"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 here had time they couldn't just sink into doing more farming and fishing. All primary industries have natural downtime. They very often spent that on specializing, often into useful things like cobbling, shipbuilding or carpentry, but also into less immediately useful things like making musical instruments or elaborate altar pieces for the churches. So what makes blacksmithing so special a guy who learned it would never "go back to a farm"?
- 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.
My first introduction to the blog was through his Lord of the Rings Siege of Gondor serie, and I've been a Patreon supporter ever since. It's well worth the time.
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.
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.
10 years of respite is nothing on the scale of countries.
History is littered with examples of states choosing to pay off their would-be attackers, and seeing it as success or failure depends on your priors.
Byzantium was especially adept at this, for centuries, and they did fine for a millenium, but more often than not it was seen as a temporary, last resort measure, with large downsides, and generally to avoid creating a new front while a more critical war was being waged elsewhere.
By paying off your enemies, you strengthen their armies, you give them an incentive to ask for more and more each year (because they know you wouldn't have paid if you weren't weak), as a rule they will regularly pillage your countryside to encourage you to pay, and they will mostly use the money you pay them as investment to launch attacks against you at the first opportunity.
For Byzantium, this was the case with Arabs, Bulgarians, Crusaders, etc., and over time it led to ruin. Though it also led to overall great outcomes with Armenians and Iberians, who became vassal states.
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.
It was also quite common for them to assassinate their emperors, to engage in civil war, to debase their currency so as to pay soldiers more, to hire barbarian mercenaries, etc. It is one thing to acknowledge these things happened, it is quite another to argue these were economically rational actions in the best interest of Rome.
> 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.
> 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.
You're rewriting history here. "The normans" were completely integrated in the French aristocracy, and that's why the kings of England took part in the successoral struggle. The 100 year war was started by the grandson of Philippe IV, of the french Capet dynasty, fighting against a nephew of Philippe IV for legitimate motives. Other cousins fighting it out included the dukes of burgundy, the house of Anjou-Sicily, etc.
If anything, a few normans lords marrying into the Capet family was just a little gene refill to stave off inbreeding.
I am not rewriting history, just giving a perspective.
The Norse raiders were given land and in exchange they would stop raiding. Paying off the aggressors.
These Norse became known as the Normans, took the English crown only a few generations after settling and then claimed the French crown.
Taking England gave them enough power to war with France for hundreds of years.
Paying off raiders, time and time again, cost France and never ended the threat. William The Conqueror’s descendants didn’t stop claiming France until around 1800.
But I totally do give you that by the 100 year war they were now English not Norse.
But in the modern West we have a very short 24 hour attention span. In other cultures and other time periods people had long memories. I could imagine Rollo telling his son to finish what his ancestors started. And eventually William telling his sons.
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.
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!
You should never consider that unless it is very obvious the other side will steamroll you. In that case you become a vassal state of bigger empire, which has different downsides, but it might be your only choice. Otherwise everyone can just come and keep extracting free stuff from you until you can neither pay the tributes nor defend yourself.
In a violent world we actually see the opposite: people become hyper violent when threatened or even when someone disrespects their honour. It seems irrational, but the fact that we see this behaviour consistently in violent environments means it is evolutionary stable.
"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 here had time they couldn't just sink into doing more farming and fishing. All primary industries have natural downtime. They very often spent that on specializing, often into useful things like cobbling, shipbuilding or carpentry, but also into less immediately useful things like making musical instruments or elaborate altar pieces for the churches. So what makes blacksmithing so special a guy who learned it would never "go back to a farm"?
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.
I've just spent an hour reading these words, and am having my mind expanded much further than I expected.
My first introduction to the blog was through his Lord of the Rings Siege of Gondor serie, and I've been a Patreon supporter ever since. It's well worth the time.
You are in for a treat, he’s got a ton of great posts.
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.
Awesome! I want to pretend to gut people, just like Attila the Hun...
acoup with yet another excellent blog
sounds good
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.
10 years of respite is nothing on the scale of countries.
History is littered with examples of states choosing to pay off their would-be attackers, and seeing it as success or failure depends on your priors.
Byzantium was especially adept at this, for centuries, and they did fine for a millenium, but more often than not it was seen as a temporary, last resort measure, with large downsides, and generally to avoid creating a new front while a more critical war was being waged elsewhere.
By paying off your enemies, you strengthen their armies, you give them an incentive to ask for more and more each year (because they know you wouldn't have paid if you weren't weak), as a rule they will regularly pillage your countryside to encourage you to pay, and they will mostly use the money you pay them as investment to launch attacks against you at the first opportunity.
For Byzantium, this was the case with Arabs, Bulgarians, Crusaders, etc., and over time it led to ruin. Though it also led to overall great outcomes with Armenians and Iberians, who became vassal states.
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.
Nevertheless it was quite common for the Romans to pay off Germanic tribes. Equally it was common for them to demand tribute from weaker neighbours.
It was also quite common for them to assassinate their emperors, to engage in civil war, to debase their currency so as to pay soldiers more, to hire barbarian mercenaries, etc. It is one thing to acknowledge these things happened, it is quite another to argue these were economically rational actions in the best interest of Rome.
> 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.
> 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.
You're rewriting history here. "The normans" were completely integrated in the French aristocracy, and that's why the kings of England took part in the successoral struggle. The 100 year war was started by the grandson of Philippe IV, of the french Capet dynasty, fighting against a nephew of Philippe IV for legitimate motives. Other cousins fighting it out included the dukes of burgundy, the house of Anjou-Sicily, etc.
If anything, a few normans lords marrying into the Capet family was just a little gene refill to stave off inbreeding.
I am not rewriting history, just giving a perspective.
The Norse raiders were given land and in exchange they would stop raiding. Paying off the aggressors.
These Norse became known as the Normans, took the English crown only a few generations after settling and then claimed the French crown.
Taking England gave them enough power to war with France for hundreds of years.
Paying off raiders, time and time again, cost France and never ended the threat. William The Conqueror’s descendants didn’t stop claiming France until around 1800.
But I totally do give you that by the 100 year war they were now English not Norse.
But in the modern West we have a very short 24 hour attention span. In other cultures and other time periods people had long memories. I could imagine Rollo telling his son to finish what his ancestors started. And eventually William telling his sons.
That’s my perspective.
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.
And once you start paying the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.
(Curious how the whole Hormuz situation will turn out.)
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!
> pre-modern
USA agreed to pay Iran to not attack just this month.
That money was confiscated from Iran in the first place though.
I do indeed find Brett's writing informative and fun.
You should never consider that unless it is very obvious the other side will steamroll you. In that case you become a vassal state of bigger empire, which has different downsides, but it might be your only choice. Otherwise everyone can just come and keep extracting free stuff from you until you can neither pay the tributes nor defend yourself.
In a violent world we actually see the opposite: people become hyper violent when threatened or even when someone disrespects their honour. It seems irrational, but the fact that we see this behaviour consistently in violent environments means it is evolutionary stable.