Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part IIb: Officials, Contractors and Professionals

This is the second half of the second part (I, IIa, IIb) 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. We’re picking up right where we left off discussing various methods for actually mobilizing an army, which is to say recruiting the troops, getting them armed and getting them in the ranks. We’ve covered ‘self-recruitment,’ systems where a lot of the burden of that process is handled by the troops themselves (almost invariably entitlement principle citizen militia), allowing for a fairly limited administrative apparatus, though I should note, not no administrative apparatus. The need to keep records of who is liable to serve tends to mean these…