Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying For It

This is the third part (I, IIa, IIb, III) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are recruited, raised, equipped and paid. In the last part, we looked at the various ways pre-modern armies might mobilize their armies, a process that mainly consisted of recruiting and equipping soldiers. If you were wondering what about larger capital items (ships, artillery, fortresses, and so on), we’re going to treat those as part of this section because pre-modern states experience those problems primarily as financial costs, rather than as the products of a military-industrial complex (a thing which they by and large do not have). So now that we have our recruits, we now have a bunch of continuing financial demands: we have to pay them, as well as paying for their food, replacements for anything that gets worn out on campaign, and so on. There are also larger capital costs associated with military activity: ships, fortifications, artillery, and armories (if any of the equipment is state-issued). All of that needs to be, on some level, ‘paid for,’ though as we’ll get to, we may need to think about payment a bit more broadly. 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). Surplus Economies Before we get into specific methods, I want to actually stop and have us think a bit about what we’re actually doing in all of this. As modern folks, embedded in highly monetized, largely capitalist economies, we’re really used to the way those economies solve this problem which is they pay people with money and we don’t normally think too hard about what is going on in the background of that process.

But here it is helpful and important to think about the physical economy first, before the financial one. We have a set of major costs (and some minor ones). The major items here are pay for the troops (which generally includes the cost of their rations and further supplies), which is the largest item, followed by a set of key capital costs, with ships, permanent fortifications (castles, city walls, fortresses) and in some cases artillery (be it catapult or gunpowder) as the major line items here. If the state is maintaining large armories of equipment, that also fits under this heading, though as we noted in the last two sections, most pre-modern polities do not do much of that. From the perspective of the physical economy – the economy of stuff and people, rather than of money – what we are looking to do is create and support non-subsistence labor. Some of that labor (shipwrights, blacksmiths, etc.) is specialized and some of it (peasants stacking rocks to make a castle wall, green infantry recruits) is not specialized, but crucially it is not subsistence labor or labor involved in making consumption goods of any kind. We are thus looking to extract, in a sense, labor from the economy (we’re also looking for raw resources here, but for the most part, that’s also just a labor problem: we need people to cut trees to make timber, to mine ore so we can smelt metal and so on). That means the polity needs to take people (the laborers) out of the subsistence economy – either long-term or short-term – and then subsist them, providing for their food, clothing and such because those laborers, removed from subsistence as they are, are no longer providing it for themselves. For specialized laborers, that may include long periods of training and effectively permanent specialization – a skilled blacksmith probably didn’t come from a farm and certainly isn’t going back to one. So the challenge here is mostly taking subsistence goods – food, clothing and so on – and moving them out of the agricultural, subsistence economy and re-tasking them to support non-subsistence laborers, especially specialist laborers.

We’re used to the monetized form of this system, where the state pays those non-subsistence laborers, who can then buy their subsistence needs from the broader civilian economy (the loop then generally being completed with those civilians use that money to pay their taxes). But as we’ll see, that is not the only way to meet these costs and indeed not necessarily even the most common way. So we want to think about this, in its most simplified form as a question about how we move food (and other stuff, including workers!) from the agricultural economy to military purposes which have no real economic value of their own (you can’t eat a fort). That’s our problem. Now let’s look at some solutions. Naturally, these solutions also aren’t usually choices, but legacy structures, consequences of the way a society is organized and the options available to it. Redistribution Economies For societies that are not heavily monetized and where a fair bit of economic power is centralized in the hands either of Big Men, the King (the Biggest Man) or temples (which could function as Big Men), often the solution was to simply handle all of the economics in-house through a redistribution economy. We can imagine this first in a small-scale: consider the position of a Big Man in an agrarian non-state polity. He controls a fair bit of land and has a lot of clients and peasants under his thumb, but his power in the broader polity (compared to other Big Men) is largely dependent on his ability to raise an armed retinue, the core of which are warriors he keeps in his own house (those vocational principle warrior aristocrats). Those men are probably going to require expensive metal equipment – swords, helmets, mail and so on – as well as horses and of course the Big Man has to sustain the men themselves. As aristocrats, those men expect a standard of living that includes ample food, relatively nice clothes and so on. Now it might be hard for the Big Man to regularly buy all of that, because his non-state polity hasn’t developed coinage and isn’t heavily monetized in that sense, so it’s hard to strictly speaking pay a wage to a bunch of skilled craftsmen.

But what the Big Man can do is bring those craftsmen into his household economy, providing them with the thing he has a surplus of – food (and also clothing, itself a product of the agricultural economy he controls) – in exchange for their labor producing finished goods. He can do the same for his warriors, meeting their subsistence needs directly out of in-kind rents (that is, a portion of the produce) of his dependents. At this small-scale, a lot of this exchange can be handled through a sort of gift-economy: the Big Man banquets his retainers and gifts their smaller households weapons and fine cloth out of his reserves, which are kept stocked by the extractions of his dependents. For states, however this sort of system can be dramatically scaled up into what we sometimes term a redistribution economy or (when the key actor is – as is often the case – a king) a palace economy. This seems to have been the dominant economic system in the broader Eastern Mediterranean (Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Mycenaean Greece) during the Bronze Age. Under this system, much of the land (though generally not all of it) is owned directly by the king or temples (whose bureaucracies often serve as extensions of the king) and the tenants of those land thus owe substantial rents to the king, which are generally paid in kind. There is often a notional value for these things, calculated in weight in precious metals, but apart from long-distance trade, most economic value remains ‘book value’ – not a lot of transactions involve physical bullion changing hands (and coins won’t be invented in this region until the 7th century BC). What makes the monetary system work in many cases is that everyone has tax obligations to the king or temple, so debits and credits can be placed against those obligations. Via Wikipedia, the storage jars (pithoi) from the Minoan palace at Knossos, dating to the 14th century BCE. These storage rooms, which dominate a substantial part of the palace complex’s floor plan, are generally taken as evidence for a redistribution economy: whatever political authority operated in the palace, it clearly commanded a substantial portion of the agricultural surplus. The result is that agricultural products flow to the state through rents and taxes.

Those products, in turn, can be used to directly support priests, bureaucrats and so on, but they can also be pushed back out to support craftsmen or other specialists. Alternately, they can be used to trade (Mesopotamian states seem to have often been trading their agricultural products for wool from the pastoralists on their frontier) for goods available locally. When the king needs unspecialized labor – soldiers or workmen – he can demand it from the peasantry and then simply credit the value against their future tax burden. In some cases, a certain amount of forced labor – what we call corvée labor – was simply an expected part of the tax burden: you owed the king a certain percentage of your harvest but also a certain number of days per year of labor maintaining public works (which might well include things like city walls or service as a local militia). Such a system is naturally quite administratively intensive: someone needs to be keeping track of all of these transactions, which means these states need a significant literate bureaucracy, often (but not always) supplied by a full-time hereditary priesthood. This is also a really hard system to scale up, because of the micromanagement and administration it requires: when these sorts of kingdoms expand into empires, they generally do not directly administer their conquests, but instead rule through vassal kingdoms, so that what you have is the central ruler (with his palace economy) siphoning off tribute from his vassals (with their palace economies), creating rather fragmented large states. I don’t want to dismiss this sort of redistributive system, but I also do not think it is an accident that once coinage becomes widely available, these sorts of systems become much less important. You can still have Big Men maintaining small versions of these systems for their household retinue, but it simply makes more sense to handle mass mobilization with coinage, once you have the coinage (and a coinage-based economy) to do so and let the market bear some of the administrative burden of organizing economic activity. Taxes, Revenues and Payments The option that is probably the most conceptually simple to a modern reader is to simply pay for it using money.