Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight
Key takeaways
- This week I want to try something a little different.
- This series is also going to be a bit unusual because in some ways its purpose is to link up and summarize a bunch of other posts.
- Now we re going to restrict ourselves a bit here in that we are going to stick to pre-modern or more correctly pre-industrial armies.
This week I want to try something a little different. Rather than taking apart a particular fantasy military system, I thought I might try to lay out a more general sense of how military systems tend to map on to societies, both because such general historical frameworks are handy for thinking about the past, but also because they make useful rules of thumb for imagining fantastical societies. So essentially here we are asking: how do societies end up with the sort of armies they have?
This is going to take a few posts to get through because there are actually quite a few key components to cover: the why and how of recruitment (both why do these people feel obligated to serve and how do you get them into the army ), how a society pay for that (or doesn t), who leads it and how, and how once formed any army coheres in the field. Finally, we ll wrap up with some historical archetypes to show how these different facets link together with the underlying civilian society and also how that shapes what they look like on the battlefield (including weapons and tactics).
This series is also going to be a bit unusual because in some ways its purpose is to link up and summarize a bunch of other posts. We ve had a lot of posts and series over the years which examined this or that historical or fictional military and discussed the ways in which their militaries reflected civilian society and I wanted to pull a lot of that together in one place. As a result in this series more than most the links are going to be load bearing. Likewise a lot of the heavy bibliography here is going to live in the links, although I think for someone looking to get a handle on how pre-modern societies and pre-modern militaries come together, the two key readings I would suggest are P. Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World (1989) and then J. Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production and Power in the Pre-Industrial West (2003). Also well worth reading as an overview is Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (2006).