This is the second half of the final part (I, IIa, IIb, III, IVa, IVb, Va, Vb) of our apparently five-part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized, with fictional worldbuilding and historical patterns in mind. Last time we started checking some fictional militaries against the general patterns we’ve laid out and we’re going to continue doing that this week.
This week, I want to turn to some of the more complex militaries structures we’ve discussed and I found they were more common in my repertoire of video games than film or literature, perhaps because the ultra-long-form structure of many video games provides a lot more space to explore complex institutions. So this week, we’re going to look at an example of a professional standing army in the Imperial Legion of The Elder Scrolls series, some private enterprise war through the Vailian Trading Company of Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire and the finally try to untangle the military system of Baldur’s Gate from the broader Forgotten Realms constructed world (including but not limited to Baldur’s Gate 3).
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).
The Imperial Legion
Now I should start by noting one of the obvious quirks of discussing any sort of worldbuilding when it comes to video games which is that video games are the product not of a single vision but of many hands, even more so than film or tv. After all, even just the dialogue of a single game is the product of more than one writer (Oblivion credits six ‘Quest Designers’ and two more for ‘Additional Writing,’ for instance) and of course a lot of the creative decisions are also made by artists, level designers and so on. And of course that team might be very different from one game to the next: there’s a lot of turnover from Morrowind to Skyrim.1 So it shouldn’t surprise us that there may be some inconsistencies or contradictions; nevertheless there is enough continuity here to proceed.
We can begin by sketching out our civilian society. I really think the society of The Elder Scrolls is something we should come back to in more depth, because while it often models itself as the most generic ‘generic fantasy world,’ it actually isn’t in some interesting ways. But we’ll have to stay brief here.
Tamriel (the world of The Elder Scrolls) is, like our previous examples, a complex agrarian society, but it is different in important ways: Tamriel is substantially more urban than either Westeros or Middle Earth. That isn’t just reflected in it having larger cities – these games city sizes are invariably products of graphical limitations, rather than direct one-to-one expressions of worldbuilding – but in the organization of society: in the places we’ve seen mostly clearly (Cyrodiil, Morrowind and Skyrim) the Cyrodiillic Empire (from here on, just ‘the Empire’ for short) is able to organize its administration entirely through urban centers. Castles – fortified private homes in the countryside – exist in this world, but local administration is urban, even in a relatively under-developed province like Skyrim, where each of the administrative divisions (‘Holds’) has a capital in an urban settlement, be that a major city for the larger holds (Riften, Windhelm, Whiterun, Markarth and Solitude all seem to be intended as major cities) or smaller towns for the lesser holds (Falkreath, Dawnstar, Morthal and Winterhold). This is a society organized around cities, rather more like the ancient Mediterranean world than medieval Europe in that regard (and given the frequent Roman theming of the Empire, this hardly seems like an accident). Still agrarian – most of what is going on is still farming – but meaningfully more urban.
The Empire is in turn organized into provinces (nine of them) roughly corresponding to the historic areas of settlement of its constituent fantasy races. Cyrodiil is the capital province and by far the largest (only Morrowind comes close and much of it is thinly settled) and most populous – it is the imperial core and its size and population helps explain why the government in Cyrodiil is able to more-or-less (mostly less, by the time of Skyrim) hold the rest of Tamriel. Each of the provinces has its own internal customary local systems of government. That may seem strange but pre-modern territorial empires often left local ruling systems in place when they could and Cyrodiil does as well. In Cyrodiil proper, we see the province is divided into sub-regions (Counties) with a local ruler (a count) who is strongly subordinated to the center. While the position of count is hereditary, the position has very limited authority (as the wiki notes). in practice, Cyrodiil itself is a state with one legal system dictated from the capital and local ‘rulers’ reduced mostly to functionaries who implement that system, rather than independent powers in their own right.
Outside of Cyrodiil, local communities are organized by local laws under local leaders: Morrowind is still ruled by its Great Houses, each with their own territory, while Skyrim is ruled by its Jarls. These entities retain their own local militaries independent of the Empire and so we ought to understand the periphery here as consisting of vassal polities. In short the state part of the Empire is Cyrodiil (and perhaps small parts of the other provinces), but much of the area it rules is non-state client rulers. That also shouldn’t be surprising: this was the normal structure for a lot of large empires – the empires of the Late Bronze Age come to mind especially. Notably though – and we’ll come back to this – the Imperial Legions (the military force of the Empire proper) maintain pretty obvious ‘escalation dominance’ over Cyrodiil’s vassals (at least until things get pear-shaped in Skyrim).2
So we have a fairly well-consolidated state in Cyrodiil which provides the imperial core for the Empire and then a periphery of vassal state- and non-state polities (mostly non-state, as we see them) which the Empire very much controls. How does the military system map onto that?
Surprisingly well, actually, so long as we account for the limitations in scale imposed by the genre (an RPG cannot have 90,000 men on the screen or it will crash) and the requirement for things like ‘town guards’ (so they player doesn’t murder-hobo entire towns).
The political structure (an imperial government with a core territory that also rules over vassal polities) is mirrored in the military structure: there is both the Imperial Legion but also local military forces. In Oblivion, these local forces (commanded by the counts) are little more than constabularies, something that actually is expressed pretty well in-game by how immediately out-matched they are by the Oblivion Crisis compared to the heavier forces of the Imperial Legion. In Morrowind and Skyrim, the forces of the local governments (the Jarls in Skyrim, the [dissertation on the wonderfully complex government of Morrowind here] in Morrowind) look to be quite a bit more substantial: particularly in Morrowind, one gets the sense that the armies of the Great Houses and of the Tribunal Temple are quite formidable (heavier, more expensive equipment, more magic, and so on), even if not a match for the Imperial Legion itself.3 That makes sense: in order to maintain control, the Imperial Legion has to maintain ‘escalation dominance’ – the ability to win at higher levels of escalation (thus dissuading potential foes from escalating) – over the many regional armies of the empire’s provinces.
The major problem with the local military forces is that they appear to be standing forces to a substantial degree. We see a lot of ‘guards’ standing around on duty and such. But in practice, such local rulers aren’t going to have much need for a standing military force on duty all the time: most communities have sporadic security needs and small communities generally do not even require much of a permanent, standing constabulary. Instead, we might expect the permanent force to be a small retinue around the local ruler (we actually do see this in Skyrim with the concept of thanes), but beyond that, we might expect a ‘raised for the moment’ form of military organization: some sort of levy or militia, possibly with a standing component that is just a rotating period of duty among those liable to be drawn into the full militia in an emergency (a select levy to go with the general levy). In that case, ‘guard’ wouldn’t so much be a career as it would be something like a two-week shift every year that you had to do, effectively as part of your taxes.
The Imperial Legion (or legions) itself is also a recognizable structure: it seems pretty clearly to be a professional army. Members of the legion are very clearly deployed far from home (a point often exemplified by the legion’s multicultural recruiting) on a permanent basis and are full-time soldiers. Recruiting seems to be done through volunteers. While we see some recruitment of local auxiliary forces in Skyrim, these tend to be lighter troops and might be local auxiliaries: the clear nucleus of the force, we’re told, arrived with General Tullius from Cyrodiil. The legion is most often stationed in permanent fortifications (we see a lot in Morrowind) or key cities (like the Imperial City in Oblivion) – it is not a local militia and makes no effort to be ‘everywhere.’ Its equipment is remarkably (though not perfectly) uniform even in regions where its styles are distinctly foreign such as Morrowind or Skyrim, suggesting that equipment is state-issued and somewhat standardized. It also seems to be a long-service professional organization: we see quite a few ‘old soldiers’ still serving, both in desk-jobs and in combat roles.
And this is a structure that actually makes a fair bit of sense for a state like this: vassal rulers retain smaller local forces and the Empire largely lets them deal with the day-to-day work of order and administration. Meanwhile, the imperial center, with its greater resources, maintains a large, professional, well-equipped standing army that enables it to coerce those local rulers as well as engage in large-scale warfare. One imagines that, in the event of a major security threat, we’d see the Imperial Legion forces form the core of a field army, probably supplemented by non-legion local forces. The amusing thing is, while I think the developers imagine this structure as ‘Roman-ish,’ the state it actually recalls to me most clearly is the Neo-Assyrian Empire (fl. 911-626) which maintained a core professional army of full-time infantrymen (in matched pairs of archers and shield-bearers) who were then supported by levies drawn up from the empire’s vassals.4
What I think is somewhat underdeveloped – especially in Oblivion and Skyrim – is the apparatus to pay for all of this. While other kinds of military systems can have their costs effectively devolved, a state-equipped professional army has to be paid out of the treasury, which in turn demands a state with the ability to raise a lot of revenue. Because it is a volunteer professional army, these soldiers would have to be well paid in order to recruit and retain them. Notably, we do not see in The Elder Scrolls, any indication that these costs are being defrayed by private enterprise war – the Imperial Legion is not a contractor-based army and commissions in its officer corps are not purchased, but awarded based in merit and internal promotion.
Now that’s not to say we don’t see any of that apparatus. The Empire clearly raises revenue both through taxes and through state-chartered monopolies. One of the first things we see in Morrowind is the Syda Neen Census and Excise Office, suggesting both head and excise taxes (excise taxes are taxes on specific goods) and there is a quest related to local tax collection. That said, the tax infrastructure in Morrowind is relatively minimal and that makes sense: most of the game takes place on Vvardenfel, which is only in the initial stages of having imperial control established. Notably, what collection we do see is in ports, suggesting customs and excise taxes may be central here, which also makes sense for a region that is only slowly being brought fully into central administration: port duties and excise taxes on luxury goods (I recall, but cannot find the line of dialogue, where we’re told that the excise taxes are on alcohol) are easier and quicker things to set up.
But what we don’t see is a more focused and intense extraction system in Cyrodiil or especially in Skyrim. By the time Skyrim takes place, the Empire is no longer at peace, but is recovering from a large war and trying to rapidly prepare for its seemingly inevitable sequel, which should demand high revenues and thus that taxes would be high as well. Yet ‘tax revolt’ is nowhere in the Stormcloak rebellion’s motivation (they’re focused more on religious persecution and ethno-nationalism) and we see almost none of the apparatus of extraction that we ought to see for a province that has been long-held by the Empire. The same is broadly true for Cyrodiil, though there are a couple of quests in Oblivion related to things like port taxes in Anvil and such.
Alongside that fairly minimal taxation apparatus, we have another major revenue source, which is the East Empire Company, a fairly obvious riff off of the British East India Company (even borrowing the ‘East’ despite appearing in places like Skyrim that are…not in the East), a massive vertically integrated company with a bunch of state-chartered monopolies on luxury goods. That is a very historically rooted way for a state to raise revenue, of course. The problem is that it isn’t enough. Recall, Tamriel is a complex agrarian society: we see no hint of even early mass manufacture, much less industry, so the overwhelming majority of economic activity is going to be in agriculture and pastoralism. That in turn necessarily means that the revenues generated from something like the East Empire Company are going to be somewhat marginal to the state itself. The Roman Empire had, for instance, a slew of state monopolies (on things like silver mines) as well as rents on state-controlled lands and resources which the Romans collectively called vectigalia, but it is very clear that the large majority of Roman taxes were what the Romans called tributum: taxes assessed on agricultural land or produce.
So what we ought to see in order to complete the Imperial Legions is the infrastructure, particularly in Cyrodiil and Skyrim, for substantial tax collection on the common folk, particularly on agriculture. Now that could be structured in two ways: we could see (as we do in Morrowind) direct imperial taxation, with imperial officials in each settlement assessing taxes themselves. Now those officials might be direct employees of the Empire, but an equally likely solution (which we do seem to see in Morrowind in Caldera, as I recall) are tax farmers: private businessmen who have contracted to do tax collection in an area.
Alternately, the Empire might do what the Romans eventually did: assess taxes on communities and leave it up to local leaders and governments on how to collect those taxes. Given how visible and important local ‘vassal’ rulers are in the Empire, this seems to me the more likely solution: tell the local Jarl or Count or Great House that it is responsible for raising a specific amount of money (or revenue in kind, so a specific amount of grain or recruits or whatever else) and then let them sort it out with their own local administrative apparatus. That said, if this was the system, we ought to hear about it more, especially in Skyrim where the local revolt against the Empire ought to mean that imperial taxes are being collected in some places and are not being collected in others.
All of that said, the fact that the Empire in The Elder Scrolls has a somewhat fragmented structure and then has a fragmented military apparatus – with a professional army enforcing imperial power over a bunch of much smaller local militaries which do the day-to-day work of maintaining law and order – works as a reflection of the society we’re shown. What is missing is mostly just the apparatus of empire itself, which has really been neglected in the setting’s worldbuilding since Morrowind.
The Vailian Trading Company
That said, bringing up the East Empire Trading Company of the Elder Scrolls games highlights one odditiy: the EEC lacks its own military force, instead relying primarily on the Imperial Legion (something we see clearly in Solstheim) and only occasionally on local goons. But of course a massive, state-chartered trading company of this sort is frequently going to have to operate far from the center of imperial control and potentially with local communities that object quite loudly to being so obviously exploited. As a result, these sorts of ‘mega-corps’ tend to operate their own independent military forces: the societates of Roman publicani that managed the tax-farming system (prior to Augustus’ reforms to the largely community-centered tax system mentioned above, though some taxes remained farmed) maintained private security forces we can see clearly in documentary evidence from Roman Egypt, while early modern trading ‘mega-corps’ like the British East India Company or the Dutch VOC maintained full-on private militaries, complete with armies and warships.
But we do see that structure in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. And let me also just say: if you are a fan of classic computer role-playing games (BG3, Wrath of the Righteous, Rogue Trader, Solasta, that sort of thing), you really ought to give Deadfire a spin. It is very good and very tightly written (and the stronger of the two Pillars games). It’s also, I think, a better introduction to Eora than the more recent Avowed and I really liked Avowed.
Here the setting is the Deadfire Archipelago, a smaller region in the larger world of Eora, with three principle military powers along with a fourth minor power (the Principi sen Patrena, a very loose pirate confederation that survives to a significant degree in the shatter-zone created by the other three that we’ll leave aside here) and all three are actually pretty well realized. The actually indigenous local power are the Huana. They are significantly fragmented: the strongest tribe (the Kahanga) are a complex agrarian society with a large capital city (Neketaka) that exert an imperial overlordship over smaller tribes and communities in their periphery. Their society is a caste-based one and their military structure follows that: the priests (including ‘Shapers’ who wield powerful magic) and the warriors both are drawn from the highest caste, the Mataru, which thus acts as a hereditary military-and-religious aristocracy which also – not by accident – controls most of the wealth. Their military is thus drawn primarily from this upper-class, drawing its cohesive principle from the exclusivity and strong social expectations for that class, financed by the wealth of its role as the ruling elite (that is to say, wealth extracted from the lower, worker classes). But of course that system imposes strong limits too: the military cannot be readily expanded beyond those classes effectively and the entrenched class interests of the elite render the Huana military static and unresponsive to new technology – though formidable, their position relative to rivals is deteriorating. As a result, the player’s interactions with the Huana are always contextualized by the Huana leadership’s own sense of growing military vulnerability to incursions from foreign colonial powers, of which they have two.
Deadfire is a really good RPG and I really encourage you to give it a try if you haven’t.
The first is the Royal Deadfire Company, which represents the distant maritime kingdom of Rauatai in the Archipelago. The name is something of a euphemism: the institution began as the Rauatai Trading Company, but was brought under the direct control of the ruler of Rauatai (the ranga-nui) and converted into the RDC, which in practice isn’t really a trade company anymore, but an expeditionary force, an army of the government of Rauatai which aims to conquer the region – albeit gradually, because the Huana are still strong enough to make a direct war of conquest a risky proposition. The RDC is thus effectively an expeditionary force of professional soldiers, funded and maintained by Rauatai (itself a large maritime empire) doing ‘ports-and-forts‘ imperialism. Consequently, what we see of them are fortified staging posts (notably Hasongo) to support their navies and channel goods back to the homeland and nearly all of the people we see are military personnel more or less directly employed by the Rauataian state.
Notably, as an aside, we don’t get as much information about the rest of Rauatai’s military that I recall. Honestly, I’d think something like a core army of conscripts might make sense (given how militarized the society is described as being), with only the forces deployed permanently abroad (like the RDC) being composed of professional ‘long-timers.’
In contrast to the RDC which is almost an army of a foreign state, the third power really is a trading company first: the Vailian Trading Company (itself a pretty clear echo of the Dutch VOC, down to the similar acronym). One oddity worth noting is that the VTC is not attached to one state, but several, representing the combined efforts of the Vailian Republics, a loose confederation of city-states. The nearest historical parallel here may actually be something like the historical Hanseatic League. But where the RDC is essentially an arm of the Rauataian state, the VTC is doing something different: private enterprise war. The VTC is a company, run by a board of directors, answerable to investors in the Vailian Republics under a charter sanctions by their confederation.
And (unlike the EEC of the Elder Scrolls series), it has its own military to secure and advance its operations, every bit as predatory as the RDC. And what we see – and I think this makes sense for the society being presented – is a contractor-based military. Indeed, we meet one of these contractors, Atello Valera, who the VTC has contracted to provide a pretty large security presence, including a number of warships. What I do think is missing here is a greater array of contractors and sub-contractors. Realistically, we might expect the regional heads of the VTC (Ignato Castol and Lueva Alvari, who split maritime and land-based operations between them) to have a few key contractors (whatever the Vailian equivalent to colonels or condottiere is), who would then have sub-contractors running individual ships or companies, with basically everyone in the chain effectively functioning as a sort of ‘military entrepreneur.’ We do get a real sense of that entrepreneurship from the Valeras, but they ought not be the ‘only game in town’ on the military side.
The VTC, in short, has a bunch of different people contracting soldiers for different tasks, so while there’s a clear cultural similarity in their equipment, it isn’t uniform (unlike the RDC, which is quite uniform!)
That said, I think Deadfire actually does a good job of correlating militaries and societies: the Huana, Rauatai and Vailians have quite different societies and thus quite different militaries: a warrior-class military with devolved costs that fits the caste-based Huana society, a professional military with standardized state equipment and regular pay that fits the very centralized Rauataian state and finally a private enterprise warfare military using military contractors that fits the decentralized structure of the Vailian Republics.
Defending Baldur’s Gate
Now we turn to the unusual military structure of Baldur’s Gate, drawing not just on the recent Baldur’s Gate 3, but more broadly on the lore of the city as part of the Forgotten Realms setting. We’re picking one city to focus on in part because it has become the most visible part of the Forgotten Realms’ setting and also because, to be frank, the military, social and economic structures of the Forgotten Realms are kind of a mess. That’s not necessarily a harsh criticism – this was a setting built for specific purposes (facilitating D&D gameplay) rather than worldbuilding verisimilitude. But that still makes them interesting to talk about from this perspective because they often test public assumptions about what pre-modern societies look like.
(Note that in BG3 one of the major plot-points is an effort by one of the villains to unbalance the city’s military system by adding on an army of evil metal golems to it, in a bid to take over. I’m going to leave that part out here, because the Steel Watchers aren’t part of the stable military system of Baldur’s Gate. Ironically, if Gortash had succeeded, the military system of Baldur’s Gate would make a lot more sense: you’d have a tyrant monarch who ruled the city by virtue of controlling its military.)
Baldur’s Gate, in the setting, is a major seaside mercantile city with a large population, clearly part of a larger complex agrarian society. Its upper-class are wealthy burghers (rather than large landowners) and it is ruled by a council of four ‘grand dukes’ who are elected for life.5 It is also a big city by pre-modern standards: the wiki figures a population around 120,000 or so in the urban area.
Now one thing in the lore is that because the city has a natural defensive position (it is located on an inlet) and because it has a very strong outer wall built by the heroic figure Balduran, for whom the city is named, that it is generally peaceful and does not necessarily require a large army. The problem here of course is that Baldur’s Gate doesn’t just need to defend the city core, it needs to defend the agricultural hinterland that feeds it. This is a common problem in fantasy worldbuilding – cities divorced from the agricultural lands they require to survive. Nor can this issue be salvaged by saying the Baldur’s Gate is a city that lives on trade and such. These are agrarian societies, which is to say that food production (via farming) makes up the lion’s share of the economy, with textile production (also via pastoralism, agriculture and peasant labor) making up quite a lot of the rest. Consequently, in the absence of industrial production, there’s no amount of economic activity you can be doing in the remaining small slice (think 10-20% at most) of the economy that is going to allow a city to import all of its food and fabric. The only activity that can manage this feat is empire: the (violent) extraction if someone else’s food and fabric, in which case you still have a hinterland, it is simply held by force and coercion.6 The city needs a hinterland and it needs to be defended.
That said, Baldur’s Gate does have an army – indeed it has one-and-a-half armies, in practice. Order in the upper city is kept by an armed constabulary called The Watch which, according to the Wiki, has about a thousand members, of whom perhaps 300 or so are on active duty at any given time, making this effectively a civic militia. What keeps the Watch from acting fully like a military is that they are not empowered to operate outside of the city walls. Amusingly to me, this force of – at any given moment – 300 active soldiers and 700 or so reservists, somehow rates a high command with six major generals and two more senior generals despite being no bigger than a battalion (which would normally by commanded by just one major or captain in our world).
Instead, the main force of Baldur’s Gate’s defense is the Flaming Fist, a mercenary company kept essentially on permanent retainer by the city. It is a standing, effectively professional force, organized on the employment principle, consisting of – according to the wiki – approximately 2,000 soldiers (with a peak strength of 6,000). The Flaming Fist was founded by a grand duke and it seems like its leader (the marshal) is generally one of the four grand dukes that governs the city.
It is striking how heavy and expensive their equipment is. Maintaining this organization on a permanent basis would be extraordinarily expensive, which if I was a citizen of Baldur’s Gate would get really frustrating, because as far as I can tell the Flaming Fist’s job is to spend the first two acts of every story about the place losing until the heroes show up and save everyone.
And there are a few problems here. The first is a problem that afflicts a lot of Forgotten Realms armies which is this is not enough army. A city-state with more than 100,000 people in the core urban area certainly ought to be able to muster up a much larger army. Medieval Ghent had a population by the late Middle Ages around 50,000 and was able to put something on the order of 8,000 men on the field to fight against the city militia of Bruges in 1382 and they were outnumbered by the Bruges militia. Baldur’s Gate is well over twice the size and yet has a far smaller total force. Indeed, its fairly close in size to Classical Athens (especially if we account for the missing rural countryside a city of that size must have), which was able to deploy more than 12,000 men against Syracuse, supported by roughly 200 triremes (so around 40,000 rowers) and was able to recover from the total loss of that force.
But that size problem gets us to an underlying problem in matching up this type of society, its resources and security needs with the kind of army it has. If we put the Watch aside for now, the primary defense force for Baldur’s Gate are the Flaming Fists and while the lore describes these fellows as a mercenary company because they sometimes take jobs outside of Baldur’s Gate, they’re really a standing army. No one is going to mistake your mercenary company for an independent outfit if it is also traditional that the marshal of the company is also one of the four elected leaders of the city. That’s not an independent mercenary company being hired, that’s a political alliance with Baldur’s Gate enabling another community to gain the protection of its army.
But you may recall as we discussed recruitment and payment principles that the state-supplied (the Flaming Fists have standardized equipment), full-time, long-service professional army is almost exclusively a creature of large, well-administered empires and there’s a reason for that. For one, only such a large and complex state is capable of mobilizing the resources necessary for such an expensive system and equally only large empires have the kind of round-the-clock security needs to justify one. That is, after all, the feature that makes professional armies so expensive: they have to be fed, paid, housed and equipped in wartime as well as peacetime – there is no option to simply send the men back to their homes and jobs. Thus, while smaller states might maintain a small standing force – a prince’s retinue, a small elite unit or a constabulary force – their military is not built around that force, it is built around forces which can be expanded and contracted to fit changing security needs.
As an aside, this is part of why we can’t just say the Flaming Fist function basically as a condottieri force. Italian states raised condottieri in response to specific military threats – they did not maintain them continuously in peacetime. Indeed, one of the key advantages of condottieri was precisely that: you could pay them in war time and not pay them in peace time, though of course they were also famously untrustworthy.
The Flaming Fists also do not fit the political structure of Baldur’s Gate. There is a reason that states which do use standing armies tend to have a unitary power structure, like a monarchy, because the very nature of a long-service standing professional army is that whoever wields that army is the state. Baldur’s Gate is ruled by four high officials who serve for life, three of whom collectively share control over a gendarmerie of 300-part timers and one of whom has control over and the loyalty of a standing for of at least 2,000 professional full-time soldiers. That is a system that becomes a monarchy very fast. Political power here is fragmented, but for some reason military power is not, which is hardly a stable structure.
And finally, the Flaming Fists do not fit the social structure of Baldur’s Gate either. This is a city dominated by a class of wealthy burghers (the ‘patriars,’ a clear riff off of Roman patricians), whose wealth mostly comes from trade or non-agricultural business. That’s fine – there really should be a landholding aristocracy somewhere too – but the problem is that this class is nowhere represented in the military structure. It’s the ruling class, whose interests the military system is intended to protect yet these families do not make up the elite of the military, nor its officer class.
We can effectively go in two directions ‘fixing’ Baldur’s Gate: we can make the society fit the military or the military fit the society. In the first direction: a city which has a professional military force that answers to just one guy (the marshal of the Flaming Fists) isn’t going to be an oligarchic quasi-democracy. It is going to be some kind of autocracy: the marshal is going to be the autocrat who sets the rules, de iure (as a monarchy) or de facto (as a tyranny). In this case, the weakness of the Watch makes sense: this was the city’s old militia, now sidelined because it would threaten the power of a tyrant-marshal, who is probably also busy breaking the power of the old ruling class (the patriars) and consolidating their wealth into his own political network. Alternately, we might get a sort of monarchy-within-bounds as we see in Venice and to an extent (with its two kings) in classical Sparta: a single leader does have command over the military, but the rest of the political system is heavily focused on constraining that leader, to the point that they have officials whose sole job is to watch their every move and there are other political institutions empowered to unilaterally remove a marshal who behaves badly. Even then, a purely professional force seems like a recipe for a self-coup in which the marshal sidelines everyone else because he alone commands the loyalty of the Flaming Fists, whatever the political system may say.
The alternative is to come up with a military system that fits the society we see: a somewhat representative oligarchy (with some democratic elements) primarily lead by a handful of elite families that wield outsized wealth. That kind of society has little need for a large standing army at all: the people with goons are also the people who wield political power and so the system they need is one that catches petty thieves and resolves disputes between each other, not a system to garrison whole districts of the city. The Flaming Fists are unnecessary for such a society (though the Watch as a gendarmerie which serves the collective interests of the patriars might survive).
Now those elite families could tax themselves extremely harshly in order to maintain a meaningful standing army but why would they? Instead, we ought to expect that Baldur’s Gate would defend itself with a civic militia that mirrors its own social structure: the very poor are excluded (and probably don’t vote), while the bulk of the burghers fight as infantry (and have some token political participation) and the patriars serve as officers and cavalry (and have maximum political roles). Because the patriars – or the middling burghers – would rather not tax themselves, they’re going to devolve military costs: everyone buys their own kit and serves based on wealth. That system might take the form of the sort of conscription-based civic armies we see in Greece and Rome or it might take the form of medieval civic militias, like the aforementioned schuttersgilde. If the latter, we should expect those military guilds to be major political actors in the city’s governance, either de iure (they have fixed places on the ruling council or whatever) or de facto (their members just tend always to get elected). Crucially, unlike the Flaming Fists, they wouldn’t be external to the city’s class system, but tightly integrated into it.
Conclusions
This series has ended up rather a lot longer-winded than I intended, but what I hope it has served to demonstrate first is that not all societies have the same sorts of armies. My critiques here have focused mostly on complex agrarian societies, because this was a series for worldbuilders and that is most of what fantasy worlds get made out of, but of course the armies of nomadic pastoral peoples or hunter gatherers are really different as well.
Importantly, societies do not pick their military structures at random, nor are they necessarily free to pick and choose whatever military system they like. Instead, military systems, which are defined by the interaction of principles of recruitment, methods of mobilization, systems of equipment, payment and supply and sources of cohesion are generally long-standing legacy institutions that emerge alongside larger social structures. Individual leaders are rarely at leisure to change or redefine these systems (though it does happen sometimes).
Perhaps most importantly, these systems are invariably tightly connected to the structure of a society and its political organization. No army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield. So a society in which the dominant political and economic force is a mass of middling farmers who elect their leaders are likely to form armies composed of a mass of infantrymen who elect their generals. A society in which a handful of elites lord over the disenfranchised and largely impoverished peasantry is likely to have armies centered on mounted elites, with infantry that is limited and unreliable at best. More complex forms of organization, like private enterprise war with military contractors or standing, long-service professional armies, demand states with matching levels of revenues and complexity as well as a set of security needs which demand these expensive, complex and difficult solutions to the problem of raising military force.
While those rules may feel constraining, I think – and I hope in this post and the last, I’ve shown – they can also, for the worldbuilder, offer storytelling opportunities. After all, if armies reproduce their society’s social structures – often more explicitly than the civilian society itself – that means any time an army is ‘on screen,’ it provides an opportunity to say something about the underlying society. An observer who noticed, for instance that British military leadership in the early 1900s was generally drawn from the same handful of schools would have learned something about the structure of power in British society. The same might be said if the person glanced at Europe and noticed that despite its modern industrial economy, most of the high military command of early 1900s Germany in the first World War continued to be drawn from the old Junker class (visible because of the ‘von’ in their names), a trend which continued into the second.
And indeed, someone who glanced at the modern American military and noticed that American officers functionally always have college degrees, that high ranking officers generally have advanced degrees and that American enlisted personnel generally do not have either will have learned something about the structure of class, power and wealth in the United States: our ruling class is defined more by where you went to school and for how long than by your last name or hereditary titles (which we do not have). And the military cannot help but replicate that structure.
The same is equally true in fictional worlds. Of course one shortcut to producing these kinds of interesting linkages is to adopt a historical pattern wholesale by imitating a real polity and making modest changes. That said, it can be equally interesting to think about the implications of odd combinations, especially for societies in transition. Because, of course, societies are never static things and as they change – be that change swift or slow – their military structures will be forced to change with them, or else will be bent and deformed by the attempt not to change. In fiction, civil-military failure can be as interesting as success.
And in the end, a society whose institutions are interwoven and interlinked – as all real societies are – is just more interesting to read about than a fictional society which is a mere jumble of tropes.
- I am focusing here on Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim because that’s what I’ve played the most of. I am leaving out Elder Scrolls Online for the obvious reason that its empire is a different empire to the one we see in the mainline numbered games (ESO is set in the Second Era, between the collapse of the Akaviri Potentate and the rise of the Septim Empire, whereas the mainline games have been focused on the ending of the Third Era: the last days of the Septim Empire and the aftermath of its decline).
- Though it is worth noting that before the Hero and dragons show up, the Empire was minutes away from successfully reasserting its escalation dominance in Skyrim during that opening sequence: the Stormcloak rebellion was about to end before Alduin intervenes.
- A lot of my sense of ‘escalation dominance’ here is signaled by equipment: the Imperial Legion invariably has heavily armored troops as its backbone, usually in armor that at least looks ‘mid-game,’ while the county and jarl armies in Oblivion and Skyrim are in light armor. By contrast, in Morrowind, the Tribunal Temple troops are in late game medium armor and the Bouyant Armigers – the Tribunal Temple’s knightly order, more or less – are in late game light armor. The Great House armies are more numerous and in mid-game medium armor. That actually fits neatly with the plot of the game itself: Morrowind takes place at a time when the Empire is much stronger than it is in Skyrim, yet we get the clear sense that it still needs to be a lot more cautious and diplomatic in dealing with the powers in Morrowind.
- In contrast to the Roman army, which employed both Roman-citizen full time professionals (the legions) and non-citizen full time professionals (the auxilia) but during the early and high empire made relatively little use of militia or levy forces.
- That is, in itself, an awkward political structure: civic structures that divide power like that tend to do so because they are concerned about one figure making themself king or tyrant, which – if that’s a thing you are concerned about – you generally give them short terms of office and rotate power. Having a four-man board with life tenure is just an open invitation for someone to spend a lifetime suborning two of the others and thereby becoming king (and then swiftly ensuring the election of their son and their cronies and so on). By contrast, if you’re willing to have a Doge act as head of state for life, you’d generally only have the one of them and then have a different body with the power to police their actions (almost always including pretty explicit surveillance). But I’ve never gotten a strong sense that Baldur’s Gate’s ‘Parliament of Peers’ acts as a strong check on the Grand Dukes.
- This is, for instance, how classical Athens manages to be such a large city that it outstrips the agricultural production of its – also quite large! – hinterland of Attica. The Athenians have an empire for much of the fifth century and it is the wealth of tribute that enables them to import food and live ‘like an island’ during the Peloponnesian War. The same is true for the ability of certain ancient cities (Carthage, Alexandria, Rome) to grow to enormous size: they were first imperial capitals and then centers of imperial administration in a larger empire, so the economic activity that powered them was the collection and movement of taxes.
BTW, I really enjoyed the podcast from last week about right-wing CHUDS (? whatever that stands for) and how they try to co-opt ancient history and Tolkien. It took me until today to sit down and keep still and sign up and listen to it.
C.H.U.D. was a sci-fi movie in the mid-1980s, with a key point being homeless folks disappearing as cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers rise.
How that became a term of abuse directed at the right-wing almost certainly involves 4chan. If I’m dating the rise of that usage correctly (before January 6th, but not by much), odds of Chapo Trap House being involved are high.
It’s a bit older than that – it was used a lot during the “Sad Puppies” conflict in the science fiction writing community, around 2014-2015. The meaning was the same as its current sense, i.e. used by the left-wing faction as a derogatory term for their right-wing / reactionary opponents.
IIRC “chud” as “despicable/dirty/generally deplorable person” is at least from 2003. It coming to mean specifically right-wing versions of that does indeed seem to be a 4chan thing from what I can tell.
You’re ahead of me, I’m like five Bret podcasts behind.
I’d love to see a full series on the Elder Scrolls, especially with Elder Scrolls 6 maybe possibly being on the horizon
(meaning its releasing within the next few years instead of the indeterminate future)
i would also
I’m not sure there’s really that much more to say than what Bret says here. In a lot of other regards, the Elder Scrolls universe is basically nonsense:
– Economy is nonexistent. The agricultural area covered by farms is smaller than the area of the cities they’re supplying.
– There’s loads and loads of unclaimed, dangerous land for no good reason, despite thousands of years of civilization.
– Having “completely uncontrolled violence-dealer” (which is what a “freelance adventurer” is) be a regular job makes very little sense historically. Especially it makes little sense to have those existing at the same time as there is a guild that’s supposed to serve that function in a more controlled manner, and regular state-structures with standing armies.
– The games don’t even have much interesting things to say about the possible influence of magic on society. It’s always something encapsulated in its own little university with no visible influence on the economy or society. And despite being extremely focused on teaching spells about violence, somehow this university is not considered part of the state.
– The religion displayed is not quite as bad as DnD’s one-god-from-many clerics, but also not really fleshed out enough to teach anything with it.
– Let’s also not get into all the sentient races like goblins, rieklings, giants and so on, whose extermination by the player is never treated as anything one should worry about.
Warhammer Fantasy is even worse in all of those.
For the human factions I don’t think it is? All four big factions have substantial farmland. They do have persistent raider and monster problems, but they’re largely based out of inhospitable terrain like thick forest, mountains, or cursed regions that keep automatically raising undead. And Sylvannia is nominally under Imperial control and the Vampire Counts have titles.
Orc society is nonsense, but also Orcs are magic and their biology is also nonsense.
The High Elves also have substantial farmland. The Wood Elves seem to be hunter-gatherers but also live in a magic forest so aren’t necessarily subject to normal population densities. Not sure about how the Dark Elves are able to feed themselves in a frozen wasteland, unless it’s just straight-up magic which they’re pretty good at.
Dwarves and Chaos Dwarves aren’t very well-explored and I don’t think have enough/good enough farmland, though they do have some. They also have extremely valuable exports, which the regular dwarves might rely on.
Norsca is thinly explored so this question isn’t really answered.
The endless legions of the Chaos Warriors spend most of their time living in a region where the laws of physics are a suggestion and they don’t necessarily have to eat and if they do food can just randomly appear.
While Naggaroth is *cold* it’s not strictly Frozen Wasteland: It’s Fantasy Canada and Canda has some decent agricultural land. They’re also a culture *heavily* reliant on slave labour, with the druchii themselves being an upper-caste of slaveholders.
There are mentions of them growing wine, so despite the sobriquet “Land of Chill” it can’t be *that* cold.
Bretonnia has some farmland but the Empire cities seems to be surrounded by forests – which are full of beastmen so farmers will be constantly raided.
It depends on your sources, I think: WFRP 4th ed. has some good material and tries to look somewhat realistic.
It’s more variable, running the whole palette.
– Bretonnia explicitly has peasants. The other human factions can’t stray too far either. Alas, the narrators are unreliable and tell tall tales about some factions, e.g. Kislev’s descriptions sometimes read as though the place were tundra.
– The orcs/goblins are non-state, relatively small-scale societies (hence the warlords). Check. They should do some combination of low-intensity agriculture and pastoralism (ranching or transhumance, not full nomadism, because horses exist but the greenskins are infantry-dominated). Instead they explicitly live in deserts. Bzzt. (This can’t even be rescued by saying that an unreliable human narrator dismissed the land as too dry for “human-style” intensive agriculture, both because the humans have sheep, too, and because IIRC some materials say the goblins subsist on various fungi.)
– Most elves (except Dark) can have a subsistence system colored between the lines. It just isn’t mentioned anywhere. Arguendo, it would be perfectly fitting to say that a human narrator may simply miss the elves’ subsistence system hiding in plain sight. Because without monocropping and heavy labor in sight, a human might mistake an engineered orchard for a pleasant park (or even natural forest) to hang out in, that just happens to be implausibly rich in food. Say, they are talking for hours with their elvish host and slowly walking about the place, and in the middle of it their host just plucks a fruit out of a tree and eats it. Without any signs of planning or deliberate effort going back beyond reaching up for the fruit. Not even a (wordless) “let’s walk this less-obvious way”. But perhaps with unambiguous signs that the elves use the place for social/leisure/entertainment functions, such as some pieces of furniture being left there. This nicely loops back to the Tolkien/Clarke “elfin technological mastery looks magical to outsiders”.
– Several species live underground (Dwarves, Skaven, Dark Elves). I have questions.
– Some species/factions (beyond the greenskins) live in explicit deserts (human followers of Chaos living in the tundra). I have questions.
– Several species/factions don’t even live, but are fully magical (Undead, Chaos). I don’t even know what questions to have.
In Warhammer Fantasy Dark Elves do not live underground, however. Theirs is a slavist society, who do all the hard work in fields and the mines (cf. 6th ed. Army Book).
-Brettonia is a fairly standard feudal system taken to somewhat comical extremes. One of the interesting things about at least some depictions is the degree to which brettonian ideals but up against realities in complicated ways that often lead to people selectively ignoring what doesen’t fit. There’s also something of an incipient burgher class (though it’s less influential than in the Empire) in cities. Though it should be noted brettonia has at least three fairly different versions and attempts to synthesize these depictions have been… varied. (Funnily enough the Brettonian *navy* is a highly professionalized and modern service, as compared to the Imperial one that is a bit of a joke) Brettonian armies are made up of the warrior elites, supplemented by long-service retainers (man-at-arms) and general levies. The main difference is that Brettonian culture to some extent puts its money where its mouth is: Brettonian nobles have to perform their Errantry (basically a period where they travel the land getting into trouble in attempts to win glory) before they can inherit. There’s also a strong cultural incentive to leave for the Grail Quest after spending some time ruling (and siring an heir)
-The Empire runs into problems because it is the most detailed faction and but the details never quite agree. Theoretically it is a confederation of various provinces, states, etc. It has some level of imperial bureaucracy though it seems to be pretty limited and most power is deveolved onto the constituend estates. (some of which are states in their own rights) it’s somewhat deliberatley presented as a mismash of fairly modern bureaucratic bits and tons of old feudal privilegies, special exceptions and so forth. (in many ways significantly less so than its IRL counterpart) The empire does have a professional standing army (the State Troops) that are paid for by taxes (there’s some confusion on whether thesea re paid on an imperial level or if the various estates are expected to pay for their and equip their own state troops) there’s some implication that these are augmented by general levies and conscription as well as mercenaries in times of need. Then there are the various specialist troops (wizards, knightly orders) etc. who are obligated to provide troops. The armybooks tends to focus on the Knightly Orders, so it’s unclear on if the empire has “normal” knights that are just landed nobles, which is one of the major confusions.
-Orcs and Goblins vary extensively, some are settled, some are fully nomadic, some are semi-nomadic. (the “Wolf tribes” of goblins in the badlands are noted especially as nomadic) they *are* noted as having very explicitly different requirements than humans do (they can and do eat just about everything) The closest thing to Brets system is that they’re non-state “everyone serves” type warrior-militaries. (though it’s noted that orcs sometimes enslave goblins, or weaker orcs, or humans, to do work they don’t like doing)
-High elves do have a relatively “normal” agricultural system though it’s noted its often seen as less so for humans, but orchards, fields, etc. are all mentioned. High elf armies are also notably one of the ones that actuall go through a bit of an evolution that can be tracked over time, starting off as the retinues of dragon-riding nobles and wizards, and graduallye volving into the “modern day” citizen levy, where every elf is obligated to serve in the army (either as a spearman, archer, or, if noble, a SIlver Helmed cavalryman) augmented by various specialist troops. Dark elves are essentially a warrior/slaver caste of landed aristocracy and their retainers, while Wood elf armies are largely based on kin-bands and seem to be general non-state based agricultural society (except the degree of agriculture seems… limited) with nobles leading their local kin-bands.
-Dwarfs are complicated. There are mentions of aboveground pastures and fields (focusing mainly on stuff like barley and goats) as well as underground mushroom farms. Some dwarf holds (eg. Karak Azgaraz) also have human settlements surrounding them that are under their loose political domination, whose job is mainly to grow food. Others ahve to at least partially import food to make do.
-Norscans, Kurgans and other “normal” chaos worshippers still mostly live “normal” lives constrained by the usual logistics. Norsca isn’t great framland but people still do farm, and society seems vaguely based on scandinavian one (with a class of slaves at the bottom, various stages of free farmers in the middle obligated to various kinds of military service, and an elite warrior caste blessed by the Chaos Gods at the top) some of these will then go off into the North and join the Chaos Warriors proper.
-Which works on Magic Bullshit, since once you get into the Chaos Wastes not just normal stuff but time itself starts to break down.
-Skaven do grow food, both aboveground and various crops (like the Black Grain that is grown around Skavenblight) they can grow underground. They’ll also eat just about everything, and more importantly… often don’t. Skaven society is a cycle of population booms leading to either starvation or attempts to conquer the surface world that culls population back to manageable levels. Skaven have VERY high birthrates, VERY short lifespans (though elites can somewhat change this via various ways) and is a constant hive of backstabbing. Skavendom is a malthusian nightmare.
-While the Chaos Dwarfs is often presented as Mordor, just like Mordor there are the occasional mentions of vast fields tended by slaves. Like the dark elves they are essentially a slaveholdin aristocracy ruling over an enslaved population (of mostly, but not exclusively, greenskins) though in their case they do have a middle-strata of hobgoblins (who also have their own nomadic Khanate just off the map) who serve as “better-than-slaves-but-not-citizens” and whose main task seems to be suppress other slaves.
Warhammer to some extent hast he opposite problem of D&D: It’s a wargame first, RPG second, and everything else a distant third. This tends to lead to often fairly detailed writeups of armies but only very vague descriptions of the societies that produce them. (and sometimes they contradict each other, if only because different bits were written 20 years apart and someone forgot to check)
It being a wargame first leads to some weirdness particularly in the sense that “Everyone needs to be able to fight everyone” in both a balance and narrative sense. This means that you have armies based from wildly different time periods and methods of organization seemingly coexisting. Just the “Old World” has 15th-18th century in the Empire alone, Brettonia whose equipment seems mostly be 1300’s, 1400’s Italy in Tilea and the hodgepodge of roughly 1400’s/1500’s Poland/Russia that is Kislev. That’s before going into the dwarfs (who are just all over the place) or Norsca (9th century with colossal amounts of magic)
Combine this with “fantasy writers have no sense of scale” (and often contradict each other, there’s a “big Empire” vs. “Small Empire” debate in terms of population in the community based on diferent sources) as well as other problmes (“There are as many elves as the plot demands”)
At least in the WFRP sourcebooks it is pretty good – there is a whole section about designing landscapes which says things like look, if you have a city, it won’t just be stuck there in the middle of nowhere, it will have towns nearby, and each of them will have a sort of halo of villages around it producing food, and beyond *that* is where you get the virgin forest full of Beastmen.
And I have a particular fondness for the “Realms of Sorcery” supplement which says “this book does not give you a figure for how many wizards there are in the Empire. That is up to you, and the sort of game you want to run. If you want a first-level wizard in every small town, fine, but that will mean the following in terms of governance and structure and the overall number in the Empire….”
And at least in some campaigns it is made very clear that the Empire does not want completely uncontrolled violence-dealers knocking around, and will do its best to either co-opt, expel, or neutralise them (there’s no way to get through PBTT without ending up as a Knight Panther, which basically means you are now a very well paid conscript who has to do what he’s told by the Graf).
Actually there is quite a lot of lore regarding their Gods, but not much about the religion and it’s practices. Of course, in Skyrim the indigenous religion, Talos worship, is being suppressed.
I particularly enjoyed this post in the series.
One thing I’ll point out is that it probably _does_ make sense for fantasy towns and villages to have a small standing guard force given the multitude of small scale threats (bandits, goblins, monsters) lurking close to town. If you have to wait for your militia to arm and form in response every small goblin raid you’re going to have a bad time.
Of course that leaves out the question of how you pay for that standing guard, but that probably falls under the standard problem of video game worlds having wonky threat ratios. Perhaps we just have to assume that the farmers also produce at the hugely elevated rates of the Stardew Valley farmer.
Hmmm. I never did get Pillars 2. I played the first one, thought it was okay but not amazing, and wasn’t all that excited when the sequel came out. If it’s better than the first one, it might be worth taking a look at.
Deadfire is the best game Obsidian has made, by a significant margin.
I agree and it never ceases to puzzle me why any recent discussion of Obsidian seems to forget that PoE I and II even exists. It’s like: They did the great New Vegas, the okayish Outer Worlds and had a downfall with Avowed (still have to play that one…) and Outer Worlds II. And I’m thinking: Don’t you forget the best part?
Deathfire was also a perfect sequel. Fixed or threw out things that didn’t work, polish the things that did to be even better, having a interesting story and a setting that felt very fresh, away from standard-medieval-fantasy.
Anyway Deathfire is one of the best RPGs of the lasts years and everyone who likes old school RPGs should play it.
As far as the modern Zietgeist is concerned, Obsidian is “the company that made Fallout New Vegas”, which naturally makes their FPS RPGs draw more attention than their isometric ones, regardless of their actual quality.
I have a great deal of trouble believing it’s better than Mask of the Betrayer.
Deadfire is better than Pillars 1 in just about every way
I was under the impression that the community’s opinion was split roughly 50/50 as to which PoE game was better (their Metacritic scores are basically identical). It seems the readership of this blog leans pretty heavily towards 2.
I do think POE1 is very interesting in how *relentlessly* on-theme it is. Almost every quest turns on the central conceit of identity/the soul/memory that is the core of the game, even when you at first think they don’t.
I’m also in the ‘thought PoE1 was mid but really enjoyed Deadfire’ party.
Italian states raised condottieri in response to specific military threats – they did not maintain them continuously in peacetime. Indeed, one of the key advantages of condottieri was precisely that: you could pay them in war time and not pay them in peace time, though of course they were also famously untrustworthy.
Actually, Italian Renaissance state did continuosly employ condottieri, even in peacetime; the first permanent, professional armies in Europe were raised in Venice and Milan, a few years before the ordonnances of Charles VII.
The basic bibliography is the following:
– Michael Mallett, Mercenaries and their masters;
– Michael Mallett and John Hale, The military organization of a Renaissance state: Venice, 1400-1607;
– Nadia Covini, L’esercito del duca – Organizzazione militare e istituzioni al tempo degli Sforza, on Milan;
– Francesco Storti, L’esercito napoletano nella seconda metà del Quattrocento, on Naples;
– id., I lancieri del re, always on Naples;
– Enrica Guerra, Soggetti a “ribalda fortuna”. Gli uomini dello stato estense nelle guerre dell’Italia quattrocentesca, on Ferrara and the Este dynasty;
– William Caferro, Continuity, Long-Term Service, and Permanent Forces – A Reassessment of the Florentine Army in the Fourteenth Century, Journal of Modern History. The only, and very brief, study on Florence.
Two seminal articles to understand how a Renaissance mercenary company worked are:
– Mario del Treppo, ‘Gli aspetti organizzativi, economici e sociali di una compagnia di ventura italiana’, Rivista storica italiana, LXXV/2 (1973), pp. 253-75;
– id., ‘Sulla struttura della compagnia o condotta militare’, in Condottieri e Uomini d’Arme nell’Italia del Rinascimento, ed. by Mario del Treppo, (Naples: Liguori, 2001).
Unfortunately, except for Mallett and Caferro, almost all the scolarship on the subject is Italian. If you can read it, then the fundamental work on Renaissance “operational” military history is Piero Pieri,Il Rinascimento e la crisi militare italiana, 1955.
Thank you Paolo for that list! I’ve read Mallet’s works (especially Mercenaries and their Masters), and I think he did a very good job of showing how the Condottieri system evolved, with a focus on the 15th century. Professor’s Devereaux’s comments may be reflective of a certain period, but by the end of the 15th century most Italian states were keeping their condottieri on the rolls for long periods of time including peacetime (although obviously expanding during war). There were many different types of contracts, but they had generally become quite long term.
The big exception seems to have been Florence, which kept old fashioned, short-term contracts. I wonder if an emphasis on Florentine history (in English sources) biased earlier views of condottieri? Although I think in terms of being untrustworthy it was often the Florentine government that was at fault!!
Anyway, I’m trying to learn Italian, but I’m not good enough to read the Italian books. With machine translation I might be able to muddle through the articles. I will try to track some of them down.
Elder Scrolls having more standing forces than you’d expect could possibly come down to monster attacks being a constant threat.
That is in itself a very unusual arrangement for a state and should be seen as a compromise for playability. Usually, states would use their large amount of standing forces to clear out all those trolls, goblins, ogres, rieklings, minotaurs, Falmer and bandits in the countryside, so that the countryside is safe to travel for the tax collector.
I mean, especially in Oblivion, you see the Imperial Legion patrolling the roads constantly. If you are attacked, it’s very likely that they will join in to help.
We also see (admittedly not the state) the Arcane University conduct missions to clear the roads of rogue wizards.
I think the main issue is that the Imperial Legion doesn’t go storm all the dungeons to eliminate the problem over the long term. Granted, if the monsters and dwemer constructs and draugr don’t regularly launch raids out of their dungeons the military commitment to eliminate them may be much higher than needed for the patrols. And in Skyrim a lot of them are in pretty bad terrain it’s notoriously difficult to root raiders out of.
The other alternative is that said trolls, goblins, ogres etc are also subsistence farmers being visited by the tax collector. If you have other intelligent species, nothing prevents them being incorporated into a state which may or may not divide cleanly on species.
However, ethnic violence is a default state of premodern humanity irl, so it’s not like “clearing out” the others (being cleared out by them, or a stalemate with ongoing conflict) is unrealistic.
” Consequently, in the absence of industrial production, there’s no amount of economic activity you can be doing in the remaining small slice (think 10-20% at most) of the economy that is going to allow a city to import all of its food and fabric.”
The Forgotten Realms can skirt this with magic as a highly productive industry; some magic users can literally conjure food out of nowhere, although Baldurs Gate 3’s game mechanics seem to be missing the efficient of doing this (Goodberries seem to be inefficient in BG3 compared to tabletop, and you can’t eat a Heroes’ Feast), and such magic users are generally better off using their magic for other purposes like brewing potions if they can.
D&D mechanics have generally not bothered providing mechanics for utility magic not relevant to adventurers. Sure, they tell us that Eberron’s magic trains work by binding elementals, but no mechanics are provided for ho bound Elementals translate to hovering locomotion.
This is because there’s no reason to provide mechanics for things players don’t need mechanized. I assure you that if you deep dive the wider D&D lore, you will in fact find references to non-militarized magic for tasks such as removing mildew and clearing up pimples. But that’s not something worth foregrounding in a fairly contained game that doesn’t even let you do the full 20 levels.
I do like that Eberron gets deeper into this: not only are first and second level spells widely available, but they’re frequently stronger than player version but drastically more limited. Players can cast predigistation to clean a small cloak, a dedicated magewright who’s had years of experience can cast it on a hotel laundry room; players can use divination to receive simple answers about what will happen in the next thirty minutes while a weather man will be able to cast a lengthy ritual to look days and weeks into he future but only about whether it’ll rain. On top of that while first and second level Spells are commonplace, fifth level is basically only available to states and powerful non state actors, and anything above that is the province of legendary one off geniuses
If I recall, 3rd edition was pretty good about including rituals and spells and such that would be generally useless for adventurers, but really valuable for civilians. Things that would increase the crop yield for the next season, for instance (Plant Growth: 3rd level druid spell, “This effect targets plants within a range of one-half mile, raising their potential productivity over the course of the next year to one-third above normal.”). Heck, even a “purify food/drink” cantrip restoring spoiled food would be of significant benefit, I’d imagine. I also recall more recently a spell that would provide a bounty of sea creatures for coastal communities.
High-level DND characters are an outside-context problem. A company of 5th level characters would be an unstoppable army. A handful of really high level characters would be like dropping modern technology on the Middle Ages. A fireball cast by a 5th level has no real-life comparable pre-gunpowder at least. A high-level caster can easily summon and control monsters that cannot be harmed by non-magical weapons, meaning no one in an ordinary army can harm them. A 15th level fighter could probably take on dozens of ordinary 1st level soldiers with ease. One Child of Bhaal after defeating Irenicus could halt any effort to establish a tyranny.
It’s even worse in previous editions. In 3.5, a level 15 fighter is functionally invulnerable if you’re fighting level 1 enemies (his AC is basically too high to be hit, his basic saves are also too high to be impacted by magic). He basically cannot be hit and will always hit in return. Basically every city requires high level defenders to prevent a rogue adventuring party from just conquering it within an afternoon.
” In 3.5, a level 15 fighter is functionally invulnerable if you’re fighting level 1 enemies (his AC is basically too high to be hit, his basic saves are also too high to be impacted by magic). He basically cannot be hit and will always hit in return. ”
Another advantage of WFRP over D&D – there is a limit to how good high-level characters can get, dictated by the advance scheme mechanic. It is impossible to get a human character over Strength 6, for example, regardless of how experienced he is. The short version is that your character can be Batman – wealthy, strong, fast, intelligent, extremely well-equipped – but if a first-level thug shoots Batman in the face, Batman dies. Your character cannot be Superman.
That sounds to me like a system in which one Child of Bhaal can successfully establish a tyranny. An inegalitarian distribution of military power leads to an inegalitarian distribution of political, and ultimately economic, power.
Most of the potential combat encounters once the party reaches Baldur’s Gate are of levels appropriate to the party. The first people you’re likely to talk to include a couple of hired thugs from the guild whose levels are nearly in double digits. (Although you get a satisfying reaction when you tell them about the level 2 boss encounter.)
There’s a reason why Cormyr has its own War Wizards as part of their dedicated military…
I’ve often felt that the warfare system that would develop under D&D conditions would look much more like contemporary warfare than anything else: squad based, lots of maneuver and fortification based around avoiding/achieving line of sight and artillery attacks (but not many _long range_ artillery attacks, your main fair is a wizard sneaking up within 150 feet), lots of information warfare around the various divination magics, questions of air superiority (although that part does probably shake out differently, since aerial recon is cheap thanks to familiars but getting something offensive into the air is a much bigger investment).
Baldur’s Gate at war would probably look more like the Battle of Bakhmut than anything classical or medieval (while still having a lot of unique wrinkles–would really love to see Bret explore it)
@thirdplac3 Absolutely!
Magic leading to a “Modern System of War” seems criminally underexplored in High Fantasy – outside of isekai-style stories that overly focus on ‘level progression’. I’m far more interested in what impacts this has on a broader society!
If you want to avoid fantasy warfare dominated by Quadratic Wizards, I’ve often thought that you can (a) limit their numbers so drastically that they’re generally irrelevant, or (b) Wizards basically ‘lock in’ on one another and cancel out magic, leaving the grunts to duke it out as if magic doesn’t exist anyways.
The Craft Sequence is a fun one where the magic system was actually inspired by the 2008 financial crisis. Basically magic is powered by soul energy, which people naturally regenerate at a low rate and can also be obtained from “necromatic earths” I’m pretty sure are literally fossil fuels and starlight. Originally this worked on a god-based system where people believing in a god created a god and then they could give energy to that god by worshiping it and have it handed back out by miracles, but then a guy figured out how the mechanics of this actually worked and discovered/created the ability for individuals to use magic via contracts and legalistic arguments. The gods predictably flipped out, he and his early apprentices killed a shocking number of gods before the reality at his location tore to the point his wife stabbed him in the chest to stop the whole world from being consumed, and the apprentices who had the good sense to run started teaching people. Many, many dead gods and Craftfolk later, there’s a fragile peace between the survivors and the Deathless Kings who have so much power and have made so many bargains they’re kept alive by sheer force of magical obligation are the rulers of good chunks of the planet. The Hidden Schools where Craftfolk study are open to anyone who can do the ritual to call them, but this obviously favors the highly-educated.
Most of the story isn’t concerned with warfare and mostly follows people in complex magical/legal scenarios like a murder/bankruptcy investigation when a god who is highly active in the soulstuff trade suddenly and unexpectedly falls below the level of soulstuff required to maintain sentience, but we do see some. The regular people involved use heavily enchanted gear and magic weapons and fight dispersed to avoid having the air turning to fire catching too many of them, the Craftfolk are coated in wards worked into their skin, and they employ a lot of magical beasts like reanimated dragons.
The later books then basically have an AI crises that might lead to the Singularity, which is a Big Problem because apparently that happens to a lot of planets and then either they stick everyone in sensory pods to maximize soulstuff creation and go hunting for other planets or they get eaten by AIs that have already done that. It actually happened to a previous civilization on the planet but some super-powerful lava serpent gods of unknown origin smacked the attacking AI in the nose hard enough that it decided continuing left it too vulnerable to the others.
I’ve already yelled once in this set of comments about the Commonweal series, but their fundamental question (“how do you build an equal society in a world of Dark Lord wizards?”) sometimes means you get an illustration how one fights an invading Dark Lord + army in that world – magical artillery and necromancy both feature heavily.
(These are novels where “every soldier we recruit is a loss to the economy” is literally stated. The interaction between defence and society is seriously considered, as is the impact of magic on both.)
I suppose there’s an option (c) of requiring material components for spells. It’s much harder to spam fireballs if your society doesn’t have a sufficiently sophisticated economy to provide large quantities of guano and sulfur. Likewise, higher level magics might require a Manhattan project level effort to provide the raw magical materials even if they had a wizard with adequate power to cast the spell.
Scale the requirements or availability up/down as necessary.
D&D is mostly uninterested in exploring the downstream effects of its magic system on society which, as much as I might make fun of it, is probably for the best.
Heroe’s Feast is actually an available spell in BG3 and creates food you can use for resting in addition to its gameplay effects.
Given the rarity of PC classes in general, magic users in particular, and people with more than a couple levels especially I don’t think the math works out. Even if they devoted all possible spell slots to supplying food I don’t think they can keep everyone fed, and the opportunity cost of not having healing magic or employing them in combat is pretty big
You can eat the Heroes’ Feast, it creates a container with a lot of random camp supplies in it.
The temple of Ilmater is specifically said to be feeding refugees so they might be using Create Food, but the murdered Father Logan may have been their highest level cleric (at level 5) which with two 3rd level spell slots would only allow him to keep 30 people fed on an ongoing basis.
Correction noted on Heroes’ Feast.
This post has given me an excellent opportunity to rant about one thing that bugs me about nearly every single popular fantasy setting in games, and that thing is how *magic* is woven into the world. If a writer wants to develop a fantasy setting that feels internally coherent and historically-grounded, then clearly the existence of very visible and mostly reliable magic should significantly change the structure of that society -and consequently, its army- yet very few of them really grapple with the implications of their magic system.
*How* magic would change society of course depends a lot on the magic system itself, but most popular fantasy videogame and TTRPG settings go for something along these lines:
1) Magic is a general human skill that is possible for everyone to learn, but it requires professional tutoring and/or literacy and access to plenty of books as bare minimum to practice and it takes much time and effort (a high-level wizard being analogous to a virtuoso violinist or professional athlete in this regard).
2) The upper-ends of magical skill are incredibly powerful, ranging from “can live forever and destroy a whole city with a spell” to “can fundamentally rework reality itself and become a God”. A powerful sorcerer is essentially a pre-modern WMD.
3) There are “Magic Guilds”, though joining them doesn’t seem to be compulsory to perform or learn magic in most settings (they are the mainstream source of employment/quests rather than an actual monopoly).
4) Magic is present *everywhere*. Magician’s shops and random wizards walking around are a common sight even in medium-sized towns, and most foes you face will have at least some magical ability. “Wizard” is a casual pick in character selection that doesn’t change much about your character’s way of relating to the world other than the way they fight in combat, what items they use and the occasional dialogue choice here and there.
I’m not even going to get into the nitty gritty of how the economy and technology needs to account for the capabilities of magic (for instance, if transmuting materials to gold is easy, gold wouldn’t be usable as currency). I’m just going to focus on this aspect: In any pre-modern society where points 1) and 2) are true, magic would obviously be an activity exclusively restricted to the high aristocracy, and both the learning and using of magic would be very strictly regulated by elite institutions (most likely a Temple that also acts as a true magic guild). So points 3) and 4) cannot possibly hold.
One reason is economic: If magic requires literacy and access to books, well over 90% of the population of a pre-modern agrarian society will never even dream of learning the basics. But the main reason is political: No way in HELL that the magnates of any society would allow some peasant’s son to learn how to invoke lightning from his fingertips. Even commoners probably wouldn’t want magic to be widespread, the common arguments used to support gun control would probably be employed much more forcefully in defense of strictly regulating the power to summon Storm Atronachs.
The most you could see is a special route for commoners who show great magic talent to be adopted into aristocratic society in order to learn magic, but they would have to undergo an arduous and heavily ritualized training process that instills strict loyalty to their patrons and would probably never be fully accepted, trusted or free (something analogous to mamlukes or janissaries). Of course there would also be resistance to the magic monopoly, and one can imagine fugitive rogue sorcerers, a “black market” for magic and magic pirates that the society regularly has to combat.
Furthermore, magic would be a standard and obligatory aspect of any aristocratic education. A warrior-aristocratic class would value learning to cast fireballs as much as they valued learning horse-riding and sword-fighting in real life, while aristocrats in urban and centralized polities would value learning mind-reading and charming spells (as well as defense against them!) with the same zeal of a Roman or Greek aristocrat studying rhetoric and literature, a Song-dynasty gentleman-scholar studying the Confucian classics or a Heian-era minister practicing poetry.
Misuse of magic in a way that violates laws or religious taboos would be a recurrent source of lawsuits and family feuds among elites. “Magocratic” societies where the elites are all sorcerers are a common theme in fantasy, but they are usually presented as one option among many kinds of societies – realistically EVERY society in such a fantasy setting would be a magocracy, and nearly every army tactic would be centered on “how to employ our mages most effectively” [We can consider martial/fighter-class characters who have superhuman power to also be using “magic” in a more general sense. There is a reason the great heroes in mythology are commonly demigods or blessed by the gods – their superhuman fighting capabilities are magical in origin!].
And I think all of this could be integrated into both TTRPG and videogames to make for highly compelling settings and player challenges. In order to play a caster you would have to pick a character of noble background (or pick one of the alternative paths I mentioned) and this would come with a lot of unique buffs and restrictions making for a very unique experience in comparison to other classes. Playing as a “rogue” sorcerer that broke taboos or learned magic illegally would be extra challenging as everyone would be after you. Conflicts related to the regulation of magic would be central to most quest lines. Enemy sorcerers would be rare but extra dangerous. Etc.
This rant mostly applies to the Elder Scrolls and D&D universes, but it doesn’t help that they are by far the most popular and influential fantasy RPG franchises at the moment. The only well-known franchise I can think off the top of my head that goes for a more realistic representation of magic as a highly restricted and regulated discipline is Dragon Age.
Glorantha, the world of the TTRPG Runequest is a world that has all of the 4 characteristics, and it the world encompasses this. Dragon Pass is a wargame set in this world, and the high-end units are single-character “heros” with the person singular power level of several infantry units. Most/all societies are lead by “magocracies”, though in this world there is no true “mage” separation — everyone who reaches any level of person power is going to be spell-caster to some extent. But, while the magic is widely available to everyone, except at the truly heroic level, it does not provide mass-destruction spells the way D&D’s classic fireball does. But, “make my weapon a +2 weapon for the next 10 or 20 combat rounds” will be something most every infantry member would have.
Absolutely agreed, and I still think this should lead to interesting stories!
Every fantasy society with Quadratic Wizards (a.k.a. where magic is extremely powerful, above what a mundane person could ever achieve) should be a magocracy as the rule – how an exception could possibly work could be interesting!
Dragon Age does a decent job of this, contrasting Tevinter with the Templar-dominated southern countries, but requires in-universe magical tools to make the Templars a viable threat to mages.
This is why Otome Villainess Isekai is the most realistic genre of fantasy. All of the mages are warrior aristocrats except for the one common girl who happens to have an extremely high level of magical skill, which leads to her being co-opted into the religious and political structure of society, but creates friction with the pre-existing elite who believe that as a low-born commoner she shouldn’t be consorting with them.
The not quite Villainess Isekai in that the reincarnated person isn’t the villainess story The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady is a fun one. This is basically the starting setup, except that the princess can’t actually cast spells despite having a ton of mana so she gets really into magitech. For some reason I really don’t grasp the prince thinks she’s the expected heir despite it being male-preference, her infamously being a mad scientist who is opposed by most of the aristocracy because her magitech is usable by anyone and she explicitly wants to make it widely available, and her explicitly renouncing her claim to the throne.
Anyway, the story kicks off when she crashes through the window on an experimental broom in the traditional “prince calls off his engagement to the villainess in favor of the commoner” scene and decides to make off with the upset villainess. Then later when the prince is preparing to prove himself by leading a force to slay an attacking dragon they completely steal his thunder by flying in and killing it so they can use its blood for experimental magic.
I like how China Mieville does magic or thaumaturgy in the Bas-Lag trilogy. There the wealthy get a liberal magic education at university, then specialise as scientists or military officers. Meanwhile working class thaumaturges presumably go to an apprenticeship or magic trade school and become things like metallo-thaumaturges, working in foundries and workshops. The ruling class seem to have no more fear of them than they do working class soldiers, who could also turn on them.
I feel like the need for Level 1 Wizard to be a viable-but-unexceptional character option also pushes such settings towards magic being a free power-up rather than something with real costs.
A setting where only kinslayers can use combat spells or where using magic requires you to have a crippling opium addiction is going to have very different cultural effects than D&D’s “I can cast [X] fireballs every day, and it costs me nothing other than overly-specific short-term personal fatigue and literal pennies.”
Can I interest you in Graydon Saunders’ Commonweal series of novels, where this is literally a foundational point of the worldbuilding?
To quote James Davis Nicoll’s review:
“a world where […] magic has incessantly shaped and reshaped the environment (geological and biological). Where you cannot understand this world without knowing of magic and its history; it would be like trying to make sense of our world while ignoring the existence of grasses.
For the various intelligent species (both evolved and created), this is a world where outbreaks of dark and malevolent magical overlords are as common as century droughts.
But not in the Commonweal, an enclave of thinking beings, many of whom (but not all) are human (or mostly so). The Commonweal has worked out a way for the little folk and the great masters of magic to coexist”
(Warning: they are NOT easy reads. Saunders regards infodumps as for the weak or something; if the viewpoint character isn’t interested in it it doesn’t appear in the text.)
It gets worse – most magic systems as written make powers available to both men and women, so there goes the patriarchy. And while you are right as far as domestic politics goes, any state that taught magic to commoners would steamroll the opposition in much the same way as Rome, with its masses of heavily-armed infantry, kicked all comers (see also French Revolution, Satsuma rebellion and similar episodes). Inter-state competition would work in favour of devolution, which in turn would provoke more changes.
In regards to the taxation in the provinces, Gerdur says this.
“It’s my mill. Some folks think it’s my town too, but it ain’t. The Jarl in Whiterun owns the land and the town. I just pay the taxes.”
Since Gerdur is the one that pays the taxes to the Jarl for the entire town, is seems that, in least in rural settlements, taxes are placed on communities. Gerdur’s family founded the town and she seems to be the local Big Woman, though more of a well-off farmer than a minor aristocracy (she and her husband both work in the mill). It thus seems the taxes are collected by the local village leader and given to the local government (Jarl in this case), who presumably gives a portion to the Imperial administration.
In regards to the town-guards everywhere, Riverrun initially lacks guards, and an early quest is delivering a message to the Jarl to send troops there after the dragon attack at Helgen. Presumably, the guards found in many other settlements may have been sent there out of fear of dragon attacks or represent alertness due to the ongoing war. At the end of the civil war quest line, roughly half of the guards in Skyrim are members of the victorious faction’s military and thus occupying garrisons.
As for the number of local soldiers, to me the Dawnstar guards felt like they could credibly represent the local Jarl’s retinue, while the few in Winterhold still felt far too numerous.
Lovely as always getting to learn from a professional on these matters, especially as I’m more familiar with D&D than with either of the other two settings. A part of me is also admittedly disappointed you didn’t cover something from Warhammer as an example, as while I doubt the armies of Sigmar’s Empire, the Dwarfs (Normal or Chaos), or the elves are wholly authentic I think factions like the Greenskins, the Orge Kingdoms, and various undead offered an interesting look at how more fantastical elements like necromancy or radically different biological needs may relate to these principles.
Yeah, Baldur’s Gate’s big problem is that The Forgotten Realms exists to facilitate adventurers. Mind, when both BG1 and BG3 center attempts by Big Men to take over Baldur’s Gate as a tyrant, I think the instability of the city’s political arrangement is doing exactly the narrative job it is designed to do. The lack of dynamism over time owes a lot more to absurd fantasy timelines and a need for familiarity than anything realistic.
It’s been phased out over the years, but high level D&D used to be ‘settle down and become the local lord’ and it’s hard to do that when it’s a weeklong march to get out of the Holy Balduran Empire. Thus, extreme political fragmentation, as justified by various ravening monsters, hostile raiding cultures (Uthgardt, orcs, goblins, wild elves, Shadow Druids, et al) and international companies and societies like the Zhentarim and the Harpers. The canonical BG1/2 protagonist (damnation upon his canonicity) became a Grand Duke of Baldur’s Gate, and I think that’s a fairly safe assumption about governance on the Sword Coast – powerful political outsiders get brought in, because its dangerous to exclude them.
Practically, I think the oligarchs of Baldur’s Gate *do* employ an army – they come in groups of 4-10 individuals with outlandish amounts of personal prowess and extremely negotiable morals.
In terms of a fantasy-ish book that talks exactly about civil-military failure, I’d love to get your take on Promise of Blood by Brian McClellan and the Powder Mage Trilogy!
> the Stormcloak rebellion was about to end before Alduin intervenes
If I remember it right, wasn’t it pure chance that they were almost able to assassinate the rebellion’s head (literally)? The troops themselves are still in stalemate, proven by the entire civil war questions. I guess what’s gotten in luck can also be undone by luck 😀
> most communities have sporadic security needs and small communities generally do not even require much of a permanent, standing constabulary
Now I’m curious if this is because of, in Skyrim specifically, the breakdown of social order caused by civil war. In game we see tons of bandits everywhere, so maybe the guard position is quite recently established to restore some local order.
I think Skyrim actually does a decent job as modeling the actual state of local forces once you get past the standing armies of guards that really just exist to harass the player.
There are at least two times where a Jarl sends forces with you during a quest to defeat a local threat.
In Whiterun this force is a small groud of guards led by the Jarl’s housecarl to fight a dragon. Whiterun is one of the largest cities in Skyrim and probably has some permanently employed professional guards even if most of the guards would be part of a temporary militia, and even then the Jarl’s personal military force is leading.
The other time this happens is in Morthal when you are sent to clear out a vampire den, and instead of guards the Jarl just gathers up a bunch of citizens and sends them off with whatever weapons and armor they have (not much.) This is what the “guards” in the smaller settlements around Skyrim would be if they weren’t needed to act as a check on the player’s behavior.
(Also the people the Jarl sends don’t actually help you fight the vampire which makes sense for a citizen militia sent to fight a vampire known to be especially powerful.)
Ooh ooh if you do another video game analysis do Tyranny. As a game it isn’t Baldur’s Gate (any number) but if you like Pillars of Eternity you will comparably like the gameplay or Tyranny. And I really want to read a Professor Devereaux analysis of the viability of the Kyros empire.
He’s mentioned Tyranny a couple of times in past posts, he’s played it. I suspect it doesn’t feature here because the military system isn’t very historical – you’ve got devolution of the military function to vassals who raise their own personal forces in Ashe and Nerat, but they both appear to be full-time field commanders and there’s no sense that they’re administering personal territories that actually support said field armies.
The setting book is a little weird too, the empire sounds very bureaucratic with the whole centralized redistribution of resources aspect and restrictions on merchants but you don’t really see a bureaucracy in place that could actually do that. And it also implies there are Archon governors ruling the regions in addition to heading up specific institutions, but all the Archons you see, who seem to be the most powerful and important, can just sit on the Tiers for years without any apparent consequences to governance in the larger empire.
I think part of the problem is that we don’t see much of The Empire as such, we see what is essentially occupation forces deployed to newly conquered territories. The reason we don’t see much of a bureaucracy is presumably because there hasn’t been time to set one up: The Tiers are still somewhat unsettled.
Note that the distribution of land seems to be a major friction point between Nerat and Ashe, so I presume the expectation is that they’d be allocated land in the Tiers to govern, and the fact that they haven’t yet (and are squabbling over the exact distribution) is part of the reason for the fracture.
Graven Ashe was an opponent of Kyros who was defeated and switched sides: The idea seems to be to deploy him as far away from his natural base of power in the North as possible.
The Tiers are basically not integrated yet, with Tuon being in charge of setting it up to some extent. He’s the chief legal official for the whole Empire and is here because building the local burecracy is his job. Nerat and Ashe are in charge of the professional (not very in the case of the Chorus) army. Bledan doesn’t really have a leadership role, he’s in charge of personally recruiting or killing new Archons and maybe does other intel stuff on the side.
Also, it’s never outright stated, but I have the distinct impression that with the conquest of the continent completed, Ashe starting to have a breakdown from all the injuries and deaths being transmitted to his brain, Nerat going increasingly insane, Tuon getting too tied up in legalism rather than purely enforcing Kyros’s will, and the Fatebinder being a big problem because Edicts can’t overlap and having another Edict Archon might mess with the reputation-based power of Archons, Kyros thinks they’ve outlived their usefulness and just wants to kill them all. The game starts with an Edict placing two of them under a conditional death sentence, there is no effort to control the civil war, and the Archon of Plagues has marshelled an army to kill the winner before they know who won.
The one problem with this theory is that Kyros and the two more loyal Archons seem to be setting up the Fatebinder to be a powerful Archon on purpose until suddenly Kyros is going to kill them. At launch there wasn’t even the possibility of remaining loyal
.
Oh, we do also have a funding source; apparently iron is an imperial monopoly both by law and by the forging techniques available depending on magic that’s not taught outside the organization. That likely generates a lot of revenue and means the Disfavored get their extremely heavy gear at a discounted rate.
I would dispute that the Empire really enjoys solid escalation dominance even during the heyday of the Septim Empire, and in fact by the time of the Skyrim civil war the Mede Empire has already lost it pretty decisively.
To source that claim, I’d return once again to the (ridiculously hagiographic) Brief History of the Empire, which importantly notes that the most successful attempts at reconstituting the Empire come from Uriel VII’s father and great-aunt, the two immediately previous rulers, whose strategy is noted as being a very slow pace where they declare war and subdue every single duke and count personally to reintegrate their holdings into the Empire.
The games support that claim – Uriel VII relies notably and famously on different means, especially the Blades as secret agents, to try and reassert control after the 10-year lapse of imperial control that is the Imperial Simulacrum, instead of the Legion. In Daggerfall, he sends an agent to find an ancient superweapon to reconquer the region and in Morrowind, he gets extremely lucky and his stab in the dark with a prophecy manages to finally dislodge a theocratic government that had resisted direct imperial control for the entirety of the Empire.
(Side note: It’s also notable how extremely lucky Uriel VII gets in that his agents don’t go rogue with this power – Daggerfall does actually give the player the option to not hand the control of the weapon to the Empire, with the expected consequences. While Morrowind sort of pulls the punch by ending the story when Dagoth Ur dies. But it should be noted what the situation is like right at that moment: You have the reborn Nerevar, recognized as war leader by three of the five Great Houses and by Vivec himself, who is actually effectively dictating strategy to the Nerevarine, plus the alliance with the Ashlander tribes, who successfully resisted being integrated into the state by both the Tribunal and the Empire, who is prophecied as the one who will “drive out the invaders of Morrowind, and shall reestablish the ancient laws and customs of the Dark Elven nations” and who currently does not have a handler from the Blades – this could go very, very wrong for the Empire.)
As for lost escalation dominance of the Mede Empire, the main source here is A Concise Account of the Great War Between the Empire and the Aldmeri Dominion (of just The Great War as the book item is called), which basically chronicles the Empire not just failing but more of less going nolo contendere against several provinces: Black Marsh is lost during the Oblivion crisis and never reclaimed. Sumerset is lost in 4E22 and never reclaimed. Valenwood falls to a rebellion in 4E29 and never reclaimed. There was apparently never even an attempt to reclaim either of those elven provinces, since what follows is 70 years of deliberate isolation by the Aldmeri Dominion, which is only possible if the Empire never tries to pierce that isolation with an army. And then Elsweyr also falls to a rebellion in 4E115 that had been brewing since 4E98 and is also never reclaimed. After the Great War in 4E175, Hammerfell is just let go instead of the Empire attempting to enforce its peace treaty on them, and notably wins the war with the Aldmeri Dominion with its local forces while the Legion struggled to reach the white peace that was signed. That means we can be sure the Legion lacked escalation dominance over Hammerfell.
The Dragonborn DLC also calls into question to what extend Morrowind is still part of the Empire. The impression one gets is that they’re basically independent – if they’ve not declared themselves officially out that’s because there’s no point in doing that since the Empire already went nolo contendere to all their institutions being thrown out and the old ruling order reestablished.
One possible explanation of why the matter of taxes does not come up during the Skyrim civil war might be that Skyrim as a province could possibly have a special status as another core province due to its history – if we’re being very gracious towards the writers.
Notably, Tiber Septim does not conquer Skyrim, we’re told it joins voluntarily after recognizing his Thu’um during the Battle of Sancre Tor. Which is weirdly vague, but it would make sense if they declared Tiber Septim High King in a moot and thus he leads Cyrodiil and Skyrim in a personal union. Which leaves the question of how his successors kept in control, given that those two places have very different succession laws (The Empire uses male-preference primogeniture, the High King is elected) and thus would separate upon his death. And the answer that would make the most sense if the nobility of Skyrim was integrated into the imperial politics by personal unions, so that the current Emperor was always able to sway the jarls to elect him as High King as well. This also (sort of) fits with the narrative of the War of the Red Diamond, which is basically a succession crisis between the main Cyrodiil line of the Septim dynasty and the Solitude cadet line.
However, the High Kingship line clearly diverges from the emperor’s line after the War of the Red Diamond so under this theory, as a result of the war, Skyrim would lose part of its special status and be administered more like the other provinces that were acquired by conquest. Still, it’s possible that they retained some tax-exempt privileges and a more tight connection with the Cyrodiil nobility. That might also be why the Empire is fighting so hard to keep Skyrim, when it let so many other provinces go after only token resistance: Because it’s about to lose part of its core.
I will observe that in the context of the US military, there is a somewhat pragmatic reason why senior officers tend to have advanced degrees and why officers are essentially always college graduates: Modern warfare is really complicated.
To make matters worse, you cannot learn it through an apprenticeship system because nations are not continuously or near-continuously at war- or, if they are, they are not fighting the kind of war that provides useful training on all the many, many kinds of systems they would need in the event of a more serious conflict (e.g. twenty years of guerilla war in Afghanistan is not necessarily a good prep school for fighting off Iranian aerial drone strikes!). Even when we ignore skills like leadership that are classically imagined as not being passed on through “book learning,” there are large amounts of specialist knowledge required for modern officers to be effective. How to use certain complex weapon systems, the specialized behaviors of various pieces of machinery, logistics in general…
Much of this knowledge effectively must be delivered in an academic setting or via some process that correlates with the process of academic learning. No general who does not read books is going to be a good general in the modern era.
Of course, in a way, this itself reflects the structure of our civilian society.
Technically you are correct, but the issue is deeper: what have the US officers actually studied in the university? The curriculum of US officer education follows the American model of higher education, with it being possible for officer students (in ROTC or West Point) to choose very diverse set of academic majors and minors. The actual military education is, in fact, rather thin, and it needs to be supplemented right after commissioning by quite long professional courses. This is not atypical for US society, where the undergraduate degree is only loosely related to what the student actually wishes to do later in life. Senior US officers typically get a civilian master’s degree in their military specialty, and another one in a military staff college. This mirrors the private industry, where you usually take an MBA in early middle-career.
Compare this with academic model of Continental Europe, where both civilian and military education is much more closely tied with the actual profession. For example, most European physicians and lawyers don’t have an underlying pre-med bachelor’s degree, but start their medical and legal education right after high school. Similarly, the European military academies tend to be much more military-oriented in their teaching. (Germany is a prominent exception, with the Universities of Bundeswehr giving a civilian acdemic education to future officers, as a conscious break from earlier traditions.)
So, this shows very well how the military recreates civilian social structures.
I wonder if someone can do a similar deep dive of Crimson Desert’s society and military organizations. The worldbuilding of the game seems quiet complex, with its open world landscape obvisouly dominated by different regional lords and factions.
I think there is a third option for Baldur’s Gate, and that is to have the city be currently in the process of transforming into the autocracy you describe. There is some lore to back that up beyond BG3:
In the previous Baldur’s Gate games, Sarevok arranged the Iron Crisis and the deaths of the council, setting himself up as Grand Duke and appointing a loyal underling as marshal of the Fists. It’s around that time they seem to become the standing defenders of the city rather than just a mercenary company based out of it, and it’s at this point that the Watch is probably sidelined.
Following those events, Abdel Adrian defeats him and after a long series of other adventures becomes the new marshal of the Flaming Fist when the previous one was executed by another Duke attempting his own takeover of the council. The Flaming Fist under Adrian then defeated that Duke’s own werewolf forces, and in the aftermath, a parliament was formed and they elected the popular and powerful Adrian as Grand Duke.
When Abdel Adrian was killed, Ulder Ravengard as his second in command of the Flaming Fist became their marshal, and was then elected as Grand Duke despite his lack of prior political involvement, a clear sign of how closely linked the stations of marshal and Grand Duke have become since Sarevok. Since then, by my count Ravengard has been targeted by at least three different attempts to kill or subvert him that have needed protagonist intervention to resolve. It’s hard not to see the hands of the other Dukes in those intrigues, as attempts to remove him and halt the increasing centralization of political power in the marshal that will otherwise end up as an autocracy.
Interested in the claim here that a preindustrial city cannot realistically afford to pay for food. So all cities obtained the majority of their grain directly through taxation rights on surrounding agriculture (or through transfers by some overarching administrative authority) rather than purchasing it?
Intuitively this sounds wrong to me. If a city’s exports aren’t more valuable than the food it consumes why even have the city and its industries? Are the administrative function and the military really holding up the entire specialized economy, everywhere, on their own – even in later, more developed agrarian economies?
You premise is I think flawed. You don’t have to compare “buying” grain to taxing grain, you have to compare the prices of the grain being bought. A hinterland that considers itself politically part of the city state will likely trade its grain at cost even if it’s not taxed directly – part of their payment is not in coin but in political representation and protection. While a city without an agricultural hinterland has to buy grain on the “open market”, such as one exists, which means it will pay a massive premium because, by default, most grain will be eaten directly by the populace and so there will not be a lot of surplus to supply the demand.
The other reason to have a city even though they’re grain and population sinks is the effect on the surrounding economy. The specialized artisans of the city can produce tools that allow the surrounding farmers to work their land more effectively, and a robust network of traders can allow farms to specialize in trade goods instead of subsistence grains, which on average will increase the land productivity. So the city takes grain, but its presence helps produce even more grain, making everyone a bit more wealthy.
1) “They’ll just trade the grain at cost due to political connections” the entire premise in the blog post is that the city is politically divided from the hinterlands. If it weren’t they would just be taxing them.
2) “The city wouldn’t be able to afford grain due to lack of market volume” even if we supposed that the hinterland is entirely absent, this isn’t necessarily true – history gives us Egypt which could export enormous amounts of grain such that their prices often undercut even local production for Mediterranean port cities.
But even if we assume there’s not such a conveniently productive maritime source available, the scenario again is not the hinterland being absent but being uncontrolled. And in that case the hinterland finds itself more economically bound to the city than the reverse – the city has access to something like an open market through its port, but to the extent the hinterland has any access to an open market it is through… the same port, that the city controls. So the hinterland’s surplus is all going to flow into the city regardless of whether the city can tax it directly.
3) “The city’s industries make agriculture more productive” if the city’s contribution is net positive, it will be able to afford to buy food for the tool-makers by selling the tools to their users.
I don’t think any of these apologies address the issue.
1. The premise in the blog post is that the city of Baldur’s Gate has a problem, ie is unrealistic, because it is politically divided from the hinterlands. Real world cities controlled the nearby farmland, so Baldur’s Gate should be taxing them.
2. Cities can’t afford “market price” grain because the long distance transport and storage infrastructure almost always doesn’t exist before the modern period. Egypt is a major grain exporter to Rome because it is part of the Roman Republic/Empire. The Roman legions are there to make sure that the Egyptians export their grain even if the local populace might be better off eating it themselves, and in Rome itself the price of grain is low for political reasons.
It’s also a special case because there’s seaborne transport all the way, down the Nile, across the Med, to Rome. Long distance land transport is almost always too slow and too expensive for food in the pre-modern era.
3. Very often the city is the centre of administration and/or religion. So there’s a positive side in that a city generates nice pottery, and steel tools, and better clothing, and prayers to keep the gods happy, and soldiers to keep raiders away, so being ruled by the city is better than not. And because the administrator/priest in the city has soldiers, if they don’t get fed, they can take what they want anyway from the hinterlands but now the farmers don’t get the positives. Usual pattern is for the farmers to be ruled by the city and have some say in affairs; malcontents move away.
In addition, the specific export of grain by the Ptolemies – that is, being sold to places outside their control, instead of moved within an empire – is historically practically unique. It not only required them to sit at a fertile place with all the advantages listed, but also to have a pressing need for silver. If they hadn’t insisted on their military system where there is a silver-paid ethnically distinct warrior class while ruling a country without any silver deposits, they wouldn’t have exported that grain.
I do note Baldur’s Gate actually *does* have a Hinterland: You see some of it in BG1. Where the areas closest to the city are farmland, then you get into the wilderness until you reach Beregost, which is a semi-indendent town. (but clearly under Baldurian influence, they have flaming fists there)
Egypt was conquered by the Roman Republic less than a human lifetime before it became the Empire. Before this conquest I think their export of grain to Greece could be explained by handling soil erosion. Ancient Athens sold wine and olive oil to Egypt in exchange of cereal grains. Wine and olive oil are made from the fruits of perennial plants.
This series has also talked about Egypt needing the exports for financial reasons; the soldiers expected to be paid in silver and Egypt had no silver mines so they needed to sell grain to get silver.
Ancient Athens imported most of its cereal grain before the conquests of Alexandros and the subsequent establishment of the Ptolemaic Kingdom.
Control of the contado was less about taxing grain that securing supply – especially in bad years. Btw, Athens’ grain supply largely came from the Black Sea, where ruling-class Scythians taxed lower-class farmers in grain and exported it (a pattern repeated with the Baltic and the Netherlands in medieval to early modern times).
I knew they imported most of their grain. But I just assumed they did it from Egypt because this country seemed easiest to get to.
The way I read it is this: a city with no hinterland has to import into its economy all the basic necessities it requires.
A city *with* a hinterland *has* those necessities within its economy, meaning that short-distance, small-scale trade can be relied on to handle most needs. You don’t have to go and buy all the food from abroad, the local peasants will bring food in for the market (in order to buy things they need and potentially acquire currency you make them need, by taxing them in it).
The city itself can be said to be importing in either case, but it’s a different kind of activity. And if you’re a big city with walls, reliant on a bunch of nearby settlements to provide you with food and textiles, they are *your* settlements. You need their labor and their production, they need (or ‘need’) your protection from various threats. Thus: if you don’t defend them, they end up broken off from you and presumably either doing their own thing, dying, or going to someone else’s market(s).
You’ve got it backward, I think. A preindustrial city exists because it’s a nexus of wealth extraction – whether that’s a palace or a temple extracting taxes, a collection of landowners extracting rents, an imperial state extracting tribute from its provinces, a commercial hub extracting duties from the merchants, etc (or probably some combination of the above). The wealth then flow downwards and support its population and industries – those rich people want soldiers, servants, fine clothes and jewelry, big houses with pretty things in it, and so on.
The biggest economic activity is still agriculture, so that’s still where most of the wealth is coming from. You could imagine a city buying its food by taxing its farmers in money and then exchanging food for that money with which the farmers will then pay their taxes – but it’s usually simpler (and requires much less coinage, i.e. precious metals) to just tax the farmers in agricultural products.
In a European context at least, some of the metrics seem to need to account for whether or not a commune has rights to hold markets, and the extent to which merchant and artisan economy has a lot more fluidity than agriculture. I think it’s a lot like the relationship today between extremely wealthy people or companies and finance; you’re richer on paper, but you need to make an arrangement with the business that will provide you with actual spending money in the here and now.
I feel this misinterprets OGH’s point. OGH said: “The problem here of course is that Baldur’s Gate doesn’t just need to defend the city core, it needs to defend the agricultural hinterland that feeds it.”
The point is that if the city does not control the area that feeds it, whoever does control that area can starve the city into submission. It is not a matter of money. It is a matter of someone else controlling the supply of a resource essential for life.
The essential thing about the Athenian Empire was not that it could force other polities to send it grain: it was that it could prevent any single power from stopping them. As long as it still had its fleet.
So with Baldur’s Gate: Anyone who can conquer its supplier of foodstuffs, or cut it of from them, or who already controls that supplier, can starve it into submission however impressive its wall. The wall, therefore, is not enough to defend the city indefinitely.
“I feel this misinterprets OGH’s point. OGH said: “The problem here of course is that Baldur’s Gate doesn’t just need to defend the city core, it needs to defend the agricultural hinterland that feeds it.”
The point is that if the city does not control the area that feeds it, whoever does control that area can starve the city into submission. It is not a matter of money. It is a matter of someone else controlling the supply of a resource essential for life.”
The thing is, IS there someONE else controlling the hinterland?
Please compare Free Imperial Cities. The four that survived Napoleon.
By the 1835 Census data, their sizes were:
*Hamburg 410 square km, 154 000 people
*Frankfurt am Main 101 square km, 54 000 people
*Bremen 256 square km, 52 000 people
*Lübeck 298 square km, 45 600 people
They were most definitely not fed by the taxes from the small land area they ruled. They had to pay for all their food… and produced something that did pay for all of it.
But I note that none of them had hinterland controlled by someONE!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Deutscher_Bund.svg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original
Bremen, small as her territory was, bordered both Hanover and Oldenburg, on opposite sides of Weser where Bremen sits.
Hamburg bordered Hanover on one side of Elbe – and Holstein and Lauenburg on the other side.
Lübeck actually had 4 land neighbours. Mecklenburg, Lauenburg, Holstein and an exclave of Oldenburg.
And Frankfurt´s mere 101 square km territory also had 4 land neighbours. Grand Duchy of Hesse, Electorate of Hesse, Duchy of Nassau and County of Homburg.
Could it have been a contributing reason why these Free Cities were not mediatized like tens of others were in 1803…1809?
That Hanover might, for example, embargo Bremen – but that would have been a modest inconvenience to Bremen if Oldenburg would not collaborate, and hurt Hanover more than it did Bremen?
Anything that happened after Napoleon is (more of less by definition) not an equilibrium state. Your point would be stronger if you examined the pre-Napoleon HRE, which is somewhat more stable as a long-term state of political ordering. Although that revealy the obvious counterargument: The HRE, for all its fractures, was nominally a single empire, which meant that the imperial cities could have called for the emperor to intervene in case of a trade war squeezing their supplies.
But on the balance, I do think you’re making a valid counterargument with this. In a situation where power is fractured and there is no single strong hostile polity nearby, a city-state might come by in an uneasy but stable arrangement with its surrounding polities, where it gets grain from them at reasonable prices, in return for not shutting them out from the markets. (This is almost certain the case with Hamburg, Lübek and Bremen managing to hold on to their special status for that long – these are all Hansa cities, and if they refused to let you use their harbors, then you were cut off from all sea trade)
Addendum: While the Hansa was technically dissolved by the 1800’s, these three cities (Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen) continued to basically act as if it still did and often got away with it. Part of that is Hamburg and Bremen sit in the mouths of two rivers whose watersheds together cover something like a third of the area of modern Germany and importantly, most of the other navigable rivers in Germany have their mouths outside of the German territory (for basically all definitions of “Germany” that are relevant here): The Rhine ends in the Low Countries and the Danube keeps going forever until reaching a sea, and then you’re still stuck behind the Bosporus. So their collective bargaining power for “Give us special rights or we shut down our harbors” was enormous. They couldn’t just play their immediate neighbors against each other, but every polity within their watershed.
Which does open up an avenue for analysis for the status of Baldur’s Gate. And actually, there is a sort of argument to be made here, even if one not as strong as for the Hanseatic Cities. If you look at the map, Iriaebor is a major thoroughfare for all east-west trade in the Forgotten Realms [src] and Baldur’s Gate is basically its seaport.
I have no idea what Frankfurt did to get away with its free imperial status – interestingly, while it sits of the Main as a major river, it’s close to but not on the confluence with the Rhine, so it couldn’t threaten to choke Rhine shipping. Maybe someone else knows more of the relevant history.
Lübeck is situated were the Trave empties into the Baltic Sea. This may have been enough to threaten to close the trade route. Frankfurt am Main did fall but was re-established in 1815. Hamburg and Bremen are still legally equal to the states of Germany along with Berlin.
The Trave as a river is pretty minor. I’d suspect the power comes from the portage – the short distance of transporting the goods overland between the Trave and the Elbe means you have a transport channel from the Baltic Sea to the North Sea that avoids the Danes (no offense).
There was a canal from Lauenburg (upstream of Bremen) to Lübeck before the current Elbe-Trave Canal.
” In a situation where power is fractured and there is no single strong hostile polity nearby, a city-state might come by in an uneasy but stable arrangement with its surrounding polities, where it gets grain from them at reasonable prices, in return for not shutting them out from the markets.”
True, but that is not quite the problem. Baldur’s Gate does not need an army because it needs to persuade people to sell it foodstuffs. BG needs an army because if it is besieged, there will be no one out there to break the siege. If it were part of a larger polity, it might only have to hold out until its overlord could raise a relief army. that can not happen with BG. It has to break the siege itself.
If its foodstuffs come down a river, it has to be able to prevent anyone else from blockading that river. If they come along roads, it has to be able to stop anyone from blockading those roads. If they come from the sea, it has to be able to break any blockade of the sea.
And you cannot do that by just hiding behind the walls.
@Lena Synnerholm:
“There was a canal from Lauenburg (upstream of Bremen) to Lübeck before the current Elbe-Trave Canal.”
Minor nitpick: Lauenburg is upstream of Hamburg. Bremen is over on the Weser.
@Alien@System
“Addendum: While the Hansa was technically dissolved by the 1800’s,”
Was it ever technically dissolved? I remember learning when I was growing up that it just stopped holding conventions. Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck kept “Hanseatic” in their full legal names. Every one of the report cards I got in school back when I was growing up started with the words “Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg”. A rather silly pretense, of course, but silly pretenses can sometimes tell us something.
“I have no idea what Frankfurt did to get away with its free imperial status – interestingly, while it sits of the Main as a major river, it’s close to but not on the confluence with the Rhine, so it couldn’t threaten to choke Rhine shipping. Maybe someone else knows more of the relevant history.”
For what it’s worth, Frankfurt eventually *lost* its status simply because it sided with Austria during the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, while Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck sided with Prussia.
Frankfurt was the seat of the Imperial Diet and other central institutions of the HRE. As such it was the equivalent of Washington DC or Canberra or similar ‘capital city’ enclaves.
@ad9 I do agree with that. It’s not quite my main point, which is more about the territorial control than the size of the forces. Still, based on that riverine trade analysis, I would expect Baldur’s Gate, Elturel, Scornubel and Iriaebor to have rather close political binding (be it by force or alliance) since they all depend on each other for keeping the trade open, and we don’t see that as far as I can tell.
@Raphael It apparently did formally dissolve in 1862 as part of general German unification, but that’s kind of a meaningless date. On the one hand, when Bremen, Hamburg and Lübeck called for a meeting in 1669 and nobody showed up, that was a pretty clear sign its status as a sovereign entity was over. And on the other, as you rightly point out, those three cities just kept on working together as Hanseatic cities until even 1920 and even today are very sensitive about other cities using “Hanseatic” in their name.
Hamburg calling itself “Hanseatic” is like using noble titles in France nowadays. It would be interesting to know when the Holy Roman Empire de facto dissolved. I have heard it was said not to be an empire anymore during the 18th century.
“Could it have been a contributing reason why these Free Cities were not mediatized like tens of others were in 1803…1809?”
All of them were, together with large stretches of northwest Germany, legally annexed into France itself during the last years of the Napoleonic Wars, when the Netherlands had already been annexed.
You´re right.
Interestingly these four were restored in 1814 – while the longstanding Italian republics (Venice, Genua, Lucca) were not.
The missing element is the “Wagon Equation” (described by our host in another essay). The further you travel in an animal powered wagon carrying grain, the less grain is going to make it, because the animals eat it. This means that cost is proportional to distance. Of course, sea-born cargo changes the equation, but generally speaking only cities have ports. A farming village has little choice but to sell their produce in the nearest city or town, which gives that city or town based merchants effective monopoly buying power (ie, they set the prices). Throughout history, farmers were notorious for resenting this arrangement, and being unable to do anything about it.
But turn the perspective around. From the city merchants’ point of view, they have a (non) choice: buy from nearby farming villages at prices they set, or compete on the open (seas) marketplace with other urban-based buyers. In that context, he who offers the highest price will get the grain. Our host is claiming that no city in history could afford to rely on the second alternative alone. (The exception is when an empire controls all the ports, and then the emperor is the one setting prices.)
The long and the short of it is, cities can’t exist without a captive hinterland, but that hinterland doesn’t necessarily have to be directly taxed (although normally they would be, because why not?).
The first time I read the expression “Wagon Equation” I thought of the Rocket Equation which it is somewhat similar to.
Pretty sure the term was coined by a commentor here making the same connection.
So how big were the differences between the armies of the US/UK/France/Imperial Germany/Imperial Russia/Nazi Germany/Soviet Union?
What do you mean by “how big”? There were differences in size, equipment, doctrine, and operational strategy.
This framework is specifically for pre-industrial armies, not industrial ones, but the rough draft would be something like “motivated by the nation-state ideology, recruited by the forcible draft that society broadly agrees with,, financed by state taxes and loans, and led by the long-service professionals who may be recruited from what country considers elites but are not assigned postings on the basis of civilian eliteness exactly”. It all kinda collapses to a single point. The only exception would be French and British colonial troops which were not the part of the nation (I would argue the Canadians and Australians were motivated by the idea of Canadian and Australian nation to serve – and then Canadian and Australian political leadership led them to fulfill their obligation as allies to the UK)
>(I would argue the Canadians and Australians were motivated by the idea of Canadian and Australian nation to serve – and then Canadian and Australian political leadership led them to fulfill their obligation as allies to the UK)
FWIW, while this is the dominant lay understanding in Canada and Australia (and NZ), it’s wrong.
In 1914 and 1939 the majority of the population considered themselves to be part of the British nation. This didn’t necessarily translate to absolute loyalty to the UK itself; as fellow Britons they were partners, not servants. But it was really just the Francophones in Canada and a faction of the Irish Catholics in Australia who saw Britain as a foreign power.
oh, I missed Imperial Russia/Imperial Germany, and thought it was only about WWII. Imperial Russia is patently weird because it had Cossacs not conscripted exactly but serving on entitlement basis (very specific privileges not afforded to average peasant or burgher). Still fair to say that my four-part formulation is 80% true even regarding Imperial Russia.
Regarding Canada/Australia again I was thinking about WWII, in WWI they definitely were “Britons”
In the 50ies Swedish mass media still called New Zealanders “Britons”. I now reserve this term for people from the UK and English-spoken groups in countries where they are in minority.
At a macro level, not that big. Not compared to the differences between say, the Roman Empire and the Germanic tribes in the 1st century AD.
Partially because almost everyone lives in a modern(-ish) bureaucratic state nowadays, partially because one of the advantages of the modern bureaucratic state is that it’s much better at reshaping society in top-down ways than other forms of political organisation (e.g. mobilisation of female labour during both world wars).
When you zoom in you see a lot more national characteristics coming out though. The Imperial German Army had a bizarre command structure due to the federal nature of the Empire and the Hohenzollern’s obsession with personal control of the military. France and the UK had substantial differences in how they recruited and organised their colonial forces. The Red Army was warped by Stalinism’s obsession with spies and saboteurs; Meretskov and Rokovossky going from army command to prison to army command is instructive.
In which way had Imperial German armed forces “a bizarre command structure”?
Some of the german states (Bavaria, Würtemburg and Saxony) had thier own armies. Most of the others didn’t but were incorporated into the prussian army. To make it even more confusing even the “independent” armies had a bunch of idiosyncrasies (eg. Bavaria and Saxony had thier own ranks and seniority lists while Württemberg was a separate chapter in the Prussian one…) The Kaiser was the commander of all of them… Except the Bavarian one. It gets really complicated and confusing and changes over time.
I will start by acknowledging I am primarily a tabletop player so I will be approaching from that perspective rather than fully addressing the iconic BG3 but I think a major element that is underappreciated is the adventurers which does provide a partial solution to the balance of power. The central conceit is rather than a single representative party of heroes we have a few thousand parties of mostly low level adventurers with a high mortality rate but occasional standout successes (due to a variety of factors including luck and state support). The summary is that the primary power is actually the funds to hire the adventurers who are the main power source and the society is built around managing the political threat their collective existence holds and utilizing the strength they represent.
What we have here is a monied class which controls a small force for handling petty thievery within the city (the Watch). The Flaming Fists are a long term battalion whose primary role is NOT to fight external threats but to provide a meaningful counter to the countless numbers of adventurers (who would fill the gap of insufficient forces referred to above). The adventurers serve as the primary enforcement and taxation network for the entire hinterland but the Flaming Fist must be maintained as a check against a mid level attempted coup by them. If we look at the level of revenue that is touched by adventurers from low levels, it is likely this is a major extraction source for the hinterland (possibly through government defined pricing structures for adventuring gear and a corresponding tax percentage to the City for the privilege of holding the store charter). The Flaming Fist is supported by a combination of levies through the adventurers and contributions from the landowners in the city. Because of this the Flaming Fist cannot seize power against the other two (landowners would cut contributions and then hire adventurers while adventurers due to their fragmented nature and outsider background would be unable to exercise control if they attempted to seize it and would likely have key parties bribed in any attempt to neutralize the threat from within. The city faction cannot simply overthrow the Flaming Fists as they would immediately need to replace it or suffer the same fate as Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade.
The caveat used above was constantly referencing mid level adventurers, high level adventurers are very much a problem of a different scope and I would submit are one of the most carefully managed concerns in the realm. They are financed and developed during major crises but are rarely seen again due to being too dangerous to permit to exist so must either be coopted into the nobility structure and carefully tied with positions or titles, killed, or sent far away so they do not have any support structure to seize power. This is why you see a very few high level characters who had succeeded in the Forgotten Realms and are held up as an example for those starting out but both other factions are heavily invested in ensuring only pre-approved parties ever come close to that level.
Adding on to the Eora example, I have some thoughts about the military system of the Free Palatinate of the Dyrwood, the setting of the first Pillars game. The duc seems to be effectively an elective monarch, ruling over a much more heavily agrarian kingdom than any of the polities vying for control of the Deadfire. If Raedric VII and his enormous castle are any indication, power is fairly fragmented amongst the landholding aristocracy (of whom the Watcher eventually becomes a member, complete with fortified residence).
That said, I don’t think what glimpses we get of the Dyrwood’s military necessarily square up with that. Some of this may be due to the limits game’s engine, but even in the text-driven battle sequence suggests a very infantry-centric combat model, without the emphasis on mounted elites. Military activity is more in the background than in Deadfire, but the windows we get into it are primarily through Eder (and to a lesser extent Durance), and the two major Defiance Bay factions.
Eder’s dialogue and personal quest make it quite clear he volunteered for the army rather than being conscripted, which seems to suggest a professional force; that said, I believe he also says that his headman on the farm was also his commander in the army, which is more suggestive of a civic militia/tribal levy system. Neither system, according to this blog series, is a great match for the Dyrwood’s political system, though I suppose the latter is a better fit given the Dyrwood’s fantasy-American Revolution background.
The Knights of the Crucible seems to fit a model not extensively discussed in this series, that of a militarized religious order, which seems like it would fit reasonably well into this setting. The Dozens are… weirder. They seem like a civic collegium/mercenary outfit with some trappings of military professionalization, which, seems to be an odd fit for this kind of society for the same reasons as the Flaming Fists. Their political influence doesn’t seem to match up to the amount of force they wield.
I do note that we sometimes do have volunteer or semi-volunteer forces, in the sense that a request is sent out for soldiers but *who goes* is something that is determined on the local levels. (and eg. paying to have someone go in your place is fairly common) and especially younger men being encouraged (or sometimes paid) to take the conscription hits for older, more established/married men.
I should also note that both Watcher’s keep and Raedric’s castle gets called out as somewhat obsolete: “Too vulnerable to cannon”.
“Their political influence doesn’t seem to match up to the amount of force they wield.”
The Dozens are in some ways a whole lot more “modern”, in that they’re clearly a *political/ideological* organization first. (somewhat funded by expeditions into the ruins, and seemingly by donations, they are fairly popular among the commoners) This doesen’t really fit with the more medieval (albiet late medieval) vibe of the Dyrwood. You do kinda see these kinds of fraternal/paramilitary political organizations but they’re usually a bit later.
The infantry-centric combat model may be explainable by terrain; I don’t think the Dyrwood is great horse country so it may be difficult for even the wealthy to maintain warhorses and difficult to employ them in many contexts. In that case you’d be looking at the wealthy serving as super-heavy infantry.
Of course, having a prominent role for infantry means the levied infantry is more militarily valuable and thus in a position to press for representation. I suppose that could be somewhat stabilized by the fact that it’s an extension of a larger society.
I suspect the infantry-centric combat model is because making animations for people riding horses would be a PITA and not worth it.
I would say based on where the Flaming First patrols and holds judicial authority in both Baldur’s Gate 1 and 3 that the city of Baldur’s Gate has de facto control and likely tribute or taxing power over a pretty wide stretch of agricultural land, down to at least Naskel in the south and probably at least as far in other directions and likely pretty far upstream the Cthionthar river. But for whatever reason that territory isn’t politically integrated into the city state itself.
This seems to be the common political arrangement of the Swords Coast region in general, with city states of Water deep, Neverwinter, Luskan, Silverymoon, etc. politically and militarily dominating surrounding agricultural areas that sustain them. Meanwhile efforts to establish broader geographic states in the area tend to quickly fall apart from invasion or internal divisions.
The toll collector up by the Emerald Grove complains that the Flaming Fist don’t pay tolls as a matter of course which implies the Fists have a regular presence that far out. I don’t recall it being specified whom he’s collecting tolls for.
Baldur’s Gate does seem kind of…Venetian? And Venice did have a lot of territory outside the city, which wasn’t represented in city government *I think*. More like colonial possessions. Including the island of Corfu, maybe others, plus some land in Italy near the city.
There was a militia for the city itself – I think – and maybe locally in other places? – plus condotta for the Italian mainland area (another commenter posted about that). The navy, I’m not sure how much was devolved.
The Venetian empire was divided in two, the “Stato da mar” (Sea state) and the “Stato di Terraferma” (Mainland state). Originally the Stato da mar, formed in the XIIIth century, was supposed to be centrally ruled (by contemporary standards at least), but as the Venetian colonists and the Greek settlers merged together it became necessary to compromise with the local upper classes in most areas except diplomacy and war.
The Stato di Terraferma was formed in the early XVth century; traditionally Venetian government has been seen as benign, enlightened etc., but it kept a tight leash (and they had great propaganda).
Regarding the military, the topic I know best: it depends on the period, but in the XV-XVIth centuries all Italian cities were supposed to have militias called “cernite”, but they were considered of low value and mostly employed in logistics and engineering. In the 1410s Venice decided to permanently employ an army even in peacetime; the numbers of this peacetime force fluctuated but in 1425 it was fixed to 3’000 cavalry and 1’000 infantry, which was doubled in 1433; in 1480 it was 6’000 cavalry and 3’000 infantry; in 1494 it was estimated in 10’000 cavalry and 7’000 infantry, but in wartime it was much higher. I know these numbers because I just checked Mallett; as far as I remember from the 1430s onwards Milan kept at least 6’000-10’000 men in peacetime, and in 1470s/80s Naples created a state army of 20’000 cavalry (if my memory doesn’t betray me about the numbers; I don’t remember about infantry).
Originally it was made by mercenaries companies, whose condottieri were enticed to the service of Venice with palaces, fiefs and citizenship; when they died, the troops were simply reincorporated in the state army (the “lance spezzate” of Total War). The captain general of the army was either the condottiero with the biggest fame and the biggest condotta (which usually meant the best, as large condottas weren’t awarded to the incompetent ones) or, if a foreign alliance was needed, to the lord of another Italian state, usually the Gonzaga, marquises of Mantua or the Malatesta, lords of Rimini.
The army was strictly supervised by Venetian commissars; Venetians themselves usually served in this fashion or in fleet, which was always centrally managed; in the XVIth century, Venice tried to have 100 galleys ready, but I’m not sure I remember well the number.
One question that always remains open in my mind after reading excellent posts, like this series, about historical militaries, is the difference that the ongoing presence of monsters in a fantasy setting makes to the need for some kind of standing armed force. If other humanoid peoples are the biggest threat you have to worry about, raising a defensive force at need when an army marches your way (and not paying that force otherwise) makes a lot of sense. But if you might at any moment be beset by a basilisk (etc.) thinking someone looks tasty and need immediate competent force of arms to drive it off, I would think that would make a full-time military of some sort pretty necessary, wouldn’t it? I’d love to read a historically-grounded exploration of the effects of a constant, significant, nonhuman threat on military systems and, consequently (as this series beautifully demonstrates), their societies. Maybe a future appendix?
I think that any functional large-scale society both could and would need to mount extermination campaigns for the big stuff in a wide area around their farms; maintaining a constant cordon wouldn’t be practical and the attrition between a basilisk reaching the fields and an armed response being mounted would be unsustainable. For smaller monsters if you can’t exterminate them you’re probably looking at “everyone is armed” rather than a professional military and it operating on a levy system resembling Rome’s except that people bring their gear whenever they leave the house.
In some settings extermination is impractical because you’ve got dungeons constantly spawning monsters and they either can’t be destroyed or manifest spontaneously, in which cases you do need violence-dealers on the regular. Usually those do an Adventurer’s Guild system in which the government devolves most of the cost to either having individuals sponsor them for regular exterminations or high-risk escorts and resource gathering or the adventurers mostly funding themselves selling valuable monster parts, or often a combination of the two, and the government effectively hires them as mercenaries by issuing a big quest that may or may not be mandatory for all adventurers meeting certain criteria. They’ll often also have standing bounties for consistently troublesome monsters but these tend to not be a big part of an adventurer’s compensation once they’ve gotten some battle experience. I think this principally works except that for plot reasons the Guild is usually pretty disconnected from the government and other powerbases while representing enough of a concentration of military force for that to be a potential problem. You can somewhat excuse this as adventurers not having a ton of class conciousness and already being well-compensated so it’s hard for the guildmaster to get a ton of buy-in on putting him in charge.
What you are describing closely resembles the world of “Goblin Slayer” (manga and anime) in which there appears to be a central government which can’t afford to send standing armies into the border provinces, so they set up an adventurers’ guild system. Occasionally there are large scale invasions by demon hordes in which case the army and the adventurers fight together.
It’s a common anime trope which I’m told originates in the Japanese TTRPG Sword World. Goblin Slayer is an example, yeah. My understanding is that in Goblin Slayer this has ended up not working particularly well in the case of goblins because the prices for taking out goblins are set too low, so it’s not worth skilled adventurers’ time and the newbies are usually taken off guard by goblin tactics, and the title character is pretty much the only qualified person who goes after them due to a personal vendetta.
Well, the Gods of narrative drama must have their due, after all.
On the impractical extermination via dungeons system, you could also have the retinue system, or the expectation that the local notables arm themselves and a retinue to deal with any dungeons that may arise in their area.
It may be that a state as we know it may be difficult to arise in such a system, due to the need for localized defense and warfare everywhere everywhen.
Potentially, with the right tax structure. The Adventurer’s Guild system comes with the advantage that you can disperse costs among people it might be politically difficult to directly tax by allowing them to hire out adventurers for various purposes, and the big-deal adventurers tend to be nomadic and will seek out trouble spots within the area the Guild operates in, which means a large number of towns can have someone show up to slay a dragon when they have a dragon problem without having to bear the cost of having a dragon-slayer around all the time. A cost that will be pretty high because there’s usually fewer dragon-slayers than towns.
Also, the Terminate The Other World! series has an interesting exploration of this in a LitRPG setting, with the main civilization being a Roman Empire reference.
In the old days, and this is still true for many civilizations, the basic principle for inter-state warfare was to power-level a small number of champions who could destroy entire armies of low-level people and deal with the biggest monsters. The obvious problem was that if your champions died you were in big trouble, and the Elves were dominant because their champions had much longer natural lifespans in which to level up. Then the Empire developed the Legion, which spread leveling out among a bunch of people following specific standardized builds that worked well together and could defeat champions while not putting all their eggs in one basket, and they’ve conquered most of the world with it as a professional military. They have the limitanei as security, who I think work part-time and suck, the comitatenses as a professional force who do inter-state warfare and as of the start of the series have suddenly been entirely redeployed away from the island the story starts on for unclear reasons, and an adventurer’s guild but one that’s a branch of the government and deals with monsters, does various forms of intel-gathering and irregular warfare in support of the legion, and gets mobilized for defense when there’s an invasion. It’s also noted that the adventurers specialize in particular monsters, because monster capabilities differ radically between different types and require wholly different builds and tactics even at fairly high levels. The main character is exempt from this because she’s a goddamn cyborg from another world who also wound up with a bunch of unique additional abilities due to an ill-thought-out choice by the System administration when she appeared in the world. As of the point I’ve read to she is refusing to get involved in international disputes.
The problem here is that in most game universes, numbers don’t really matter. One high level hero really is worth 100 first level soldiers. So it would make more sense to hire heroes, but they are, by definition, rare (how many protagonists can one story have?). I imagine this situation would evolve into either a hero-warlord system, or a mercenary company of heroes who would hire out to whomever has the most cash (depending on the tech level). In no situation I can imagine would small teams of heroes be wondering the countryside accepting quests from innkeepers.
The problem with this is that the last time humans were faced with something like this we were using bone spears and fire was a newfangled thing. This is, fundamentally, a paleontological question. And paleontology has some pretty clear answers.
You have to understand, humans really, really, REALLY don’t like our children being eaten. We also usually (but not universally) object to our elderly being eaten. And those are, by and large, what predators eat. When we enter an area where monstrous organisms exist (and the short-faced bear is as close to a monster as you could wish, this side of the hell-pigs anyway) we tend to rather quickly exterminate them. I’m a fan of the Overkill Hypothesis–not merely that we kill the animals at a higher rate than their populations can sustain, but that we also out-compete them for food resources. The result is an ecological cascading catastrophe such as the Americas saw circa 12ka.
Put another way: When our species was last faced with monsters at a reasonable scale, our species caused a mass extinction.
I imagine–and some Greek and other myths bear this out–that when there are smaller numbers of human-eating monsters around (man-eating lions and the like) what you end up with is heroes going to slay the beasts. St. George fighting his dragon, for example (early renditions show him fighting what looks like an alligator). Maybe small bands going to fight the thing. Is that an army? I suppose it depends on who you ask. The guys in Beowulf, who (for the first fight anyway) were essentially watching a hall in order to kill a monster, certainly thought of themselves as warriors. St. George wasn’t a weaver before he took up dragon-slaying. But they also weren’t regular olive-drab army either.
That said, if a fantasy realm somehow maintained the existence of monsters in sufficient quantities to threaten a human civilization despite reaching the stage where large cities were possible, yeah, we’d raise an army to fight it. And to kill everything that even looks like it. Again, we REALLY don’t like our children being eaten. If the thing we’re trying to kill is able to organize an armed resistance–say, if we’re talking orcs–then I can see a situation where humans invent the concept of a regular army simply because it’s the easiest way to handle the logistics. And once you have a regular army, that army will find ways to continue to justify its existence.
That said, dwarves, elves, trolls, orcs, lizard-people, cat-people, and the like may have very different views on this subject. Once you allow the Argonians, you necessarily open up the possibility of very different ecological and military outcomes.
I will note that we’ve allowed populations of big animals who will potentially attack our young, and our valuable livestock, to persist in areas we aren’t heavily using even before we worked out enough ecological theory to know that getting rid of them entirely would be a bad long-term idea. That said they only occasionally intruded into our territory and when they attacked humans or persistently attacked livestock we organized expeditions to hunt them down. So without magical spawning they’re probably going to be reduced in numbers until there’s only maybe a couple attacks a year.
We’ve allowed some, sure. But the evidence is extremely clear that we’ve mostly stripped the ecosystem of predators. Even “untouched” areas are depauperate of predators, and anywhere humans have a reasonable presence can be said to only have a few stragglers left, living on the margins, unless we’ve intentionally preserved them or introduced them. Residual risk, in other words.
Compare this to your standard RPG. There are legions of large, dangerous predators immediately outside city gates. You can’t go from Helgen to Whiterun without running into packs of wolves, and you can barely step outside Riften without getting attacked by spiders. Morrowind, as usual, explains it better–the Blight Disease causes problems, and since kwama eggs are a staple of Vvardenfell the population puts up with the foragers.
Maybe magic explains it. There are plenty of examples in fantasy (video games, TTRPGs, books, etc) of mages using wildlife and creating new threats. Or there could be areas where you can’t, for some reason, eliminate the dangerous wildlife.
@Dinwar,
I think you’re exactly right in terms of the history and prehistory. That said, I do think once a world has figured out contraception, and has both the means and the interest to limit their numbers, you are going to see the situation for predators (and other animal species) improve. The competition between humans and predators, like many other things, is really about numbers.
How to make large predators coexist with livestock also matters. There are large herd dogs taught to keep wolves away. Llamas can be pretty good at this too. There are even donkeys keeping away cheetahs although the later are super-specialised on speed. A cheetah does not have a chance in a fight with an able-bodied human.
@ Hector: Personally, I doubt it. By the time you worry about having too many kids you’ve developed farming, and that means predators not only eat your children but also your livestock. Humans take a rather dim view of that as well. There are laws on the books today allowing farmers to kill almost anything that harasses their livestock, for example. So while it may be a numbers game, by the time contraception comes into play it’s humans plus animals humans use.
Predators can be viewed as a luxury. Once a society becomes wealthy enough that it doesn’t need to use every square inch of farmable land that culture can devote a certain amount to “wilderness” (in quote marks because it’s still heavily impacted by human activity), including predators. But by that point the majority of the species will be safe from any negative impacts by virtue of living in cities instead of villages and farmland.
If you ask me Homo erectus hunted the species preferring to eat people to extinction after developing big game hunting:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/The-myth-of-the-predator-threat#wbb1
I would point out that we didn’t manage to eliminate predators in forests until the industrial era, and there have been times when we unthinkingly eliminated animals we think threaten agriculture and really, really regretted it. For predators that can attack humans specifically, eliminating wolves in the US led to explosions in the deer population, who eat our plants and are why my family gave up having backyard berry bushes. Since we have many people and guns we’re able to somewhat control the deer population ourselves, but it’s proven a lot more troublesome than having wolves do it, which is one of the motives for reintroduction programs. Farmers are furious about them because they occasionally lose an animal, but they’re not the ones dealing with deer herds eating their crops. People use fences to keep them out but the damn things can really jump.
For another example, part of the Great Leap Forward disaster was killing as many sparrows as possible because they ate crops, not realizing they also ate locusts, and then swarms of locusts ate more crops than sparrows ever did.
Wrote farmers when I meant ranchers; related but separate industries.
@Lena,
I’d guess a fit adult human has more upper body strength and certainly more stamina than a cheetah. But it looks like cheetahs often kill by biting the throat, and our throats remain fairly vulnerable targets, so it’s not inconceivably to me that a cheetah could get lucky and win the fight.
Most predators can definitely kill unarmed humans, and many of them rely on ambushes so their prey has little opportunity to fight back. But humans with even basic spears have good odds and we have the wit to go track down and kill threats, plus predators are sometimes intimidated by how tall we are and aren’t inclined to take chances on unfamiliar targets when their regular prey is available.
On the rare occasions when predators do attack humans, they figure out we’re not all that and sometimes rack up shocking body counts before the hunters sent out track them down. Some have reportedly reached triple digits.
Most large predators certainly can kill an unarmed adult human. It is just that in areas with sufficient wild animals to eat they don’t see any reason to attack us other than in self-defence.
Humans have long been one of the most common largish mammals and compared to our numbers we are incredibly rarely prayed on. We are not left alone because we are strange and unfamiliar, but because we are familiar and terrifying. For instance we are responsible for about *75%* of adult lion mortality. A 2015 estimated globally we kill ~18% of large predators *each* *year* There is a lot of research showing predators actively avoid us (shifting ranges, shifting to nocturnal, etc).
Even spear-armed humans are pretty clearly the apex predator. Killing a large predator (lion, bear, etc) is a bit of a rite of passage in many, many pre-gun societies. Semi-famously the Bushmen and lions historically largely avoided conflict and treated each other with respect. But dig into it, and there are some biases in the dynamic in favor of the former. At the end of the day one is the scariest predator in Africa and the other is just a lion…
Humans with spear-points and arrowheads of iron hunted the lions of Europe to regional extinction. However, I think this was a by-effect of the encroachment of civilisation. Lions are killing our livestock? Let us kill all we can find! In Antiquity this happened in such a large part of their European range there were too few of them left for a viable population. At least I think this is why there are no lions in Europe.
Real life predators also learn to avoid humans over time. Animals like wolves and bears are smart enough to understand how dangerous we are to them. Here in Europe they usually avoid us deliberately.
The truth is that predators are usually fundamentally cowardly and avoid anything that looks remotely like a fair fight unless desperate. They have to attack prey a lot so even taking small risks adds up. Their targets are almost invariably young, sick, or old, and they either attack while they’re separated from the herd, or in the case of pack hunters work to split the herd up so they can get at their targets.
Now I’m wondering how lions managed to become culturally associated with courage.
Maybe because they steal so much of what they eat from other predators? This might seem combative from a human point of view.
Predators do sometimes square off with other predators for control of a hunting ground and/or mates as one of the few things that will make them take a serious risk. This is a main duty of male lions and why they have manes that provide a bit of protection against a lion’s normal attack method while females don’t.
The strange thing is that the history of Tamriel is actually full of deliberate extinctions, outcompeting and dispersal between its sentient races, which makes the lack of cleansing of dangerous animals (or semi-sentients) look strange in contrast.
Here’s a like not exhaustive list of conflicts for habitats between the sentient races, with (x) marking those which are straight-up extinctions or at least exterminations to the point of obliterating them as a distinct ethnic group:
– Atmorans/Nords fighting Falmer (x, sort of)
– Bretons outcompeting Aldmer (x)
– Velothi/Dunmer fighting Dwemer (caveats apply)
– Alessian Nedes/Imperials fighting Ayleids (x)
– Bretons fighting Orcs
– Yokudans/Redguards fighting “Giant Goblins” of Hammerfell (x?)
– Yokudans/Redguards fighting Nedes (x)
– Bretons fighting Orcs
– Argonians outcompeting Barsabeic Ayleids (x)
– Argonians outcompeting Lilmothiit (x)
– Bretons fighting Orcs
– Argonians outcompeting Kothringi (x)
It is a bit weird that the Nords would chase the Falmer all the way to Solstheim (one of the most remote and marginal places of Tamriel) to exterminate them, but not put in the effort to displace the giants (and their mammoth herds) to be able to use the Whiterun tundra for human pastoralism, or that the Velothi would fight the Dwemer over the volcanic wasteland that is Vvardefell, but over the thousands of years they then held it only realize “Hey, maybe we should cull the Cliff Racer population so that you can walk from Balmora to Ald’ruhn without getting pecked to death” about five minutes before it stopped mattering (Hail St. Jiub nevertheless).
I guess you can handwave it by the various monsters not being a particularly organized threat likely to form an army and storm a city. The Nords would have a reasonable expectation the Falmer would come back for vengeance at some point but the giants are pretty chill unless you attack them. Sure, they’re competition for pastureland, but the Nords seem fairly agrarian and so that sounds like the rancher’s problem.
Of course there is the pathetically tiny farms problem but that’s a gameplay conceit where rendering a sensible amount of farmland would be a huge dev time investment for a bunch of territory with nothing for players to do.
I don’t think you can really handwave this away as easily as you claim. There are basically two mutually exclusive realities true here at once:
– The reality as depicted in the games, in which there’s loads of unclaimed, uncontrolled wilderness, in which it’s easy to find virgin land for a homestead, which turns out to be unclaimed because it’s goblin territory
– The reality as implied by these genocides, which the various polities are capable of projecting force so far into the lands that there is not enough wilderness left into which the pursued people could retreat and hold out.
And yes, we all agree that this is a gameplay conceit so that the player character has lots of land to adventure in, but it’s still important to talk about how this conceit undermines any serious worldbuilding from which a player might learn what realistic fantasy lands might be like.
There’s a substantial difference in the amount of force a society is willing to put forth to eliminate a major strategic threat and the amount of force a society is willing to put forth to claim new territory when they don’t seem to be under significant population pressure. Quite possibly a dedicated campaign by the Legion could clear out the goblins but it would be time consuming and expensive and the political will in Cyrodil just isn’t there.
Like, we’re talking about forest predators upthread, and the Roman Legions probably could have killed most of the wolves in Europe if the Emperor got it into his head to launch a 30-year wolf extermination campaign with the entire army but obviously they’re not going to do that.
To Alien@System:
This is a contradiction in pair with conspiracy talk by people not considering the possibility of own error. The purported conspirators are supposed to be capable of reaching implausibly far. Yet society does not show any other signs of them having or using such capacities.
In the Baldurs gate case, I wonder how much the presence of high powered individuals – adventurers and such – affects the dynamics both militarily and societally.
The council members tend to be personally powerful adventurer classes, a wizard or cleric there would dominate over the presumably fighter head of the flaming fists.
Perhaps the ability of individual power to scale way beyond our world explains the small but well equipped professional militaries – much like modern militaries shrinking but gaining missiles, tanks and fighter jets.
I’m starting an Umdaar game soon and my character concept is basically ‘kung-fu birdman’. What would be the best weapons for a flying humanoid (both wings and arms)? It’s a science fantasy setting, so ‘spear’ is as acceptable answer as ‘laser pistol’.
What actually works in that particular game will depend very much on game mechanics.
Trying a more general historical analysis approach “how realistic would this be?” I’d have to say that much as I enjoy Chinese Wuxia style movies, historically guns beat kung-fu (eg Boxer Rebellion) so I’d go with the laser pistol. Even better if you can fly, be your own helicopter gunship.
If I were designing the setting, I’d make sure that combat cannot be dominated by “guns”, meaning any accurate long distance weapon so including lasers, because close combat where skill matters is better for an RPG. See for example Prof Devereaux’s analysis of how Frank Herbert’s “Dune” is a science fiction setting where aristocrats duelling with swords and knives actually makes a lot of sense:
https://acoup.blog/2026/02/24/collections-warfare-in-dune-part-i-fighting-faufreluches/
Against what target? If a hostile birdman, are they in flight, or sleeping in their nest?
What are the constraints on weight, cost per shot, etc.?
What’s the environment like, what’s the doctrine/RoE/etc. — for example, there’s a massive difference between wanting to bomb something which may or may not be defended, with the plan in case it turns out to be defended being to run away and try again later, vs. having to bomb the same thing and thus possibly needing to do it despite some defenders.
RE: Baldur’s Gate.
I think these actually kinda-sorta do make sense. It’s just that there’s a piece missing. You mention that the army of Baldur’s Gate is too small for a city that size and yet also talk abuot the concentration.
I think the clear intention (especially since, IIRC; they do raise forces larger than the 2000 men of the Flaming Fist at various points) is that the Flaming Fist is, essentially, a standing or core that is supplement in times of actual war by various militias, but because those are only raised at need they’re not generally accounted for (they’re not permanent soldiers)
This to some extent also explains why the Marshall of the Flaming Fist does not just seize control: He’d still have to contend with the civic militia. (though he’d still have a pretty good advantage should he actually want to launch a coup)
As mentioned Baldur’s Gate also *does* have a hinterland: It’s just usually skipped over for narrative purposes unless there’s something specific there (like ankhegs…) it also does seem to have at least some level of suzerainity over quite a large area at least until Nashkel (which is amnish territory) and presumably in the other direction as well.
I think the somewhat unusual distribution of power to some extent comes from the history: The Grand Dukes were originally outsiders who seized control of the city, and I think it kinda makes sense if you think of it as the remnant of two different groups with somewhat different governing structures: The Parliament of peers thus represents the “native” Baldurians while the Grand dukes represents the outsiders and their descendants who seized power (the patriars) over time these distinction has blurred but lifetime appointed grand dukes (presumably originally appointed by their pirate crews) is a remnant. Over time presumably these groups merged and the patriars just became the nobility (landed and mercantile, we know some of them have estates outside the city).
I think the intent was for the Flaming Fist to be supplemented in times of crisis by armed bands of adventurers, a sort of pseudo-warrior aristocracy whose wealth is not in land, but in the ridiculous number of magic items they’ve accumulated over the years.
Definitely this — the 5e Descent into Avernus book explicitly says as much
“in practice, Cyrodiil itself is a state”
Missing capitalization (or else the preceding period should’ve been a semicolon).
“You can see quite clearly that this is n army”
-> an army
I really want to see an analysis of Warhammer 40k sometime but also that would be an entire undertaking all on its own, given the scale
The Imperium is an interesting one because despite being in the space future it’s pretty devolved. Basically, the Imperium imposes a Tithe for both resources and manpower on every world except Forge Worlds and Knight Worlds and those that are assigned to use their local resources to maintain a Space Marine Chapter, fortifications, or some other specific task, but then tells the planetary governor “meet this however you want or we will have you killed and replaced” and planets mostly select their own governor however they like. The Imperium can veto selections but usually rubber-stamps them.
The Imperial Guard is a professional force, but its manpower is tithed and may be recruited by any principle, and its issued equipment is either tithed or supplied by the AdMech under what’s basically a treaty with a separate government in a personal union; it outright is until the Heresy, and even with its formal integration it’s still largely separate beyond having a seat on the High Lords. Same for the navy. A lot of fans miss this, but Imperial Guard are allowed to retire and often muster out on planets to live civilian lives, with some expectation they’ll serve as military settlers in that their kids will be subject to the manpower tithe and Cadians who muster out on other planets tend to retain a culture of early military training. Commissars, Tempestus Scions, Soroitas, and some officers get taken in to the Schola at a young age after their parents die, which I guess makes them into a pseudo-warrior-caste with no personal resources. The Sisters are also raised to be religious fanatics and believe the High Lords and Inquisition are the hand of the Emperor in the mortal world, so they’re generally obedient although more than a few of their bosses have discovered they can have their own opinions on what the Emperor wants.
The vast majority of Admech forces appear to be conscripted and have brain implants that eliminate the risk of revolt. Their top officers are tech-priests who have gone into military service, so they’re from the civilian equivalent of an aristocracy.
Astartes are inducted into a warrior caste at a young age and usually get massive brainwashing that eliminates their connections to their original society. If they’re planet-based they get total control of their planet’s population and resources, and for big-ticket items they can’t make with the industrial forges they’re issued they make individualized deals with other planets, particularly Forge Worlds. If they’re fleet-based they generally get a starfort or supercapital with onboard forges and recruiting and presumably resource rights on a number of planets in their area. Now, a warrior caste with no connections to civil society is an obvious coup threat as Horus amply demonstrated, so the High Lords are super-worried about this and go to a lot of effort to ensure Astartes are too few in number and too divided to pose a serious threat to the rest of the Imperium.
The answer to “How does the Imperium recruit its armies” is generally “Yes.”
*All* the methods Bret has talked about are used to various extents depending on where in the Imperium you are, and both social structure and army structure varies *wildly*. (and if the answer is “How does that work?” the genral answer is “it doesen’t” because the Imperium is a decaying mess that is kept alive mostly because it is in a very real sense too big to fail)
With the caveat that all Imperium-level forces are long-service professionals no matter how they’re recruited. Given the unreliability and difficulty of Warp travel levies that get demobilized after a campaign aren’t a practical option.
The Imperial Guard also sorta tries to impose a professional military organization, but when drawing from planets that have nobility somehow all the officer slots start out filled with nobles.
Not quite, AFAIK. While the Imperial Guard tend to be long service professionals the various Planetary Defence Forces arne’t neccessarily.
Right, that’s why I specified Imperium-level. PDFs are planet-level, under the control of the governor most of the time, and if needed for interstellar campaigns are inducted into the Guard and stay in until normal retirement.
Most planets that are past the gunpowder era seem to do long-service professional PDFs but given the nature of Imperial rule I rather doubt that’s mandatory.
{pedantry} The very real sense of “too big to fail” means “so big that failure would have disastrous consequences that cause additional resources to be artificially pumped in to keep it afloat”. I don’t think that meaning can be applied to the idea of a system that continues to function in spite of itself just based on the inertia of being massive.
I think at least by premise, the Imperium is supposed to be incentivized to ensure the functioning of the systems that furnish its military power, by hook or by crook, because of the constant theatres of danger they’re exposed to, some of which constitute real existential threats at levels between planet and entire sector (if not occasionally segmentum).
Hell, half of the existential threat comes from their own side. It possibly presents a unique incentive to ensure a halfway functional and staffed military if sufficient strategic compromise might cause Imperial authorities to write your planet off and conduct their own extermination bombardment.
(I think the case could be made that just enough of the Emperor’s institutions and infrastructure survives as to give the barest sense of cohesion to societies that are otherwise greatly divided by distance, that the powers at the top of the hierarchy control sufficient resources in their own right to impose upon overt secession if necessary, and said existential threats can operate at a scale that imposes a need for more coordinated responses.)
The general idea with the Imperium is that it’s so big it’s impossible to rule effectively and it’s badly ruled even given that. It functions as well as it does by extensive devolution, such that planetary governors can do basically anything except worship Chaos or work with Xenos so long as the Tithe is paid and they can be flexible on Xenos. Above that, sectors raise most military forces within themselves and it’s unusual for much of it to leave a sector. They proof against coups by splitting the command structure, at significant cost to military effectiveness, and they prevent most multi-planet uprisings by limiting interplanetary communication and making even most civilian ships Imperial property that must fly approved routes with approved cargos.
And even then the line is always going to be fairly iffy: The Imperium famously denies the mutant, the witch and the alien, and yet is entirely dependant on mutants, witches and heretics to function. The difference between a legit imperial cult and a chaos cult* is often basically impossible to tell from the outside, and usually comes down as much to if/when an Inquisitor decides to look into things.
* Rogue trader is *fantastic* about this bit. Kibellah’s death cult is literally hanging around in a place festooned iwth skulls with a waterfall of blood behind them. No, it’s a legit imperial cult. (though you can end up corrupting it if you’re inclined that way)
I think even by Warhammer standards, the basis to evaluate differences in religion are a bit more sophisticated than having superficially similar iconography. I would find a difference in substance between the skull as a symbol of human form made reverent through sacrifice and the skull as a symbol of having pulled it out of somebody’s still living head.
“I think even by Warhammer standards, the basis to evaluate differences in religion are a bit more sophisticated than having superficially similar iconography. I would find a difference in substance between the skull as a symbol of human form made reverent through sacrifice and the skull as a symbol of having pulled it out of somebody’s still living head.”
Funnily enough there’s a Regimental standard about that…
There’s a clear line in whether a cult is a Chaos cult, and that’s whether they’re actually backed by the Chaos Gods who are a real thing that exists. Start of game Bloodspun Web are not. However, Death Cults focusing on sacred murder are definitely adjacent to Khorne and can easily be subverted.
More broadly, the Imperium can consider non-Chaos beliefs heresy but the line is entirely open to interpretation and whether your cult that murders people to glorify the Emperor passes muster is up to local religious authorities or an Inquisitor. This can go as far as being openly polytheistic as long as the leader of your pantheon is sufficiently Emperor-like.
“There’s a clear line in whether a cult is a Chaos cult, and that’s whether they’re actually backed by the Chaos Gods who are a real thing that exists. ”
Point is that figuring out a cult is actually backed by the Chaos Gods is trickier than it seems for any individual imperial agent trying to figure it out. Like sure, if they’re summoning daemonettes it’s *probably* chaos,* but until that point?
Heck, there are chaos cults who explicitly worships the Emperor as the Fifth Chaos God. (and chaos cults that worship one of the chaos gods in the guise of the Emperor)
* But might also just be a sufficiently Radical Inquisitor being up to shenanigans…
Minor note on Baulder’s Gate army sizes: it may end up being smaller because the effect of levels is pretty intense. So you could easily maintain a smaller force of higher-level people and not see a good reason to supplement it with a bunch of level 1 people.
Successful cities require two things:
1) Sufficient drinking water.
2) A change in mode of transportation (or portage/canal around a travel hazard).
This is frequently locations going from shallow draft river vessels to deep draft ocean vessels. Also locations near shallow fords or waterfalls.
Cities function primarily as a trading hub. All the other activities are built on this foundation.
Successful towns require two things:
1) Sufficient drinking water.
2) Production of resources. This can be raw materials (grain, iron) and/or finished goods.
Connection to a city is a huge plus, as it makes export AND import of goods available.
Thus cities need towns (goods being moved), and towns really like cities (facilitate moving goods).
Not exactly. (and these kinds of attempts at hard-line definitions almost always break down when confronted with actual historical examples) yes, a city needs sufficient drinking water, but there are plenty of cities that aren’t at all located near exchange points (though those are good places for cities!) and there are plenty of examples of markets or trading spaces that don’t neccessarily grow into cities.
While trading hubs are *often* one of the main reasons for a city to exist they can also be political/administrative, military/strategic and any of a number of other reasons. Obviously even moreso in the modern era (see: Soviet “Closed Cities”)
Just to take a famous example; Jerusalem isn’t really located at any natural point of exchange.
I thought Jerusalem was built to control a pass through the highlands/mountains (depending on where you draw the line). Or maybe Jerusalem’s old town is just situated on a defensible position?
Just a defensible position. And a key reason making it defensible is the Gihon Spring.
“The RDC is a predatory, exploitative army of conquest, whereas the VTC is a predatory, exploitative company.”
In what way are they more predatory and exploitative than the Mataru? The thing about a ruling *caste* is that they are generally not intermarrying with the ruled castes. No blood ties. So from the viewpoint of the ruled, what is the difference between the Mataru and any other possible competing ruler?
The Mataru have legitimacy and the others don’t.
1) People believe their religion. They want the services the Mataru priests perform for their communities, and for them personally.
2) People have business disputes. My neighbor grazed his goats on my kitchen garden. Thus people need a court system (or something very much like it).
– Under the Mataru, everyone already knows how the system works, how to access it; they know what the laws are and so can mostly predict the verdict; and they know that everyone else in the village will respect the verdict, so the losing party will “voluntarily” comply with the verdict, rather than having to actualize the threat of force by going back into court and getting the scofflaw banished/executed.
– Under a new conqueror, it is unclear who I should complain to and how; it is altogether unknown how their system works (er, immediately after a conquest almost certainly the military commanders act as king-type judges) and if it is a king-type system, what these foreigners’ understanding of what the laws are/should be will probably not match the locals’ understanding. Furthermore, at first the other villagers might not take the verdicts (especially the “incorrect” ones) seriously, so the losing party will often not comply with them, and since the conqueror (commander and regiment) are often Otherwise Occupied, often they will not be available to enforce the verdict. Even if they could, predictably, any recordkeeping related to legal matters will be snafu. (Yes, the colonel of regiment #3 said my neighbor has to pay five sacks of grain for the goat incident. His scribe even noted the verdict down into regimental records. But then the whole regiment moved a few villages over, taking their logs with them, and now regiment #7 is here. When I complain to its colonel about my neighbor still not having paid the fine, he has no record of what I’m talking about. I’m probably not familiar enough with how their military works to say “regiment #3”, and even if I manage to, the colonel probably doesn’t want to bother with sending a messenger to retrieve the verdict from the logs. So if he doesn’t just blow me off, he holds a retrial and decides my neighbor has to pay two sacks of grain. Which he does, and him doing so is entered into regiment #7’s logs. Next month, there’s another rotation, and coincidentally it is regiment #3 that comes back. The system is starting to work, they even received a note from #7 that my neighbor paid two sacks. So I sue him for the remaining three, obviously…)
I would call that three reasons, as there can be reasons for legitimacy other than the two you name. And a conqueror may have all of them.
Quebec, for example, was handed over from the King of France to that of England, with lots of documents and witnesses to prove it. We can absolutely demonstrate the legitimacy of the transfer. And the North West Mounted Police (forerunners of the Mounties) were formed to provide justice, and thereby demonstrate Canadian claims to sovereignty, in northern and western Canada. A more administratively sophisticated ruling power might well be better at this than the people they replaced.
As for religious services, many priests have continued their vocation after a conquest. The new ruler might try to stop them, but then again he might not. Indeed, a priestly caste that has just had its other sources of wealth amputated might be motivated all the better to provide religious services to their former underlings.
To give an example: The United States of America clearly conquered the Kingdom of Hawai’i. Does that fact prove that United States rule must be exploitative, and that the old King’s was not?
It does not, but consider that conquering armies have costs, and political factions back home who expect to make buck off the conquest. Generally speaking, most indigenous populations fought to protect the independence of their local elites, for good reason.
I think they fought back because their would-be conquerors would take their natural resources with the profit from this leaving the area. In other words they fought against colonialism.
I don’t know about Hawaii, specifically, but I think that the USA is probably one of the worst conquerors you can get. The country is notorious for not respecting previous property-rights and allowing a free-for-all of theft. This was particularly noteworthy in California, New Mexico and Texas.
And considering that the USA, as a conqueror of Hawaii replaced the existing power structure and relegated the native population to second-class citizens, I would say that the US rule was exploitative.
Great Britain and France, for example, were much better in keeping their treaties and respecting the private rights.
There are people in Tahiti, Algeria, South Africa and India who might have something to say about that.
@Demarquis
Sorry: I meant these countries vis-a-vis their neighbours, other Western societies. For example, the British didn’t engage in large-scale stealing of land from French settlers in Quebec, and French were pretty good in honouring the property rights in Alsace and Lorraine after WWI, to the point that the local real estate law still follows German law, if my memory serves. Naturally, no European power ever honestly treated with any party that was outside the Westphalian state system.
On the other hand, I can’t remember a single case where the USA would actually have abided with private property clauses of any of the international treaties with which its area was enlarged. My point is that USA has never been, in this regard, a reliable treaty partner with anyone.
“the Vailian Trading Company (itself a pretty clear echo of the Dutch VOC, down to the similar acronym). One oddity worth noting is that the VTC is not attached to one state, but several, representing the combined efforts of the Vailian Republics, a loose confederation of city-states. The nearest historical parallel here may actually be something like the historical Hanseatic League. But where the RDC is essentially an arm of the Rauataian state, the VTC is doing something different: private enterprise war. The VTC is a company, run by a board of directors, answerable to investors in the Vailian Republics under a charter sanctions by their confederation.”
“the banner of the Vailian Trading Company. The five stars are meant to indicate the company is recognized by all five of the major constituent Vailian Republics.”
Which is closely based on the actual VOC.
Actually less odd than VOC. Or, indeed, odd for not being as odd as VOC.
United Provinces was a confederation of provinces *which in their turn* were confederations of city-states *and* countrysides outside the city-states. Exempli gratia the County of Holland was a confederation of Ridderschap and 18 city-states. The County of Zeeland was a confederation of *Ridderschap* and 6 city-states.
VOC was itself a federation of 6 “chambers” that acted as constituent companies – had separate sets of shareholders and directors *and* built and fitted out ships, recruited and appointed employees, marketed the goods imported…
The 6 Chambers were *from* just 2 of the Provinces – Holland and Zeeland. Yet VOC was *chartered* by United Provinces jointly – all 7, the other 5 being Friesland, Groningen, Utrecht, Gelderland and Overijssel.
The internal structure of VOC was designed around an alliance cutting across the border between the two Provinces – the key compromise was Amsterdam Chamber vs. the 5 smaller chambers (Zeeland, and the 4 smaller Holland chambers – Rotterdam, Delft, Hoorn, Enkhuizen).
How much do we learn about internal life of Vailian Republics, comparing them with United Provinces and with Hanseatic League?
Not *too* much. (and the inspiration is clearly Italian, rather than anything else) but they were established as colonies of the Grand Vailian empire that declared independence as that empire collapsed. It’s mentioned there’s fourteen city stats of which five are “great cities” who have more influence and voting power tahn the others.
I do kind of wonder about how much of this evaluation of standing armies is based on the amount of metal in their equipment. What would it mean for an army with the kind of heavy infantry Hellenistic states had, where a lot of the armour is textile? Are they still using a lot of metal relative to the output of the economy, constituting a still high capital investment relatively? Does the cost even out based on the social expectation of how much they’re paid? Or the value of keeping them under arms to train in the relatively complex manoeuvres?
(I ask this with the recollection that Hellenistic armies themselves weren’t even on a permanent professional basis, just how some of the assumptions would translate to different kit.)
Actually, the value of the metal in their equipment isn’t the big factor, in that all forms of army need metal in their equipment. It’s that you need to pay a bunch of guys while they contribute absolutely nothing to the economy, and probably in coinage because they’re cut off from the social networks that let you buy stuff without coinage. And you need to pay them a good amount, because if you don’t they’ll launch a coup to get paid more.
But this post specifically cites equipment as a signifier of the investment necessary in maintaining them as a standing force.
I suppose with the point about escalation, it’s not so much “it’s as expensive as possible” so much as “it will be more expensive than the next equivalent, and you need to pay for a lot of it”.
If a state is rich enough to afford a standing army, it would be (and is) stupid to not spend money on their equipment. Uniforms, banners, drill, weaponry all have a deterrent value, visible indications to outsiders that you need to take this army seriously.
TBH even standing armies sometimes try to defer costs to individual soldiers (by eg. having the buy equipment, though usually from state armouries)
My point is that there have been fighting systems and material availability points in history in which the difference between “the state pays for your equipment” and “you pay for your equipment” would not be signified by how heavy the material it is made from is.
Well, for professional standing armies you do need to pay for their equipment out of state revenues, because the soldier’s only source of income is from their state salaries so if you devolve it you need to pay them enough to buy equipment. But it’s still expensive to keep a standing army with cheap gear, because the cost of paying a guy the kind of salary that makes him not launch a coup for twenty years is an awful lot even compared to the heaviest armor.
That, and the cost of the equipment depends on the skilled labor that went into it. Textiles weren’t cheap!
See, now that’s the answer (combined with other recent observations about the manner of dress in these societies) that helps me get into the correct mindset. So sure, in a world where most clothes consist of a single square of cloth artfully draped and held in place with pins and belts, something with the level of technical labour of a thickly quilted and multi-piece chest covering gets into a similar value bracket.
Obviously it’s not necessary for the state to supply that kind of armour (it wasn’t necessary for the state to provide heavy plate either), but in its own terms it gets across being the kit of people of means and could be used in the right context as a visual coding of “people who are being supplied superior arms to subordinate fighters, at relevant expense”.
Very well put! I think that the archaic Romans used, according to their lore, the toga as their everyday clothing. In those days, it would have been draped only once around the body (not twice, like in classical times) and in work and in war, its ends would have been simply tied on the chest. Cincinnatus, I think, is mentioned to have plown his field with his toga tied like this, when the Fathers of Senate arrived to ask him to become a dictator. (Naturally, this is also a depiction of the idealised simplicity of a mythical past.)
I have the impression of a similar clothing item being worn by some men in Ancient Greece. But this could be due to the historically ignorant ascribing cultural expressions of the Romans to pre-conquest Greeks. Anyway, I think using two smaller pieces of cloths would have been more common. One would be worn in front and one in back. These would have been tied together with fibulas or straps at the shoulders and a belt at the waist. I consider the result a simple form of tunic.
@guy is right, the value of the equipment is much less than the cost of paying a lot of men to be soldiers in peacetime.
In Central and South America (Aztecs, Inca) where metal armour and weapons were very very rare, it was still only the big agriculture based states that had standing armies. The less developed tribes/groups had “everyone is a warrior” forces without uniforms or drill.
The value of the equipment is the thing repeatedly cited in this blog post that we’re all commenting upon.
I can think of a few reasons why you would use metal as the measure of army quality:
– It gives you harder data from archeology. For things like drill and pay, you’re heavily reliant on the sparse sources. For how many hours in a day did a Gaulish aristocrat train mounted combat? If Caesar doesn’t tell you, there’s no way to know. But you can tell how much his sword cost from when he threw it into a bog.
– Metal represents more of a capital investment into the army than drill or pay. A mail shirt sticks around even as the guy wearing it musters out, because he’s going to pass it on to somebody else who still serves.
In addition, the argument he’s making here isn’t just about the amount of metal, it’s also about being state-issued, uniform equipment. Which has a not quite quantifiable but not small extra multiplier on the amount of work per piece of equipment, because you need a bureaucracy which keeps ordering new gear as per spec from the blacksmiths and tailors and armories (likely including guards and porters) that store the gear when it’s not being used.
Consistent equipment = consistent training, and therefore a consistent pool of skilled soldiers to draw upon, all of whom know how to fight together.
I think in this case the evaluation that certain armies are professional forces/standing armies based on their equipment is being based in the fact that their equipment is *uniform* rather than just how expensive or effective it is, which means it is probably being issued to them by a central authority rather than levies rounding up the cash to equip soldiers however they can.
I have the impression that uniformity in such military equipment is largely a function of common needs more than a mandate to look the same coming from the top. Not least because real uniformity in handmade items of some structural complexity is kind of a non-starter coming from even a single individual, let alone multiple suppliers.
I believe the pre-modern equivalent of a uniform in military gear was more a function of where you could place a common insignia than everybody having stuff that looked like it came from the same mould.
Handmade stuff is never identical, but two sets of mail are a lot more similar to each other than they are to lamallar armor, and if equipment is state-issued they’re likely to order the same type of armor for everyone with a given tactical role, while if the armor is purchased by individuals they’ll order different kinds depending on personal opinions and budget. And they’ll likely order the same weapon instead of picking between a bunch of different types of sword that are all relatively tactically similar.
You can actually see this in the Lord of the Rings movies, where Rohan kit is all good but is a mish-mash while the professional Gondorian army all wears the same type of armor.
Swedish soldiers during the Great Northern War wore breeches, coats and probably waistcoats all in the same colour. At least the same units wore approximately the same colours of these clothing items. I think this should qualify as wearing uniforms.
The 30-year war actually saw a process. Early on soldiers started sticking different types of foliage in their hats, IIRC by the mid-war they’d at least started wearing coloured sashes/armbands, and towards the end of the war they at least tried to color-coordinate some pieces of clothing, even though they weren’t “uniform” per se.
Didn’t modern military uniforms emerge during the Kabinettskriege/cabinet wars era as a way to make all the soldiers wear the same bright colors so that deserters would be easier to catch?
I heard it was mostly to be easily recognizable on a smoke-covered battlefield so you could tell who was on your side and you should not shoot. Before uniforms they tended to have distinctive banners for every unit for the same general purpose.
@guy:
Thank you!
(“Come on, Men! Forward” – “We are not your men!” – “Hey! Those are MY men!”)
One of the reasons for the Baldur’s Gate 3 scenario to not make much sense is that it just takes the situational snapshot from Forgotten Realms Adventures and increases the numbers.
In FRA, Baldur’s Gate has a permanent population of 86,000, increasing to 115,000 at the peak of trading season. The armed forces are a patrol of 60 fighters, a navy of seven ships, and the 1,700 members of the Flaming Fist, half of whom will be in the city at any given time with the other half out on contracts. This is still way too small, but that’s a common scale issue in the Realms. The City of Splendors boxed set says Luskan has a population of 16,000 and an army of 200, Neverwinter with 400 soldiers among its population of 17,000, and Waterdeep has 1,200 soldiers and 1,600 watchmen for a city of 122,000.
One key difference is that in AD&D 2e the situation in Baldur’s Gate is new. It’s set in 1358 DR (Dale Reckoning), and Xeremiah Eltan founded the Flaming Fist in 1340, then leveraged the power from that to become one of the Grand Dukes. Within 2e, they don’t end up dominating Baldur’s Gate because a large portion of their force is dedicated to exploring Maztica after its discovery in 1361 with reinforcements sent in 1366 after a large portion of the original group is wiped out.
So originally this wasn’t presented as a long-term stable situation, but as something that had just happened and wasn’t immediately destabilizing because Eltan was distracted by things happening elsewhere. Baldur’s Gate 3 has this dynamic situation remain stable for ~140 years, which is what makes it weird(er).
That runs into the larger problem with the FR specifically in that while 3rd. ed advanced the timeline by a bit, 4th. ed. then advanced it some 100 years, blew up large portions of the setting including some popular bits to replace them with new 4th. ed. compliant stuff (even people who like 4th. ed. tends to dislike 4th. ed. FR for this reason) only to back course and have another 100 years timeskip for 5th ed. that mostly restores things back to the status quo of around 1350, despite the “current year” being around 1500. This has lead to some very odd stuff.
3e didn’t have any significant timeskip at all. Forgotten Realms Adventures (the 1e to 2e transition) was set in 1358. Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (the 2e boxed set) advanced the timeline to 1367 and a couple sourcebooks like Sea of Fallen Stars and The North described events taking place in 1371. Third edition Forgotten Realms started in summer 1372 (specifically on Shieldmeet, a leap day between the 7th and 8th month of the year). Adventures for third edition ran through 1375 and then 4e started in 1479. I haven’t kept up much with the newer editions, but the 5e books I’m aware of are set between 1489 and 1496.
(I’m an old Ravenloft and Spelljammer grog, so timeline discussions pop up a lot because of how those settings interact with the more traditional settings).
The timeline that was handled better in 4e (in my opinion) was Dark Sun, by going to the point that has the most opportunity for PCs to have an effect on the world. That campaign started when the Sorcerer-King Kalak is overthrown, kicking off a time of change but before a bunch of other Sorcerer-Kings get ganked by metaplot. The results of the Prism Pentad had never been hugely popular with fans, and the time they chose to roll back to was pretty well accepted as a good starting point for a campaign.
Also, yes, I am still mad about Dambrath, why are you asking?
The 5e Descent into Avernus book (which I believe is the main official source for BG in 5.0e) suggests it’s still not a permanent situation. I particular, one person being both Marshal and Grand Duke doesn’t sound normal:
Ravengard “refused to relinquish command of the Flaming Fist” after getting elected, and the Fist “has gained even more power since” he did so.
It seems more like Ravengard is trying to take over the city, until his capture in DiA itself puts a spanner in the works
I think the difference may be in Ravengard being Grand Duke* rather than “merely” one of the Council of Four.
We know of four Marshals of the Flaming Fist by name and probably one more who’s referenced but unnamed. The named ones are Eltan, Nederlok (from Siege of Dragonspear), Abdel Adrian, and Ravengard**.
Of those four, Nederlok is the only one that isn’t positively known to have been a Duke in addition to being Marshal. We don’t know that he wasn’t a Duke, since he gets even less detail than the others. We also don’t know if he was a permanent Marshal or just serving an interim role, since Eltan was recovering from an assassination attempt.
The unnamed leader before Abdel Adrian is also said to have been a Duke in Murder in Baldur’s Gate. Presumably this wasn’t Nederlok, since he was Marshal for the Siege of Dragonspear in 1368 and the Marshal before Abdel Adrian was killed “a few decades” before 1482. It would take a very generous interpretation of “few” for it to be reasonable that Nederlok lived that long, let alone remained an active military man.
It’s possible Eltan stepped down, but it’s not certain (and he held both positions at the time of the original Baldur’s Gate CRPG). Abdel Adrian certainly didn’t, nor did his immediate predecessor. Notably, Adrian and his predecessor are Ravengard’s two immediate predecessors who between them held the dual ranks of Marshal and Duke for decades before Adrian’s death.
This implies to me that it was viewed as fine for the Marshal to be a Duke, but elevation to Grand Duke (and its tie-breaking vote) was seen as something that should not be held by an active Marshal.
*Eltan is titled Grand Duke, but at that time all of the Council of Four have that title, rather than it being the head of the Council, so I’m considering him equivalent to a 15th-century Duke.
**I’m not including Angelo Dosan as Marshal since he was a traitor working for Sarevok who briefly usurped control as part of a coup attempt.
I will argue that unbalanced control of military force in Baldur’s Gate actually makes sense. Because power in Forgotten Realms doesn’t really come from thousands however well-armed man-at-arms. One high-level wizard or cleric is worth more than a thousand plate-armored mercenaries.
One notable case of the military FAILING to replicate civilian society is that no modern democracy has soldiers vote for their generals. Or perhaps.. that says something about the REAL system of power in these societies…
Except that in modern societies every executive position except the very highest is usually appointed or part of a package deal with the prime minister in a parliamentary system. The societies where generals were directly elected directly elected most or all magistrates.
The point “as far as I can tell the Flaming Fist’s job is to spend the first two acts of every story about the place losing until the heroes show up and save everyone” reminds me that, in a lot of fantasy stories, individual heroes or small groups succeed at things armies fail to do. In some stories, this is clearly supposed to be the result of exceptional circumstances: In Lord of the Rings, there’s not going to be another One Ring that needs to be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom any time soon. However, in other stories, this is a repeated situation that the inhabitants of the fantasy world should plan for: There is either a minority of people with special magical powers that make them much more effective in combat than ordinary people, or a recognized group of heroes and adventurers who are similarly effective by some combination of magic and superior skill.
In such a world, how would military recruitment change? There are likely things armies can do that heroes can’t, so a polity would likely have an ordinary military recruitment system together with a system for recruiting heroes. The systems that could work for recruiting heroes seem like a subset of the ones that work for armies:
Heroes are well-suited to form a military aristocracy, though it’s hard to think of stories where that happens. One example that comes to mind: In the tabletop RPG Exalted, the people with the fantasy-story-protagonist powers, the eponymous Exalted, form a military aristocracy in the largest polities of the setting, and many of the smaller ones beside.
If this isn’t done, it seems necessary to recruit the heroes on an employment principle, paying them vast sums of money or trade goods out of the coffers of a consolidated state. Using the money, they are likely to become elites of some society, but not necessarily the society that is paying them.
Heros seem difficult to keep in the dependancy relationships required of the clientage principle, and the service they offer is too important for the entitlement principle to justify it.
I feel like the “relatively small standing force” supplemented by conscription/mercenaries/levies etc. is a relatively common system at least starting in the late medieval/renaissance. The Ottomans, Muscowy/Russia, and a bunch of others used variations of this model.
I feel the Baldur’s Gate discussion is kind of omitting that this is a seaside city. I’d imagine fishing and possibly aquaculture and whaling or an equivalent would play a significant economic role, both in providing food for the city and a trade good to bring in revenue from landlocked trading partners. It may not solve the entire problem of the undersized hinterlands, given the enormous population, but I don’t think it should be overlooked.
Disclaimer: I haven’t played the game, I merely live somewhere where fish are a cornerstone of the economy.
I don’t know how much seafood could provide under pre-industrial conditions. Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest were able to support permanent villages and even chiefdoms by aquaculture. But I doubt it would do much to support a city of more than a hundred thousand people.
You could also import grain from across the sea, it it came to that. What happens if the enemy blockades your harbour? You need a navy to stop that, and Baldurs Gate, as described, does not have one.
One of the issues with this kind of analysis is that some of these worlds operate under quite different basic *physics* than our world – in DnD and derivatives, for example, combat effectiveness is tied far more strongly to experience, in the form of ‘levels’, than it is to equipment or numbers. There’s a point, reached pretty early on, where hiring more guys with spears does not actually help you overcome your enemies who might just be literally immune to spears. Halbazzer Drin, who runs a shop in the lower city and is for some reason canonically an 18th level wizard, can teleport around the world in an instant, bind devils from hell into service, change the weather for many miles around, foretell the future, and pull meteors from the sky. Does a standing army of a few thousand guys actually allow their commanding Grand Duke to enforce sole rule in the face of random shopkeepers and clergy with apocalyptic magic?
For that matter, is having more soldiers in your army even better in a DnD world (it’ll dilute their xp gains, after all)?
One day, it might be interesting to hear your thoughts on how military systems might change under common fictional worldbuilding like ‘the existence of reliable and powerful magic’, or at least what principles you can even use to analyze these worlds.
If he’s taking requests, I would really appreciate a deep dive into the world of the Wheel of Time (the books). I think he would find it rewarding, because there are several different cultures represented, each with a different military arrangement. There’s a society of warrior-nomads, a centrally controlled empire with a professional army, and of course the high-feudal kingdoms, each of whom have their own army. The way magic users are organized in this world is also interesting (a society of sorceresses, who act a bit like a church hierarchy). Notable because while the world seems about as organized around cities as Skyrim is, the named protagonists are actually from a farming village, and the hinterland is explicitly depicted.
I feel like the main continent is sliding into fully professional for the kingdoms viewed as militarily powerful. The Queens Guard, the Defenders of the Stone, and the Companions are standing royal armies of significant size. The Whitecloaks are a military order with de-facto control over Amadica and sufficiently able to project power that everywhere except Tar Valon has to permit them to operate within their borders. The Tower Guard is also professional and pretty big. Elayne also at one point states an intent to make the Queen’s Guard big enough to match anything any ten great houses could put in the field, which gets a pretty shocked reaction from one of her allies who points out that trying is likely to touch off an even bigger revolt. In practice she mostly ends up hiring existing mercenaries, some as companies and some into the guard.
The borderlands are heavily militarized with effectively standing armies, though funding them may be devolved to nobles. Notably Saldea has horse archers as a settled state, with the constant threat of Trolloc raids justifying making the necessary investment in training.
Tar Valon incidentally has a very limited agricultural hinterland mostly not meaningfully under its control, but it’s got control of the major north-south trade route because it’s in the middle of the big river the trade relies on, it is the most trusted name in banking, and a large number of wealthy nobles give regular substantial donations in gratitude for counsel or healings. It is a significant plot point that it can be wholly supplied by river trade and a major arc is set off by Egwene being captured during an effort to make the ports unusable by making it impossible to lower the chains.
Yeah, there is so much diversity and dynamic change during the course of the story, you could conduct an entire research program on it (were it real). I would love a professional assessment of how well these different militaries match the polities they are part of. Andor alone is worth an entire essay all by itself. It seems to be a hybrid, there is a standing force in the capital, but the narrative makes clear that they are badly outnumbered by the forces controlled by the noble families. As you point out, Elayne wants a larger more centralized force, but she is constrained by politics and seems to have only very limited control over her own borders. She rejects outside assistance (Rand’s forces) and ends up hiring a lot of mercenaries. She is, herself, a powerful magic user, but not allied with Tar Valon. It’s Game of Thrones before there was a Game of Thrones, and that’s just one faction out of dozens.
It’s deep world-building, that’s for sure.
Tear and Illian seem to be the same sort of hybrid, with a royal/ruling council army that’s big enough to meaningfully deploy independently and probably bigger than any single noble, supplemented with noble levies. Tanchico has split rulership and both rulers have a personal standing force, though they’re not really adequate even to maintain order in the city during the crisis in the books.
Cairhain is the most militarily powerful southern realm without one, explicitly because the throne is basically a prize for the most politically successful house and changes hands often, so the king has no incentive to build an army that will end up going to another house and be trouble for his son.
Murandy is divided among feuding nobles and has no centralized military force, though the king manages to maneuver his way into getting all the nobles onboard just in time for the Last Battle. A lot of the other minor southern realms are in a similar “nominal king” situation.
We get a fairly limited look at Shara, but given that it’s pretty explicitly a China stand-in it’s presumably professional. It seems to be under the control of the Ayyad since that’s who reports directly to Demandred, who are also the de-facto civilian rulers.
The Aiel follow the “every man and some women fight” (except blacksmith) model, which is viable given the fact that they don’t use body armor period, though on a bigger societal level what do they eat?
There are mentions that the aiel herd, IIRC, so presumably they’re bedouin-style nomadic pastoralists. Of course that’s downstream of Dune.
They are said to have permanent settlement in canyons so they probably have some irrigated agriculture too. Not enough to explain their most common drink being made from maize, however.
They seem fairly attached to their holds. They do relocate sometimes, as the Bowl of the Winds plot involves using a technique the Wise Ones use to find a new water source when the existing ones dry up, but I get the impression that’s like a once in a generation thing at most.
I can buy people surviving in a desert, but the Aiel population seems pretty high. Granted, because most of our numbers are army numbers the fact that Aiel mobilize basically the entire population inflates their apparent size relative to the wetlands, and clans are spread across multiple holds with no indication I recall of how many there were.
12 Aiel clans, IIRC. I think the Shaido and Tardaad are the largest?
Twelve clans, but they’re divided into an unknown number of septs with separate holds and I don’t think we get a population number for an average hold.
I think we get a number that the Tardaad could muster 15,000 spears. Which is definitely a big figure, but then the Aiel Waste itself is really big. IIRC they’re one of the larger clans?
I think we have a source that the four clans who fought in the Aiel War mustered 70,000 soldiers?
If they live in a pretty large area (like that of the Arabian Peninsula) and can mobilise more than half of their adult population I don’t find it too implausible.
This makes sense as “The Wheel of Time” is based on the Early Modern Period.
I think part of the answer is that political power and military power can be quite different. Not only does D&D have different physics, it also has different theology. A world where gods directly and irrefutably intervene on a regular basis is going to have a very different idea of what’s right and wrong than we generally do (it’s one reason why it’s so hard for modern people to get into the mindset of a Medieval person). An army empowered by divine wrath is going to be a very different thing from one empowered by poky sticks. And it may not get to the point where you have to fight. Angering your god is going to end badly for you and everyone you love, so you probably don’t want to do things that upset the god. It’s equally valid that doing things your god likes is going to end well for you, so you’re going to tend to do those things.
It’s also worth noting that people believe their religions. We as players think in terms of rewards and punishments, but people in the past didn’t always. It was, again, a fundamentally different world-view, or rather a myriad of different world-views. Some things were done not for any reward or fear of punishment, but because that’s what you did.
I know this is a military history blog, so we’re going to tend to focus on, well, militaries, but the fact is that Heinlen was wrong about the origin of authority. Sometimes “I really respect that person” is sufficient to cause them to have power over you without any use or threat of violence. Societies function in ways that aren’t related to their ability to cause violence all the time–a society that only operates on the principle of might makes right is considered an abject failure of a society.
“For that matter, is having more soldiers in your army even better in a DnD world (it’ll dilute their xp gains, after all)?”
In a world where people can become individually powerful enough to level cities, I think assassins are going to be far more important. An army may not be able to take out a high-level wizard, but an assassin trained to take them out may be able to. And it wouldn’t take many incidents of that sort of thing occurring before everyone got the message and society re-oriented around it. You’d end up with an oligarchy pretty quickly–societies oriented around a few extremely high-powered individuals–which is more or less the whole “big man” idea anyway.
“Some things were done not for any reward or fear of punishment, but because that’s what you did.”
I call this “culture”. People having grown up as very much part of a society usually do so today even if they don’t believe.
“And what we see – and I think this makes sense for the society being presented – is a contractor-based military. Indeed, we meet one of these contractors, Atello Valera, who the VTC has contracted to provide a pretty large security presence, including a number of warships. What I do think is missing here is a greater array of contractors and sub-contractors. Realistically, we might expect the regional heads of the VTC (Ignato Castol and Lueva Alvari, who split maritime and land-based operations between them) to have a few key contractors (whatever the Vailian equivalent to colonels or condottiere is), who would then have sub-contractors running individual ships or companies, with basically everyone in the chain effectively functioning as a sort of ‘military entrepreneur.’ We do get a real sense of that entrepreneurship from the Valeras, but they ought not be the ‘only game in town’ on the military side.”
Here I disagree.
Yes, the fractal contractor array is *an* option – but it´s not the *only* option, nor even the most common option even given presence of some contractors.
Compare the ownership and operational structure of the major routes to Indies…
*On the Portuguese route to East Indies, the King owned most the ships and a large share of the goods. As for the ships, sometimes the King licenced private ships to join the fleets, but usually few wanted to. As for the goods, a large part of freight share was given to crews as perquisite/part of remuneration.
*On the Spanish route to West Indies, the King owned a few warships – but most ships were private ships licenced for transatlantic voyages. Most of the goods were freighted by merchants who were neither King nor the ship owner. The King owned only the precious metals sent to Spain.
*On the Spanish route of Manila Galleons, the King built and owned the ships. The goods were freighted by merchants
*On VOC, the Chambers of VOC built and owned all the ships and owned most of the goods. A modest amount of private trade by crews was at least tolerated, but VOC made an effort to have less private trade than Portuguese
*On Honourable EIC, the Company owned most goods – but usually did NOT own the ships. The ships were usually *chartered* from shipowners who had separate capital and ownership from EIC. And the shipbuilders were separate from shipowners. As for goods, freight space was a significant part of crew remuneration.
So… There is nothing implausible or rare about having a contractor (like Atello Valera) to *not* have subcontractors, but instead running a substantial enterprise with employees.
“This is a common problem in fantasy worldbuilding – cities divorced from the agricultural lands they require to survive.”
I think it is authors not thinking about were economic resources come from. Or if they think about it they fail to realise just how inefficient pre-industrial production and transport were.
Pratchett pretty neatly sums up the modern attitude to where stuff comes from in The Last Continent:
I have seen people promoting handmade things as being of higher quality. Trouble is it is impossible to make things by hand at anywhere near the rate needed to meet such demand. Before Industrialisation there were long periods when most of humanity had a standard of living comparable to today’s poorest.
I sometimes think that part of the bitter ironies of our time is that it can be the easier to have a nominally “anti-capitalist” lifestyle, the more money you have. Get yourself enough money – let’s not think too much about *how* – and you can afford to pay artisans fair, non-exploitative prices for any goods they might make with their own hands. Sigh.
At least I have the opportunity to like cheaply despite having a low income by Swedish standards. If you are living in a walkable neighbourhood and have the large chains within sensible walking distance you don’t need to consume that much. I don’t think I do.
I think it’s more that people are totally divorced from production these days.
I remember going to an agricultural expo with my kids a few years back. It was basically a festival celebrating farming, including a bunch of tractors and various crops the state grows and animals. The boys and I were checking out the hogs, I having helped raise my share of them, and I pointed out that this is where the bacon they ate that morning came from, and where pork chops come from, and other cuts. A mother asked how I could say such things to a child. I pointed out that the sign said this specific hog was being raised for meat, and the owner of the hog came and had a nice chat with the boys about where meat comes from. The mother literally grabbed her child and drug the child out of the area, because the idea that meat comes from animals is horrific.
And it’s not an isolated incident–I’ve had many conversations with people aghast that I’d buy a half a hog or quarter of beef from a farmer instead of buying meat from a grocery store, as if getting it from the guy who raised the thing was somehow problematic.
Nor is it isolated to agriculture. My job has given me an insight into just how dangerous modern industrial society is–every factory is basically a chemical weapons depot and a series of bombs waiting to blow up. If you don’t believe me sit at a railroad crossing with a NIOSH handbook and look at what’s being transported; good luck sleeping after that. What happened in Ohio a few years back (train derailed, and they blew up the train to keep it from getting worse) isn’t as isolated as people think. But most people I talk to are totally unaware of this. Stuff just shows up in the stores, and they don’t consider the manufacturing or distribution networks.
For evidence of that look at the maintenance of our infrastructure. Or lack thereof, in many cases.
If as a culture we systematically ignore our OWN economic realities, ones where we can literally drive twenty minutes down the road and see the process for ourselves, it’s hardly surprising that so many people fail to understand the economic realities of the past.
I think I had understood that meat was animal parts by the age of seven. Not being easily disgusted my objections to eating (much of) meat is environmental and not emotional.
This has no bearing on the topic at hand.
I am under the impression a lot of Americans don’t spend a thought at were the things they consume come from. Not only is a considerable number misinformed enough about society to politically support fascists. But I have seen many crack ideas of the present or past which fatal flaw is taking economic resources for granted. They don’t exist today or did not exist at the time in reality.
Then there is the problem of overprotecting your kids. When going to the extremes I read about in my daily newspaper it leaves then wholly unprepared for life. Then I am talking about what a non-negligible fraction of the parents do in at least part of the country. Compared to the majority of American school age children today I was quite “free rage” as TV tropes call it. I was born in 1982 and both born and raised in Sweden which has a high level of trust. From an early age I was allowed to move freely within built-up areas. The residential area where I grew up was nearly one square kilometre in the 80ies (including a couple of public parks). This gave me plenty of room to discover things myself. Something I think is necessary for proper mental development.
Please stop using my posts to vent your dislike for American culture.
I’d say most of that is common across the Global North, the way Dinwar describes it. Even people who, on an intellectual level, know where food or clothes come from, sometimes still seem to kind of emotionally assumes that they just appear in stores on a *gut* level.
(Personally, I’m quite left-wing on most (though not all) political issues, but one thing that keeps annoying me about the Left is that often, it either doesn’t pay any attention to where the stuff around us comes from, or it only pays attention to that in order to condemn the general evilness of the processes in question. Relatively rare to come across statements along the lines of, “this enables us to eat food, and that’s a *good* thing, because it would be bad if we would all starve”.)
As for parenting, a while ago, there was a best-selling humorous non-fiction book based on collecting anecdotes about helicopter parents in Germany, and IIRC it even got a sequel.
Then again, I sometimes see social media posts along the lines of, “people today have no idea how *neglected* my generation was back in the day”, and I’m honestly not sure whether I agree or disagree with that take on matters.
It’s part of the division of intellectual labor. We don’t NEED to know where our stuff comes from–unless we’re involved in making it, we can simply assume it’ll be on the shelf when we need it. This can be deplored, but there are advantaged. The fact that I don’t need to spend my time farming and my wife doesn’t need to spend her time weaving means that we can spend our time doing other things, things that we both enjoy and which are more beneficial to society.
Should we have a better appreciation for where our food and stuff comes from? Sure. But….well, if you let a person focus on the things they care about, and make things they don’t care about seem automatic, you can hardly blame the person for caring about what they care about. It only really becomes a problem when what you care about does relate to supply chains–such as world-building.
As for parenting, the rhetorical leap from “People don’t understand supply chains today, ergo we can’t expect them to understand supply chains in the past” to “Americans are a horrible culture that doesn’t care for their children” is inherently dishonest. Regardless of my views on helicopter parenting or free-range parenting (NOT “free rage”), it’s not relevant to the discussion at hand.
I was thinking more of trying to protect children from something only temporarily unpleasant as if it would cause long-term harm. I admit there is something similar to helicopter parents in Sweden too. Over here we have the concept of “curling parents” which was coined by the Danish psychologist Bent Hougaard. He was referring to parents continuing to solve problems for their children long after they learn to run. This can and often does extent to meddling with their interactions with other kids. However, it never goes so far as to forbid their 7- to 9-year-olds from running (!), climbing or hanging by their knees. I find such bans deeply unnatural in the sense of forbidding what the children naturally want.
And my impression is that it’s basically a part of the folklore of the modern world that you hear of people who spent some time working in places where a particular type of food is made or processed, and then afterwards, they didn’t want to eat that specific kind of food ever again for the rest of their life.
Older relative of mine used to walk to school past a slaughterhouse. They used to let him in when they were killing the smaller animals. Did not turn him into a vegetarian.
I’ll admit that after spending a day butchering chickens I’m not craving KFC for a few days, but I’m not going to turn down a drumstick either. I’ve found that people involved in the process have a deep appreciation for and love of the animals involved. It’s a business, sure, and if the hog costs more than it’s worth it’ll be put down, but farmers in general are very concerned for animal welfare (there are exceptions, of course).
I think part of the issue is that like mining and forestry, people still think that butchery and animal processing is stuck in the 1950s. A few decades ago some studies came out demonstrating that properly caring for animals has a measurable positive impact on farm finances–hoof care may be expensive, but it pays for itself in the reduction in medication and loss of cattle, for example. Modern butchery is–with some exceptions of course–as humane is it is possible to be. Which all goes back to the main point: People not involved in the supply chain for a product generally don’t understand those supply chains today, and have no shot at understanding them in the past unless they specifically study that topic.
Good you pointed out that taking good care of farm animals is profitable. I agree that many people have an outdated view of where their food comes from. Be it imagining agriculture from before the Green Revolution or how the food is processed. The later could well be extrapolated to things not practical to make the same way at scale. I have personally met a guy who believed TV diners to be made by hand. When I explained to him how I imagined highly automated food processing he actually got disgusted. Please not that the guy was an ethnic Swede. Here in Sweden there are supermarkets selling leftover food from nearby restaurants. But this is just a few dishes on the “chilled pre-packaged meal” refrigerated shelf. The rest of the food on the same set of shelves comes from more or less automated processing. So is all of the larger number of dishes offered in the same supermarket’s freezers.
[…] “people who spent some time working in places where a particular type of food is made or processed, and then afterwards, they didn’t want to eat that specific kind of food ever again for the rest of their life.”
If this really happened I think they got fed up with it, really.
I think most people are loosely aware of economic realities, at least as much as ancient people were for stuff they didn’t personally produce, but there’s such a massive change that it’s hard for people to properly grasp the realities of the past and they project back current ones where farmers are a tiny portion of the population far away from cities. People do generally know food comes from farms and what animals produce what meat but don’t exactly think about how much of the process relies on industrial machinery.
A lot of people probably imagine agriculture to be much less industrialised than really is the case. I think the degree of this vary greatly between different countries. Even within the developed world the exact mix of methods varies. Here in Northern Europe farming families growing multiple crops and keeping various animals is still common. Farms are much larger than they were just a couple of generations ago. For example they keep dozens of animals of the same species instead of just a few. However, we don’t have much in the way of agribusiness. This is actually visible in our agricultural landscape. Those of Sweden are patchworks of medium-sized fields with mostly cereal grains, potatoes and canola. Some of the field are used for grazing cattle and sheep. In the far south they also grow sugar beets. There in a smaller area where most apples grown in Sweden are from. Yet even there apple and pear trees cover less than half of the cultivated area.
It would not be possible to feed the world without more or less industrialised agriculture. As late as 1960 there was an UN report expressing worries about the world being able to feed five billion people. Now there are more than eight million people in the world. I think at least half are kept alive through the use of artificial fertilizer. Unfortunately, artificial fertilizer is typically made using oil. There is a similar, less used process using natural gas. The later will be necessary to continue feeding the world as natural gas does not have to be of fossil origin.
It should be “eight billion” and not “eight million”.
I’ve been analyzing the Alethi armies of the first two Stormlight books under this paradigm, and (to my disappointment), I think Sanderson is making a similar mistake to George R.R. Martin.
To start off with, Alethkar is a complex agrarian society and at least nominally a vassalage-based polity. Alethkar was united under a single crown within living memory, the ruling house struggling with vassal management is a major plot driver through the first couple of books, and civil war is still common even after Alethkar was nominally united. The local organization appears to be semi-hereditary feudal manoralism (“feudal” here meaning that the “Big Man” has a formal title and legal privileges): small farming towns are ruled by a “brightlord” appointed from the light-eyed ruling caste by the Crown or the local highprince (these appointments are usually inherited but this can be overruled in special circumstances). The darkeyed peasant caste seems to be mostly demilitarized, but the average darkeyes does retain freedom and travel and can at least choose which brightlord to serve (slaves and peasants bound to the land both exist but are not the standard).
The problem is that Alethkar’s armies don’t seem to follow the rules you have laid out for this sort of society. Soldiers are conscripted from the local communities (volunteers are taken first, but if there are insufficient volunteers the local brightlord can send anyone of an appropriate age range and who does not belong to an occupation that renders them immune to conscription), armed directly by the state (or at least by fairly high-level brightlords, they do not supply their own gear and are not armed by the local brightlord), and organized into large uniform bodies under the command of what seems to be a professional officer class (recruited from the larger officer-aristocracy social caste of the lighteyes, note that the local village brightlord does not necessarily or even usually go to war himself). Cohesion is very clearly from shared professional service (random recruits are thrown together into squads, not organized by town of origin or forming retinues around the brightlords – who as mentioned above usually send men to the army but stay behind themselves).
All in all, I think this has the exact problem you have called out Martin for having in Westeros: a nominally vassalage-based polity producing armies that look like early-modern long-service professional armies.
I will note that the higher-ranking brightlords, specifically Amaram, can explicitly defect to another Highprince and take at least some of their army with them, and the lighteyes who make up the elite cavalry that appears to be the primary arm seem to have more individualized ties, plus the Highprinces have tighter control over their own territory than was typical for feudal rulers, aided by spanreeds. And while Roshone is not called on to serve himself a lot of the higher-ranking officers hold territory, highprinces are expected to command in battle personally, and Shardbearers are automatically given substantial lands. Our view of their role in civilian life is distorted by the fact that Alethkar has been at war for seven years by the start of the series and they don’t make peace, but Dalinar is concerned about the consequences of having so many high-ranking nobles in the warcamps for so long and it’s one of the reasons he’s considering making peace.
It more operates as a vassalage system at the Highprince level, where they each have their own independent armies and expect to have pretty much total control over them on the field. Jah Keved, the most culturally similar kingdom, operates on basically the same system as far as we can tell.
Also the Alethi have a massive cohesion buff from the Thrill, which means they have more trouble getting men to not rush heedlessly into deadly danger than they have keeping men from running away.
In general, Alethkar is more of a centralized system in which there’s a limited caste from which to draw administrators and usually you get appointed to your father’s, though it’s a lot less centralized than Azir and the army ends up reflecting that. Azir is just straight up a 100% professional army where military rank is not hereditary and people don’t legally own Shards and can be compelled to use them for tasks beneath Alethi Shardbearers like construction.
The one country that I really don’t see working is Shinovar, with its military being low-caste and actively despised, but we do have an explanatory out in that they have the Honorbearers and are backstopped by a living god so launching a coup looks less attractive.
Oren Ashkenazi has complained about Brandon Sanderson’s cultures being illogical:
https://mythcreants.com/blog/building-roshar-how-sanderson-turned-to-the-arbitrary-side/
Reading this I get the distinct impression he didn’t read The Way of Kings very carefully. Like, he talks about Soulcasters not having much impact when they’re the driving force of every plot except Szeth’s. The entire Alethi strategy on the Shattered Plains that necessitates Bridge Four existing is about securing the gemhearts because of their value in soulcasting. Shallan is attempting to recover a replacement Soulcaster because just one used infrequently was the main income source for her noble house. And he talks about them making buildings the same as a carpenter when we see Soulcast buildings are stone and have a distinctive shape because it’s easiest to Soulcast.
Then when he talks about gender roles he mentions that women being the ones who can write and thus are engineers means they should be involved in military decisionmaking, apparently missing that nearly every Alethi officer has a wife in the camp and people are pushing Dalinar to remarry precisely because it’s important for an Alethi officer to have a wife to do the paperwork and engineering.
Still, it feels quite weird to have the women of a society use fully developed writing while its men are limited to proto-writing. Also, having all the armed placed on the bottom of society is inherently unstable.
I just came to say I hope we get the [dissertation on the wonderfully complex government of Morrowind here] teased in this article.
“Amusingly to me, this force of – at any given moment – 300 active soldiers and 700 or so reservists, somehow rates a high command with six major generals and two more senior generals”
If Larian studios were an American company, I’d say this was because the stereotype in America is that militia forces tend to absurdly overrank their officers–for example, at the Battle of Blue Lick, 182 soldiers were commanded by a colonel, two lieutenant colonels, and a major.
Just a nitpick.
Skyrim clearly establishes that the Legion was cut off from Cyrodril supplies, with messages in the abandoned forts about not being able to move through the mountain passes now. There also multiple complaints from Skyrim NPCs about how the Blue Palace is paying most of the Legion costs and Skyrim is bleeding taxes to feed the Cyrodril, while they ignore the Thalmor.
For example, Ulric declares in his throne room that “I fight for my people impoverished to pay the debts of an Empire too weak to rule them, yet brands them criminals for wanting to rule themselves!”
And
Simple. Let the Empire fight its own war, with its own funds, and without hijacking our supplies and soldiers. Let Haafingar rebuild.”
Erikur: “My lady… Surely you’re not that naive. Such foolishness would only leave us defenseless. The rebels would storm the palace in an afternoon.”
Bryling: “The Stormcloaks only rebel because the Empire uses Skyrim as its personal larder. The more they take, the more support the rebels gain!”
On the other hand, there is the discussion in Message for Whiterun, in which Baalgruf weighs which side to support, and taxes do not just not come up, but it seems like the Empire paid the jarls of Skyrim not to defect. (Although the passage is insufficiently clear whether it’s the Empire that’s spending money, or the High King)