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. Yo

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.