Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part IIb: Officials, Contractors and Professionals – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

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Bret Devereaux

Collections

June 19, 2026

25 Minutes

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 ‘self-recruitment’ systems are most often used by urban societies with a literate upper-class.

We also looked at the over low-overhead alternative: having mobilization handled by local Big Men. The big caveat here is this functionally ensures the fragmentation of power (and thus a non-state society, since centralization of military force defines states) which means that a society which turns its local aristocracy into petty warlords in order to raise its armies has to then cope with having a whole bunch of petty warlords who have their own small armies they can use to push for power and position.

And I want to reiterate here societies do not choose these systems from first principles , instead these systems develop organically, over generations (it’s quite rare that someone plans such a system from scratch, although it does – rarely – happen) and are constrained by existing social structures . A non-state society is basically compelled to adopt Big Man Mobilization because, lacking state structures, they have no other options. By contrast, a long-established state cannot adopt Big Man Mobilization effectively, because they don’t have the petty warlords it relies on and creating those warlords would mean disestablishing the state to a substantial degree by fragmenting its power.

So for the most part, we ought not think of these systems as choices but as consequences of social structure.

This week, we’re going to move forward and discuss some of the more involved solutions, which might give the state a bit more control over the process, at the cost of greater overhead (although not always greater overhead for the state necessarily, as we’ll see).

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).

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Households and Officials

Now we’ve seen how compact state societies with a broad ‘middling well-to-do’ class which can political preserve their interests and have some political entitlements to fight for can recruit. But what if your state society doesn’t have that well-to-do peasant or burgher class ? At least, not enough of them?

That is the case for most pre-modern state societies : it is substantially more common for the peasantry to be pushed down basically all the way to subsistence . After all, it is in the domestic economic interests of the king, the temple and the local aristocracy to extract as much as they can from the peasantry and most do so – the conditions whereby that peasantry can politically defend themselves from that sort of extraction are rare (and it’s often not the whole peasantry). But now you have a problem: that aristocracy is not big enough to be the society’s whole army on its own, but your peasants are too poor to afford their equipment and have no political entitlement for which to fight .

Actually, to take an aside for a moment, there’s some complexity here in what is happening. Fundamentally, pre-modern societies are all about agriculture and subsistence and so what the society needs is for these small farmers to generate enough surplus to support two kinds of non-farmers: producers making military equipment and soldiers who aren’t farming because they’re fighting. Entitlement-systems do...