Awesome! I want to pretend to gut people, just like Attila the Hun...
Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying for It
31–34 of 34 posts
Re: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying for It
#32"a skilled blacksmith probably didn’t come from a farm and certainly isn’t going back to one." How certain is that really? I read a very niche, but very well researched book about local violin makers in my region, and there were hundreds, and that "didn't include the ones who merely made one or two fiddles as a project" according to the authors. All the people they listed did it as a side gig to their farming. People…
Differences, I think, may be that
- running a forge isn’t something you can do alone (even if lighting a forge and doing the blacksmithing is doable for a single person, you still have to get the fuel for the forge, which typically is charcoal, coal, or coke)
- running a forge isn’t something you do in small pieces of natural downtime. Once you fire up a hearth, you’re committed to using it for the entire day.
Re: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying for It
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a wide gulf between arguing something happened on occasion and arguing it was a sound idea. History records ancient states performing human sacrifice to make the sun rise again. It's likely these people saw it as a good idea, and hey the sun kept rising for years, but you'd have a hard time convincing me it was economical compared to alternative options.
Only if you frame it as an attempt to keep the sun rising via blood sacrifice. If instead the priesthood is a power faction within the civilization's various power brokers, and it's all political, then blood sacrificing your "randomly" selected rival's daughter is going to be much more economical than not sacrificing her, and having your political rival be stronger than you.
Which is exactly the point I was making. For a particular emperor in Constantinople, paying tribute to an army outside the wall may have been, or appeared to have been, an economical option for achieving their personal goals, which may not have been aligned with the empire's, and thus the fact the action occurred can not be taken as evidence that it was a rational choice which served the interest of the Roman Empire. People in the past weren't dumb, but they weren't hyper-competent nor devoid of ulterior motives either. We should expect most past decisions to have been sub-optimal.
Re: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying for It
#34"a skilled blacksmith probably didn’t come from a farm and certainly isn’t going back to one." How certain is that really? I read a very niche, but very well researched book about local violin makers in my region, and there were hundreds, and that "didn't include the ones who merely made one or two fiddles as a project" according to the authors. All the people they listed did it as a side gig to their farming. People…
By the time violins existed, then you are already 100+ years into the modern era and much of this article no longer applies.
Centralized states were becoming much more common and developing much more administrative capacity. Literate bureaucrats were much more easily available. Economic surpluses were much larger. Directly recruiting, equipping and paying an army became much more practical than it previously was and the other methods described here were no longer as necessary as they previously were.