Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying For It – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

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Bret Devereaux

Collections, How To Civic Governance

June 26, 2026

27 Minutes

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).

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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...