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

> “structure of technological products”

Unless the technology is glued together with ad-hoc systems using email, slack, Dropbox, and the like. At least that’s my experience in small businesses.

Looks like it was a satire? I couldn’t find any authoritative sources on it.

https://www.m9.news/social-media-viral/viral-microsoft-caste...

What? Can you explain?

is it really that far fetched that instead of bikes, football, and basketball, klingon society decided to give all their kids batleths, so everyone grows up really into it?

I think Tokugawa-era samurai fits the description better. The Meiji era saw the samurai stripped of most of their stipends and privileges, and with little left but their pride they had to go find respectable jobs.

Sparta never really kicked butt, they just propagandized themselves as having done so in the past, even though their performance is pretty average compared to other city states (and very dependent on their tributaries and slaves, at that).

Then Sparta started believing their propaganda and setting up a huge warrior caste, which sucked up resources for decades without ever really accomplishing anything. Then Philip rocked up and annihilated the whole place, their much-vaunted warrior caste had no chance against the Macedonians.

And fittingly enough, a good description of what Sparta was actually like and the myth of their warrior prowess is the same blog series as the original post: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

Sparta was built on slavery, their obsession with war was necessary to keep their slaves in check and deal with constant uprisings, it was very practical for their way of life.

Its also because they built it entirely on slaves and refused citizenship to most. 300 was an entertaining movie but it left out the slavery that was central to Sparta.

No, it was because of the low fertility rate. Most powerful class in Sparta were rich widows, even kings had to borrow money from them.

Sparta and Rome suffered from the same problem, actually. They approached it differently. Rome survived. Sparta didn't.

The problem was that citizenship or social class was based on inheritance and it was essentially a closed system. At a time when infant mortality was so high and being in the military was risky, this meant that the ruling class diminished over time.

The author of this piece touches on how most soldiers had to bring their own gear. That's fair because they're talking about why people fight not how but it's important. So in Rome, you were cavalry if you could bring your own horse. Only the wealthier people could do this. This was a later reform. The very early Roman cavalry were a closed class. We don't know a lot about this other than legends because records were lost, most notably when Rome was sacked by the Gauls in 390 BCE.

Anyway, so "equites" were a higher social class but were a mix. Some of them were patricians (probably descended from the original heavy cavalry that protected the pre-Republic King, allegedly). Also, some patricians weren't equites.

In the early Republic there were 40-45 Patrician families. They held all the political power and offices. By Caesar's time it had dwindled to ~12, so much so that some plebeian families got elevated.

Sparta was what we'd now call an ethno-state requiring a full bloodline for citizenship. AFAIK Sparta never evolved away from that and all such closed societies die, just like the original Roman patrician families.

Rome took a different approach that bears some similarity to "whiteness" in the modern world. Race is an invented social construct (and, in the case of whiteness, was invented to justify slavery). But what has made whiteness resilient is that definition of who is white keeps evolving as necessary to maintain the in-groups.

For example, Ben Franklin didn't consider Germans "white" (famously describing them as "swarthy" [1]). Through different waves, different European ethnic groups became "white". The Irish didn't become "white" in the US until 100-150 years ago. Arabs became "white" in 1915 [2].

I just want to stress how made up this all is. Anyway, back to Rome.

Rome was famous for taking over an ethnic group (usually quite violently) but then making them Roman. Many people on the periphery of the empire aspired to become Roman. We have a term for it: Romanization

[1]: https://medium.com/@cailiansavage1/why-benjamin-franklin-did... (or Latinization). There's historical record of this everywhere from Eastern Europe to Northern Africa ro Britannia. Britannia was a funny one because there are Latin inscriptions describing a very Roman life from people who unsuccessfully rebelled against Rome in the early occupation a century earlier.

So I guess I'm saying is that yes, Sparta atrophied as all purity-based ethnicities always do whereas Rome survived much longer with an expanding concept of "Roman-ness", which isn't too dissimilar from what we recognize as "whiteness" today.

[2]: https://teachinglegalhistory.unl.edu/s/oer/item/1999

I live in a country that was ruled by the military many times in the past, and the US never looked to me under treat of a military coup.

In my country, any political problem real or perceived, and part of the population are already asking for the military to attempt a coup and fix things.

> It also doesn’t pretend to be anything other than the author’s opinion

The annoying part of the article is how it very much pretends to be some kind of objective truth and that fictional stories are bad and wrong for not adhering to the author's exact view of historical militaries. Every sentence he writes about fantasy stories diverging from his view is dripping with contempt for the authors, as though they're ignorant at best if not outright mentally challenged for daring to write their fictional worldbuilding in a way that is not congruent with his expectations.

I'm not going to build a catalogue of every one of his irritating statements (it would be about as long as the article), but, take, for instance: "Fans of fictional worlds will have often run into the most egregious examples of the failure to think in these terms". That is not a man sharing his opinion, that is a man asserting that his opinion is objectively correct and that anyone who disagrees are so stupid they must not've thought of all the details he thought of, else they would have come to see his light. Not once does he stop to consider that perhaps an author did do their research, and that their work was informed by a specific piece of research or simply an interpretation that differs from his own, or that they deliberately chose to take liberties because fiction is about crafting a compelling narrative moreso than creating an autistically-perfect simulation of the existing world.

> counteract what he sees as historical misinformation perpetuated by fantasy authors adopting a sheen of ‘based in realistic history’

Ah yes, realistic history like... Star Trek. It seems much less like his agenda has anything to do with counteracting misinformation and everything to do with being the archetypical "AKSHUALLY" nerd who gets off on correcting people in extremely pedantic and not actually meaningful ways.

> Oddly enough I don’t see “money” mentioned, at least not simply

"the entitlement principle (service as the flip-side of the coin for some set of rights or status)" and

the employment principle (separate from the vocational principle). We may sum it up with, “recruits show up purely as an economic transaction: service for money” – it’s a job.

Close enough.

> and that should probably be reason #1

Article goes on to explain that:

it is fairly rare for pre-modern armies to function purely ‘as a job.’

Which makes sense: humanity's history of picking fights with fellow humans goes back much further than the history of money itself. And even where they overlap, there's other reasons for recruits to enter an army.

Much of pre-modern societies were organised around master-servant, slavery, nobility, family clans & related concepts. Free market economies with individuals striving to maximize the amount of gold nuggets in their pouch, is a relatively recent concept.

I guess it’s so long-winded you never made it to the four paragraph section, about 20 paragraphs and two subheadings in, about economic motivations for recruitment?

> The first place most modern folks’ mind goes, of course, is to pattern this task off of their own jobs and so to assume that these fellows are under arms because they are paid to be, which I am going to term the employment principle.

It is a little rich to simultaneously complain that the article is too long, that it didn't go into enough detail, and that it didn't support your pet theory. Maybe if you'd read the article, you'd find out that not only does the author discuss money as a motivating factor as the first example (precisely because it is popularly hold to be the main motivating factor) but then immediately explain why it was the least important motivating factor for pre-modern societies.

It's also worth mentioning that directly linked from this blog post are several in-depth examinations of historical military systems, including Mongol, broader steppe nomad (note that the Mongols were exceptional), Roman, Carthaginian, Macedonian, Greek, and Gallic specifically covered in depth, and a couple of other cases (e.g., Medieval Europe and Mamluk examples) more covered in passing. The detail you think is lacking can easily be found in those blog posts.

You can also find a nice summary of the different motivating factors at the end, with 21 specific examples distributed among them. Is that not enough for you?

I do think it's worth looking at a few of his other posts (I'm a fan) to lend some credence to this one speficially. The more history-focused (so not aimed at worldbuilders) pieces are consistently well-sourced in a way that most blogs aren't, and he has a pretty long history of this same level of care.

Does that make him infallible? Of course not. But it does mean I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt here.

You're right about reason #1. And you've probably heard about strong contenders for #2 and #3.

There's a famous quote attributed to the Italian military commander Gian Giacomo Trivulzio in 1499.

When asked by King Louis XII of France what preparations were needed to invade the Duchy of Milan, Trivulzio responded: "To carry out war, three things are necessary: money, money, and yet more money."

If you think its quite long winded taken note it's title includes PART 1

Why would "money" be necessary?

https://acoup.blog/2025/01/03/collections-coinage-and-the-ty...