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> wars mostly affected the 'state' and not the people that much How do you exactly think armies are fed, armed, and paid? There are innumerable examples of rev

> wars mostly affected the 'state' and not the people that much How do you exactly think armies are fed, armed, and paid? There are innumerable examples of revolts ignited due to the abuses of the local or occupying army. This idea of "limited" warfare where a king took a few men and fought it out with his rival with the population not caring or suffering much is utterly deluded.

pjc50 6y ago
Parent is more right than wrong; while armies were fed by forage, local purchase, and outright looting, they were also necessarily localised and the apparatus for total war didn't really exist until railways, despite Napoleon beginning mass mobilisation. The Grande Armee marching across Europe would have made a huge impact to the zone within a day's ride of it, and much less outside of that. It was the 20th century which made giant fronts and mass bombing of civilians behind the front possible. Not that previous war was without its atrocities (Magdeburg), but the scale was proportionally smaller. And, yes, tax and fiscal policy was completely dominated by warmaking related costs. As the state was much smaller and had little remit outside that. "Nationalism was not a concept yet" also deserves looking at; the map looked very different, with either huge loose polyglot empires (Austria-Hungary, HRE) or smaller monarchial states, and the idea of self in the world that people would have had looked very different. Especially for much of the middle of that period it was bound more to religion.
fsloth 6y ago
Perhaps I wrote imprecisely. I did not claim the population did not suffer. I meant that the aim of the warfare was rarely annihilation of native population. You wanted to have native population, as having native population farm the land was the only way to extract revenue from the land. The main question I wanted to answer was how could a stable culture survive in an area that went through so many wars. Not to make claims about "better way of living" or anything like that. Another point which I wanted to stress that state powers in nations that lacked advanced bureaucracy (China, Ottomans) really did not have any way to extract wealth from the land efficiently. Yes, if an army parked nearby they likely foraged the nearby areas. But an army is a very localized thing. There was no concept of "nation wide war economy". The extraction caused by the army was localized around the army. So when we think about state induced horrors of the 20th century which were enabled by sophisticated bureaucracy and monoculture as anything else, those things did not really exist in medieval europe. You really did not want a king to park his army in your backyard, that's for sure.

pjc50 6y ago

Parent is more right than wrong; while armies were fed by forage, local purchase, and outright looting, they were also necessarily localised and the apparatus for total war didn't really exist until railways, despite Napoleon beginning mass mobilisation. The Grande Armee marching across Europe would have made a huge impact to the zone within a day's ride of it, and much less outside of that. It was the 20th century which made giant fronts and mass bombing of civilians behind the front possible. Not that previous war was without its atrocities (Magdeburg), but the scale was proportionally smaller. And, yes, tax and fiscal policy was completely dominated by warmaking related costs. As the state was much smaller and had little remit outside that. "Nationalism was not a concept yet" also deserves looking at; the map looked very different, with either huge loose polyglot empires (Austria-Hungary, HRE) or smaller monarchial states, and the idea of self in the world that people would have had looked very different. Especially for much of the middle of that period it was bound more to religion.

fsloth 6y ago

Perhaps I wrote imprecisely. I did not claim the population did not suffer. I meant that the aim of the warfare was rarely annihilation of native population. You wanted to have native population, as having native population farm the land was the only way to extract revenue from the land. The main question I wanted to answer was how could a stable culture survive in an area that went through so many wars. Not to make claims about "better way of living" or anything like that. Another point which I wanted to stress that state powers in nations that lacked advanced bureaucracy (China, Ottomans) really did not have any way to extract wealth from the land efficiently. Yes, if an army parked nearby they likely foraged the nearby areas. But an army is a very localized thing. There was no concept of "nation wide war economy". The extraction caused by the army was localized around the army. So when we think about state induced horrors of the 20th century which were enabled by sophisticated bureaucracy and monoculture as anything else, those things did not really exist in medieval europe. You really did not want a king to park his army in your backyard, that's for sure.