Who Are You To Speak Of Laws To We Who Carry Swords

History 101: Everything Is Caused By... Armies

Welcome to the next entry in our History 101 series, explaining how everything is caused by everything! This time, I’m going to be making the short case for what everyone who went to high school¹ already knows - that political and social power are downstream of who has the ability to beat everyone else up. That’s right, this time we’re talking about armies.

Imagine you’re a person in 1100 AD Europe. You are fortunate enough to be adult, male, healthy, Christian, of the locally favored ethnicity and a landowner; you are, indeed, in the 85th (though not 99th) percentile of Well-Off-Ness.

If you’re in Iceland², you are a respected member of the ruling class. All free farmers are equals in Iceland under the law with the right to sue any other free farmer who violates his rights³, and while there are gothi⁴ who are more important than you, they have authority because you support them and you get to pick which chieftain to follow.⁵

If you’re in France you are a filthy peasant. The actual lords have no reason to care what you have to say and if you try to push your luck they will kill you and get away with it.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, in Iceland in 1100, every free man was a warrior, while in France only the nobles could afford to be knights. Iceland is cold and icy, bad horse country, and most fighting is either quarrels between neighbors or men going a-viking to earn their fortune in foreign lands. Longboats aren’t designed as horse-carriers and the Icelanders kept the old Germanic way of war, dating back at least to the legions⁶, with blocks of armed men on foot with swords and spears and axes and big, big shields⁷ fighting together in formation.

In France, meanwhile, the land was huge and flat, good for raising and riding horses. The French had learned their way of war from the Romans, too, from the heavy cavalry of the late Roman era. No formation of foot soldiers could resist a charge by mailed lancers⁸, as the French had proved that across every battlefield in Europe and beyond⁹. There were French foot soldiers, sure, but they’d been fading in importance for centuries before the knights, who were the people the government listened to. These cavalry tactics seem to have been emphasized more and more intensely in the ninth through eleventh centuries for the purpose of beating the Vikings¹⁰, and they worked - when the French knights met the Norse pirates, the French mostly won.

The last stand of the Germanic infantry.

But horses are very expensive and it takes a lot of money to buy a knight his gear. He can’t have a huge round shield as his chief protection; he needs a shield that works well on horseback and since it can’t protect him as well he needs mail¹¹ and a good helmet, he needs multiple horses, one with endurance to ride out of combat and one with fire to ride in and probably a third to carry his gear, and sword and lance and spare lances because he’s going to hit so hard the lances break...

... And so you end up with a tiny elite group of knights who control practically the military power in the society. And of course they monopolize political power¹², with the rights of the free man steadily fading compared to the day when they were the backbone of the army. The knights have got all the weapons. What are you going to stop them?¹³

This is just one case of how the shape of the army affects the society that produces it. One of the most common rules of history: If you have a distinct military caste who do all the fighting, and they’re not in charge, they will be.

Examples: Repeatedly in the Muslim middle east from about 800-1600, you have a ruler attempting to weaken an existing military caste¹⁴ by putting together an elite group of slave-soldiers based in the capital with no local loyalties answerable only to the throne. The ghulams of the Abbasid Caliphate, the mamluks of Ayyubid Egypt, the janissaries of the Ottoman Empire are all good examples. In each and every case, they end up as either permanent power-brokers¹⁵ or pulling a coup. The samurai of Japan start off as just warriors, and then they get called in to win civil wars to determine which Emperor¹⁶ has power and before long the answer is “the Emperor’s chief general, that’s the one who has power.”

I’ll also push this one step further. A couple hundred years after this little story, infantry makes its dramatic return into the annals of Europe.¹⁷ Over the period 1300 to 1800, the effectiveness of commoners fighting on foot with cheap gear steadily grows compared to expensively equipped noble cavalry, starting with early victories by Scottish and Swiss pikemen in the mountains and continuing until pike and shot decide battles, not glamorous cavalry charges¹⁸. Development after development simplifies training, emphasizes simple drill and discipline over complicated maneuvers, renders expensive armor less and less important compared to cheap guns and pikes. Before long all the infantry has muskets and bayonets¹⁹ and no need for armor at all, and every new industrial development drives down the cost of muskets and driving up their efficiency. In 1793 the French revolutionary government declares that every man 18-25 needs to serve in the army and these quick-trained French conscripts beat the armies of every monarchy in Europe. Before very many decades had passed every government in Europe had been forced to reckon with the fact that keeping its army happy meant keeping the people happy, and keeping the people happy meant listening to the popular will - democracy, in other words, introduced little-by-little as needed to quiet emergencies, but democracy nonetheless.

The military class had become the population, and the ruling class with it.

1. Or middle school, in my case.

2. Which exists somewhere between “republic,” “traditional society” and “anarchist paradise,” it’s a really weird place.

3. It’s a really weird place.

4. The two common translations are ‘chieftain’ and ‘priest’; it’s a really specific bundle of legal rights.

5. When the system breaks down, one of the key elements is the takeover of the majority of the gothards by a handful of powerful families, removing this element of choice.

6. I’m not actually sure if they learned from the Romans or if it’s parallel invention, but the traditional Germanic method of war greatly resembles a highly simplified version of legionary tactics.

7. The bigger your shield, the less armor you need; the more armor you have, the less you need a huge shield.

8. This is false.

9. This is true.

10. This is the position of the books and articles I’ve read, which were written ten to fifty years ago. I think the most cutting-edge historians disagree with me in a complex way, I just don’t know why or how.

11. It’s 1100 AD, so good plate armor hasn’t been invented yet.

12. Interestingly, professional armies don’t always monopolize political power the way hereditary military castes do. It’s still a risk - in the Roman Empire, the legions tended to pick the new Emperor whatever the Senate said - but not the near-certainty it is if military rank is hereditary.

13. I think Bret Devereaux disagrees with me about the causality of this. If I’m modeling him correctly, he thinks that the French focused on the knights because the ruling class were focusing on what worked well for them and ignored the military development of their clients. If they’d tried, then (I think he thinks) infantry tactics would have worked at least as well for their empire. I am currently convinced the system of knights and castles was developed specifically to deal with the Vikings, and think that the one-two punch of Hastings and Dyrrachium demonstrates that in 1100 cavalry had the edge on infantry, with more innovations needed before infantry would regain the edge. But while I think I’m right, it’s never worth dismissing the military historian with the PhD.

14. In each case they do this because the preexisting military caste has started meddling in politics, and the rulers think it’s rebellious and unreliable.

15. In an attempt to maintain their power, the Janissaries veto all military reforms in the Ottoman Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries to the point where it goes from being the best army in Europe to losing to the French with 10-1 odds in its favor.

16. Japanese politics are complicated and this is the best short summary of the trigger for the Genpei War I can manage.

17. I discuss the start of this a little in my Joan of Arc story, but I want to do a full article on the military revolution at some point.

18. Cavalry remains relevant up through WW1, it just becomes used as one part of combined-arms warfare instead of the heart of it, and a less important arm every military breakthrough.

19. Bayonets let your musketmen 80/20 the benefits of carrying pikes without requiring you to sacrifice shooting ability by giving some of your troops pikes instead of guns.