Fireside Friday, August 16, 2024

Fireside this week! I find I have my thoughts more or less together for the last part of the Imperator series, but I have not yet gotten them into a satisfying order – a common hazard of writing – so they will have to wait for next week. It’s not yet clear to me if Part III will be split up. I have two major threads to follow (how Imperator understands non-monarchic internal politics and how it understands stability and the fall of the Roman Republic) which overlap but which I’m not sure if I can fully split up. In any case, that will be next week.

Percy lounges, Ollie roars (that was actually a particularly vocal ‘meow’ requesting a head-scratch, but he looks like he’s got his war-face on!)

For this week’s musing, I want to ruminate a bit more on military motivation and what we might call ‘frontier maintenance,’ following up on a semi-viral Twitter thread I posted lately.

For those who aren’t on Twitter, what I argued there was that the Night’s Watch from A Song of Ice and Fire (and derivative products) doesn’t actually really work as described as an institution. In particular, and I’ve gestured at this before, it has the structure of a ‘military order,’ which is to say a knightly religious order – they’re ‘brothers’ who take vows, live communally in difficult circumstances on a distant frontier – but lacks the thing that makes those military orders work, namely a single religious creed and consequent religious practice.

Instead, the Night’s Watch is a mostly secular organization with no prominent religious rituals beyond the oath which recruits members of two different faiths. This, as I’ve noted before, is a repeated weakness with George R. R. Martin’s worldbuilding, in that it often struggles to grasp the implications of people in the past (or fantasy versions of the past) believing their religion and acting accordingly. Without a religious creed holding them together, there’s really not a lot of reason this highly trained, cohesive band of armed men wouldn’t just turn south and set up shop as a group somewhere more hospitable (or stay where they are, but just begin ruling as secular elites with wealth, wives and inheritance, like Albert von Preußen).

One response to this was to simply note that the Night’s Watch is, at the time of A Song of Ice and Fire, a decaying, weakened institution, with only around a thousand men at arms at the outset. This answer doesn’t work for me, because the Night’s Watch has been only slowly decaying over centuries. The Targaryens ruled for nearly 300 years and this institution trucked on through all of that without major issue. Three centuries is a long time! Highly cohesive bodies of men who lack a reason to be loyal to the polity that employs them tend to go rogue in periods of time measured in months, not centuries. This is the same reason I don’t think the existence of the ‘Night’s King’ renders this any more plausible, because it is so deep in the past. Indeed, one of the things that prompted this thought was the realization that the Watch plays basically no role in the Dance of the Dragons (the focus of House of the Dragon), despite being a large (at the time) body of full-time soldiers in a kingdom in the midst of civil war!

But the more interesting responses were those trying to justify the system within its own logic: the brothers stay on the wall because they would face punishment otherwise, because they were sent there for petty crimes, or because on the wall they get (very basic) lodgings and food, or because of the abstract threat of the Others and so on. What I find interesting about these responses is they’ve made the same misstep I think GRRM has perhaps also made: they have only considered the problem from the elite perspective. I’ve noted elsewhere, though I now cannot find where, that it is striking that all of the point-of-view characters so far with more than a single chapter (invariably a prologue or epilogue) in A Song of Ice and Fire are members of the aristocracy (indeed, nearly all members of the high aristocracy – mere knights are rare!). This series is, for all protests to the contrary, far more relentlessly focused on the elite perspective than something like Lord of the Rings, where we at least have one non-elite main character (Samwise Gamgee).

And sure, from the elite perspective, this all makes sense. Someone needs to stand on the wall, so we’ll send someone (over time, increasingly low-status, disposable someones) to do it, provide them very minimal comforts necessary for minimum survival and decree harsh punishments should they ever leave their military-penal colony. For a Warden of the North in Winterfell or a King in King’s Landing, that all makes sense.

But consider it for a moment from the perspective of the brothers of the Night’s Watch. Sure, someone needs to stand on this wall, but it doesn’t need to be them. Fear of the Others or Wildlings is useless here: that answers why someone needs to be here, but not why I need to be here. Some people will self-sacrifice for the community with no thought to other rewards (money, prestige, status), but they are very, very few.

And sure, before they were sent to the wall, they might have been a petty criminal. But now they are a trained soldier, in the company of other trained soldiers with whom they share interests, well-armed and cohesive. Why should they stay on the wall, instead of heading south to knock over some minor lord and set themselves up in his place and live in far greater comfort? I must stress the moment you hand these men weapons and training, motivating them is a new game, because they’re no longer thieves and outcasts, they are armed and trained soldiers, professional purveyors of violence in a society that values skill at violence at lot. And they can command payment (again, in money or status) commensurate to that valuable skill (especially in a political context where power is so fragmented that they will always find someone who needs a few hundred good men at arms). Early modern European states sometimes did empty the prisons into their professional armies, but once you handed those men a pike or musket and taught them to use it, you had to pay themor someone else would.

This is a thing – bands of armed men, made cohesive through shared suffering turning on civilian society – that happens with astonishingly regularity and the fuse on that bomb, historically speaking, is short. Given the age of the institution, we might have expected that particular bomb to have gone off many times over the previous three centuries!

So how do actual historical societies resolve this tension? By promising the men on the wall something after their tour of service.

A religious order promises those men salvation. It builds cohesion because the men of the order are bonded together in religious practice: praying together, singing hymns together, observing mass together, and so on. Of course that only works if most of these men believe – in a strong, immediate, emotional sense, believe – in the promises of their religion. And the salvation is personal: you cannot get into heaven by having someone else join a monastery for you, but you can absolutely hold off the Wildlings and Others by having someone else stand on the wall for you. The shared religious aspect is thus both what holds the order together (cohesion) and keeps it on the wall (morale), which is why most religious orders do not include non-co-religionists or indeed, even members of different denominations of the same religion: they need to share the same binding belief. The protestant reformation basically vaporizes many of the knightly religious orders it touches because uniformity is so important for this reason.

Another solution, as I noted in the original thread is long-service paid professionals. But here, and this is important: you have to let them retire. Military life, after all, is difficult and unpleasant and if all you can promise is more of the same, that is a poor reward: it doesn’t matter if you’re paying them if they can never spend the money. Indeed, it was actually very common in both antiquity (e.g. with Carthaginian wage-troops, Polyb. 1.68-9) and in the early modern period with professional soldiers for pay and wages to remain almost entirely notional until discharge at which all of the arrears needed to be paid.⁴⁶⁶ When the Roman army professionalizes, soldiers were famously promises a praemia, a retirement bonus (literally ‘the prize’) of more than a decade’s worth of pay, delivered as a single massive lump sum on retirement.

This avoids what we may call the ‘Bane Problem‘ that payments made yesterday do not give you power over someone today. By holding most of the pay in arrears or as a retirement bonus, you incentivize continued loyal service and indeed, create a ‘sunk cost’ to that effect. Your soldiers, in the meantime, justify putting up with present discomfort – the miserable cold of being on that wall – because, if they survive (and perhaps roughly half of Roman soldiers probably did, in the imperial period), they’ll get a chance to start a family with financial security in their retirement. Of course the life-long vows of the Night’s Watch make this system impossible. Martin has a fascination with these sorts of life-long, no children, no wives, no inheritance, no titles vows (the Maesters and Kingsguard do the same thing) but in practice the only institutions that could ever command that kind of devotion were religious ones.⁴⁶⁷ Once again, it is hard to escape the suspicion that Martin, as a secular agnostic does not appear to understand the role that religious devotion plays in institutions very well, which is a problem when his source material is medieval Europe, particularly Britain in the War of the Roses (1455-1487), a period in which religious devotion mattered a great deal. Instead, professional military service often held forth at least the promise of upward social mobility.

The remaining option for this sort of frontier-guarding work was traditionally military settlers: create communities on the frontier where the men who farm the land (with their families) have an obligation to serve in the army. Some early Roman colonies worked like this, as did Hellenistic military settlements. Often military settlers of this sort acquired some legal or economic privileges – elevated into the ‘ruling class’ – and were ethnically distinct from the peoples they held off (or down), as a way of ensuring long-term loyalty. That said, in the very long term, these sorts of fellows tend to be hard for the central state to keep control over: the failure of the diwan-system is a classic example.

I should note that those long-service professionals and military settlers overlap more than you’d think. Generally, retiring long-service professionals don’t move back into the imperial core – they settle (with their money and land) on the frontier, near their former bases, marrying local and having families (whose sons often end up in the army!). Meanwhile, a military settler gets to enjoy his retirement whenever there isn’t a war, but can also look forward to his children holding his lands after him.

But the main point I want to make here is that for any of these systems to make it out of the first generation there has to be a source of loyalty and morale from the perspective of the common soldiers standing on the wall. And that source generally has to be future oriented because service on the frontier is rarely pleasant and crucially is generally less pleasant than how well-trained, armed men might be able to live somewhere else, either as soldiers or as bandits. A system that is ‘all stick, no carrot’ – what many folks suggested – just produces bandits at a high rate. So there has to be a future-oriented carrot to make these systems work, be it spiritual salvation (for religious orders) or a comfortable retirement (for professional soldiers or military settlers).

And simply watching a whole bunch of people thinking through the problem at the same time, it is suddenly no surprise how frequently polities that try to set up these systems – especially non-state polities like those in Westeros – instead end up creating time bombs with extremely short fuses. Successes, like the legions of the Roman imperial period, or the Han dynasty’s increasingly professional frontier armies, are rare. Catastrophes like the endlessly predictable Mamluk revolts, the Army of Flanders sacking Antwerp, the Great Catalan Company’s ‘Catalan Revenge,’ the Victual Brothers and so on are distressingly common. Of course, that GRRM’s readers don’t realize that the Night’s Watch is such a time bomb isn’t necessarily a worldbuilding problem – such time bombs regularly caught rulers by surprise. What puzzles me is that I cannot see that Martin understands it as a time bomb either: with the caveats that the books are not done, he seems to understand the problem to be that the Night’s Watch is too weak to fulfill its stated purpose, not that a Night’s Watch remotely strong enough to do so would rapidly become a much more immediate problemfor everyone else.

For what it is worth, the outcome I’d expect for the Night’s Watch is not a slow decline, but rather that the inclusion of recruits with the Faith of the Seven would lead to the secularization of the order, leading fairly rapidly to a revolt which would either end up with the Watch going the route of Albert von Preußen and becoming a secular polity (and thus ditching the asceticism) or being disbanded and replaced by one of the other solutions above.

On to Recommendations!

I want to start with aseries of postsover at Liv Yarrow’s blog, adventures in my head, working through some questions about Roman coinage production in the mid-first century. The discussion here is fairly technical, but it is a good example of an expert working through a set of interconnected questions about the precise dating of coin issues and their quantity and as a result of also a good example of how our understanding of the past often comes down to highly technical work by specialists to resolve a lot of questions that seem small and unimportant but which collectively add up. After all, as you can pick up from the posts, the production of Roman coinage interweaves with both our understanding of the Roman economy (both as money, but also in terms of silver production) and Roman politics and coins, precisely because they can often be dated securely, are particularly valuable. This sort of research work only happens in academic setting – you’d never be able to ‘crowdfund’ it – but without this kind of meticulous effort, a lot of the history you can crowdfund is made much weaker.

At The Vital Center, fellow UNC alumnus Joshua Tait, a historian of American conservatism and in particular the effort to intellectualize that movement, lays out some thoughts on the ‘professional managerial class’ and how opposition to this new socio-economic class animates (in different ways) critiques on both the left and right and then in a subsequent post on his blog, To Live if to Maneuver, he expands this by looking at some of the history of conservative approaches to the managerial class in particular through conservative thinker James Burnham (1905-1987). Like any sort of intellectual history or critique, it can be a bit dense, but a rewarding reminder that ideas have contexts and history.

Meanwhile, the publication of the Ancient World Mapping Center’s Livy Study Maps: Book 21 (noted on this month’s Pasts Imperfect, also always worth a read) is as good a time as any to shout out the AWMC and their Maps for Texts series, which match together a few key ancient texts with carefully and scholarly produced maps. Book 21 of Livy is the one which covers Hannibal’s siege of Saguntum, his crossing of the Alps and his victory at the Trebia, a useful set of events to make maps for!

Meanwhile, a bit of very big classical news from earlier this month, scholars have identified two new fragments of the Athenian tragedian Euripides, short sections of plays where before now all we really had were titles (likely the Polyidus and Ino). Antiquity does not deliver us next texts – even in such short fragments – often, so it is always big news when we get them.

For this week’s book recommendation, I want to recommend N. Rosenstein, Rome at War: Farms, Families and Death in the Middle Republic(2004). This is something of a variation from my normal recommendations, so I want to lead with a necessary caveat: this book is not a light or easy read. It was written for specialists and expects the reader to do some work to fully understand its arguments. That said, it isn’t written in impenetrable ‘academese’ – indeed, the ideas here are very concrete, dealing with food production, family formation, mortality and military service. But they’re also fairly technical and Rosenstein doesn’t always stop to recap what he has said and draw fully the conclusions he has reached and so a bit of that work is left to the reader.

That said, this is probably in the top ten or so books that have shaped me as a scholar and influenced my own thinking – as attentive readers can no doubt recall seeing this book show up a lot in my footnotes and citations. And much like another book I’ve recommended, Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production and Power in the Pre-Industrial West (2003), this is the sort of book that moves you beyond the generalizations about ancient societies you might get in a more general treatment (‘low productivity, high mortality, youth-shifted age profile, etc.’) down to the actual evidence and methods we have to estimate and understand that.

Fundamentally, Rome at War is an exercise in ‘modeling’ – creating (fairly simple) statistical models to simulate things for which we do not have vast amounts of hard data, but for which we can more or less estimate. For instance, we do not have the complete financial records for a statistically significant sample of Roman small farmers; indeed, we do not have such for any Roman small farmers. So instead, Rosenstein begins with some evidence-informed estimates about typical family size and construction and combines them with some equally evidence-informed estimates about the productivity of ancient farms and their size and then ‘simulates’ that household. That sort of approach informs the entire book.

Fundamentally, Rosenstein is seeking to examine the causes of a key Roman political event: the agrarian land-reform program of Tiberius Gracchus in 133, but the road he takes getting ther eis equally interesting. He begins by demonstrating that based on what we know the issue with the structure of agriculture in Roman Italy was not, strictly speaking ‘low productivity’ so much as inefficient labor allocation (a note you will have seen me come back to a lot): farms too small for the families – as units of labor – which farmed them. That is a very interesting observation generally, but his point in reaching it is to show that this is why Roman can conscript these fellows so aggressively: this is mostly surplus labor so pulling it out of the countryside does not undermine these households (usually). But that pulls a major pillar – that heavy Roman conscription undermined small freeholders in Italy in the Second Century – out of the traditional reading of the land reforms.

Instead, Rosenstein then moves on to modeling Roman military mortality, arguing that, based on what we know, the real problem is that Rome spends the second century winning a lot. As a result, lots of young men who normally might have died in war – certainly in the massive wars of the third century (Pyrrhic and Punic) – survived their military service, but remained surplus to the labor needs of the countryside and thus a strain on their small households. These fellows then started to accumulate. Meanwhile, the nature of the Roman census (self-reported on the honor system) and late second century Roman military service (often unprofitable and dangerous in Spain, but not with the sort of massive armies of the previous centuries which might cause demographically significant losses) meant that more Romans might have been dodging the draft by under-reporting in the census. Which leads to his conclusion: when Tiberius Gracchus looks out, he sees both large numbers of landless Romans accumulating in Rome (and angry) and also falling census rolls for the Roman smallholder class and assumes that the Roman peasantry is being economically devastated by expanding slave estates and his solution is land reform. But what is actually happening is population growth combined with falling census registration, which in turn explains why the land reform program doesn’t produce nearly as much change as you’d expect, despite being more or less implemented.

Those conclusions remain both important and contested. What I think will be more valuable for most readers is instead the path Rosenstein takes to reach them, which walks through so much of the nuts-and-bolts of Roman life: marriage patterns, childbearing patterns, agricultural productivity, military service rates, mortality rates and so on. These are, invariably, estimates built on estimates of estimates and so exist with fairly large ‘error bars’ and uncertainty, but they are, for the most part, the best the evidence will support and serve to put meat on the bones of those standard generalizing descriptions of ancient society.