Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight

给世界构建者的前现代军队指南，第一部分：为何而战

Bret Devereaux Collections June 5, 2026 23 Minutes Bret Devereaux 文集，2026年6月5日，阅读时长23分钟

This week I want to try something a little different. Rather than taking apart a particular fantasy military system, I thought I might try to lay out a more general sense of how military systems tend to map on to societies, both because such general historical frameworks are handy for thinking about the past, but also because they make useful rules of thumb for imagining fantastical societies. So essentially here we are asking: how do societies end up with the sort of armies they have? 本周我想尝试一些不同的东西。与其剖析某个特定的奇幻军事系统，我打算尝试梳理出一套更通用的逻辑，探讨军事系统如何映射到社会结构中。这不仅是因为这种宏观的历史框架有助于思考过去，更因为它们能为构想奇幻社会提供实用的经验法则。因此，我们本质上是在问：社会是如何形成其所拥有的那种军队的？

This is going to take a few posts to get through because there are actually quite a few key components to cover: the why and how of recruitment (both ‘why do these people feel obligated to serve’ and ‘how do you get them into the army’), how a society pay for that (or doesn’t), who leads it and how, and how once formed any army coheres in the field. Finally, we’ll wrap up with some historical ‘archetypes’ to show how these different facets link together with the underlying civilian society and also how that shapes what they look like on the battlefield (including weapons and tactics). 这需要通过几篇文章来完成，因为涉及的关键要素相当多：征兵的原因与方式（包括“这些人为何感到有义务服役”以及“如何将他们编入军队”）、社会如何支付（或无法支付）军费、谁来领导以及如何领导，以及军队一旦组建后如何在战场上保持凝聚力。最后，我们将总结一些历史“原型”，展示这些不同侧面如何与底层的平民社会相互关联，以及它们如何塑造军队在战场上的表现（包括武器和战术）。

This series is also going to be a bit unusual because in some ways its purpose is to link up and summarize a bunch of other posts. We’ve had a lot of posts and series over the years which examined this or that historical or fictional military and discussed the ways in which their militaries reflected civilian society and I wanted to pull a lot of that together in one place. As a result in this series – more than most – the links are going to be ‘load bearing.’ 这个系列也会有些不同寻常，因为在某种程度上，它的目的是串联并总结以往的诸多文章。多年来，我们发布了许多文章和系列，探讨了各种历史或虚构的军队，并讨论了它们的军事力量如何反映平民社会，我希望将这些内容汇集在一起。因此，在这个系列中，链接将起到“承重”的作用，其重要性超过以往任何系列。

Likewise a lot of the heavy bibliography here is going to live in the links, although I think for someone looking to get a handle on how pre-modern societies and pre-modern militaries come together, the two key readings I would suggest are P. Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World (1989) and then J. Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production and Power in the Pre-Industrial West (2003). Also well worth reading as an overview is Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (2006). 同样，这里大量的核心参考文献将包含在链接中。不过，对于那些希望了解前现代社会与前现代军事如何结合的读者，我建议阅读两本关键著作：P. Crone 的《前工业社会：前现代世界的解剖》（1989）以及 J. Landers 的《田野与熔炉：前工业化西方的人口、生产与权力》（2003）。此外，Azar Gat 的《人类文明中的战争》（2006）作为综述也非常值得一读。

Now we’re going to restrict ourselves a bit here in that we are going to stick to pre-modern or more correctly pre-industrial armies. The rules change a lot for industrial and post-industrial armies, though by the same token we really don’t have nearly the same range of examples for industrial armies either: we really have a single dominant model for industrial armies that emerged in Europe from 1914 to 1945 and then a bunch of reactions to that model (along with what we might term an industrial ‘transitional’ period from ~1800 to 1914). It is thus hard to build a complete typology, because the industrial sample size is so small. 在这里，我们将范围限制在前现代，或者更准确地说是前工业化时代的军队。工业化和后工业化军队的规则大不相同，但同样地，我们对于工业化军队的样本研究也远不如前者丰富：我们实际上只有一个在1914年至1945年间于欧洲出现的工业化军队主导模型，以及随后对该模型的一系列反应（加上我们称之为约1800年至1914年的工业“过渡”时期）。因此，建立一个完整的类型学很困难，因为工业化的样本量太小了。

By contrast, the sample for pre-industrial agrarian armies is really big, so it becomes a bit easier to spot recurring patterns of organization and structure as different societies stumble on to the same solutions for generating force. So that’s what we’re going to do this week: look at some of the patterns, keeping in mind that these are general rules with many complications and exceptions. In the process, we’re going to pull together a lot of the individual discussions of specific systems – historical and fantastical – as examples. 相比之下，前工业化农业军队的样本非常庞大，因此当不同的社会偶然发现相同的武力生成方案时，更容易识别出反复出现的组织和结构模式。这就是我们本周要做的事情：观察一些模式，同时记住这些只是带有许多复杂情况和例外的通用规则。在此过程中，我们将汇集许多关于特定系统（历史和虚构）的个别讨论作为案例。

Fans of fictional worlds will have often run into the most egregious examples of the failure to think in these terms. Professional or seemingly professional armies employed by societies that lack the administrative structure to manage them, armies that are too large or too small for their parent societies, ‘guards’ that seem to spring out of holes in the ground rather than organically fit into society anywhere and so on. 虚构世界的粉丝们经常会遇到未能从这些角度思考而导致的严重谬误。例如，由缺乏管理行政结构的社会所雇佣的职业或看似职业的军队；对于其母体社会而言规模过大或过小的军队；以及那些似乎是从地洞里蹦出来，而不是有机地融入社会任何部分的“卫队”等等。

Armies and Societies

军队与社会

I have written this maxim a few different ways, but it is worth writing again: no army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield. When analyzing a historical army or creating a fictional one, everything must begin with that idea, that military systems grow out of and reflect their ‘civilian’ societies or – for societies that lack civilians as such – reflect the civilian side of the lives of their members. 我曾以几种不同的方式写过这条准则，但值得再次重申：任何军队都不可避免地会在战场上重现其平民社会结构。在分析历史军队或创作虚构军队时，一切都必须从这个理念开始：军事系统源于并反映其“平民”社会，或者对于那些缺乏平民概念的社会而言，反映其成员生活的平民侧面。

That means that armies tend to recreate civilian hierarchies, with similar – often identical – lines of status between the two. So to understand what kind of military our society might come up with, we first need to ask some key questions about the civilian society. First: is this society agrarian? Which is to say, are they farmers? In most cases, the answer will be yes because with only a handful of exceptions, if they’re not farmers you’re not going to have cities or states and most settings have those. 这意味着军队倾向于重现平民等级制度，两者之间存在相似——通常是完全相同——的地位界限。因此，要了解我们的社会可能会产生什么样的军队，我们首先需要对平民社会提出一些关键问题。第一：这个社会是农业社会吗？也就是说，他们是农民吗？在大多数情况下，答案是肯定的，因为除了极少数例外，如果他们不是农民，你就不会有城市或国家，而大多数设定中都有这些。

That said, if your society consists of nomads – either hunter-gatherers or pastoral nomads – they aren’t going to have a state (which is a creature of the agrarian world) and so you want to think about non-state forms of military organization, which is going to channel them towards some specific solutions to our problems below. Next: is this a state? Is military force in this society collected into a single political entity or is it fragmented among many different centers of power? One odd choice I see in a lot of fantasy settings is to have huge, sprawling cities with non-state systems of organization (power informally divided among a bun… 话虽如此，如果你的社会由游牧民组成——无论是狩猎采集者还是游牧牧民——他们就不会有国家（这是农业世界的产物），因此你需要考虑非国家形式的军事组织，这将引导他们走向我们下文将讨论的某些特定解决方案。其次：这是一个国家吗？这个社会的军事力量是集中在一个单一的政治实体中，还是分散在许多不同的权力中心之间？我在许多奇幻设定中看到的一个奇怪的选择是，拥有巨大、蔓延的城市，却采用非国家的组织系统（权力非正式地分配在……）