Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part IIa: Mobilization without Administration

This is the second part (I, IIa) 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. While I hope this will be of great interest to the history nerds out there, I’ve opted to structure this specifically as a service for the worldbuilders out there, making useful rules of thumb for imagining fantastical societies. Last week, we laid out some basic groundwork questions for our underlying society and then discussed what I’ve called recruitment principles – the social justifications for military service. And as we saw, some of those principles are going to fit some societies a lot better than others: a society’s recruitment principles (remember, they may use different principles for different groups!) are generally going to map fairly directly onto the society’s own peacetime organization. That said while those principles provide the justification to get and keep fighters under arms, what…