Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying for It
acoup.blog90 points by jfoucher 13 hours ago
90 points by jfoucher 13 hours ago
I've just spent an hour reading these words, and am having my mind expanded much further than I expected.
I am designing a long term early edition d&d sandbox (Delving Deeper rules) and I have found this series and ACOUP’s other worldbuilding very helpful in shaping my thoughts and filling in the edges of procedurally generated stuff.
acoup with yet another excellent blog
If you can afford to pay am army you can afford to pay the opposing side instead. And, many fine arguments abound for paying off potential invaders. It may be cheaper, and it may include paying them to go and attack somebody else.
Most likely not. The price to pay people to get them to do something must exceed the opportunity cost of them not doing that something. Raising an army from your people, if they don't fight alongside you they are probably facing a pretty suboptimal situation - their crops burned, their cities looted, their wives and daughters raped, foreign oppression, etc. This risk may be small, while stepping onto the battlefield has risks of its own, and it requires materiel which isn't cheap, so most people will not do it for free, and even if some will you probably want more and better soldiers as well. But you don't need that much to tip the scales.
On the other hand the adversary stands to gain a lot from pillaging your countryside, both gaining wealth from the loot they capture and security by knocking you out as a potential threat. In the most extreme case they may be looking at exterminating you entirely and taking your land and everything in it for themselves. They may be facing starvation and death if they don't take your resources from you. You fundamentally can't offer them more than they could potentially take. It is rational for them to accept less treasure for sufficiently reduced risk, but there is no guarantee you can offer enough that fighting for the rest isn't worth it in their eyes. Paying them to attack someone else is even harder - they still do not reap the full benefits of defeating you, but they still suffer the risk of fighting, and they have an additional enemy to boot. If they do manage to go for that option, you're almost certainly losing a potential ally (the enemy of your enemy is your friend) and whoever wins that conflict is going to be pretty pissed at you.
On top of this, paying your own people to fight for you strengthens your side. Yes war may not be the optimal use of resources but those dollars are flowing right back into your economy feeding your people, employing your smiths, etc. The strong army you raise both deters potential adversaries and can be used to extract demands from neighbors. Conversely, paying tribute to the adversary makes them stronger - they can afford more men, better weapons, deeper war chests. You may buy yourself time but the fundamental grievances that made war possible in the first place have gone unaddressed; it is reasonable to expect you will wind up in the same situation again at some point, but the next time it will be more expensive to bribe them while you will have less money to raise an army for yourself. You can't repeat this cycle too many times.
All this assumes your adversary is rational. Unfortunately that's not a safe assumption. For the right price you'll be able to raise an army, but whether it be a holy crusade or a fight for freedom or a face launching a thousand ships, a particular army might be fighting for something they consider priceless.
If I understand it, Brett's central point is that early states lacked free capital to actually "pay" anyone and so levee-en-mass was compulsion for food, or forage/pillage and obligations driven not cash driven. England was an early progenitor of paid soldiers and had an effect on the conduct 0f European wars, not entirely beneficial. But that's long after ancient times.
My point is that history records ancient states with surplus, paying off invaders. Success is highly conditional to time. Most people here think if in 10 years they own you it failed.
I tend to think if you held power for 10 years you won.
> If you can afford to pay an army you can afford to pay the opposing side instead.
Aside from all questions about how such an agreement is to be enforced once you no longer have the money but the invaders still have their weapons, the article shows very clearly that this is not true. Early states are seriously cash-strapped, and rarely pay their armies in easily portable goods. They can "afford" to raise armies consisting of soldiers who bring their own weapons and, by-and-large, their own food. That does not make for good tribute and so, in fact, they cannot afford to pay off an invader.
You are right in the longer term but surely wrong in the shorter term since history records The Byzantines paying off Attila the Hun from the 430s to the mid 440s, so a 10 year window.
The Danegeld lasted over 150 years. It undoubtedly failed in the end, but it certainly worked in the short to medium term.
The Sassanid and Byzantines paid off each other for ages. The persians paid tribute for a long time to border states.
The pre-french kings paid off The tribes who eventually became the Normans.
It's a shit long term strategy. Doesn't mean it didn't work in the short term for the states using it.
Remember, these tributes were clearly liquid cash, or equivalent. When they ran out of money it seems to turn into land. The implication they could NOT have been used to raise forces internally begs questions. The counter argument I suggest is that you raise an army (that you don't have to pay) when you CANNOT pay off the other side, or don't want to cede land.
Perhaps where we meet is that history records states doing it but it didn't work in the medium-to-long term. Did it happen? Yes. Did it work? "no" for a long term view but the immediate effect, for some period of time? Depends how you view it.
The same might be said for the condottieri. Groups like the English "white company" in the extended wars of europe in the middle ages. Paying them to switch sides might be more effective than putting up your own guys to fight them.
[Edit: I invite people to think about the average lifespan in role of ancient leaders, and what a decade or a hundred years means for "success" or "failure" against those measures. Bear in mind that most modern democratic states operate on a change of leadership in a 4 to 6 year timescale, with some cycling much faster and some cycling much slower, and it is rare for a successor leader to entirely endorse his predecessors choices. Now cast that into pre democratic times and ask yourself what success looks like.]
We know about instances when it was tried, and usually failed, but we also know about the rest of history when as far as we know it wasn’t tried or even contemplated for the exact reasons the OP stated.
> The pre-french kings paid off The tribes who eventually became the Normans.
Probably the worst decision any French leader, possibly any European leader, ever made. It could be argued that this lead to at least 600 years of pain until the Normans aristocracy (now English) gave up trying to take France.
That people did things at some point or another in history does not mean those things were good ideas on any time scales. People both make bad decisions and face conflicts of interest. History is chock full of incredibly dumb things that nevertheless happened.
There are those who make strong arguments for the opposite.
Once you have paid him the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.
Once you pay an army, you accept the army can take you over, internal or external.
That is indeed one of the many hazards and risks which pre-modern states seemed to have grappled with, according to the linked blog series. You may find the series to be an interesting read to see one historian's overview on how pre-modern states were to varying degrees exposed to, managed, and suffered the consequences of, said risk!