Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight

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). 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.

The rules change a lot for industrial and post-industrial armies, though by the same token we really don’t have nearly the same range of examples for industrial armies either: we really have a single dominant model for industrial armies that emerged in Europe from 1914 to 1945 and then a bunch of reactions to that model (along with what we might term an industrial ‘transitional’ period from ~1800 to 1914). It is thus hard to build a complete typology, because the industrial sample size is so small. By contrast, the sample for pre-industrial agrarian armies is really big, so it becomes a bit easier to spot recurring patterns of organization and structure as different societies stumble on to the same solutions for generating force. So that’s what we’re going to do this week: look at some of the patterns, keeping in mind that these are general rules with many complications and exceptions. In the process, we’re going to pull together a lot of the individual discussions of specific systems – historical and fantastical – as examples. Fans of fictional worlds will have often run into the most egregious examples of the failure to think in these terms. Professional or seemingly professional armies employed by societies that lack the administrative structure to manage them, armies that are too large or too small for their parent societies, ‘guards’ that seem to spring out of holes in the ground rather than organically fit into society anywhere and so on. 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). Armies and Societies I have written this maxim a few different ways, but it is worth writing again: no army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield.

When analyzing a historical army or creating a fictional one, everything must begin with that idea, that military systems grow out of and reflect their ‘civilian’ societies or – for societies that lack civilians as such – reflect the civilian side of the lives of their members. That means that armies tend to recreate civilian hierarchies, with similar – often identical – lines of status between the two. So to understand what kind of military our society might come up with, we first need to ask some key questions about the civilian society. First: is this society agrarian? Which is to say, are they farmers? In most cases, the answer will be yes because with only a handful of exceptions, if they’re not farmers you’re not going to have cities or states and most settings have those. That said, if your society consists of nomads – either hunter-gatherers or pastoral nomads – they aren’t going to have a state (which is a creature of the agrarian world) and so you want to think about non-state forms of military organization, which is going to channel them towards some specific solutions to our problems below. Next: is this a state? Is military force in this society collected into a single political entity or is it fragmented among many different centers of power? One odd choice I see in a lot of fantasy settings is to have huge, sprawling cities with non-state systems of organization (power informally divided among a bunch of different groups that all wield force), but that’s not a pattern we see often historically. Instead, the more urban a society is, the more likely it is that military power is concentrated into a single political entity – the state. At the same time, non-state polities may lack a single political entity with a monopoly on the use of force, but that doesn’t mean they lack a military system, it just means that power is fragmented in that system. Third: what kind of aristocracy does this society have? Every society has a socio-economic elite, but there are different kinds. Does aristocratic wealth mostly flow upwards from large landholdings or flow downwards from employment in a royal bureaucracy (the former is much more common)? Likewise, to what degree does this society have a bureaucracy as such and how much power does it wield?

It can be easy to assume modern bureaucratic administrative structures, but these are rare in pre-modern societies: power is often wielded by local grandees than by employed representatives of the state and if the power is wielded by those grandees, the military system is likely to run through them to some extent as well as well. Your aristocrats are going to assume that – since they lead society in peace – they lead society in war, but how they do so depends on their self-conception. Here, I distinguish sometimes between military aristocrats – aristocracies who understand their primary purpose is warfare generally (often leadership), as distinct from religious or bureaucracy aristocracies that might be of a non-military character – and warrior aristocrats, who understand their primary purpose in society as personally fighting in a specific way (usually but not always mounted). Note that while warrior aristocrats’ legitimacy in claiming aristocratic status comes from their personal practice of violence, the source of their power is almost invariably wealth from large landholdings: they’re not aristocrats because they’re good at fighting. Instead, they’re aristocrats because they’re rich and then to justify the wealth and power they wield, they practice a certain form of direct, personal kind of warfare. A guy who is really good at fighting but is poor and without title is not a knight; a guy who has wealth and title but is terrible at fighting is a bad knight, but a knight nonetheless. Warrior-elites are thus elites-who-are-warriors, not necessarily warriors-who-are-elite-at-war, though since their social class places a lot of emphasis at being good at fighting, they’re often very good at fighting (in a specific way, again, usually but not always mounted). Fourth: how do the regular farmers (who are 90+% of the population) connect to the aristocracy? Are they mostly free-holders who own their own land, but are economically dependent on the Big Man? Or does the local Big Man – that is, the aristocrat who is nearest them – own their land itself? Or does the king (or state, in some other form; it might be a temple!) own their land, in which case the aristocrat they engage with is an administrator rather than a land-owner?

For the aristocracy to exist (and for the state to exist, if it does), it has to be siphoning agricultural production from these smaller farmers, so consider how that happens as well. Aristocrats collect rents on the lands they own or control. The state may collect taxes, but in many pre-modern states, royal revenues are dominated by the lands the king owns rather than taxes. Naturally, if taxes are being collected, that implies some kind of bureaucracy collecting them, which non-state societies may not have and which may be underdeveloped in weak-state societies. What we’re trying to get with all of these questions is thinking about how the peasantry and the aristocracy relate to each other and how that relationship is understood and justified. Those questions are important because civil society comes first – armies are built out of existing subsistence systems and social structures, not usually the other way around – and because the structure of a society limits the possible military systems it can house. Recruitment Principles Once we have a sense of our civilian society, the next thing we need to think about is how do we get recruits? Landers (op. cit.) breaks down recruitment systems based on the principle they function on, distinguishing between general compulsion (conscription by force, levies), the entitlement principle (service as the flip-side of the coin for some set of rights or status), the vocational principle (standing armies or military aristocracies that served because that was their role in society) or devolution (devolve the problem downward onto vassals, communities or households). That’s a useful framework, but I want to shift it around somewhat for our purposes, because I want to separate clearly why the recruits fight from how you get them (and because I think ‘general compulsion’ is actually not the most useful category here). So we can start with what I am going to call the recruitment principle (as distinct from the recruitment method), which is the why of your recruitment: why do these fellows feel like they must or ought to serve. A lot of historical fiction or fantasy settings fail to address this particular question or else answer it with a very crude ‘because they have to’ (that is, compulsion) but that’s not usually how this works.