This is the first half of the final part (I, IIa, IIb, III, IVa, IVb, Va) of our apparently five-part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized, in particular exploring the principle that armies cannot help but recreate their civilian social structures on the battlefield. Last time we looked at the importance of generating cohesion in these armies and the ways cohesion could come either organically from the underlying society or be manufactured as part of training (or not be produced at all, resulting in less effective armies).
To close out this week, I wanted to provide some examples – each relatively brief – pulling the factors we’ve discussed (recruitment principles, mobilization methods, dealing with costs, leadership and cohesion sources) into coherent military systems that emerge organically from their underlying civilian society. And since this series was always intended as ‘one for the world-builders,’ I figured the best way to do this would be to take some fictional militaries, examine them along the lines above and see what (if anything) is necessary to fix them so that the underlying civilian society and the military it generates ‘matches.’
In a lot of cases, these are going to be fictional militaries we’ve looked at before, so a lot of this will be overlapping with more detailed treatments (which I’ll link) but also we’ll get some new stuff.
In the end, I had enough examples I wanted to work through that I opted to split this last part in two. So in this part we’re going to be taking apart some examples of matching up (or struggling to do so) army and society in literature (namely my perennials, A Song of Ice and Fire and The Lord of the Rings). Then in the second half, we’ll break some new ground and look at some examples out of video games that deviate from some of the classic ‘medieval fantasy’ patterns: the standing legions of the Empire of Cyrodiil, the oddly (but interestingly) bifurcated urban defense force of Baldur’s Gate and finally some private enterprise war in the Deadfire Archipelago.
I want to be clear, the goal here is not to praise or tear down any of these examples, but to explore them, to practice thinking about how the fiction armies and societies do and don’t match. I’ve tried to avoid here picking any example that is actively really bad (thus a preference for A Song of Ice and Fire (the books), for instance, over Game of Thrones (the show)).
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).
Westeros and Fragmented Vassalage-Based Polities
So my critiques of some of the ‘realistic’ worldbuilding of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones (and spinoffs) are not new. To be clear, I don’t think there is anything wrong with enjoying these stories; rather my critiques emerged in a period – now largely passed, thankfully – where it was common to claim that George R.R. Martin’s work represented a truer or more faithful vision of medieval vassalage-based polities. But that era is largely passed and my sense is that the ASoIaF/GoT community largely now understands that Westeros is not necessarily the gold-standard for ‘realistic’ medieval fantasy societies. So I don’t bring this up first to bash GRRM, but rather because (unlike Middle Earth, as we’ll see) it represents close to a ‘pure’ example (notionally) of a fragmented, vassalage-based polity.
So first we should begin with the underlying society. Westeros as we see it is a complex agrarian society – that is there is quite a lot of specialization, but this is a distinctly pre-modern society in which the vast majority of the population is still engaged in agriculture or pastoralism. Now I find that Martin’s depiction of the ‘smallfolk’ – ably summed up by the Wiki – is a bit frustrating as it is mostly a collection of aristocratic stereotypes about peasants, but nevertheless this is clearly a society where the bulk of the population is a largely demilitarized peasantry. In short, it is supposed to resemble high or late medieval Europe. Above the smallfolk is a hereditary landed aristocracy which fashions itself a ‘knightly’ (mounted military) warrior aristocracy, structured through vassalage. The social distance between these two groups is yawning: Westerosi aristocrats have more in common with other aristocrats half a continent away than they do with the peasants out of their front door.1 That social distance is not a worldbuilding problem, mind you; we see that kind of ‘trans-national’ elite (keeping in mind these aren’t nation-states so we’re using the word ‘national’ rather loosely) in a number of pre-modern societies. A French nobleman often did have more culturally in common with an English nobleman than he did with his own peasants and indeed in some cases a mounted Christian European military aristocrat might find he had more in common with a mounted Muslim military aristocrat from the Middle East than either had with their own peasants too.
So far, so good. But – as I’ve noted a few times before – when we see the armies of these polities, both in the books and in the show, they do not derive organically from this society at all. Westeros produces very large, surprisingly uniform armies which are not obviously organized into the retinues of smaller lords but rather function as large field armies tied explicitly to the largest vassals of the crown. Moreover, very large proportions of these armies are infantry (especially in the show, where the Lannister, Tyrell and Stark armies are almost entirely infantry!), composed of massed peasant soldiers. They’re also broadly uniformly equipped, often with recognizable liveries.
In short, these resemble the armies we would expect of large, extensively administered state-based societies.
But, and I have to stress this extremely strongly, Westeros does not have a state. It was not a state under the Targaryens (they make no effort to consolidate control of the various House armies) and it sure as heck isn’t a state under the Baratheons who are even weaker in terms of central power.
So what ought we see? Well, let’s return to that underlying society.
The core of these armies are going to be that mounted military aristocracy. It’s possible in some regions (the north, perhaps?) the aristocrats might also fight on foot, but we’re still looking at the aristocracy. Now the core landed aristocracy is going to be really small, but what is going to expand out this class are two kinds of soldier that GRRM has largely neglected: unlanded knights bachelor and non-aristocratic ‘men at arms’ (men who fight like knights but do not have the social status of knights). GRRM has some unlanded knights, but not many – but in this sort of society, such men are going to be ubiquitous in the households of those landed elites.
After all, most of the wealth in this society is held by a landed military aristocracy (the lords) who want to develop private military force and lack a state, so they’re going to do so in their household, by retaining (as retainers) full time warriors. And in this society, we see very clearly that full time warriors are almost invariably mounted heavy cavalrymen. So while the number of lords and their families is small, they can retain a bunch of non-noble heavy cavalrymen as part of the retinues, though we’re still dealing with armies that are likely much smaller than the massive armies Martin reports: whereas Martin has armies reaching the upper tens of thousands, we might instead expect the armies of the most powerful houses to at best be fielding a few thousand to perhaps 10,000 or so mounted men at arms.
In short, to use our typology, our first component here is a retainer-based army composed of a warrior class, recruited on a vocational principle, with military costs largely devolved (these guys or their lords purchase their horses and armor as a private expense). Cohesion is provided through a mix of warrior-class cohesion, probably combined with collective training in small cavalry units within those noble households. We probably ought to expect these men to perform quite well on the battlefield, given how strong that cohesive bond is likely to be.
Now, below this, every army needs infantry, especially because – as noted above – the cavalry components of these armies are still small. But those major Houses didn’t just become states when it was time to equip their infantry, so the infantry – drawn from the commons – is going to be recruited also using non-state structures. That means that equipment and wage costs also have to be substantially devolved, because none of these polities has the administrative infrastructure to handle the complexity of these costs (note that this is as much or more a question of complexity as about raw revenues!).
That leaves the warlords of Westeros essentially two options and we might expect them to use both: they can raise their own peasants or they can hire mercenaries.
If they raise their own peasants, this is going to be clientage principle recruitment, because the administration isn’t there for an employment-based system and the smallfolk don’t have any political entitlements to tie to military service anyway (notably Westeros lacks enfranchised little urban republics to provide urban militias). We should thus expect costs to be devolved, probably using a brigaded household model simply because the smallfolk seem too poor to expect individual households to furnish a man with his equipment. Nevertheless, the equipment that results from this is going to be both poor and non-standard (it would be hard to tell a Tyrell peasant-soldier from a Lannister peasant-soldier if you saw one on the road). And the cohesion principle is pretty obviously weak: these guys don’t have a strong corporate identity and their masters cannot afford to keep them under arms long enough to drill them. They’ll get to the battlefield, but often perform poorly. And because we have to brigade a bunch of households to get a soldier, we should still expect the numbers here to be smaller: low tens of thousands, not mid- or high- tens of thousands.
The real problem is how drab they are. These are men of importance and station! They’re wearing expensive equipment! They would want to look nice!
The alternative would be mercenary infantrymen, recruited en bloc (likely via contractors) using an employment principle and paid in cash. Since these houses don’t have a lot of revenue because they have very limited state capacity, their ability to engage these fellows is also going to be quite limited, but it isn’t hard to imagine how valuable they’d be, especially for providing specific military skills that aren’t ‘mounted military aristocrat,’ which obviously the peasant levies will also generally lack. If there were polities in Westeros that produced good infantry – because they had tight civic militias or other strong communal structures – we should expect them to be in heavy demand as mercenaries, just as Greek hoplites or Swiss pikemen were in their day. Good infantry, after all, is nice to have, but the Great Houses of Westeros are structurally largely incapable of producing good infantry at scale.
In short the military that flows from Westeros social organization is meaningfully different than the one Martin imagines. It is much smaller (no 100,000 man strong Tyrell armies!), more fragmented and much less ‘regular.’ Not only does the king have to care what Tywin Lannister thinks, but Twyin Lannister has to care what Lord Broom thinks and Lord Broom has to care what his retainers think and so on. Tywin’s Lannister army would likely be broken up into dozens of irregularly sized and structured retinues (of which his own would be the largest). Notably, ‘landless knights’ would be a key commodity in this system, an essential military resource that everyone with land and money is trying to attract (which in turn means those retainers have some bargaining power too), in part because none of these fellows will have a lot of faith in their poorly and irregularly equipped, weakly motivated infantry.
Crucially, this is a society defined by low state capacity (because it is, in fact a non-state society), which limits what the king and his lords can do at almost every turn.
Now to be clear, I don’t want to make it sound like Westeros – particularly the Westeros of the books – is a complete failure here. I think we could actually bring the armies of Westeros into line with their underlying society with fairly modest changes: shrink both the world size and the armies to a scale that fits a personalistic, vassalage based mobilization system and acknowledge that these polities are going to really struggle to employ good infantry at scale (lacking the revenues to recruit mercenaries or the social systems to effectively mobilize their peasantry), so they’re going to rely on their cavalry, which is in turn going to put sharp limits on the kind of warfare they wage. Finally, we’d want to flesh out the class of mounted man-at-arms and landless knight – present in Martin’s writing, but less common perhaps than they ought to be.2 The resulting world would feel smaller (it would be smaller) but that makes sense: these sorts of polities and their military systems do not durably scale.
Infantry and Cavalry in Rohan
I’d argue we can see a ‘heavy cavalry culture’ done a bit better with the Lord of the Rings‘ Rohirrim, although with the caveat that Tolkien is developing something closer to an early medieval society which still retains a relatively strong (perhaps fading) infantry tradition, as opposed to Westeros’ distinctively late medieval (or really early modern) sense; these are as we’ll see fundamentally quite different societies and as a result they produce different armies (albeit I think the armies of Rohan are more tightly fitted to their society).
Once again, we should sketch out Rohan’s society first. This is also a complex agrarian society, albeit less complex than Westeros and seemingly with a fair bit more pastoralism (in the form of ranching or fairly short-range transhumance, given that this society still lives in villages, rather than nomadic pastoralism). Military power is still somewhat fragmented in this society – men like Éomer and Erkenbrand appear to have some independent access to military force (they have their own retinues)3 but this is both a smaller and ironically more centralized kingdom than Westeros, but what make sit similar in a lot of ways is that state capacity remains low.
What I mean by that is that while on the one hand Théoden’s authority over his subordinates remains notionally higher (Tywin Lannister is a more independent figure than Erkenbrand, by custom and general understanding), Théoden still lacks anything like an administrative apparatus or bureaucracy and instead has to rule through his aristocracy. What’s different and thus what makes Rohan a bit more centralized in its structure is that Théoden has more latitude to hand-pick the top level of that organization chart, the three Marshals of the Mark (he initially picks himself, his son and his nephew, with his son being replaced by Erkenbrand after Théodred was killed), rather than being stuck with a specific local mega-aristocrat (like Tywin Lannister, Mace Tyrell, etc. etc.). Those commands (which historically are what will evolve into the highest reaches of the ‘feudal’ European nobility) are not yet wholly hereditary, though the fact that command in the Westmark immediately devolves to Erkenbrand Lord of the Westfold (the largest chunk of the Westmark)4 may suggest that, in the absence of a suitable member of the royal house, there’s a strong expectation that overall leadership ought to fall to a major local aristocrat.
As an aside, the fact that Rohan, resembling an early medieval kingdom is more effectively centralized than Westeros, which resembles a late medieval kingdom, should serve as a useful reminder that historical processes like centralization do not proceed only in one direction. It is not always the case that later societies have more centralization or administrative capacity.
We also need to talk about the situation of common folk of the Rohirrim. We don’t see much of them, but there are some assumptions I think we can make (which largely conform to Tolkien’s own pretty obvious Anglo-Saxon inspiration for these fellows). First, the Rohirrim aristocracy strikingly present themselves as having more culturally in common with their commonfolk than with neighboring aristocrats: they have their own language (that is, the aristocracy has not abandoned Rohanese for Westron) and their own internal term for themselves (an endonym) as Eorlingas, ‘people of Eorl’ which appears to include the commonfolk. Notably, the aristocracy, while clearly large landowners, do not appear to be titled: apart from Théoden King himself no one gets hereditary titles appended to their names (the Marshals being appointed positions). They also have a muster of all able-bodied men, implying a tradition of universal military service and thus a peasantry (I’m including their shepherds here) that hasn’t been entirely demilitarized. That last point matters a lot and signals, I think, quite a different underlying social structure than the one we see in Westeros.
We might then, in a desperate moment like this, not only see the lord’s armory emptied out, but individual middling-peasant households passing around old or surplus equipment to friends and relatives (pulling old arms and armor out of temple storerooms where they had been dedicated for last-ditch defenses was a standard trope of ancient Greek and Roman warfare, for instance).
Taken together, what I think we’re looking at is a landholder aristocracy governing a society mostly of free peasants rather than serfs. In something akin to the Carolingian system, there is probably a property line which makes a landowner liable for cavalry service (which thus defined the lower bound of the aristocracy), while landowners below that level are liable for infantry service (a ‘select levy’) and landowners much above that level are expected to furnish not only themselves but a larger retinue (thus we hear of the ‘knights of the king’s house’ and Marshals of the Mark having an Éored (120 mounted men) as part of their household). We should probably also assume a substantial number of farmers or herders who are simply considered too poor to serve (possibly expected to supply men for garrison service on a brigaded household model or as part of a ‘general levy’ in a local crisis).
The military organization then flows that social structure. The aristocracy fight at mounted heavy cavalry and are organized into retinues around the major magnates who on the one hand derive their wealth from large landholding but on the other hand owe their official positions to the king.5 We meet a fair number of these magnates (Erkenbrand, Grimbold, Elfhelm, along with of course Éomer and Théodred). There is a clear preference in these appointments, when not granted to a man of the king’s family, to use someone local: Erkenbrand commands in the West-mark because he is from the West-mark. Éomer will end up making Elfhelm command in the East-mark and by all indications Elfhelm is from the East-mark as well, given that he was in Éomer’s retinue as Third Marshal of the Riddermark with that geographic area of command.
Meanwhile, as I noted back in the Helm’s Deep series, we get a better sense of what we might term the ‘select levy’ of Rohan (the infantry force kept in the field by Erkenbrand) as well as the ‘general levy’ of all able-bodied men who have fled to Helm’s Deep. We’re pretty clearly told that the levies of Rohan are raised geographically (Erkenbrand has the Westfold’s men, who have a distinct sub-regional identity as ‘Westfolders’ and the ‘musters’ are by region); we don’t see the lower levels of command but there’s no reason to assume they’re not like the higher levels: local magnates lead the levies from their home area. That in turn explains the cohesive principle we see: when the Rohirrim get into trouble – common infantry and aristocratic cavalry alike – they invariably ‘clump up’ around the magnates, which suggest pretty close civilian ties. It makes sense: where do the regular infantrymen go when things are bad? The men of their village clump up together around their village leader (the local Big Man) who is also their unit commander and who they know fairly well. The comparative lack of social distance – implied by the common culture, language and lack of titles above – matters here for making this kind of cohesion work.
So my read on Rohan is that it is a complex, non-state agrarian/pastoralist polity, with a freeholding farmer class (a yeomanry) recruited regionally under a cultural norm of universal military service (at least for landholders), with an elite class that understands itself as a mounted military aristocracy (recruited as a warrior class, defined by wealth), where the cohesive principle is probably tight clientage ties between the infantry and their magnates and then horizontal ties between the magnates and each other. But that works because these fellows seem to actually know each other (in contrast, for instance, to the far more insulated noble class in Westeros).6 In terms of cost, this is clearly a system where costs are devolved, but the sense we get, given the performance of Rohan’s infantry against Saruman, has to be that the infantry class has preserved a bit more of their wealth against the aristocracy, again leading to somewhat better infantry, although it is worth noting that outside of the king’s immediate retinue, Rohan’s army is not uniform in its equipment.
Men of Gondor
Unsurprisingly, I think that Gondor – particularly book!Gondor in The Lord of the Rings is also an effective example of matching a military to its underlying society, but it is particularly interesting here because it is a composite force: different components are recruited under different principles, equipped differently, probably paid differently and so on. For large states, composite forces were very common.
And Gondor (at least under the last steward, Denethor II), is a composite polity and has a composite army to match. Gondor is also a complex, agrarian society, but a fair bit more complex than Rohan, with quite a few proper cities (Minas Tirith, of course, but also Pelargir, Dol Amroth and others) and evidently a fair bit of specialization. If the model for Rohan seems to have been Anglo-Saxon England, the model for Gondor seems to me fairly clearly to be the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, complete with a beacon system, and something like the tagmata and theme systems. Given the level of organization we see – Denethor is capable of large-scale building projects (like the repair of the Rammas Echor), substantial mobilizations (including the orderly evacuation of the Pelennor Fields) and maintaining a standing military force – I tend to conclude that Gondor is a state society, albeit that state power has frayed quite a bit around the edges (and of course part of the story is that it will be reasserted by Aragorn as king). Though we never see them, I think we ought to safely assume Denethor has some bureaucracy in addition to his military command structure, which lets him direct Gondor’s efforts from his high hall.
In particular, Gondor is split between the core territory around its capital and its subordinate regions, described as ‘fiefs’ and evidently entrusted to the control of a particular lord. Frustratingly, of these lords, the only one for which we can be sure we know how lordship is assigned is that of Belfalas, governed by the hereditary Prince of Dol Amroth (Prince Imrahil at the time of the War of the Ring), who has a different title from all of the other regional leaders but we do get references to these fellows equipping men out of their households, so I think we should understand them as local rulers who are vassals to Minas Tirith rather than appointed officials. So we have a core state with autonomous vassals making up its periphery; in this case the core state is geographically fairly small but clearly makes up the bulk of the military power: despite Minas Tirith’s long decline, it is a major population and economic center.
And lo! the military system basically follows from that political structure.
Because Gondor has a state at the core of its polity with the resources to manage massive construction projects and the like, he has a substantially wider range of options for the kind of military it will have. And it ends up having a bit of everything: a standing military centered on Minas Tirith but also a mix of other military systems drawn from its constituent regions.
First, the core of Gondor’s armies seem pretty clearly to be a standing, professional force, albeit perhaps not a very large one. The two components we see very clearly are the Guards of the Citadel and the Rangers of Ithilien. The Guards of the Citadel are pretty explicitly a professional force: Beregond is explicit that he is not any kind of aristocrat, but is still a full-time soldier in the Third Company of the Citadel (RotK 42). Given the fact that they are left effectively permanently deployed, it seems like the Rangers of Ithilien are similarly a professional force. To reach a little father, in Unfinished Tales (260 fn. 17) we get a title, “ohtar” for a “fully trained and experienced” footsoldier who was not, however, a knight, which also suggests to me (alongside Beregond’s use of the phrase ‘man at arms’ to seemingly mean the same: a man for whom war was a profession) that Minas Tirith has a substantial body of professional infantry at the core of its armies. We’re quite explicitly told that at least the Guards of the Citadel are equipped at state expensive, for they have a unique livery, but honestly it seems likely to me that the whole of this professional force was state-equipped, which is why we’re told that the livery is unique (in design and materials), rather than being told that these men were unique by having an issued livery at all.
Doubtless in an emergency this would be supplemented by drawing up the rest of the able-bodied male populace, but we’re not given a clear sense for the city of what that would look like. I find myself wondering if under normal circumstances, since Gondor is almost always in some kind of low-intensity conflict with Mordor, if the professional core wasn’t always supplemented by rotating conscription or some kind of reserve among the men of the city.
That said, I can believe that Gondor does have some professional, state-equipped heavy infantry – indeed, we’re told they have at least three companies of it in the Guards of the Citadels and presumably more ‘regular’ soldiers beyond those.
Then we have the forces of Gondor’s fiefs and here it is useful to just reproduce the passage in which they show up:
The men of Ringló Vale behind the son of their lord, Dervorin striding on foot: three hundreds. From the uplands of Morthond, the great Blackroot Vale, tall Duinhir with his sons, Duilin and Derufin, and five hundred bowmen. From the Anfalas, the Langstrand far away, a long line of men of many sorts, hunters and herdsmen and men of little villages, scantily equipped save for the household of Golasgil their lord. From Lamedon, a few grim hillmen without a captain. Fisher-folk of the Ethir, some hundred or more spared from the ships. Hirluin the Fair of the Green Hills from Pinnath Gelin with three hundreds of gallant green-clad men. And last a proudest, Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth, kinsman of the Lord, with […] a company of knights in full harness riding grey horses; and behind them seven hundreds of men at arms, tall as lords, grey-eyed, dark-haired, singing as they came. (RotK, 46)
I should note that, in a slightly earlier passage, we also get Forlong the Fat, Lord of Lossarnach, with “a dusty line of men, well-armed and bearing great battle-axes.”
What I love about this passage is that it not only applies our principle of militaries reflecting their civilian societies to Gondor itself – a composite kingdom has a composite army – but it also applies it to the component parts! One gets the sense that Belfalas (with its big city at Dol Amroth) are the most state-like of the fiefs and so they have an army that looks at lot like Minas Tirith’s army: a company (about a hundred) mounted knights, matched by seven hundred men-at-arms which – given their contrast between the other groups, I think we ought to understand as also being professionals, or at least well-trained in addition to well-equipped. By contrast, from the hill country of Morthond, we get five hundred bowmen led by what is evidently a ‘family affair’ of rule there, given that it is Duinhir with his two sons commanding them: a smaller, poorer community that fights in a way that fits with coming from a hard-scrabble kind of place.
We get some class-divisions too, particularly from Anfalas, where the great mass of men – presumably a poor peasant levy – are poorly armed saved for the household guard of their lord. Of course that strongly suggests that outside of Minas Tirith, Belfalas and perhaps Lossarnach (which seem to have fairly uniform equipment and perhaps represent the remains of the decaying Gondorian ‘state’ with professional troops and state-issued arms), these fellows are equipping themselves and that most of the costs of their service have likely been devolved either onto the men themselves or their lords (and quite evidently Golasgil has opted to spend those resources on his household guard and not on the rest of his troops; one wonders how that decision will play with the newly crowned King Elessar).
Notably, this is very clearly an infantry-focused force. That makes quite a bit of sense too, because Gondor is substantially more urban than Rohan or, for that matter, Westeros.7 The more urban societies get, the more infantry-focused they tend to be, for the obvious reason that raising horses requires a lot of space. Even though it is clear that Gondor’s population has declined, its military tradition still remains infantry focused (with cavalry support) and that too is a product of its economic and cultural structures (urban and state-based).
And again, because the infantry matter, this society can develop cohesion in them: for the professional core, that is probably a professional cohesion. One imagines the Guards of the Citadel are quite stubborn on the battlefield given that we see how intense their professional ethos of obedience to orders goes. On the other-hand, for many of the men of the fiefs, they arrive at Minas Tirith in fairly small, relatively tight groups, organized around leaders that are quite evidently familiar to them. One imagines that the bowmen of Morthond, for instance, probably all know each other and are tightly connected by bonds of clientage to their lord and his sons (notice that he doesn’t have a household guard – this militia is his army).
So we have a range of components, each with its own likely methods of recruitment and supply. We have a core of professionals, equipped by the state, housed and presumably trained together, with an appropriately professional cohesive principle, supported by levies recruited locally, with their costs devolved onto local lords and relying on organic cohesion arising out of their common communal bonds.
The result is something of a messy composite army rather than a ‘cookie-cutter’ army that is unrealistically uniform. And that’s probably more or less right: even the Romans, close to the gold-standard for pre-modern military organization west of the Ganges were never perfectly uniform and always made use of the forces of allies, client kings and subject peoples, creating composite forces.
Next time, we’ll keep this going by turning to look at some societies and armies from video games that, as noted, deviate a bit more from the ‘standard’ medieval fantasy pattern and think a bit about standing professional armies, urban militias and military contractors in substantially more complex state societies.
- Except, arguably, the North, but we’re mostly going to leave the North out here and focus on the southern Six Kingdoms, for the sake of simplicity.
- The alterations for Game of Thrones Westeros would be much more substantial, because the showrunners seemingly cannot resist having everyone fight with large infantry armies, often with uniform equipment, which is a kind of army this society is simply incapable of producing at scale, for reasons we’ve discussed before.
- Note that Éomer is able to sally out with his Éored in the movement that will bring him to destroy the orcs that seized Merry and Pippin, despite orders not to do so – it’s as much his Éored as it is Théoden’s.
- ‘West-Mark’ here denoting what is essentially a military district, the ‘West March.’
- Indeed, Éomer on becoming king is able to change the titles of the Second and Third Marshals, making them strictly geographic commands, which speaks to the degree to which these are offices in the gift of the king rather than hereditary titles.
- To get what I am saying here, note how culturally the aristocracy in Westeros in, say, the Reach, the Riverlands, or the Westerlands all have more culturally in common with each other than they do with their smallfolk. That’s not a crazy thing either – in, say, the 13th century, the aristocracies of France, England and Scotland shared a lot more literature, language (French) and culture with each other than they necessarily did with the peasants they ruled. But it is not true for the Rohirrim, who – commoners and elites alike – are culturally distinct and have a shared cultural identity that forms the basis for their military participation.
- Yes, Westeros has big cities but also remember that Westeros, as a place, is absolutely enormous physically. Gondor looks, by the map, to be around 100,000 square miles, very roughly, at the start of the War of the Ring; The Seven Kingdoms by contrast are somewhere on the order of three million square miles – which at that size makes them very rural and thinly peopled, with relatively few major cities (most regions just have castle towns!).
I’m a little sad not to see the ‘army’ of the Shire in here in the discussion of Tolkien. But this is very good.
This one is an interesting question. Early in The Hobbit, Gandalf seems to dismiss the Shire as a military power, commenting that they have no heroes or warriors to be found and “that is why I had to settle on a burglar”.
But read his remarks closely and he makes it clear there are a lot of hobbits with swords or axes and shields, even if they haven’t seen recently military use. Which seems like the Shire could throw together a decent medium or maybe even heavy infantry shield wall. It’s not so much that Gandalf has dismissed the Shire as a military force so much as concluded that the dwarves wouldn’t find the Beowulf they wanted.
Well the Took patriarch famously bashed an orc chief so hard he invented golf a few hundred years before The Hobbit, so it’s probably more fair to say that the Hobbit Beowulf was simply undiscovered.
Actually given that Samwise the Great would proceed to fuck up Shelob, daughter of Ungoliant the Cthulhu-like demon spider, the dwarfs were merely a generation removed from their Beowulf. Although Bilbo was, himself, quite the legend. But he certainly wasn’t ready to hear that *then*!
As for the shire as a whole, they had a decayed military that nonetheless could produce a capable light infantry armed with bows, which Pippin and Merry famously marshal during the scourging of the shire. It just hadn’t had to organize since the aforementioned Took invented golf. They had no real shields or armor, although if pressed they could likely drum some up over time.
I was kind of hoping he’d talk about the Rangers of the North, because I’m not sure they make any sense.
I recall in the Game of Thrones articles some discussion of the Night’s Watch and how Bret found it implausible that they would stay loyal to their mission and not interfere in southern politics on a time scale of centuries.
And in the article about the future of Westeros’s elective kingship (tl;dr: Fat chance of it lasting) there was discussion in the comments of the Night’s Watch as one of the two places who know anything at all about election. The other being the Church of the Seven.
I was actually thinking specifically about his Night’s Watch post because (as I mentioned in a comment at the time) I think a lot of his criticisms of the Night’s Watch (that without a good reason to keep them at the Wall, there was a good chance they’d turn around and conquer the North) could apply equally to the Rangers.
Apologies for misunderstanding your question.
Tolkien’s Rangers of the North only work as well as they do because in Tolkien there’s an explicitly moral component to culture and Good People simply do not do certain things, at least for so long as they stay Good. The Rangers are a scattered people who are unusually long-lived and associate closely with the elves; they are to some extent an offshoot of Elendil’s “Faithful,” the Numenoreans who rejected Sauron and fled before the continent sank. Gondor is the biggest descendant of that population but not the only one, and not necessarily the one of highest character.
The Rangers are also explicitly supposed to be few in number, to the point where when Aragorn mobilizes them as a fighting force to come to his aid, he gets… I don’t know, I think it’s only a platoon or company at most. Even given that the northern reaches of Arnor are largely depopulated wilderness, that’s a very small force to conquer much of anything.
They’re the remnants of the army of a fallen Kingdom that exist on the sufferance of allies, specifically in this case the Elves. I get the feeling the reason they’ve been getting smaller in number over time is precisely because the ones left are the ones that haven’t yet gone “screw this, I’m joining somebody else”
The rangers are probably best viewed as a hereditary military order quietly bankrolled by Rivendell, which we know fosters their children and provide them training and supplies. This isn’t actually that implausible, as we can see similar arrangements in the crusades era Mediterranean with various knightly orders which were largely funded by the Pope and sometimes the Byzantine empire, although those politics were, well, Byzantine, with significant material donations by the Italian city states and personal and supplemental resources from kingdoms as far away as England and Scotland.
These knightly orders could not organically produce the economic activity needed to arm and equip their men, lacking the civilian tax base to support the needed specialists (they never held that much land) but they had lots of backers. So a steady stream of European armed, trained, and funded men at arms sailed Italian built ships to islands in the eastern Mediterranean and spent centuries raiding the Muslims.
The rangers are a lower intensity version of this type of organization. They operate in a stateless landlocked frontier region rather than the urbanized eastern Mediterranean, so they are much smaller in scale and resources. This wouldn’t work if there were thousands of the fellows marching around, but we see thirty of them in one place, with some unknown number of dependents hidden about. The north is a periphery for Sauron too, so it works out.
I cannot remember where this was, but I do vaguely remember a suggestion somewhere in the Fellowship of the Ring that they have small villages.
Tolkien’s unpublished notes put the center of the non-Ranger Dunedain settlements at the Angle between the Bruinen and Mitheithel rivers, about 300 miles east of the Shire and extremely close to Rivendell. For anyone who plays Lord of the Rings Online, the Angle is where the Ranger village of Tornhad is in the game.
Having just brushed up on their lore in Tolkien Gateway: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Rangers_of_the_North, I have to agree. They’re supposed to be the remnant of the people of Arnor, and while they’re organized enough to have a line of chieftains (the last of which being Aragorn), who can pull together a force at will, we don’t know about their base of operations, or how they maintain cultural ties while being a “wandering people” with no evident nomadic bands or regular meetups. That being said, I find the idea of being a ranger as a cultural identity rather than a mere individual profession fascinating. The closest approximation I can think of would be the frontier scouts (like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett) and mountain men in North America. I haven’t read about any real-life medival equivalent, though thanks to Tolkien you see them a lot in fantasy lore. However, it isn’t hard to imagine a people coming out of a non-state or weak state environment deciding to live as wanderers, agreeing to come together annually for a rendevous but traveling individually the rest of the year, living off the land and offering assistance to any settlements they pass through.
Perhaps the Romani were the model for this peoples.
One thing about the Dunedain that’s always struck me as very strange is the way they have remained a separate people from the Bree-folk despite being active in the same areas for many generations. I’d expect there to be a lot more integration between them over the years: Dunedain falling in love with Bree-landers and settling down in the villages or Bree-folk falling in love with the Dunedain and running off to marry them, less adventurous Dunedain setting up as huntsmen or herbalists in the villages (or even settling down as farmers, there seems to be more than enough land) while more adventurous Bree-folk ran off to join the Rangers, and so forth.
But evidently none of that has happened: the Bree-folk and the Dunedain are still very much separate groups (they have different phenotypes and naming conventions and the Bree-folk clearly see the Rangers as strangers to be mistrusted).
Possible typos:
“The aristocracy fight at mounted heavy cavalry”
At or as?
“the Citadel are equipped at state expensive, for they have a unique livery”
expensive or expense?
“To reach a little father” – should be “farther”
Now the question whether to rant about the complete illogic of the Elder Scrolls Empire of Cyrodiil, now, or to wait until next week when Bret had a stab at it.
Grah, I can’t help myself. Here’s some high-level thoughts:
– The only game where there’s an indication that the Empire is actually projecting power into its provinces is Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, which I doubt people will have even heard of. Otherwise, we do not see any demilitarisation or subordination of the traditional rulership to the imperial rulership.
– In fact, there’s two instances that imply heavily that *not enforcing a monopoly on violence* is the norm for the Empire (First when the Potentate disbands local armies, which is treated as part of the pattern of breakdown of the first Empire, and then during the Great War, when local forces from Hammerfell rescue the Legion from an attack by the Thalmor)
– The Great War and its aftermath (which we see in person in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim) makes no sense whatsoever. It basically amounts to the empire being reduced to a tributary and then spending its own resources, both monetary and military, to enforce the overlordship of its new ruler onto its own provinces. The Skyrim Civil War is basically the Empire fighting tooth and nail to enforce its own delegitimisation.
Well, regarding the Skyrim thing, is that the empire was not actually enforcing the rules of the concordat on Skyrim until the stormcloak rebellion started, which gave the Dominion leverage over it and forced it to mobilize to avoid losing territory
“The only game where there’s an indication that the Empire is actually projecting power into its provinces is Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, which I doubt people will have even heard of. Otherwise, we do not see any demilitarisation or subordination of the traditional rulership to the imperial rulership.”
Well, that’s not true. Morrowind is not only overflowing with the Imperial Legions, but the Empire established a monarchy with a loyal Queen (married to an Imperial General) to depower the traditional rule of the Great Houses.
Besides the history of the Third Era spells out how much the power, authority and centralization of the Empire has fluctuated over those four centuries. The situation for Tiber Septim in Redguard and that of Uriel Septim VII in the main games (pre-Skyrim) are very different.
Based on the evidence we see in the games, the power of that imperial monarchy is basically nil. Barenziah rules over her palace and that appears to be it. All the rest of Morrowind is dominated by the Houses and loyal to the Three.
I was under the impression that the game sets out pretty clearly that VVardenfell is an ancient religious outpost that has been inviolate by treaty for hundreds and hundreds of years until the imperial puppet king (not the current one, the uncle he murdered shortly before the game starts) declared it open for colonisation just a decade or so ago unilaterally, over the heads of the Temple(!!!!?!!!).
In general it seems like the puppet monarchy was at least moderately able to command respect and weild authority, even if on the ground it didn’t control much land.
Even if the puppet monarch didn’t wield tremendous power, it’s not like the Empire wasn’t exerting power among the Houses. While House Hlaalu was a traditional great house, it was, at the time of the game, extremely open to Imperial influence, being the most friendly to Imperials and allowing Imperial-style cities to be built within its territory. This copies numerous historical examples, and some extant examples: Rather than fighting the locals, empires often side with a local faction in some internal conflict as a way to establish power. This has a lot of advantages, after all. The Imperial influence on the other five Houses is more subtle, but still there. This is, after all, the whole reason Daguth Ur and the Sixth House can gain traction: a significant faction within the Dunmer want the Empire gone.
It must also be admitted that by the end of the game, the Empire (via the player) has ended Vvardenfell culture. Like, just, all of it. The gods of the Vvardenfell religion are dead. The ability to erase a culture and end a local religion does not suggest a lack of Imperial power in the area. Sometimes power isn’t a flamethrower; sometimes it’s slitting a few throats.
Claiming that Imperial power is not being projected into an area that’s on the brink of war–on multiple fronts, with multiple factions–precisely because of the presence of imperial power is….well, a bit silly. The whole point of Morrowind IS the projection of Imperial power into an area that really, really doesn’t want it. Vvardenfell isn’t a fully-integrated territory yet, but the Empire is certainly exerting both power and authority, in a wide variety of ways, many of which are literally part of the playbook by which empires exert power.
@Dinwar, your argument would be stronger if you didn’t keep bringing up the Nerevarine and over-emphasizing its effects.
Firstly, it’s not something the Empire planned to take down the ALMSIVI. When the player character lands on the island, Caius Cosades has only the vaguest idea what the prophecy is (except that you fulfil its conditions) – the first missions for him are just very basic information gathering, and by the time you learn its full scope, he is cut off and ordered home. That is of course in addition to the fact that the Three were already dying and the transformation of the Dunmer religion was inevitable. If anything, destroying Dagoth Ur preserved their society and religion against a much more substantial reshaping.
Which is my second counter-point to your assertion of it as an destructive event: When we see Dunmer culture and religion again a few centuries later, it’s not actually changed substantially. The religion managed to reform itself as its original Daedra-worship and House politics appears to have taken only the tiniest of shakeups (House Hlaalu got the boot), and that not from the end of the ALMSIVI, but the end of the Empire.
We already see this resilience to the “Nerevarine shock” in Morrowind itself, where the religious organisation under Vivec is able to smoothly pivot from opposing the Nerevarine to supporting them and pretending it was part of their plan from the start.
The situation where the Empire, which has lost a major war, and is now forcibly allied with its former enemy, is actually quite typical, and so is also the situation where such a state needs to enforce an unliked policy internally in order to avoid a catastrophic war or foreign occupation.
To give an example, I would point to post-Napoleonic France where Louis XVIII was essentially brought to the throne in the baggage train of the allied powers. But still, the French civil administration remained, France was soon unoccupied but you needed to accept an unlikeable internal policy for a while as part of the deal so as not to trigger an unwinnable war. Prussia was in a very similar situation in 1807. I think that the US-Iraqi relationship in early 2010’s had very similar dynamics. The leeway for the losing side here is that the winner will not be eager to upset the apple cart either, and start an expensive war, and eventually, if everything goes well, you will have done internal reforms, restored your national strength and can restore your full freedom of action.
If you listen to the discussions of Imperial leaders in Skyrim, this is actually their strategy. And you can see, if you read the materials found during the game, that the Stormcloaks are supported by Thalmor, who want the empire to be divided into smaller countries powerless to resist them. In historical perspective, I would tend to say that the Imperials are in the right: their strategy of preserving internal independence and waiting for a chance for throwing off the Thalmor yoke is, historically, how major states behave. The main reason why this works is because the local representatives of the major power in advantageous position have a need not to upset the apple cart. They have failed in their mission if they are forced to request military intervention- and most likely, their superiors have better use for those resources elsewhere. So, they tend to paint the situation in favourable light, allowing leeway for the weaker power, and an efficient use of this leeway will allow a lot to be done.
So, the economics of the game are simply unrealistic, but the grand strategy is not. (Similarly, I really liked the College of Winterhold arc, where the local leader solves his bureaucratic qualms by making the player the nominal president of the college while becoming, himself, the actual power behind the throne.)
The important part to note about the analysis of the Empire’s strategy is the case of Hammerfell: The Empire was allowed to just unilaterally declare themselves incapable of actually enforcing the ceasefire treaty within Hammerfell without any negative consequences. There, the war continues to go on, and apparently is binding up a large amount of military resources of the Thalmor.
Which means the calculation for the Empire when faced with the succession crisis in Skyrim being triggered by Ulfric is as follows. If it tries to keep Skyrim in the Empire, it needs to spend even more resources to do so (they apparently already had to bribe Skyrim’s jarls for them to accept the peace treaty instead of rebelling), reducing both its own military strength and that of its vassal, leaving them weaker when the important war with the Thalmor comes around again (which everyone treats as basically inevitable).
If on the other hand it declares Skyrim to be another Hammerfell, it forces the Thalmor to spend those same military resources, because they don’t have a case that this somehow is the Empire’s responsibility, after having already conceded the argument on Hammerfell. Which means the Thalmor would have to spend military resources, either to force the Empire to comply, or to end the civil war themselves. At the very least, you’re saving the military strength of one of the provinces (Cyrodiil or Skyrim) instead of wasting them against each other. Not to mention that it’s likely that like Hammerfell, an independent Skyrim would be able to hold off the Thalmor much more effectively, because time and again we see that the Empire is bad at extracting military manpower compared to the local rulers.
And then there is the matter of legitimacy, which is that the civil war is ostensibly about the worship of Talos, the deified Tiber Septim. The Mede Empire presents itself very much as the continuation of the Septim Empire, down to having Tiber Septim’s face on their coinage. And note what those coins say: “The Empire is Law. The Law is sacred“. Basically, the legitimacy of the Empire rests in part on its sacral nature as being ordained by its god-ruler Talos. Which means that not just conceding on Talos not being divine, but then taking up arms when people insist that he is, the Empire is weakening its own legitimacy. When the second war with the Thalmor were to end with a victory, Cyrodiil could not really claim to be the Empire’s rulers again, because the Stormcloaks would immediately be able to say: “Oh yeah? Why’d you piss on Tiber Septim’s legacy, then?” If on the other hand they refuse to enforce the Talos ban in Skyrim and force the Thalmor to fight the civil war, they don’t burn that bridge.
Addendum: Based on what we see, the Empire already skipped on being responsible for enforcing the Talos ban within its territory. It’s instead done by Thalmor agents acting as secret police.
So there’s even less reason for the Empire to jump in with military force when that fails.
“The only game where there’s an indication that the Empire is actually projecting power into its provinces is Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard…”
Morrowind. A major part of the setting is the conflict between the Empire and the Dunmer. You see this in a few ways. First, there’s the limited amount of territory that’s “Imperial”–most of Morrowind is culturally, biologically, even architecturally distinct. The legions don’t fight the Dunmer, but they’re not exactly best friends with them, and some of the Dunmer will attack you on site (makes exploring the less Imperial areas fun). There’s also informal conflicts. The whole Assassin’s Guild thing, for example. Even the interactions show that you, as an outsider, are Other and not welcome in the culture. It’s a fantastic way to manage the limited computer power of the time, and the flagrant racism allows the developers to use the limitations to enhance the setting.
The quesiton is, what does projection of Imperial power look like? The ebony mine monopoly, the taxation without caring about internal politics, the physical presence of legion forts–I’d say these all count. The Dunmer certainly think they do at any rate.
“In fact, there’s two instances that imply heavily that *not enforcing a monopoly on violence* is the norm for the Empire”
There’s also the Assassin’s Guild and Fighter’s Guild, both of which are built entirely on the use of violence. The Assassin’s Guild needs to hide more, but the Fighter’s Guild is open in every game. The Mage’s Guild also engages in a lot of violence. Ostensibly they’re a research institution, but they fight a lot too.
Then going back to Morrowind there’s the whole tax collector quest early on. The guards basically say “Huh, that sucks. Up to you what to do about it.” They are perfectly find with vigilante justice.
I think one of the things fantasy writers have to remember is that all modern ideas on politics, war, and governance are based on humans. Argonians and Khajit are NOT. Argonians in particular are going to function significantly differently than humans, what with the whole tree thing. And the Mer aren’t either–they look more human, but at the end of the day we can expect very different physical and psychological needs from them. I can see a good argument being made that a monopoly on violence isn’t going to work in such a case.
The other thing is, the idea of a monopoly on violence was only ever on paper in human cultures. There’s a rather famous story where competing institutions–one local, one imperial–argued about who had authority over a case. “We come to Rome to sentence Nazareth/We have no law to put a man to death/We need him crucified, that’s all you have to do!” The whole situation arose precisely because there were multiple institutions that had the authority to enforce laws, and no one wanted to deal with the guy on trial or the political fallout from it. This means that in areas where the Empire extended its power (Black Marsh, Elsewhere, Vvardenfell) it would be perfectly reasonable for the locals to have authority over certain things, and the Imperials to have authority over others.
“The Great War and its aftermath (which we see in person in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim) makes no sense whatsoever.”
I disagree entirely. The idea of a puppet ruler has all kinds of historic precedent, and it was the only way the Empire could end the war without ceasing to exist. The Great War was an attempt to remove the Empire and replace it with an Elven overlordship, based on the idea that Elves were inherently superior. The Empire gave up as little as possible to continue to exist, and the Aldmeri Dominion took as much power as they could, both at the time and as time went on. The Aldmeri decided that they would switch tactics, essentially. Again, this has historic precedent–it’s one of the ways Rome and England both expanded their empires, for example. There’s also the Bene Gesserit, though the Aldmeri Dominion acts more like the Honored Maters without the….well, less than PG-13 aspects.
The tax gatherer quest is the perfect example of what I mean with the lack of projection of power. If there was actually a functioning imperial system in place, there would not be a lone imperial tax gatherer wandering around begging random adventurers to help him out in collecting taxes. Instead, Vivec would be sending part of his wealth over to the empire on the regular, or would have his Ordinators help out the tax gatherers.
I disagree entirely. The tax collector reminds me of the Roman tax system–private citizens bidding on contracts to collect taxes for the Empire, and making a profit off those contracts. It helps the Empire because they don’t have to pay the tax collectors AND because it means the tax collectors, not the empire, gets the hate (which you clearly see in the quest).
By the way, the tax collector quest I was talking about was the early one where you find the dead tax collector. He wasn’t asking for help, you just stumble across him.
I also can’t see the Ordinators helping with tax collecting. This goes back to the division of power I discussed. The Ordinators were temple guards, focused on a very narrow range of responsibilities. Using them for Imperial purposes would have literally be sacrilege to the Dunmer. Vvardenfell wasn’t worth the resources to fully take over, so the Empire allowed local customs to continue, including certain local laws. Made the Empire’s job easier, and kept the Dunmer relatively happy. Again, you see this in Rome–local customs and laws, including law enforcement, were respected to a fair extent.
Saying that something’s not a functional system when it was in fact, in reality, a functional system for centuries, is a bit silly. Again, it goes back to state capacity. The Empire in TES has more state capacity than historic ones, but it’s still far more limited than a modern industrial, internet-age society would have. Handling that lack of capacity is one of the main things the Empire has to manage. And at least in Morrowind, the game developers found a perfect solution in history.
As for why the Empire would do this, play Skyrim. The whole Aldmeri Dominion thing is what happens when an imperial core tries to impose too much on the rest of the population. Could the Dunmer kick the Empire out? No, they tried and failed. But they could make it very, very expensive, and the Empire had enough to deal with at the time. It was better for them to officially play nice and get the ebony and taxes (while the player undermines the very foundations of Dunmer society and ends their religion, because the Empire isn’t nice).
I’ll respond to everyone who brings up Morrowind as a counter-point to my assertion that we don’t really see the Empire projecting power in one post, since otherwise I’d repeat myself a lot.
The core premise of the argument is that an empire projecting power into its peripheries has to suborn the local rulership and local institutions to the rulership and institutions of the empire itself. The local rulership and the local institutions might still be there, but they can only wield power by the grace of the imperial core not taking that power. And the most important power for the imperial core to hold is to be the arbiter of disputes and delegitimiser of violence – instead of the local king being allowed to raise an army to settle the land dispute with his neighbour, he has to argue the case to his imperial overlord and hope the request is granted.
And to me, despite the presence of forts in Vvardefell, the Empire in Morrowind fails that test. What we see is less subordination and more parallel structures, and these parallel structures from the Empire appear to be weaker than the local structures.
– Barenziah, as noted, is the puppet queen installed by the Empire to rule over Morrowind. But she’s never depicted as having any authority over the actual rulers of the country, neither over the ALMSIVI nor the House heads.
– At no point during the power struggles of the Houses does the Legion intervene, or is even considered a viable pawn to wield against another House.
– Given the monumental architecture of the cities of Vivec and Mournhold, the ALMSIVI are capable of extracting a good amount of taxes from the local populace. Instead of somehow interfacing with that, the Empire apparently does its own thing, with its own Imperial Census institution and its own tax gatherers, both of which are far too small to actually do their task and who are incapable of even calling upon the other resources the Empire has on Vvardenfell.
– The Mages Guild is a bit of an edge case (it’s technically not an organisation fully subject to the Empire), but it’s also weirdly unable to leverage its influence in the rest of Tamriel into any kind of advantage over the Telvanni.
Even in the extremely off-hands Roman Empire, these thing weren’t true. If you had a dispute, even among locals, you always had to be aware that this could get escalated up to the governor if it got too contentious. Tax gatherers could call on the governors and the local garrison to help out if taxes were not handed over willingly, and you’d be very sure the governor would stick his nose into the affair if a tax gatherer got killed.
All I can say is you are wrong. You are wrong about how empires project power, you are misremembering the facts of the game, and you are mistaken about how historic empires work.
“Doubtless in an emergency this would be supplemented by drawing up the rest of the able-bodied male populace, but we’re not given a clear sense for the city of what that would look like. I find myself wondering if under normal circumstances, since Gondor is almost always in some kind of low-intensity conflict with Mordor, if the professional core wasn’t always supplemented by rotating conscription or some kind of reserve among the men of the city.”
The book Lord of the Rings Weapons and Warfare, based on the films, says as much. All abled bodied men of the city are expected to be part of the army for a few years and afterwards are sent to the reserves.
Such a system implies a wealth of resources over manpower, as they are able to equip nearly all of the reserves to the same standard as the standing army. Unlike the book, Weapons and Warfare also portrays Minas Tirith as little more than a city-state (most other movie media tried to work in the soldiers from the fiefs).
Look, you got to have some sympathy for movies that just want to have all the soldiers look alike. Put yourself in the shoes of the costume department here. It’s got to be a lot easier to adapt one pattern to a 100 extras than to develop 100 costume patterns so everyone looks different.
How the material reality of having to film real people in the real world affects movies is part of why they’re so great.
They should try a different approach them. For example, they could switch to devolution and make extras supply their own arms and armor.
Muster the cosplayers! Weta calls for aid… and Comic Con will answer.
Given the job of obtaining 100 distinct costumes that look like they came from a single military tradition, and the options of (1) making them from scratch or (2) interviewing 2000 cosplayers to pick out 100 that work — I suspect we’d hear those sewing machines start up pretty quickly.
I feel like costs are also why armies in movies and tv shows tend to be mostly infantry. (With Monty Python’s Holy Grail as the most extreme example.)
That and skill. The pool of extras who know how to ride a horse well enough to do basic maneuvers like riding in column is much smaller than the pool of extras who know how to walk in a straight line.
I seem to remember the background documentary about the LOTR films talking about how most of the Rohirrim extras are actually women, simply because it was a lot easier to find women who knows how to ride than men.
Some of the Nazgul chasing Arwen in Fellowship were also women. Given their costuming and effects, that was probably easier to pull off than the Bearded Ladies of Rohan.
It’s kind of ironic that we’re forced to posture rich armies because designing poor armies is too expensive.
To be fair, if you tried to equip a poor army personally, you’d **also** rapidly run into the same problem.
Eh, just bad casting.
Put out word among HEMA, living history, and SCA types that you need extras for a movie and they’ll come in their own armor and garb. This gives you a very nice variety–some folks in plate, some in maille, some in cloth, some in brigandine, all sorts of stuff–without you needing to buy it. Plus you build up a fan base that’s going to be VERY excited to see the movie or show. Last time I spoke with a SCAdian about being an extra the problem was that the guy’s kit was too good, better than the hero’s kit in the movie. (Same thing happened with “Deadliest Warrior”: folks offered to donate accurate recreations of various things, but were turned down because it wasn’t showy enough.)
I know it’s been done before. “Timeline” used SCAdians (and as a thank you they put some KSCA bling into the movie–the gold chains and white belts), and I’m pretty sure at least some Tuchux were involved in Eragon (you can see their shields in the final battle sequence). So the idea that it can’t be done doesn’t hold; it has been done. Just a question of whether the film makers are willing to put the word out.
“I think we could actually bring the armies of Westeros into line with their underlying society with *fairly modest changes: shrink both the world size* and the armies to a scale that fits a personalistic, vassalage based mobilization system and acknowledge that these polities are going to really struggle to employ good infantry at scale”
Shrinking Westeros would not be *a modest change* !
It’s basically on par as making its summers and winters become constant three-months seasons…
Westeros is defined by its huge size !
That’s what make the sense of wonder of this world, and makes the thought experiment interesting : what if England was a hundred times larger ?
Which brings the other point : its armies would be much more fragmented, as you explained, but couldn’t they be quite large anyway ?
Logistics considerations aside, I mean.
The essential considerations for warfare would be how to provide for such large armies, which is mostly impossible away from rivers and coast.
That would have interesting repercussions (losses would be easier to replace, making for protracted wars; and mastery of the Riverland and coastal cities would be quite essential, and harder to challenge)…
Westeros’ huge size is underused to the point of not being supported by the text. If Westeros were actually the size of South America, its politics would not take the shape that it does. For starters, there would be far more than seven kingdoms, because as Bret explains, vassalage polities do not scale well – past a certain point, a kingdom becomes so unwieldy that the king can’t actually keep up his horizontal ties with all the vassals any more *and* be prepared to intervene in case a dispute between vassals is about to become violent, just from the travel times. The King of the Crownlands wouldn’t be able to pay any attention to what’s going on in Dorne because he’d be busy with all his vassals and his immediate neighbours.
I’d say based on what we see of climate and culture, Westeros is, intentionally or unintentionally, roughly equivalent to the Western European countries on the line Spain-France-England-Scotland, except without a sea or strait between the “France” and “England” parts. Dorne seems to be very much inspired by Spain, or by clichés about Spain, while The Wall seems to be Hadrian’s Wall’s very big brother.
That’s pretty large, perhaps implausibly so, for a political entity with that kind of technology, society, and culture, but, I think, still a *lot* smaller than the entirety of South America.
(Though, of course, Scotland isn’t actually permanently covered with snow.)
Martin explicitly says Westeros is the size of South America. Fans using the scaled maps broadly conclude the Seven Kingdoms are somewhere between the sizes of Australia and Brazil: https://atlasoficeandfireblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/28/the-size-of-westeros-revisited/
Of course, in every way the stories portray it it’s smaller, because GRRM doesn’t understand the implications of what he’s said.
If the Seven Kingdoms only consist half the continent George Martin’s numbers seem to work out.
On that scale the seven kingdoms are very large kingdoms, but not crazily outsized if you think of them as actually being separate kingdoms. And I think that matches the text. They were indeed separate, then they got pasted together by Kings on magical dragons. Kings who not only could conquer or threaten annihilation, but who also could actually visit their vassals regularly to maintain those all important personalistic relationships. Once the dragons died out there was a long tradition of the great lords seeing themselves as peers in a larger polity, but that unity is visibly fraying well before the series starts, shattered by war, only tenuously retained by Baratheon in the war’s aftermath, and – without magic – is probably destined to collapse sooner rather than later. Maybe the decline was longer in the coming than would happen in reality, but at least it is there.
This makes sense to some extent, thank you.
@Raphael,
Dorne read as more “foreign” to me to really be the equivalent of Spain, from a Western Europe/England perspective. Maybe more a stereotypical “Middle Eastern” country? Minus the Abrahamic patriarchal culture, of course.
It was also hilariously implausible, of course, that everyone in a continent the size of South America would be speaking the same language.
Many people from North America have trouble grasping just how abnormal their own situation is in this respect. That loads and loads of language would naturally arise over millennia does not occur to them.
It’s also just easier to write stories where the characters can all understand each other, even if you know it isn’t realistic. Tolkien came up with a thin excuse, Martin didn’t bother.
(In Lord of the Rings, there’s a lingua franca that covers several regions that don’t seem to have much contact with each other – Rohan is only vaguely aware of the Shire if at all – and that lingua franca is the Hobbits’ native tongue, which is convenient because they aren’t the sorts of people who would have learned a foreign language.)
@Lena,
Probably well under millennia, actually. It seems like about 500 years seems to be enough time for languages to diverge, though I’m not exactly sure?
“For starters, there would be far more than seven kingdoms, because as Bret explains, vassalage polities do not scale well – past a certain point, a kingdom becomes so unwieldy that the king can’t actually keep up his horizontal ties with all the vassals ”
I do not get this. The whole point of hierarchy is that it is fractal: you only need deal with your immediate superiors and inferiors. The difference between a vassal and a servant is that a servant has no power base of his own, which means he can be commanded fairly easily. A vassal DOES have a power base of his own, which makes dealing with him more like dealing with a junior ally.
The issue is that as the kingdom becomes bigger, the king must increasingly *travel further* to be meeting and forming personal relations with the spread-out vassals, as those vassals become rulers of increasingly large nested fiefs in their own right. If a king must travel thousands of miles (with much of his court!) to visit each of his high lords, then how much time does he have for doing anything else? (Or in turn, if the lords are centralised thousands of miles from their fiefs, how do they feel about effectively being puppets for whoever they left in charge, when news or letters will be weeks and months out of date)
In theory you can have a beautiful tree model where each level rolls up to the next, and there are as many levels as you want: peasants to knights to barons to viscounts to earls to marquesses to dukes to a king; go right ahead.
In practice, this doesn’t work precisely because of the reason you’ve noted – the lower level vassals have power of their own; so the upper levels need _enough_ power that they can ‘encourage’ their juniors to stay broadly in line. But if you’re operating on a personalist vassalage model like that, there’s something of a hard cap on how much power those upper levels can manage to control within their own retinues etc.
This has the effect of keeping these systems rather flatter. Knight, lord, king is usually the common limit; with “lord” covering a lot of variation and churn. That in turn means the physical ability of the monarch to travel enough to actually stay in touch with the lords is a limit on how big such a polity can get (and you can’t necessarily just drag them all to one place, since they have stuff to do to manage their own lands and vassals).
> That’s what make the sense of wonder of this world, and makes the thought experiment interesting : what if England was a hundred times larger ?
The problem is that GRRM doesn’t understand the history or the underlying political/technological/etc constraints that you would need to marshal to actually explore that thought experiment. Instead he just multiplies everything by 100 and assumes it’ll work out.
There is a reason my post-apocalyptic world don’t have any continent-spanning empires. The closest thing is Australia which manages to keep together over many centuries. Yet with the exception of the Murray – Darling River system all their settlements are near the coasts. These are not that numerous either as arable land is so scarce. With irrigation, terra preta, crop rotation and high-yield crops inherited from technological civilisation it still can’t sustain more people than Ireland. An island 1% of its size!
I think the answer is clear: You get the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history, with the major rivers dominating strategy – and all players trying to develop strong and well-administered states to survive.
Apparently, George Martin’s idea of epic proportions is making things arbitrarily bigger without understanding their consequences.
This series is great, and was more or less perfectly timed, as I recently started running a TTRPG campaign in a homebrew setting, where the behavior of a pre-state army is fairly important to the plot I had planned.
I ran an Elder Scrolls campaign for the last few years (it fizzled out due to burnout on my part beginning of this year), and I also felt like Bret’s writing (although of course not this series, I don’t have a time machine) helped me a lot with making sense of political developments. Over time I did subtly bend Elder Scroll’s ideas of ruling to be more in line what’s historically feasible. That also makes it easier to deal with the oddball effects of the player party, because you have a firmer grasp on how the rulers might think and what they might consider important.
Interesting article again. I understand Jackson’s decision to give Gondor’s armies a very distinct look from Rohan and the other factions, and to play up the idea of Gondor as a state with a professional army, but the movie look has always bothered me, especially the extensive use of plate armour. But I have the feeling that the Gondor armour has become so iconic and influential in pop culture that a more book accurate depiction would not go over well with audiences today.
On your point that Gondor is likely modelled on eastern Rome – Minas Tirith is often compared to Constantinople, but its description in the books reminds me much more of Mystras, the capital of the Despotate of Morea, which outlasted Constantinople for a few years. I don’t think Tolkien had Mystras actually in mind, but both its look and general vibe (the mountain stronghold-capital of a severely diminished empire, whose former actual capital has fallen) fits Minas Tirith quite well, I think.
I am under the impression they are Ancient Greek inspired.
Despite being an avid reader of ASOIAF, I didn’t know until today that there was a House Broom. I learn something every time I check out this blog!
And speaking of ASOIAF, your section on it focuses on armies of Westeros south of the Wall. Do you plan on discussing the armies of those north of the Wall as well?
I guess the Dothraki have been examined in detail, but I do have vague memories of the Wildlings’ assembled forces being a hodge-podge of different tribal contingents.
House Broom’s words “We Sweep Clean.”
“Westeros produces very large, surprisingly uniform armies which are not obviously organized into the retinues of smaller lords but rather function as large field armies tied explicitly to the largest vassals of the crown”
I really don’t think this is the case. I think the show is leaking into your memory of the books. Let me go point by point.
“It is much smaller (no 100,000 man strong Tyrell armies!), more fragmented and much less ‘regular.’ Not only does the king have to care what Tywin Lannister thinks, but Twyin Lannister has to care what Lord Broom thinks and Lord Broom has to care what his retainers think and so on. Tywin’s Lannister army would likely be broken up into dozens of irregularly sized and structured retinues (of which his own would be the largest). ”
Let’s put aside the size of Westerosi armies. Martin is famously terrible at numbers and so many of the numbers that appear in the books are outright nonsense.
But in the books over and over we shown larger lords (like Tywin) having to care about what lesser lords think. This isn’t in evidence as much in the first book (because we don’t have the POV of any of these larger lords and because it’s still the first book and Martin hasn’t had time to flesh out who these smaller lords are) and the Lannister vassals are noted specifically as being unusually and remarkably subservient to Tywin (both compared to how the same vassals acted in the past and in other regions) but we get constant references in the books about how difficult it is to wrangle Riverlands and Reach vassals and again and again AGAIN we have lesser lords doing their own things or at least trying to. For example in the first few books you can see Lord Bolton steadily working to undermine rival lords by putting their retinues in dangerous places (for example the Umber retinue being put in the van at the Green Fork or the Glovers and Tallharts being sent to Duskendale where they get mangled) while keeping his own retinue and those of friendly lords relatively unscathed by putting them in safer positions.
As far as the retinues, those are right there in the books. For example in the Battle of the Green Fork in the first book a lot of these specific retinues are mentioned. The Lannister personal infantry retinue is the red cloaks of Lannisport (an urban city watch/militia) who are noted as being unusual for all having red cloaks, the Karstark pikemen, Tyrion’s band of mountain clans, etc. etc. I don’t think the kind of uniformity of Westerosi armies (in which EVERYONE in the Lannister army is a red cloak) exists in the books and I’m not sure what’s the source of your assertion that Westerosi armies are especially “regular” in the books, in the books they are portrayed as Medieval hodge podge retinues of retinues and the red cloaks are only Tywin’s personal infantry retinue and FAR from the bulk of the army.
Martin’s medieval armies seem like a pretty clear example of retinue of retinues with elite cavalry and brigaded houshold infantry and I’m not sure where you’re getting it being anything else (the show is whole different beast of course).
Now Martin DOES get a lot of details wrong. As you note there aren’t enough unlanded knights and mounted men-at-arms, although we do get examples of them like the Cassel family. Also Martin doesn’t know the nuts and bolts of how brigaded peasant infantry is raised but he’s obviously read books that include that kind of infantry and is trying to replicate it. But in general, Martin’s armies look a lot more like Medieval armies and you’re claiming.
“To be clear, I don’t think there is anything wrong with enjoying these stories; rather my critiques emerged in a period – now largely passed, thankfully – where it was common to claim that George R.R. Martin’s work represented a truer or more faithful vision of medieval vassalage-based polities.”
I think it’s pretty clear that George R. R. Martin’s work represented a truer or more faithful vision of medieval vassalage-based polities. Not because Martin’s historical knowledge is that deep, he has a pretty thin pop history view of Medieval societies that gets a lot wrong it’s just that the competition in terms of fantasy world building WAS JUST THAT BAD. I remember in 1996 when A Game of Thrones came out it was like a breath of fresh air compared to standard 80’s/90’s fantasy world building. A lot of what we had at the time was having Tolkien, filter that through D&D, and filter THAT through D&D-inspired fiction. There was so much fantasy fiction that was inspired by other fantasy books that had been inspired by other fantasy books and on and on that they were often really disconnected from historical inspirations and were getting things WILDLY wrong, so Martin’s very flawed pop history understanding looked a lot better in comparison despite goofy shit like 100,000-man Medieval armies.
These days thanks to the internet it’s a lot easier for world builders to research various things so the general standard isn’t as bad as in 1996 when A Game of Thrones came out, but there is still so much Ren Faire fantasy (in which everyone has modern ideas with a Medieval palette swap) out there that A Song of Ice and Fire is still WELL above par in terms of realism , even though there are serious gaps in Martin’s understanding of Medieval polities (such as most people not taking their own religion seriously enough).
As an addendum, this: “acknowledge that these polities are going to really struggle to employ good infantry at scale (lacking the revenues to recruit mercenaries or the social systems to effectively mobilize their peasantry)” is already present in the books.
In the books it’s pretty clear that Westerosi polities DO struggle to employ good infantry at scale, with better infantry retinues (such as the urban city watch/militia of Lannisport) being specifically called out as exceptions that can’t be deployed at scale and we do see Westerosi polities not have the financial resources to recruit mercenaries at scale, with one of the few exceptions being the Brave Companions who are bargain bin mercenaries only recruited in limited numbers by the exceptionally rich (in the books, the bit about the mines running out is show only) Lannisters. Again you’re telling Martin to do…what he’s already doing.
Now I don’t want to go too far in defending Martin, his pop history view of the Middle Ages is maddeningly inaccurate at times and his sense of scale is terrible and any time he gives us a number it’s probably utter nonsense…it’s just that the specific criticisms you’re making of him here seem to be things that only apply to the show and are things that the books already do at least somewhat.
And I do note that the Lannisters are said to have exceptional amounts of ready cash at hand thanks to the gold mines. (thoguh even that is not enough to actually fight a major war)
But yes, I think the assumptions aren’t really correct, Martin has problems with scale and to some extent the details, but he is *broadly* recreating late-medieval feudal society for Westeros.
Exactly, I could make up a dozen point list of things that Martin gets wrong about Medieval society, but “what a Medieval army looks like” isn’t really one of them (aside for them being way too big, but then most of Westerosi world building is just “turn Medieval society up to 11, logic be damned”). This post is just chock full of stuff that apply perfectly to the show but are just really off-base when applied to the books. I think the Pedant hasn’t read the books in a while and is getting some book canon and show canon mixed up.
If Westeros has a more or less static economy (and we certainly don’t see that much indication of technological advancement or innovation), then wouldn’t “mining more gold” pretty soon run into issues with inflation?
Given the rough similarity to Western Europe, I’d assume the gold eventually ends up going to Yi Ti, Asshai, and other places in Eastern Essos in exchange for luxuries from the more complex civilizations there. Just as in our world gold and silver flowed east on the Silk Road for silk, spices, etc.
Jory Cassel was my first thought when mentioning met at arms in asoiaf. Also we see Clegane, a landed knight, pillaging around the Riverlands with a troop of what have to be men-at-arms. There are also scattered mentions of “household knights” in the service of various lords, which I think we should unlanded to be unlanded knights bachelor in the retinues of those lords. I also recall there being a discussion of the Northern lords keeping cavalry who are not knights as permanent retainers.
I can understand that fantasy fiction before “A Song of Ice and Fire” was even more unrealistic. First you had Ronald Tolkien whose writing had numerous ties to reality. Then you got the “Dungeons & Dragons” role-playing games which were at least partially inspired by him. However, these were in a different, interactive medium following its own logic. What works well for role-playing games does not have to work well for fiction literature. Which means loads of what makes fiction relatable was lost by being transferred trough role-playing games. This is not a second artist effect but at least a third artist effect.
The influence of Tolkien on Dungeons and Dragons is I think largely cosmetic: that the races of the characters you can play were in early DnD (with one exception) based on Tolkien. It just happens that that is the part that all the players have to read to get started. The actual inspiration for DnD – the books that get cited in the rules to explain what is being modelled – is much more Conan, and Lieber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouse, and similar pulp fantasy.
Not a fantasy army, but if societies always recreate their social structure on the battlefield, I wonder what the armies of the superstates in 1984 look like. We know that they’re fairly small, and I think it’s reasonable to assume they don’t give weapons to proles.
The problem with trying to do an analysis of 1984 is that the worldbuilding is such that one almost wonders if “Oceania” is actually confined to Britain and is that world’s equivalent of North Korea.
For example, the fighting is implied to be on a continental scale, but none of the characters is in the military or knows anyone who’s in the military. For that matter, the one time we’re shown a military action (the sinking of the ship) instead of hearing about it over the radio, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, based on the information provided by O’Brien regarding the geopolitics of the world.
1984 is really more about the psychology of living ng under totalitarian rule than any reasonable world building so it doesn’t always make the most sense.
One bit that always struck in my craw was this line: “Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police.” Why would the Thought Police be especially efficient though? In real totalitarian states we find all kinds of inefficiencies in their political police forces.
That line in 1984 comes from Goldstein’s book, which is itself party propaganda. Though we have reason to believe the book is mostly in universe, the party also clearly wants people to believe the Thought Police irresistibly capable, so they would put that in the book true or not.
Clever, I like it. I still think Orwell underestimated how much damage a million people like Julia running around would do to a totalitarian state, however…
This is what Václav Havel called “power of the powerless”. Authoritarian regimes are dependant on the actively dissident being few enough for them to be kept down. If too many actively resist it the regime falls. Exactly this has happened on multiple occasions in my lifetime.
It is decades since I last opened “1984”, but I think that “Oceania” is essentially America+Britain+Australia, which is reasonable, considering that this was how the American assumed that Western Europe would easily fall to a Soviet aggression.
The war itself is, I think, mainly inspired by Keynes’s war-time observation that the economies of industrial countries actually work better with the overproduction of resources being destroyed senselessly in war. So, you have a steady war of attrition maintaining the legitimacy of the governments, carefully calibrated for such a balance that active operations take place only in marginal areas.
It is decades since I last opened “1984”, but I think that “Oceania” is essentially America+Britain+Australia,
It’s bigger than that- it includes all of the Americas (north, central and south) as well as the southernmost portions of Africa, and then, as you say, the British Isles and Australia.
The war itself is, I think, mainly inspired by Keynes’s war-time observation that the economies of industrial countries actually work better with the overproduction of resources being destroyed senselessly in war.
Paul Sweezy developed that idea even further in his 1967 book Monopoly Capital, although he also went into other ways that capitalist economies could use up the surplus generated by underconsumption. He was writing from a Marxist/Communist perspective so his views might not be congenial to everyone, but I think he’s described as having tried to synthesize Marx and Keynes (and was certainly, at least, very much influenced by Keynes).
I’m not a big fan of Orwell’s politics but I have a lot of respect for his talent as an essayist (most of the “ideas” he’s trying to convery in 1984 are also present somewhere in his essays). I don’t think he was a good fiction writer at all, though. He was a lot better at rhetoric than he was at world building.
“For example, the fighting is implied to be on a continental scale, but none of the characters is in the military or knows anyone who’s in the military. ”
As is pointed out in the book, the number of people actually fighting is fairly small, and the important frontiers are never fought over. Oceania has not so much a war as an excuse. Recall that North Korea is still officially at war with South Korea. Have they exchanged many shots recently?
It’s been a little bit, but I don’t think the book ever says that the number of people fighting is comparatively small.
Furthermore, we’re shown prisoners brought back from the front in some quantity, the fighting described at the book’s finale involves the entire Congo region, and the “debatable land” that the three powers fight over seems to consist of Africa between the Mediterranean and Angola, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia.
I was wondering how the Rohirrim infantry cohesive principle works. You describe it as the infantry “clumping upp” around the magnates. Due to the strong clientage bonds, however shouldn’t we expect the magnate to be part of the heavy cavalry aristocracy. So the magnate is “over there somewhere” instead off with his infantry for them to “congeal around”. So how does this work?
Helm’s Deep is a special case because everyone is inside a fortification and the magnates are therefore dismounted. (Barring Theoden’s last desperate riding out, and that’s just with his household retinue.)
On a larger battlefield, medieval armies normally divided into “battles”, often three, each of which would usually contain all the troops from a given area. So the Westfolder cavalry could be leading the vanguard, followed by the Westfold infantry. They’re not too far away.
When a battle goes badly, banners and livery / heraldry help a lot. Look for the unit of heavy cavalry with the lord’s banner, head for that. Or, look for the infantry wearing your particular combination of colour and shield design, head for that. Infantry in medieval armies usually don’t have enough status to have their own coats of arms, but it was very common for lords to provide their infantry with a cheap garment like a modern high-viz vest that they would wear in battle.
And the Rohirrim magnates are still comfortable fighting on foot Anglo-Saxon / Viking style, as shown by Eomer wanting to form a shield wall when he thinks all is lost at Pelennor Fields. So rejoining the infantry and dismounting is part of their accustomed fighting style, and it’s something everyone knows to do, even if they’re not formally training for it.
How does the Rohirrim infantry cohesive principle of “bunching upp” around the magnates work if as we expect the magnate is part of the mounted aristocracy. So the magnate is not with his infantry for them to “congeal around”. So how does this work?
It works because the magnate is, in a sense ‘low’ enough – socially close enough – for the infantry to know. He’s the big man of their small village, rather than a distant lord in a big castle.
I can imagine that working, though maybe moreso for morale then for cohesion. Would I be right in thinking that this principle would be stronger if the magnate was physically with the infantry?
I have also been wondering for a long time how the infantry is operated in these kinds of systems, who makes sure that they end upp in the correct place in line, or how do you make infantey like this advance. Because it seems like all the authority figures are not there to coordinate this kind off thing.
And thank you for the quick answer.
That explains it from the perspective of cohesion. Maybe I misunderstood the question, but I think it is about on the ground physical mechanics. If I am infantry in the retinue of a lower lever aristocrat, and I have a solid social relationship that attaches me to him. How does that translate to physical behavior? He’s a mounted armored warrior and is forming up with a bunch of his peers in a line of cavalry for a charge. What am I supposed to do?
Same question and extending to the knight lance (the unit) as well. Since a knight lance is a mix of the knight and his household member and clients, many of which would be on foot. What happens to the infantry when the knight and all of (total single digits) his riders are joining a cavalry block?
Possibly slightly out of scope here (ie. not in Westeros proper) would be the cities on the ‘shore of(?)’ the Dothraki Sea, which do seem to be small urban city-states while Danaerys is rolling them up one by one with the help of the Unsullied, who might also qualify as the “in-demand mercenaries”. Danaerys seems to have obtained their services in ways other than coin, but before she showed up I could easily see them as your “Swiss pikemen” type.
Then again, I only ever read “Song of Ice and Fire”, none of the sequelae, and quit watching the show somewhere in Season Five, so whadda I know? Thx. J.
Essosi in general are written as heavily reliant on mercenaries, clearly inspired by Martin’s (highly imperfect) knowledge of Italian condottiere.
Funnily enough, A Game of Thrones (the first book in ASoIaF, not the show), seems to imply a somewhat more centralized kingdom, closer to what you describe for the Rohirrim. In particular, the 4 Wardens (of the North, East, West, and South) are appointed by the king and, although there’s a strong expectation that the position will go to the son of the previous Warden, the king can technically appoint anyone he wants (hence Robert proposing naming Jaime Lannister as Warden of the East after Jon Arryn’s death, an idea which greatly concerns Ned).
However, after the first book, Martin more or less drops the idea of the Wardens (the lists of characters at the end of each book still mention who each Warden is, but I don’t think the title is ever mentioned in the actual text) in favour of the pure vassalage system you describe here. And, to be honest, I don’t think the Wardens ever made that much sense (the idea that the Dornish would be under the command of a Tyrell, or the ironborn under a Lannister was always dubious), so quietly retconning then was probably a good idea. However, I’m wondering if the inconsistencies you note here might be leftovers from a time when Martin was envisioning a somewhat more centralized kingdom.
The Wardens are not a priori a bad idea, especially if trying to tell the tale of a more centralised kingdom (as we’re meant to imagine it was under the Targaryens) falling apart. In Early Medieval times, especially the Carolingian period, landed titles were intended to be by appointment and there were royally-appointed war minister positions, but over the generations the expectation of “placing a man on the honor of his father” became so strong that it morphed into hereditary titles. Of course, to tell that story, Martin would have needed to pace the action out over more than one generation, which he wasn’t really good at – he didn’t even manage to actually commit to the multi-year timeskip he had originally planned.
Yeah, the Wardens are what tvtropes calls “early installment weirdness” – something from an early episode that doesn’t line up with later worldbuilding.
That said, for what it’s worth, I’ve made up a reason for the Wardens to exist that makes sense to me, at least.
Aegon the Conqueror only actually conquered six of the Seven Kingdoms; Dorne didn’t join up until generations later. So I figure there were a lot of minor wars between Dorne and the “Seven Kingdoms”, sometimes without the Targaryens being present. So you’d have the question of who is going to be in charge on the side of the “Seven Kingdoms”, and the King settled it by declaring the Lord of Highgarden to be “Warden of the South”. Then the other Warden titles got handed out as meaningless courtesy titles.
The problem is that Ned clearly doesn’t see the them as “meaningless courtesy titles”. The reason why he’s so worried about Jaime being named Warden of the East is because it “would put half the armies of the realm into the hands of Lannisters” (with Tywin already being the Warden of the West), implying the title comes with real military power.
You often kinda get weird stuff like that though. With titles and/or offices of various types that might be handed out by royal assent and whose powers could vary considerably. Sometimes these kinds of postions are more or less literally the king formally says “I expect you guys to listen to this guy” and the degree to which it works is entirely dependant on how much the local nobles cares about that, sometimes there’s weird paralell structures going on.
That’s one of the hardest things to get right about the Middle Ages for world builders, how much weirdness and inconsistencies there are with everything. Off the top of my head I can’t think of a single example in fiction that really gets the “paradise for rules lawyers” aspect of the Middle Ages right.
Yeah there’s the entire “Is feudalism a thing and in that case *what*?” going on because “idealized” feudalism as described basically *doesen’t* exist anywhere (*maybe* northern France for a bit, but people will argue about it) and there’s always all sorts of weird remnants, innovations, exceptions, etc. Also how the incipient (or decaying!) state structures could coexist with vassalage, various relations to cities, traditonal local assemblies, etc.
Another interesting thing with seeing that cohesion play out in LOTR, is the bit describing how many of those lords died, giving us an idea of the way they might have viewed their leadership role, and reinforcing that their command was split up to be the forces they brought, not redistributed. Duilin of Morthond and his brother being specifically killed leading their archers closer to the Mumakil for instance, is a simple but accurate way to show the way command was dispersed historically.
Might be worth noting (and I didn’t see this on a quick skim of the comments above) that there are good Doylist reasons to cut the GoT show some slack on excessively uniform, excessively infantry-heavy armies. It is hella easier to arrange for a bunch of extras on foot than a bunch of extras on horses, and it is also easier to tell your prop and CGI departments “just make two hundred of these” than “make bespoke rag-tag equipment for two hundred guys.” You might be able to approximate the latter by coming up with, like, five designs for each bit of equipment and making forty of each one, so you can mix-n-match to break the uniformity, but that’s still a lot of extra work, especially when working on a TV show’s budget and production schedule.
It doesn’t make the *end result* more accurate, of course, but I do try to acknowledge when external pressures are in play. (Similar to “why is armor apparently useless in most movies?” Because it’s much, much safer for the stunt guys to hit each other at a heavily protected point of center mass like the stomach or chest than to show them going for the genuine vulnerable spots.)
Who says you need to ask them to make it? I can’t imagine that all of the clothes from the various medieval movies/tv shows just get thrown away after filming.
Yet LoTR was able to introduce a reasonable level of variation for the Rohirrim. It’;s not 200 different kinds of armour, it’s that you have 2-4 sets of armour that someone might have (in the case of the Rohirrim, textile armour or chainmail) and you can introduce variation in what armour people actually have. In the case of GOT, have the nobility in plate, for lesser nobles have the plate be in increasingly poor condition, for the infantry have textile amour, chainmail for some (Albeit I can actualyl imagine the show skipping those because chainmail is pretty expensive), with varying levels of plate for others. For denoting particularly unfortunate bastards, you can even have a smattering of people that only have a helmet.
That gets you an army that can have considerable variation in what each extra has by way of amour, yet without actually straining the budget that much.
Whoops — coming back with more time to read, I see that I missed where this was addressed by other commenters!
@Marie in general I very much agree with you. Making a TV show is hard work, and the battle scenes aren’t that important.
However, GoT wasn’t working on a typical TV show’s budget. (Nor is Rings of Power.) When you’ve got five million US dollars per episode, I think we can be a bit more critical.
While scaling Westeros down would be the easiest way of resolving its plausibility, it would be much more interesting to try to make it work at its present large size.
Logistically speaking, you could divide Westeros into three parts: the coasts, the riverbanks, and the other inland portions. The inland regions would be de facto independent. Commanders simply cannot feed large armies in these areas and there is not a practical way to physically transport many resources out of them. Most of Westeros would be null space. It’s also plausible, given the unpredictable seasons, that the population is much less dense than in historically comparable regions like medieval Europe, which makes it harder for armies to march through as there is even less food available for plunder. The inland regions then are nothing but endless forests and fields ruled over by petty lords who are theoretically subject to the real powers on the coasts and rivers. They would probably be a good source of mercenary knights.
The coasts and the riverbanks can be supplied by maritime and riverine logistics. Armies can operate there and anywhere within a few days march, or weeks, if they have a more efficient tail. “The Seven Kingdoms” is in practice land adjacent to the accessible waterways of Westeros.
In general, this should be a famished world driven by food scarcity, which would puts selective pressure on the ability to concentrate supplies. That is to say, you would expect more farmland to be required per farmer because of the enormous need to stockpile crops for winter. This means that farmland is more “spread out,” which in turn makes it harder to collect supplies by cart.
In the real world, there’s a concept called hydraulic despotism, which argues that river lands like Egypt have a natural political and geographic pressure to unify into strong states because monopolizing the irrigation system secures the state’s power. Westeros might have what we could call a granary despotism. A state can secure its power by securely storing taxed grain for winter and then redistributing it when the snows roll in. Naturally, this is much more easily done by boat.
When Aegon the Conqueror builds King’s Landing, his primary idea is to store taxed grain. The city grows around the Red Keep and the granaries. He would need a bit of a bureaucracy for this but he could scrape up some leftover Valyrians from Essos. They would be widely hated.
The dragons are the divine right of kings made flesh. Only the Targaryens have them, they can go anywhere, and they can easily destroy any army, city, or castle. They allow the Targaryens to rule a primitively organized Assyrian style of empire: disobey me and I will destroy you. It doesn’t matter that some inland lord has no personal relationship with the king, or that the king can’t get an army out to his lands, when the king can fly over and torch his castle. Dragons are what allow for a tenuous unification of Westeros.
On that note, Targaryen taxation probably began as a demand for livestock to be shipped to King’s Landing to feed the dragons, since that would be much easier than the king having to fly around to various vassals’ field to feed his divine right weapons.
I’ve been loving this series, but I notice one group keeps getting left out of these discussions of pre-modern armies: siege engineers. Somebody has to design and build the catapults, siege towers, covered rams, etc. Where do they come from, how are they organized, and what do they do during peacetime?
“The real problem is how drab they are. These are men of importance and station! They’re wearing expensive equipment! They would want to look nice!”
Well they are on a cultural death march, there’s something to be said for atmosphere. It’s not like we don’t see austere kit choice in reality, the various knightly orders had a semi standardized tabard which was nearly monocolor.
Of course you’d still expect one asshole to show up in motley even with a clear cultural taboo, as anyone whose tried to organize any form of costume gathering can attest, so the point probably stands.
On the general point I think it’s very likely the show runners are reusing assets, which is part of why the uniforms are similar between eras. Even if they’re kit bashing their game of thrones stuff together to get the final product you’d see similarities simply because it’s economical. This would lead to inheritance of uniformity even if the house of the dragon show runners knew better.
” my sense is that the ASoIaF/GoT community largely now understands that Westeros is not necessarily the gold-standard for ‘realistic’ medieval fantasy societies.”
I feel like you yourself were a significant part of that shift in understanding, so congratulations.
This series has been as interesting as I expected. Nice examples here as well, though with both Tolkien and Martin already discussed at length, I would have been interested to see other fantasy worlds dissected (or maybe different exemples from these two authors. What about the First Age Haladin from _The Wanderings of Hùrin_?)
Just as a side note: Elfhelm is apparently not from the East-mark, but from the Folde. In _Unfinished Tales_, he was in charge of the Riders from Edoras. He was put in charge of the first Éored of the East-mark at the Battle of the Fields of Pelennor, because Éomer was put in charge of the first Éored following the King. This is actually a nice example of reassigning a major aristocrat from one official assignment to another (rather than promoting somebody from below Éomer).
If you’re looking beyond LotR I’d love to hear your thoughts on military organizations presented in the Malazan books and the Black Company books (if you’re familiar with either).