generally accepted and undisputed leader of the larger Trumpist movement if something would happen to Trump.
Someone at the centre of a cult of personality might not even want a clear successor.
“Also why is USA blessed with “docile” generals?” It’s mostly cultural, a matter of founding mythology. What got Washington the reputation to be trusted with top command in the Revolutionary War was a deliberate public relations effort to equate him with Cincinnatus; this lead to a cultural value equating a desire to retire with good generalship, such that promotion in the military even today is boosted by demonstrating an attitude of work-life balance.
A key reinforcing factor from the days before full professionalization of the General staff was the public response to Aaron Burr’s killing of Alexander Hamilton; Burr would have set up a (semi-?)independent frontier dictatorship in the territories but people just didn’t like him enough anymore, so there’s no precedent for that sort of thing in American history to inspire mutinous generals.
Along with that, active-duty generals are barred from holding elected offices in the USA. I will grant that someone contemplating a coup doesn’t care too much, but the population DOES. And that matters, because anyone trying a coup is going to have no end of trouble.
For a coup to be successful you either need the population to support you, be indifferent to the events, or be so subdued that they’ll let you get away with it. US citizens are none of these things. Huge numbers would violently oppose this–huge numbers tend to violently oppose anything in this country. Look what happened when Trump suggested that an election wasn’t legitimate (I do not condone these actions, and hold that every person who participated is guilty of insurrection; my point is merely that we are willing to engage in violence if we think our elections are being tampered with). We are obscenely active in politics, and expect our fellow citizens to be active in them; this is, fundamentally, what the “Culture War” is. And we’re pretty much the opposite of subdued–a common criticism is that US citizens are one step away from being feral.
A general trying to take over the presidency would cause a civil war, one that includes both regular fighting and guerilla warfare.
In contrast a general is perfectly allowed to retire and run for presidency. The general will still retain the respect of his former troops (there’s a long history of this), and while many would oppose his election it wouldn’t be any different from opposition to any other political candidate–the retired general wouldn’t violate any of the principles of legitimacy as understood by the US population.
“And we’re pretty much the opposite of subdued–a common criticism is that US citizens are one step away from being feral.”
A considerable fraction of the population have a horribly poor grasp of society so such a reputation makes sense.
One of the things I’ve loved is watching the reactions of Europeans to being exposed to actual Americans during the World Cup. The number of misconceptions that people not from the USA hold is staggering, and the realization that 1) they had such misconceptions, and 2) those misconceptions were very frequently wrong has been one of the few things that make me think large-scale athletic events like this may actually do as much good as harm.
I think you could use such exposure.
Of cause there are misconceptions. No people have an entirely accurate view of any other cultures. However, people need to understand that not everyone from a certain culture is the same. Prejudices cause problems when people take it for granted they apply in every single case. Apart from that there are at least nine cultural regions in North America:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ninenations.PNG
Now it can be debated exactly where the borders between different cultures are. But the important thing is differences existing within the US.
@Lena Synnerholm:
Arguably, local cultural differences within the USA are by now mainly about the rural/urban divide, and a lot less about the old regional divides.
@Raphael,
Arguably, local cultural differences within the USA are by now mainly about the rural/urban divide, and a lot less about the old regional divides.
+1000 to this. I mean, with the caveat that the biggest divide in the US, as it always has been, is Black vs. White, but that aside, you’re absolutely right that old regional identities, and even ethnocultural differences among “white” people, matter less and less these days, and the urban-rural divide matters more. (I think the two things are related, of course, as your identity as a Finnish-American living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or a Portuguese-American living in Rhode Island or Fall River becomes less and less salient, your identity as “White” becomes more salient).
You can see this in the decline of regional accents and speech patterns, to take just one example (and one that’s pretty sad, to me). Though some accents tend to be “stickier’ than other ones.
I have written a blog post on ethnicity not being determined by how you look. Or known biological ancestry for that matter.
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/The-difference-between-ethnicity-and-population/#wbb1
Could you expand on what where those misconceptions ?
(I am curious)
The most common one is there being much more gun violence than actually is the case. Sure, the US has something like five times the murder rate of countries Britain, France and Germany. (My native Sweden is within the range of the last three.) But many people fall into the mental trap of believing “more violence than here” means “violence everywhere”. It is the same faulty thinking making Swedes from the countryside or smaller towns believing our three largest cities to be dangerous. Failing to grasp the scale of these cities (hundreds of thousands of people within each city’s administrative area) does not help either.
I know there are more privately-owned handguns in the US than there are adult inhabitants. This does not mean virtually every adult owns at least one gun. In the same context I read this it was pointed out only a smaller part of the population are gun owners. Such individuals oftentimes own several ones each. My educated guess is that a lot of those are gun nuts. Also, they might very well be concentrated to certain states. My dad once asked me how a breeding population of pumas can survive in Florida. Considering all the happy trigger fingers they seem to have there. I suggested they find refuge in Everglades National Park.
“Could you expand on what where those misconceptions ?
(I am curious)”
Size is one. The sheer scale of the USA places significant burdens on our culture that Europe doesn’t have. We think very little of a 90 minute drive, and 8+ hour drives are considered normal. 8+ hour drives in Europe put you in a new country. Sometimes several new countries.
Related to that, the idea that Americans are uncultured because we don’t travel. There’s a Brit that posts funny videos about cultural differences between the USA and England, and this was a big one for him. He assumed that because we don’t have passports we don’t travel. Then he got here and realized that we travel as much as, if not more than, many Europeans, we just do so within our own country. We have everything from tundra to tropics, from deserts to mountains to oceans, every sort of culture and climate you could want, within our own boarders.
Also, cars are a necessity. Not entirely because of poor city planning, either. We just prefer spread-out cities to compact ones. When your citizens consider a 45 minute drive to be a casual thing, you build cities to accommodate it. And the sheer scale of undeveloped land in the USA surprised people. Especially out West you can drive for hours and be almost totally alone. This creates a very different culture from one where the assumption was you’ walk to the local city on Market Day.
(The Brit guy also does videos of American animals. The Continental US isn’t quite as bad as Australia, but we’re probably a close second. Though I do think his views on robins are misguided; wish he’d learn about the shrike.)
Food was another one. Europeans eating at Waffle House for the first time was a whole thing during the World Cup. They realized that all their beliefs about it were fictional. It’s not five-star food, but it’s not bottom-of-the-barrel garbage either, and the whole 24 hour thing is quite useful. Ranch Dressing was a huge hit as well (I don’t get it, but my daughter loves the stuff).
And the variety of food apparently amazed people. Everyone seems to think Americans eat nothing but fast food burgers, but we have pretty much every variety of food you could ask for. My wife and I had a favorite Afghani restaurant, a Pho place we’d eat at on Fridays, a local Vietnamese place that loved our dog, a Jamaican joint we’d hit occasionally, and some African place my wife loved (never did find out where exactly). All within a relatively small city. And we aren’t particularly adventurous. There are grocery stores were English is a second language–Arabic or Hindi or, in the Southeast, Korean are more common. We also have bakeries making fresh stuff, and butchers, and farmer’s markets, and all kinds of stuff in addition to Walmart and Dollar General.
It’s not related to the World Cup, but I’ve seen foreigners amazed by the American craft beer scene, and the quality of our bourbon and other local alcohols. Everyone assumes Americans drink Bush Light and Jack. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll pick up a case of cheap light beer if I’m doing a lot of yard work–and so will a European, small beer is one of the most traditional types. But we also have as much variety as Europe in terms of local brews, and they’re just as good.
Friendliness is another. People shared their astonishment by just how friendly and helpful Americans were. There are exceptions, to be sure (there something like 400 million of us!), but the general attitudes is one of friendliness and willingness to help.
The lack of violence was also commented on. Like our friend Lena here, many people outside the USA form their opinions based on the news (and mostly the headlines). When folks got here they commented on the fact that our cities are fairly safe and people didn’t feel threatened walking down the street. They didn’t see a lot of guns–an occasional sidearm, but it was treated as part of the outfit, not a threat. They were surprised, but they could do whatever they wanted and be at no greater risk (often less risk) than they would be doing the same things at home.
(Speaking of sidearms, the Brit I mentioned earlier was astonished about Walmart selling firearms. But in a country where the wilderness occasionally comes to visit, in the form of giant predators [the city I’m in occasionally has bears, and constantly has coyotes and bobcats and the occasional mountain lion], and where hunting is a major source of food for many families, it’s fairly practical.)
The biggest, most persistent, and most annoying one to me, though, is that we don’t HAVE a culture. It’s something that’s constantly paraded around as a generalized insult towards the USA, and I’ve met a surprising number of people who believe it. The mere fact that there WAS culture shock demonstrated to many visitors that we have one. It’s fairly wild and dynamic and plastic, but it very much is a thing.
The Eurasian equivalent of the coyote is the golden jackal. It is spreading through Europe now although it has trouble with deep snow. In boreal climate this species would probably be dependant upon man-made infrastructure. Since it would have too pass trough such an area to get to Sweden the golden jackal don’t occur regularly here. The Eurasian lynx, grey wolf and brown bear all typically avoid people. I suspect the lynx tend to do so because it used to be hunted for its fur. Wolves and bears were hunted to near-extinction for killing livestock. New ones have immigrated here from Russia after the Iron Curtain disappeared. Still, wolves and bears deliberately avoid people if they can. It is nowadays more common for bears to discover humans in the forest than the opposite. When a wolf turned up in a built-up area it made national news.
“Seems like the similarities between Greece, Rome, and China is not because they’re more egalitarian or anything, but because they SUCK at horse fighting?”
I think these things are related. In general, societies with infantry as the backbone of the army tend to be more egalitarian than those with cavalry as the backbone, because (in sedentary socieites at least) cavalry is essentially always a warrior elite. Now, there’s a “chicken or egg” question here: it could be that societies where the cavalry is already bad will have to rely on infantry out of necessity, allowing the infantry classes to extract political concessions, thus pushing society in a more egalitarian direction. Alternatively, it could be that societies that are already more egalitarian for whatever reason will tend to produce better infantry, and worse cavalry.
“Also why is USA blessed with “docile” generals? Like they never coup or anything despite some disagreement sometimes.”
Our host has a post on Bluesky which I think is relevant here.
https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux.bsky.social/post/3liul6gtgos2v
“The structure of the Constitution and American governance more broadly is such that most of the normal ‘coup-to-takeover’ buttons have instead been rewired to ‘civil war.’ Governors handle elections, they have access to military force (national guard), the populace is armed, etc.”
(He goes through a bunch of specific situations in the replies.)
I suspected it had something to do with the organisation of the government, thank you.
There’s also a very good blog post here on the topic https://acoup.blog/2025/07/04/collections-the-american-civil-military-relationship/
During the US Civil War both sides were saddled with a number of ‘political’ generals who had influence in upper society and wangled commands. Some of them had some military education but many were only appointed to please their patrons or by influencing their peers in government. It often didn’t work out well for the men under their command – Ben Butler is a prime example of an excellent politician but a bumpkin on the field.
I presume that in Rome it was also the practice to put such rich and/or influential idiots in charge of areas where they could do the least damage.
The practice of placing incompetent people in positions where they do the least harm is called the Dilbert principle.
A lot of the time they were also people who had raised thier own regiments and so expected to command them… With mixed results.
Never thought I’d see a Legend of Heroes reference on this blog!
Trails is very explicitly a setting that’s supposed to resemble early 20th century, though; in-universe the military academy originated as a finishing school for the nobility and the social stress of nascent mass politics and shifting economies versus the declining old aristocracy, with a balancing act between powers (state/royal/noble/popular) that is theoretically a major plot point. I say theoretically because all of the elaborate world-building is ditched in some of the climaxes for some blah blah blah ancient conspiracy blah blah great sealed evil blah blah blah stuff that is way less interesting.
On the other hand, it also had one of the most direct (and negative) references to Japanese imperialism (of said early 20th century) I’ve ever seen, in an otherwise mostly-tonally-light RPG series, I guess? So there’s that.
I’d tell people to play the games, but if they’re not on board now, they never will be. Trails of Cold Steel is the middle four volumes of what is now up to 12 individual games.
For all that he’s proud of it, I often think about some of the flaws present in George RR Martin’s “broken men” speech in A Feast for Crows.
The relevant section in relation to what came up here is the absurdity of recounting things in terms of how the retainer-levies of a slain lord will just be absorbed into the control of another lord whom they have no connection to (and crucially, no obligations to), and could remain stuck fighting well past the point where anybody whom they know is still alive, let alone associating with them.
Would be curious on your thoughts about Tamora Pierce’s books in tune with what was discussed in the post, particularly her Protector of the Small series.
I’m also curious about how Japanese & other Asain military structures fix into what has been discussed (though I know that isn’t the focus of this blog.)
Do you have any resources to suggest?
With regards to non-state societies with officer aristocrats, maybe one could argue that the Plains Native Americans had this to an extent? There are various cases of influential medicine men inducing warriors to battle and supervising from a distance without actually being known for being strong in physical combat.
Non-state societies were based on personal relationships. This may have prevented the degree of specialisation needed for officer-aristocrats. The medicine men encouraging Native American tribes to fight may have more to do with religion as they were their culture’s closest equivalent to priests. Them leading from behind might be a misunderstanding by non-Natives from state societies.
” I cannot see any specific reason why [officer leadership] couldn’t emerge in a non-state society, but I struggle to think of an example”
Two late guesses:
1) I think there’s a higher… barrier to entry? suspension of disbelief? for the officer-aristocrat, or more precisely, for the common soldier following the aristocrat. The warrior-aristocrat is taking highly visible personal risks and whether that feels fair or honorable or courageous or whatever, it’s an easier sell to your troops than ‘this rich guy is gonna stick behind you and tell you what to do while you do the actual stabbing and getting stabbed’. You need the institutions of the state to produce lower classes who are willing to listen to orders from the back (and of course that’s not a guarantee!)
2) Given the above, the individual aristocrat wants to be seen as leading from the front. It might be wrong to put our modern lens on this, but in our modern times, even when our officers are, well, officers, the lay instinct is still to praise the general who leads from the front, leads by example, and be suspicious of anyone who stays in the back, in safety. The institutions of state are what either compels or encourages the officer-aristocrat to lead from behind, because it’s seen as better for the collective that doesn’t really exist in a non-state society.