Ive seen it written that kingdoms of antiquity werent feudal societies, but is this just wrong or what? didn’t they also have nobles and peasants and warrior castes?
Well, it depends what kingdoms you’re talking about, but in general you should avoid drawing a straight line from say, Classical Greece to Medieval Europe and saying it’s all the same thing and ignoring this massive thing in the middle called the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.
The classical world didn’t really have feudal contracts between the nobility and the monarchy – armies were much more likely to be either recruited from the citizenry or professional mercenaries than a warrior caste who provide timed military service in return for land – or serfdom for that matter (instead, slavery dominated).
It has been my experience, and I speak purely as a layman, that folks tend to forget about the whole “timed” part of the military service in the classically European model of feudalism. That’s really a very important, I would say essential, element of it.
Because that was a huge deal. It gets elided or ignored a lot in popular culture and even in basic histories. Your feudal overlord couldn’t just call on you to gather up all your guys and go a’warring within him and you had to do that for an indefinite period. You might choose to, but your actual obligation was usually very short; ninety days was a good standard but it could be as short as thirty, if I recall correctly. And there could be all kinds of weird clauses and exceptions in your tenancy agreement, which your overlord would have to honor.
They hated doing that. Hated it. It made imperialist ambitions difficult and diluted power. It is no great surprise that eventually monarchs started saying “fuck it. Guys, give me gold instead, and I’ll just HIRE people to go to war for me.”
(Steven of course knows all this better than I do.)
But people don’t know this. Indeed, even ASOIAF, which of course this post is in context with, tends to just straight up not want to deal with it. There are never any discussions amongst any of the high-rollers in the books about how they’d better prosecute their various wars to a conclusion soon, because in six weeks three-quarters of their host will be allowed to tell them to go fuck off and return to their own lands if they desire. Historically, telling your monarch that the end of your obligations was approaching and if they wanted more service they’d better sweeten the deal was astoundingly common, but it doesn’t seem to really be a thing in Westeros at all; your military obligations appear to be rather open-ended.
The closest we get, I think, is when Robb is calling the banners up north and there’s a statement along the lines of “when he called, they would come… but not forever.” But that’s about it.
We get a bit more, and pretty much all from the Stark side – Catelyn talking about losing men to the harvest in ACOK, for example.
If I was going to No Prize it, maybe this is why GRRM has all of his wars last no longer than 1-2 years?
Can you guys expand on this? How the hell did any of the lords ever allow this to come to pass? Why would a lord ever allow a commoner to dictate the terms of war? How could not just FORCE his soldiers to stay? This boggles my mind.
Quick correction: commoners are not dictating the terms of war, it’s knights and lords negotiating with their liege lords and kings.
As to why, the alternative is having to pay for a standing army – your soldiers are going to want wages, they’re going to need to be fed, they’re going to need supplies, etc., and all of that takes money, which means you need a bureaucracy who can extract the necessary tax revenue from the population, work out the logistics of how to get the money and supplies to the army on time, keep records of everything, and so on.
Whereas the upside of time-limited service and feudal land contracts is that you don’t have to worry about any of that: you don’t pay your army, instead you just give out land grants and leave it to your lords and knights to support themselves.
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