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. Now I should note, conceptually simple, rather than simple in practice: actually managing wages for 20,000 soldiers (or hundreds of smiths or shipbuilders or timber-cutters or masons or what have you) is really quite administratively complicated.

But conceptually it is simple: you raise taxes, pay wages for your soldiers and laborers in coin and let the market do the rest. The problem is coinage and revenue.

To start with the first, for this system to work, you need an economy that is based around transactions with physical currency, which allows for low transaction costs in low-trust exchange. But a lot of pre-modern economies are not heavily monetized: coined money may exist, but it is often used primarily for long-distance trade and large-scale elite transactions. To be able to simply pay for everything in coin, the polity needs coinage to have penetrated down into the peasantry so that soldiers or laborers paid in coin can use it to buy food and basic necessities. That sort of monetization is not, I should note, a simple function of time: Greece from the Classical Period and Rome from the third century BC were sufficiently monetized for this to work, but many early and even high medieval European polities were not. If your peasantry do not use coinage, you will have to tax them in agricultural products (called “taxation in-kind”) which are a lot harder to move around and store than coins.

Via Wikipedia, an early Lydian coin, minted in electrum (an alloy of gold and silver), c. 620-563. These were some of the earliest coins in the Mediterranean world – humans had states and state-raised armies for two thousand years before we invented coins.

It is possible for a state to intentionally monetize an economy for the purpose of employing a coin-payment based system and the one of the clearest examples we have of that are the Hellenistic successors of Alexander: Macedonian kings coming from a coinage-based economy in Greece and Macedon found themselves ruling a largely non-coinage based (but vast and often wealthy) economy in Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia and responded with different strategies to convert that wealth into coinage. To simplify greatly, Ptolemaic Egypt relied on bulk exports (especially grain) into the coinage-based Eastern Mediterranean world to bring in hard currency, while the Seleucids in Syria and Mesopotamia minted a lot of coinage and then used colonial Greek-speaking settlement to create market towns where local peasants could sell their goods for money they could then use to pay taxes.1 But this was no small task: both processes took up multiple reigns to complete and involved the large-scale resettlement of Greek-speakers (the military settlers we’ve already discussed). A state needs quite a bit of state capacity to force coinage usage in this way.

Via Wikimedia Commons, a Roman denarius (42 BC) minted by Brutus and Cassius. The reverse design features a pileus (a cap associated with freedom) along with two daggers, along with EID MAR (the Ides of March), reflecting an effort to position the assassination of Julius Caesar as the liberation of the Roman people. However it is worth noting that it is Brutus’ head on the obverse – itself a break with older Roman republican tradition, which had long avoided putting living men on coins, as that was something only monarchies did.

The other problem is revenues: paying for everything is expensive.

Now I should be clear here: dealing with costs in non-monetary ways doesn’t make those costs go away. Someone, somehow has to bear the costs, regardless of if the state pays in grain or coin or tax remission or simply makes someone do it for free (in the latter case, the forced laborer is bearing the costs). In all of these cases, labor still has to be taken out of the civilian economy and it has to be subsisted while it does something military in purpose, be that soldiering itself or providing for military capital. Just because something isn’t paid for in money does not make it ‘free.’

However, it is also the case that the cash revenues of many states are both really complex and often quite limited. The thing to understand is that these are generally traditional polities with tax regimes that are also customary and traditional, which is to say that the ruler often has very limited latitude to simply change the system without triggering intense resistance. As a result, rulers often focus on developing revenues in the areas where they do have substantial latitude, even if those areas are smaller parts of the overall economy (remember: most of the economy is in farming).

A classic example of this, to get a sense of the general situation, was pre-revolutionary ancien régime France. France in the 1700s had a direct agricultural land tax (the taille), but by old custom, the First Estate (the Church) and the Second Estate (the nobility) were immune, limiting the revenue this tax could collect. However, the king had a state monopoly on salt and so the salt tax (the gabelle) become a core source of revenue for the state, to the further repression and impoverishment of the peasantry (who were required to buy a certain quantity of salt per year).

A lot of tax systems, when one looks closely at them, have these sorts of quirks. Roman taxes were, for instance, divided into two categories: tributum (a property tax based on land) and the vectigalia, which covered a wide variety of state revenues from things like renting state owned land or state monopolies (as on silver mining). Rates of tributum outside of Italy (where the tax wasn’t collected after the 160s, since the whole point of having an empire is to make someone else pay taxes) were often set by truly ancient tradition, with the Romans generally preferring (for reasons of local stability) to preserve whatever taxes existed before they conquered a region, merely redirecting them to the Roman treasury (the aerarium Saturni). But that too might mean that while Roman revenues could be vast, they could also be remarkably inflexible as changing tax rates on a region was a breach of tradition which could provoke instability (and was ‘being a bad emperor’ to boot!). The workaround of all of this was the emperor’s private purse: property of successive emperors becoming a parallel form of revenue called the fiscus (the word for a household’s private money supply, literally a box of cash in the house), which at least notionally could be a bit more flexible.

In short, these state revenues tend to be messy, complicated and idiosyncratic, the product of generational layers of both innovation and stubborn tradition. But even as an economy grows, state revenues may stay stubbornly static.

Moreover, outside of the smallest citizen communities, collecting taxes requires significant administrative capacity: you need bureaucrats to track the economic activity you want to tax and a legal and enforcement mechanism to compel extraction. Consider, for instance, a sales tax charged on something like auction sales (as with the Roman centesima rerum venalium tax, a 1% sales tax on auctions which under Augustus partially funded the retirement bonus for soldiers): now you need an official present at public auctions, recording the transactions and calculating the tax liability. You need that official in every major city where such auctions take place.

Now of course that official might also have other duties, but you still need a guy and he needs to be literate (because this process needs to generate written records) which, as you will recall, is not a ubiquitous skill. One solution to this administrative burden is tax farming: the state sells the right to collect a certain tax (for a certain time) to a private business who then collect the tax. The state thus gets a portion of the revenue upfront without the hassle of administration, while the tax farmer gets to pocket the difference between the tax collected and the money paid for the right to collect the tax. The downside of this sort of tax farming, of course, was rampant corruption, since the tax farmer has every incentive to over-collect the taxes in his remit. Even if the tax farmer was perfectly honest – and they most certainly were not – the entire nature of the arrangement is one in which the state is forgoing certain revenues (the profits of the tax farmer) simply to avoid the hassle of collection.

All of which is to say many states found their cash revenues quite limited: they might have economic activity happening in the underlying economy which could be taxed, but due to either lack of administrative capacity, lack of a coinage-based economy or due to traditional or customary constraints, the state found itself unable to effectively tax that activity. Relatively strong states, as we see in China or with Rome, might muscle through these problems and thus handle most or all of the expenses of their armies in cash. But for most states, which didn’t have nearly as much administrative capacity – not to mention non-state polities, which had even less – it was necessary to shift some of these costs off of the state’s balance sheet. Which leads us to:

Devolution

When the state shifts an expense downward to individuals or communities, we say that the cost is devolved on to them. Devolution is thus a strategy for shifting costs off of the state balance sheet and given the above discussion, you may already be able to see the value: for a polity that has a lot of economic activity happening which (because of low administrative capacity, sticky traditions or a lack of coinage-based economics) it cannot effectively tax, devolution provides a means of shifting military costs directly onto those economics actors.

In historically-inspired or fantasy worldbuilding, this is a strategy that is often both neglected and unintentionally evoked. It is neglected in that it is rarely explicitly placed as part of the system: no one says, “oh, the town guards have to buy their own equipment” and generally the town guards never look at motley as they ought if that were the case. On the other hand, the basic nature of the ‘adventuring party’ involves a lot of devolved costs: the state needs monster hunters, but it expects those hunters to equip and supply themselves and often doesn’t do much to pay them (though part of this is ‘payment in loot,’ discussed below). But cost devolution was very common and worked on both smaller and larger scales.

Conceptually, we can break this idea down into three categories, based on upon whom the costs are being devolved. We can thus distinguish between individual or household devolution, where the costs of war are devolved onto individuals or their households, Big Man devolution, where costs are instead devolved into wealthy members of the elite (often, but not always, for bigger ticket items) and finally communal devolution, where costs are devolved onto a whole community, like a town. Naturally in each case the thing having its cost devolved is going to vary – you will not get very far asking a single peasant household to support the cost of a warship or castle – but you would be surprised just how much can be devolved in this way. And again: the purpose of devolution is to move costs down into the underlying economy, so the state does not have to bear them directly – this is especially true if your society has no state to bear the costs at all, making devolution almost a necessity.

When it comes to individual or household devolution, the most common forms by far are requiring commoners to furnish their own military equipment or serve at their own expense. The Roman Republic neatly provides an example of both: Roman citizen-soldiers were expected to buy their own military equipment and then to serve at a rate of pay probably around one-third of the Mediterranean norm for heavy infantry military service. That is a fairly extreme example, but this sort of devolution shows up all the time: peasant levies expected to bring their own (generally cheap) weapons, for instance. It is implicit in the ‘brigaded households’ mobilization model: the reason you are brigading the households is so they can afford one properly equipped infantryman between them (as well as to be able to spare his labor). Note that this isn’t just devolving buying equipment, it is also devolving the cost of a soldier’s labor, by underpaying him such that his household essentially bears the cost of his lost labor: the difference between what a state would pay a mercenary or professional and what it pays a militiaman is a devolved cost.2

That said, the recruitment principle matters a fair bit here. You can compel farmers to reach into their own resources a little bit, but if you want them to really dig deep for a war effort, they need to motivated by something beyond compulsion. Systems that devolve heavy infantry service – which demands a considerable investment in armor – are generally entitlement-principle recruitment systems. We see this with the hoplite armies of ancient Greece, the citizen-militia armies of the Roman Republic and also the heavy infantry militias of many medieval towns: what gets these men to work harder in order to afford to be able to shell out for that expensive equipment is the fact that their status in the community and their political position in the community are connected to it. Polities that are unwilling to devolve any political power to the commons are going to struggle to get the commons to buy expensive equipment or be highly motivated on the battlefield.

Taking one step up, we then have what I am going to call Big Man devolution, although in this case we’re thinking really of devolution to the wealthy, who may or may not be Big Men in the sense of being able to independently wield force. It’s not hard to see the appeal of this approach: Big Men are, almost definitionally, invested in the political system which backstops their power and wealth, there are few enough of them that the state can monitor their compliance directly and most of all they have a lot of spare capital. Because they’re very wealthy.

The most common and least intense of this kind of devolution is generally self-funded elite cavalry service, which shows up in a bewildering array of agrarian societies. Essentially, the wealthy are expected to fight on horseback, their social status is often tied directly to this combat role, but the polity or state expects them to provide their own horse, their own equipment and train on their own time to be effective at this task. This is the most common way that pre-modern agrarian cavalry forces are mobilized. There may be some state support here (it is a good idea for the king to have spare mounts), but it is often quite minimal. In essence, this is the same principle as individual devolution (devolving the cost of service and equipment), except for much more expensive cavalry service.

But we can go bigger.

What about devolving the cost of maintaining a warship? In Classical Athens, while the state paid to build triremes and pay rowers, the cost of maintaining the ship – and to be clear, this is a c. 35-40m long ship with a crew of roughly 200 – was born by a trierarch. The cost was a ‘liturgy’ – a compelled state service assigned to rich citizens. So each year Athens selected, from its wealthiest citizens, trierarchs for each of its triremes, who would then have to foot the bill for maintenance and then command the ship in battle (though they have a specialist helmsman for the tricky bits). Needless to say, the costs were burdensome: triremes needed continuous maintenance to remain seaworthy and trierarchs were also responsible for making sure they had a full crew (even if the state paid them), which could mean additional costs getting or retaining rowers.

But we can go further than that: early modern European navies well into the 17th century made extensive use of multi-purpose ships, mounting guns and marines on merchant vessels to make up the bulk of the fleet, organized around a handful of purpose-built ‘royal ships’ functioning as flagships. The state thus essentially conscripted its merchant marine – ships and all – when it went to war and while ship-owners might expect to be paid for their ship’s time and risk, in practice a lot of the costs here are being devolved onto ship-owners.

What about the cost of an entire military unit? We’ve really already covered this, noting that Big Men often outfit out of their own resources a whole retinue: when they were called up by the king to fight, they would bring their retinue with them. We have a decent amount of evidence that in Iron Age Gaul and Germany, this might extend to providing the weapons necessary to arm their peasant clients to make a larger infantry force. We can even understand medieval castles – the fortified manor homes of Big Men – as, in a way, devolving the cost of fortifications. Those castles, of course, enhanced the power of the Big Men who owned them, providing them protection against local rivals and also leverage against the king (do you really want to spend the time to siege me?), but they also served as the defensive network of the kingdom itself.

Finally, we have devolution to entire communities, most frequently towns. The socii system of the Roman Republic provides a remarkable example of this system: the Roman ‘deal’ with subject communities in Italy was that they provide troops for Rome’s armies, but that process was entirely managed by the socii who were expected to provide their troops in cohorts (units of c. 480 men) with their own officer and paymaster. The socii thus made whatever internal arrangements they cared to to manage the selection of soldiers, their wages and equipment. Some socii, the socii navales were even expected to provide ships (generally lighter ships) in lieu of troops. But this kind of devolution was hardly unique to the Romans: the Schuttersgilde militias of the towns of the Low Countries functioned similarly, as they could be pulled into the service of the army of the town’s liege (from 1384 to 1482, this was the Duchy of Burgundy).

The advantages to devolving costs are substantial: the state is able to forgo the administrative burden of collecting the tax revenue and at the same time, shift the cost of raising military force off of the ‘balance sheet.’ However devolving the costs of warfare downward in this way almost always means devolving political power, to some degree, downward as well. It is not an accident that the very effective systems of individual devolution tend to be citizen-communities with entitlement-based recruitment. Likewise, state formation is often a process of moving away from Big Man devolution towards other forms of raising force as a process in which military power is centralized in the state. Meanwhile, for non-state polities where power is highly fragmented, devolution is often simply the only way to support military activity.

Loot and Foraging

The other way to shift costs, of course, is to shift them onto the enemy or at least whoever is unfortunate enough to be in the proximity of the army. What I would stress here is that it is very rare that a “war will feed itself” (Cato the Elder’s words, Livy 34.9.12-13; bellum se ipsum alet).

We should distinguish here between three categories under this broad heading: foraging (the process of extracting, often violently, supplies from wherever the army happens to be), loot (the taking of moveable wealth, including prisoners, during operations) and indemnities (the practice of forcing the loser to pay you as part of the peace settlement).

Via Wikipedia, Plate 5 (‘The Pillage’) from Les Grandes Misères de la Guerre, a series of etchings by Jacques Callot (1592-1635) showing the horrors of the Thirty Years War, and a useful reminder that when we talk about armies ‘foraging’ we do not mean picking nuts and berries, we mean violently robbing the local rural population.

We’ve discussed foraging in some depth already, so we can be brief here: for pre-modern armies, foraging was essentially required in order to operate in hostile territory. Even in friendly territory, armies often extracted their supplies through requisition or ‘forced purchase’ (compelling peasants to sell food, often at below-market prices). All of these practices shift the cost of feeding and supplying the army onto the population around it, albeit at the cost of doing some damage – potentially very significant damage – to the underlying rural economy. One of the real challenges that standing armies posed to states that sought to build them was the need to arrange for their permanent supply in peacetime without having those armies essentially tear up friendly rural communities. Communities in the Roman provinces would even pay large bribes to avoid having legions quartered on them, because having twenty thousand armed young men dropped on your town was quite robustly disruptive.

Taking loot, meanwhile, was an expected part of nearly all pre-modern warfare and so the promise of loot was a regular inducement for service. What I want to note here is that the promise of loot was almost never sufficient inducement: it was very rare for armies to serve only for loot. Instead, promises of loot were layered on top of other recruitment principles: loot and pay, loot and social status, loot and a role in the community. And that should make sense for two reasons. First, loot is never guaranteed, it requires winning, which generally only one side is going to do. Indemnities – which unlike loot, flow entirely to the state, rather than at least partially to individual soldiers – require winning the war and imposing a peace and again, only one side is generally in a position to impose indemnities (and often neither side is!).

Via the British library an illustration of the Chroniques de France ou de St Denis (1270-1380) showing a medieval foraging party pillaging a farmhouse.

Second, loot and indemnities are often insufficient. Armies are extremely expensive creatures, capable of devouring enormous amounts of wealth simply in order to function and so even the most spectacular windfalls are often insufficient to support an army long-term. Alexander took all of the wealth, built up over two centuries, of the Achaemenid Empire, one of the largest conquest-windfalls ever managed and by all indications he was at least in sight of running out of money – if not already out – when he died. The combined loot and indemnities Rome imposed on its enemies after running the table on the rest of the Mediterranean powers in the third and second century BC were staggering and also only covered about 75% of Rome’s military spending in that period – Rome’s spectacular run of conquest was still a net cost.3

In short, the one-time blast of loot is generally not enough to sustain the armies used to do it: for that, extraction has to be repeated and regularized, which is to say it must stop being looting and must instead become taxation or tribute, which neatly returns us back up to the first two options: tribute in-kind (with redistribution) or taxation in coin.

This is something, I will note, that RPG-economies (both table top and computer) get quite wrong. The problem is three-fold on the one hand, these games invariably underestimate the cost of simply subsisting even a small adventuring party. Food and basic clothing consume quite a lot of resources in a pre-modern context, but that would be irritating to players and so it is often ignored or the cost reduced massively. Second, the loot gained is often over-valued, with itemization systems that fail to take into account that an old, busted hauberk pulled off of a corpse is not going to command the same market value as a shiny new one, freshly crafted to order.

But most importantly, these economies fall apart because they assume an insane amount of fighting and an absurd ‘win rate.’ Recall that, for an aged hoplite, having been in three battles was quite a respectable number even in a very violent period in ancient Greece. By contrast, your typical Dungeons and Dragons adventuring party has been in three battles before they unlock their subclass features at level 3. Moreover, most of the combatants on the losing side of a battle typically flee. In a battle between two armies of 10,000 men, we might expect the winning army to have lost around 500 men (5%) and the losing army to have lost perhaps 1,500 (15%), so that is 9,500 survivors splitting the loot of 1,500 fallen (2,000 even if they’re willing to rob dead comrades). So while your D&D party or Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord company sustains itself by splitting the loot of dozens of foes for every party member, in an actual army, you’re lucky to get your ~1/6ths share of a fallen foe.4 Loot is still a factor, but one cannot expect to run an army on it, long-term.

That said, loot distribution can have interesting distorting effects even if it isn’t enough to relieve the whole burden of running an army. Loot is a high-variance sort of thing: many soldiers get none, but some soldiers, if they are lucky to be on the right campaign, might get a great deal, potentially enough to alter their social position and status. Again, this simply cannot happen to everyone in a society, but it can happen to select individuals. Some of Alexander’s soldiers did get rich off of his conquests and certainly some Romans did too, although it is worth noting that in most societies, the structure of power channels looted wealth upwards: most of it ends up in the hands of the elite (as was certainly the case for both of those examples). Often this was institutionalized, with the proceeds of conquest being distributed in shares based on rank, with higher ranks getting a larger slice of the pie.

What I want to pull out here at the end, however, is that once again these systems are sensitive to the nature of the underlying society. It takes a strong state with a lot of administrative capacity and a coinage-based economy to simply pay all of its military bills in cash. Such states certainly existed, but they were hardly the most common type in the pre-modern period. Instead, we see a lot of polities making a mixed use of all of these strategies. The Roman Republic, for instance, mostly devolved the costs of its armies, but paid its soldiers a wage (which allowed it to recruit poorer landholders, expanding the assidui, the class of men liable for conscription) largely out of tax revenue (the tributum), while also sometimes imposing contributions (effectively taxes) in kind (often in grain) on some of its conquests and directing that food directly to its armies. And of course the Romans absolutely engaged in looting – systematized and centralized, because these are Romans – with the rewards of a successful war shared out among the soldiers by rank.

On the flipside, for certain societies, some of these options are not really available. Societies that lack much in the way of coinage are going to struggle to pay for anything in cash (though some expenses may be handled in bullion) and so may rely more on devolution or in-kind redistribution. Non-state societies aren’t going to be able to manage much large-scale redistribution or taxation and so are going to rely on fragmented systems, mediated and devolved through Big Men. Meanwhile, highly centralized states often are able to devolve fewer costs: if the peasantry and local communities have been made to give up all of their political voice to a centralized state, then that state better also be able to provide most of its military force.

So as we keep seeing, the political and social structure of a society also dictates quite a lot about its military structure. In the next part, we’ll turn to the structures of military leadership, where this axiom will be as true as ever.

1. On the Ptolemaic system, see von Reden, Money in Ptolemaic Egypt (2007). On the Seleucid system, see Aperghis, The Seleukid Royal Economy (2004).
2. Technically, there’s probably also a skill premium involved as well, but it is important not to overstate that skill premium. The Hellenistic mercenary paid three times what the Roman legionary was paid was not three times as skilled (he was generally less skilled).
3. Taylor, Soldiers and Silver (2020), 128.
4. The absolute apotheosis of this is Henry from the Kingdom Come: Deliverance series who, because he spends the game personally slaying hundreds, if not thousands, of knights and men-at-arms (and then reselling their equipment), likely accumulates a quantity of money which would crash the entire medieval Bohemian economy. He was hungry indeed.