Advisory Opinions - Bret Devereaux Talks Orc Battle Tactics

Episode Date: August 18, 2022

Bret Devereaux is an ancient and military historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is here to discuss military tactics of some of fiction's biggest battles from The Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones. Can David contain his excitement? Does Sarah understand anything being said?   Show Notes: -A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I was born ready. Welcome to the Advisory Opinions Podcast. And this could be the greatest podcast in the history of the universe. I'm not promising that fully. I'm just mostly promising that because of a guest that Sarah has brought to us. She reached out, and she brought us this guest, and it might be my perfect guest. So, Sarah, do you want to introduce the pedant? Is that how you pronounce it? Pedant. Pedant. Okay. The pedant. So Sarah, do you want to introduce the pedant? Not knowing how to pronounce crudite, David. I'm so sorry.

So David, I just want to state, we've been doing this podcast for now about two and a half years. And I just so appreciate your friendship, your mentorship. I mean, it's just, we have a wonderful relationship, but I have never gotten you a gift until today. Yeah. Today, I have brought you what you give the man who has everything, including a sword, Lord of the Rings, whatever your sword thing is.

What is your sword again? Endural. It's Narsil Reforged. It's an Aragorn sword in Lord of the Rings. I knew the term Lord of the Rings in all of what you just said. Okay, well, I have brought you Dr. Brett Devereaux. He is an ancient and military historian. He teaches at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

But, David, that's, of course, not why I've brought him as your present today. No. In fact, there are several fans of Dr. Devereaux who listen to this podcast, and one of them provided such a persuasive argument that it wasn't even a close call. I have to say, the part that was most persuasive was the all caps, ORC period, logistics period, in bold. But I do want to read some of the rest of it because that was obviously for you. But he knew that he was sending this email to me as well. And Dr. Devereaux has covered pretty much every intersection of historical fantasy fiction and actual history cool stuff. So here's, again, just a very, very small introduction on the other stuff.

So the preposterous logistics of the loot train in Game of Thrones. Oh man, we got to talk about that. The future of Westeros at the end of the series. Practical polytheism, a four-part series on how polytheism worked in the pre-Christian West. Bread, how do they make it? Exactly what it sounds like, a five-part series on the making of bread in the pre-industrial world. A trip through Duada, I think I'm pronouncing that right, but

this is on the Carolingian female aristocrat that'll also come up in our conversation about Game of Thrones. I mean, this blog, David, I'm surprised it is not your every night reading. It is called A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, A Look at History and Popular Culture. The blog is acoup.blog blog and everything about it is delightful and funny and there's screenshots from literally all of David's favorite movies.

All of the Dunes. He has strong opinions on which Dune is the right Dune and the good Dune. Spoiler, I don't think he's a David Lynch fan.

Oh, and one other thing. Brett is a Dispatch member so you're going to see him in the comments section. Beware. So with that, like, too long but very necessary introduction, David, I present to you my gift as a human. Dr. Brett Devereaux. This is fantastic. Thank you, Dr. Devereaux, for joining us. Great to be here. It's very Roman to present a human as a gift. Although, I mean, I think these

days we frown on that. But it's great to appear on the flagship podcast, right? I have boarded the flagship. So let's just go back and sort of talk more about you. How did you get involved in ancient and not just in sort of studying ancient military history, but then bringing it into the world of fantasy fiction. Sort of take us on this journey. So really, I have to confess, I am as much a nerd as David. And so a lot of this is just, these are my interests colliding. This is what I read and what I watch. And there's also a lot of gaming is what I play. And I also happen to be an ancient historian. And so naturally, that sort of collides. And it made sense as a project. I had thoughts anyway. My friends were tired of being besieged

by them. And so it made sense as a project, as a way of both discussing some of the media that I love and some of the media I love less in genres I like, and at the same time bringing a bit of history to the public in a way that was a little less dry and a little more palatable. It has been a wild ride. I did not expect to get an audience, and then I did, which was strange. So let me just start with this question. As a history of ancient Roman tactics, and I really enjoyed looking at

one of your pieces recently on foraging, how medieval armies foraged their way through the countryside. Fascinating stuff. So if you're also a fan of fantasy fiction and all of the cool things that I like, which of sort of the

big fantasy fiction series slash movies do you look at and are least offended by its depiction of military tactics of the period? You know, I have a soft spot in my heart for Tolkien and the books more than the films, although the films are great. Unfortunate that they never made follow-ups for The Hobbit, but these things happen. Tolkien is really interesting, and this is actually part of the reason I did the two big series on Helm's Deep and The Siege of Gondor, because he approaches it from an unusual angle. He is both, was, a scholar of Old English literature, and so Tolkien has marinated in the realia of the Middle Ages in a way that almost no one does. He has an instinctive sense for how these societies are organized, how these armies are structured, how these aristocrats think, what they value that comes out in his writing.

And then at the same time, of course, he was a combat veteran. He served in the First World War, I want to say in the Lancashire Fusiliers. He fought in the Battle of the Somme. He was frequently sick. It probably saved his life. And that experience also comes out very clearly, I mean, both in really poignant moments in the Lord of the Rings, you know, Frodo explaining that he can never really go home again to Sam is one of these remarkable sort of World War I literature passages. But at the same time, it also comes out in an instinctive familiarity with how fast can armies move? How can they maneuver?

What are the sort of concerns? There are certainly moments where the Siege of Gondor especially feels more the Western front than the Middle Ages. But nevertheless, I think he knows enough about siege tactics that it never gets crazy. And so there is a groundedness that I think other subsequent authors have tried to sort of manufacture to greater or lesser degrees of success that Tolkien has because he has these sort of two pools of experience that he's drawing on in his life. So that's more realistic than when Jon Snow effectively calls in a dragon airstrike from

several hundred miles away while he's besieged on an island of snow and ice by the White Walkers in season seven of Game of Thrones. Late season Game of Thrones gets pretty wild, and I've had some issues with it. Earlier, when they're more on the books, Game of Thrones is a little bit better. Martin has a decent sense of how the societies of Western Christendom, if we might say that, in the Middle Ages were organized. It's not perfect, but it's fairly good. Martin gets himself in a little more trouble as he moves east and is dealing with societies that he's less familiar with. The Dothraki are a mess of, frankly, problematic stereotypes.

I've written about that at some length. Now, hopefully, I mean, we'll get them, if he ever finishes writing the next book, hopefully we'll get a little more of the Dothraki. And, you know, the last time we really got in the books an intensive look at them, it was the late 90s with the rate he writes. So I kind of hope that maybe we'll get some depth

to that culture in the future that might solve some of these problems. But Martin is generally a little better, though he does not have a good sense of how fast things move. Nevertheless, his armies do not teleport the way that late season Game of Thrones armies do. Okay, so I think we need to get into some of this now. Wait, we weren't? We weren't? Just bear in mind that I have no clue what y'all are talking about in Lord of the Rings. So as much as people complain in this podcast that we overuse acronyms, that we don't explain legal terms, I will finally be that audience member when y'all are talking about Helm's Deep, which honestly sounds kind of dirty.

So... Oh, man, so. Oh man, Sarah. Okay. So walk me through orc logistics in some of these battles, pick whichever battle you want, because Lord knows I don't know the difference, and how you even begin to study a fake people's, fake military's, fake battle. Man, you can tell, but I'm sorry, Dr. Devereaux. I'm just going to apologize for that preface.

That's, oh my goodness. That was almost disrespectful, but you can go ahead and answer. If I can stop laughing for a second. Yeah, so when I was writing the two Lord of the Rings series, one on the Battle of Helm's Deep and then one on the Sie Lord of the Rings series, right? One on the Battle of Helm's Deep and then one on the Siege of Gondor. You know, part of what I was aiming to do,

one is talk a lot about the Lord of the Rings because that is fun, but also essentially to produce something like a 101 level primer on military concepts that uses this, because normally what you would do with students is you would pick a historical campaign. And for most students, you would then have to teach them the historical campaign and then you

could analyze it. Here is a campaign that everyone but Sarah in the world knows the details of. I literally don't know what orcs are. So you're also going to have to explain what an orc is. I'm sort of thinking they're like White Walkers, but I don't know. Or Stormtroopers? Yes. These are references I know. Stormtroopers is probably closer. Okay, got it.

Similarly, poor aim generally. Yes. And so what I did is I was like, I am going to apply the same ways that as a historian I would analyze a historical campaign to these campaigns. And again, I think Tolkien's two sort of backgrounds matter here. If the narrative was gibberish when you analyzed it, this wouldn't be particularly fun. You can only point out armies that move too fast or have no supplies so many times before it gets boring.

What's really interesting is that it's not gibberish, that you actually can construct a pretty coherent narrative here where army movements make sense, they're moving for reasons, they have objectives. And in both battles, the battle itself is conditioned by the fancy term we'd use is operational realities, right? The three levels of military analysis, tactics is how you fight, operations is where you fight, strategy is why you fight. The operational realities of how these armies are moving, what they intend to achieve, and how they have to get their condition, how they go about the battle, and in particular, to take Helm's Deep, Saruman's army has to storm this fortress. And in part, the reason why it is such a disaster is that Saruman has put his military,

by his own bad decision-making, in such a difficult position that they have to essentially storm this difficult-to-storm fortress almost instantly, and they are clearly unprepared for the task, which I actually think makes a lot of sense given Saruman's character. He is a schemer and a tinkerer. He has never commanded an army before, and he really comes across as the sort of person who assumes he's like, well, these dummy-wummies over here in Rohan, these guys that ride horses and hit each other with sticks, they can command armies. So how hard could it be? And then he finds out. And in particular, by the time he's moving on Helm's Deep, he's already sort of quietly betrayed Sauron. So he has to achieve his

objectives before Sauron's armies show up, which puts him on a very tight timescale. He has to disassemble the kingdom of Rohan in something like a month. He then, he deploys his army, he forces a major river crossing, and just about everything from there goes wrong. And I argue it actually goes wrong in a really predictable way. Saruman has done what many overly self-confident dictators do. He has attempted to build a fancy modern professional army without investing in a lot of the building blocks that make fancy modern professional armies work, like training and non-commissioned officers. Those Orkin COs have reputations for brutality, though. They degrade morale rather quickly. Right, right. And there aren't a lot of them,

you know, as far as we can tell. And so when it gets into actual difficulties, this army that looks fearsome on paper falls apart. So the army crosses the River Aizen. There is a Rohirrim army present, an infantry force under Erkenbrand. If you're just reading through the text, it's hard to see these guys. If you look at the appendix, they show up. There are some references to them, like Tolkien is actually keeping track of a number of different units, which is really fun. Erkenbrand's army is defeated and it disperses, it flees.

And then what the orcs need to do in this moment is stay concentrated and go to wherever the king of Rohan Theoden is and fight him and win. And that in this particular moment is Edoras, at least they should think it's Edoras. What they actually do is what pre-modern armies frequently did in this situation. They dispersed a pillage. They scatter to steal stuff and chase people that are running away. And as a result, when Theoden, to the orc's perspective,

shows up out of nowhere, his army, a force of about a thousand cavalry, the knights of his house, is concentrated. And so it moves through this dispersed cloud of orcs to Helm's Deep, and they can't stop him because their army isn't all together. They flee before him. They don't fully concentrate until after he is already in the fortress. And now to get at him and to secure their position in Rohan, they now have to storm this fortress, which I would guess they were hoping they would not have to do.

What they then launch is what Clifford Rogers, a medieval historian, describes as a hasty assault. This is a pretty standard element of a medieval siege. When you arrive at a castle or a fortified city, you have to besiege it. The sure way of doing this is to encircle it, prevent all the food from getting in, and wait a really long time. Obviously, you don't want to do that. The slightly quicker way is to build lots of siege engines and siege works and dig lots of trenches,

and it's very slow and irritating. And so what armies generally did is when you showed up, you built your camp, and then you immediately launched a hasty assault. You tried to surprise the defenders. You just have some ladders. You try and pick a part of the wall they're not guarding and just blitz it and hope they're not ready for you. And if it fails, you lose a few guys, but you're not betting the farm on this attack. If it succeeds, you've saved yourself several months of irritation and taken the city. So these sort of hasty assaults. What Saruman's army does is it launches a hasty assault with all of its eggs in that basket, which is a choice. But what's really fun is that when you zoom out particularly in the book narrative you can see

why they have to make this choice saruman's army departed eisengard with presumably a limited amount of supplies this is a fact about pre-modern armies um it's what i sometimes refer to as the tyranny of the wagon equation the problem pre-modern pre-industrial specifically pre-modern, pre-industrial, specifically pre-railroad armies find themselves in is that everything that can move food eats food. You can have people carry food. You can put food in wagons carried by animals. They all eat the food. And so there is a real limit to how many days of food you can carry with you. It's about two weeks.

And at that point, you are bringing a fair number of wagons. two weeks, and at that point you are bringing a fair number of wagons, a month on the outside, in particular, much like rocket fuel, which is where I got the joke line, the tyranny of the wagon equation from the tyranny of the rocket equation, the amount of food you need to bring and the amount of animals and wagons and everything that you need to bring to move it increases multiplicatively as you stretch out your range, so it rapidly approaches infinity. The normal solution that armies take is to gather food locally. They pillage the countryside. You have foraging parties that steal, because the countryside is full of farmers, so you steal their food. The problem is you need to disperse to do this, which is a really bad idea if right over there in that castle is a large army

of cavalry. The moment you spread out to grab the food, they're going to roll out and attack you, so you have to lay siege. You're trapped into this decision. And if you haven't brought a whole bunch of spare supplies, you may need to do this in rather short order, right? The timer is ticking. And so both on the strategic level, Saruman needs to win before Sauron's armies show up. And on the operational level, chances are his army is at its supply tether. And so they have only maybe a day or two that they need to take this fortress in. And so the result is being trapped into launching a hasty assault that, frankly, fails badly. launching a hasty assault that, frankly, fails badly. Saruman's army is already losing when Erkenbrand's reinforcements show up in their rear, which is also just a terrible job in scouting,

right? These guys are not very good at siege works. There should be some sort of... When you besiege a city, we talk about you first circumvallate the city, which is you build defenses facing inward against the fortified place. And then you contravallate, you build defenses facing outward against a potential relief army. And Saruman's forces have resolutely failed in that second task. And so they're caught by surprise by infantry moving across open terrain, which is not, you should never be surprised by infantry moving across open terrain. These guys move at three miles an hour. They should not shock you. Two questions. One, is there a place where I can just go and like sit at your feet and learn

at length that doesn't require me paying North Carolina tuition because I could listen to this all day. I found David's new best friend. Number two. Really pumped about this. Number two. Let's move this from the Tolkien world where you've grounded in the real world to the real world, one thing that I've been struck is I read about the warfare, say the Hundred Years' War, or you're reading about everything from the wars of religion up to the wars, the French and Indian War here in the United States, where there were what was then colonial America, is the concept of the tyranny of logistics. In other words, you could only go so far as your supplies were going to carry you in a way that we can't really conceive of now,

in the sense that you think of armored columns being able to move 20, 30, 40, sometimes 50 miles in a day, potentially. But the tyranny of logistics, which was rooted in how you needed roads if you were going to have oxen carrying carts of food. So you had very limited avenues of approach anywhere, and then a campaigning season, depending on the climate, so that you could only fight or campaign for a very limited amount of time and for a very limited radius. Except, except David, and this is what I want to ask about. So I'm going to tag it onto your question. All right, tag it on. Except the Vikings. The Vikings could attack during the winter because while it's not totally undermines the tyranny of the wagon because boats do still have to be powered by men. It's a lot bigger.

And so your ratio of men to size of space to carry food is pretty different. So I want to add in the Vikings to the question. Ha. Boats are the escape from the tyranny of the wagon equation. And this is also how you get sometimes some very large, for instance, Roman armies.

And then you see that they are moving along coasts and rivers, and you're like, ah, okay, I get it. That that is how these are being supplied. This is why, as a side note, because I do Roman history, when you think about the Roman Empire and it's sort of stretched along the Mediterranean, don't think of the Mediterranean as a barrier. It's the highway that knits the Roman Empire together. It is how they can move governors, taxes, resources, information, and of course, the legions across the Mediterranean.

It is a Mediterranean empire. We don't think of the Romans as a sort of sea empire, but in many ways they were. So boats are your escape from the sort of stark logistical limits. But yeah, the campaigning season is a real thing. It obviously is going to vary based on the rhythms of agriculture. The main issues are the presence of forage, that is food you can steal from local farmers, and fodder. And the campaigning season generally begins as the haygrass is coming in at the very beginning of spring.

Obviously, horses eat grass. Now, the kinds of horses that an agrarian army will have are not the sort of horses that emerged from natural selection on the Eurasian steppe. This actually means that, by the way, the logistics of steppe nomads are different, very different from the logistics of agrarian armies. When the horse is imported into the sort of world of farming, the tendency is to selectively breed the horses bigger and stronger, either as draft horses or as war horses, great big horses. And the result is that you get breeds of horses that are so large they can no longer support their muscle mass by grass alone. And so they eat a mixed diet of what we call green fodder, grass, hay, and so on, and hard fodder, which is often barley, rye, or oats.

If you can't get any green fodder, you can make up the whole difference with grains. But a horse eats something like 10 times as much as a human. So the logistics implications of trying to supply your horses if there isn't any fodder available are terrible. So your armies don't go anywhere if they're bringing a lot of horses until the grasses are in. And so they come in first. So your army can start moving with the grasses are in. And so they come in first, so your army can start moving

with the supplies it has. And then in very early summer or late spring, the grain crops will start to come in, barley first, wheat second. And so you now have those, you know, the peasants are harvesting them for you and storing them in barns and granaries, and then you can raid the peasants and steal them and use them to supply your army. There is a lot, I mean, there is a lot of brutality to this process, but this was how warfare was conducted. And a small army, 20,000-ish or less, could maneuver almost anywhere in Europe this way, you know, foraging as it went. As your armies get larger, where you can go is limited. And the other problem you face is the agricultural calendar doesn't stop in early summer. And of course, the moment the harvest is in, the peasants begin eating it.

And so the amount of food available in the countryside spikes up and then begins to decline over the year. Most armies respond to this problem by campaigning in spring and summer, and then maybe into the fall, and then you go home, and you eat the produce of your own farms, and then you come back next year. Now, that imposes a lot of limits, and so, understandably, some societies are trying to say, can we campaign year-round? And you can, but that means you need to be thinking about how are we going to get through the winter? And you hear this, the army went into winter quarters in such and such a place and so on, which often means I'm going to make sure my army, when fall is ending, we're getting in November, I'm going to make sure that I am in a camp in an area that is resource rich, that's

going to support my army over the winter. Or perhaps I have intentionally built up supply depots to support my army over the winter. And so you get some armies campaign seasonally, some armies don't. Like in the ancient world, Greek hoplite armies are seasonal campaigners. I'm always reminded of the almost laughably amateurish Spartan invasions of Attica during the Peloponnesian War. The Spartans are two days' march from the nearest large market in Corinth, and they run out of supplies seven consecutive years. Spartan logistics were consistently awful. It's kind of stunning. By contrast, the Romans seem to have campaigned year round from a fairly early date in the middle Republic. Um, now part of that is just Italy is better farmland than Greece. But part of that is that the, you know, the Romans were working with a

greater degree of sophistication. Alexander the Great, of course, his army year round campaigners, um, they do not go home. So you have that, that distinction. Medieval armies tend to be seasonal campaigners, but there are some that pull off year-round campaigns in specific instances or as a general matter. So this is sort of, you have that. That said, because supplies are limited in winter, even if you're a year-round campaigning army, you're generally spending most of the winter in camp, where your supply depots are, where you know the supplies are good. And so there is a seasonal rhythm to warfare that is related to the rhythms of agriculture, predatory on the rhythms of agriculture. You're reminding me of the old

adage, amateurs talk strategy and professionals talk logistics. And it strikes me that you're explaining one of the reasons why industrial age warfare was so terrible. And it wasn't just the invention of the machine gun or long range artillery. It was the ability to keep multi-million man armies in the field and supplied indefinitely. That putting that many people in the point of attack and sustaining them in the point of attack for week after week, month after month, year after year, sounds like it's just as indispensable as the actual weapons of war that made World War I and World War II so awful. Well, and we can see this sort of process work even earlier. You know, there's, I'm going to glide over a very large debate in the historiography,

but the introduction of firearms changes a lot in European warfare. But one of the things is that the field armies start to get bigger. But, you know, firearms are becoming common in the 1400s and the 1500s. The railroad shows up in the 1800s to solve your logistics problems. So you have this intervening period. And these early modern armies, they get larger because the kind of warfare you're engaging in, you need a lot of guys with muskets, which means the logistics demands are higher. And the states producing them are utterly unprepared for this. Spain goes bankrupt

trying to pay its armies seven times in the 1500s. And that is the Spain that has the open running river of gold and silver coming from the New World and they're still going bankrupt. This actually makes some,

at points, these armies hideously destructive because soldiers you don't pay will collect their pay in arrears from whoever happens to be around them. At one point, when Spain can't pay its army in Flanders, they just sack the regional capital of Antwerp. And it sort of culminates with the Thirty Years' War, that these armies have become large, they cannot be supplied, and they just—the Thirty Years' War is spectacularly destructive. Something like a third of all of the inhabitants in' War is spectacularly destructive. Something like a third of all of the inhabitants in Germany are killed over the war. Areas end up depopulated

because armies have crisscrossed them so many times that all of the farmers have fled or starved. That leads to, in turn, sort of European states after the Thirty Years' War are like, we can't keep doing this. This is no longer profitable for us to fight this way. And so they begin to institute greater centralization of supply, greater controls, which enables larger armies, which then begins feeding back on itself, sort of culminating first in the wars of the French Revolution and the Leveillon Mass. And you suddenly get armies that are almost an order of magnitude larger than they used to be. Napoleon invades Russia with 600,000 men, which is absurd. The entire Roman army was 300,000 men

in the imperial period. So this is just an absurd expeditionary force. Of course, in the event he can't supply it and they all starve, so logistics is still a factor. And then the railroad removes the logistics constraint. And that is where you get World War I. You suddenly have armies so large that the entire frontage from the channel to the Mediterranean, with the exception of the Swiss Alps, can be filled with troops. So there's no flank anymore. They have these tremendously destructive weapons. And in the run-up to World War I, there were a lot of thinkers in Europe who said, look, our economies are so intertwined, there's so much trade, a war can't possibly last very long because everyone will be out of resources almost instantly. And they were very wrong,

that it turns out that states dig very, very deep to keep fighting. And obviously, the war ground on and on and on and on. The Germans hit the point of eating turnips, which were generally thought to be only fit for animals. I agree. In 1916, right, they're only halfway through the war, and they kept going. And so, you know, this is something where the destructiveness of warfare increases as a factor of time, and indeed increases to the point, and I, this is something where the destructiveness of warfare increases as a factor of time and indeed increases to the point, and I think this is one of the interesting sort of paradoxes stroke lessons of history, is that in the ancient or the medieval world, we might say the returns to successful warfare were higher than the returns to investment.

If you had a choice as a state, you could spend a whole bunch of money raising an army and conquering your neighbors or spend the same money investing in, say, improving your farmland. You would get more agricultural production out of the army, assuming you won. And so the states that succeeded were the states that did the most war and were the best at it. By the time you get to World War I, clearly the switchover has happened somewhere in the 1800s. Warfare has become so destructive on the one hand, and the Industrial Revolution has created such high returns to investment on the other hand that the relationship is flipped, right? superpower by virtue of having both world wars happen somewhere else. I mean, inter alia, other factors, obviously. And so war becomes counterproductive. This is the world that we live in, right? Does anyone look at what's going on in Ukraine and be like, that's working out great for everyone involved? No, obviously not. Unfortunately, we have cultures, social structures, and values, and indeed, one historian, Azar Gott, would argue, genes that are evolved for warfare. We have a society set up to fight in a condition in which fighting is now maladaptive.

Well, speaking of that cultural part, I would like to talk a little bit about your take on the portrayal of the aristocracy in Game of Thrones. What you think they get right, what you think they get wrong. And in particular, I know you've talked a little bit about the role of women in some of these things. So it's my turn, David. It's my turn. Go, Sarah, go.

Yeah, I think Game of Thrones is obviously an interesting case. And they've been, this has flared up again because the prequel series is coming out soon and the producers made some statements about this. I think there is a tendency, and Martin engages in this a little, and the HBO team a lot,

to sort of imagine that the sort of the condition of people, and particularly the condition of women, is a sort of a linear progression from bad to good. But there is, in fact, a lot of oscillation there. And that's not necessarily really reflected in Game of Thrones, you know, which presents a very patriarchal society, also a society that is very comfortable with violence against women, including violence against elite women. And, you know, I just have to say, like, medieval society was not comfortable with sexual violence against elite women. And, you know, I just have to say, like, medieval society was not comfortable with sexual violence against elite women. That was not okay. The church had rules.

I mean, aristocrats tend to get really upset when you beat up their family members. And so this is something where, I mean, I think the sort of the shock value has kind of eclipsed the actual historical presentness. And it's also just striking that, you know, something that comes out is that in Game of Thrones, and this is coming up again in the prequel series, the idea of women ruling is treated as really bizarre and foreign. I'm like, that wasn't actually all that uncommon in the Middle Ages. Now, you did have some places that were under Salic law, France most notably, where women could not inherit. But in Italy, in Spain, in England, they absolutely could. And they did. And so you have women that end up on the throne because, you know, that's how family trees work. Even if, right,

it's an agnatic inheritance system. So males are preferred. If there are any males, you go with them. But, you know, this is a high child mortality society because of disease and so on. So you frequently end up with just a couple of surviving children. If they're all girls, then that's where you go. And so you do see women rulers. Elizabeth II, but you also have figures like, going back into the high Middle Ages, someone like Matilda of Tuscany, who was a key ruler in northern Italy during the Investiture Controversy, this fight between the Holy Roman emperors and the popes over who has the authority to create bishops, a dispute that became military at various points. And Matilda's armies are important. She sides with the popes against the emperors for political reasons, probably also religious ones. And she is a key political and military player in this interaction that wasn't

uncommon in the Middle Ages. I think you also see in Game of Thrones, generally, right, the religious structures of Westeros are, resemble medieval religious structures, robbed of all of their power because no one seems to believe their own religion. And this is something I regularly tell my students. This is one of my almost catchphrases. People in the past generally believed their own religion. And this impacts the way that you understand how people in the Middle Ages are functioning. Look, there were wealthy noblemen and noblewomen and knights who had wealth and power and everything who in their latter years retired and went to live in a monastery eating, you know, unsweetened bread. You know, why did they do that? Well, because they believed their religion and they were worried about

all the wars they did maybe being bad for their immortal soul. And you don't see, you get a touch of this in the books that Martin presents people that actually kind of

believe the religion and, you know, The High Sparrow, for example. Yeah. And you even get principled pacifists. But you get a lot less of this except for The High Sparrow

in the show. And none of the aristocrats seem to buy it, which is very weird. It's much more of a sort of early modern Europe, post-Reformation, we've been fighting about this for a while, Paris is worth a mass kind of world, which is not really a medieval world.

And that was actually broadly my conclusion on Game of Thrones is that much of it is actually accurate for the early modern period in terms of the society and the values. You have armies that at least behave like they're professional armies, not a thing you generally had in the Middle Ages, but a factor in the destructiveness of early modern wars. of early modern wars. Religion is a less effective constraint on violence because no one's paying attention anymore. There's a lot of real politic

that would have actually been quite foolish to do in the Middle Ages. Circe in particular has some moments, especially in the show, where she just treats her own vassals terribly. And that's not a route to long life and success in a medieval polity. You rely on those people to fight for you.

If you're a jerk to them all the time, when you call them, they just won't show up. You don't pay them. They have their own lands, so they just stay home. I thought it was really weird that Cersei's army shows up on the walls of King's Landing to face the dragons at the end of Game of Thrones.

And I'm like, these guys should have about zero investment in this regime. I'd bail. I'd be out. I mean, you know, you can hire the mercenaries

of what was it, the gold company. It's too bad that they didn't bring their elephants. That would have been cool. I guess they spent the CGI budget already. War elephants, actually a thing.

I have a three-post series on war elephants and how they functioned. But yeah, I mean, you'd expect those guys to bail because they're not the hired help, right? Those are retainers in the households of other aristocrats that have their own castles and their own lands and aren't as, they're attached by bonds of fealty and trust.

If you violate that trust, they're going to bail. And so you look at, for instance, the historical analogs to things like the Red Wedding exist and they're all in the early modern period. They're all right at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period when these norms are breaking down in the face of new impersonal administrative states

that are increasingly centralized. And so I think that that infects Game of Thrones in a number of different ways. And also I might add in its perspective on women, I think there is a solid argument to be made that the position of women in society actually declines as you move from the Middle Ages into the early modern period. Women were very important in medieval Christianity, for instance,

that becomes less important in the early modern period. There are changes in the structures of things like labor. And again, I think Martin is somewhat carelessly retrojecting some of those later attitudes back to a society that, at he seems to assume looks like an earlier society where it doesn't quite match so did you watch the last kingdom yes i have not yet what i'm sorry i have limited time no no it's on my list because seriously you know there's there multiple people in there king king Alfred. Alfred the Great. No, I always say. Alfred the Great.

Alfred the Great. And Aethelflaed, Queen of Mercia, which I'm sitting there watching this, and Aethelflaed becomes Queen of Mercia. And I'm thinking, did that happen? And I look. And absolutely, there's an Aethelflaed, Queen of Mercia in the 9th century. A queen. Yep. An English queen. Well well she's not it's mercia not england but and then i was also as you're talking thinking of eleanor of aquitaine queen

of what part of france yeah yeah fascinating absolutely fascinating time and fascinating history well i really like this because it means that you have an assignment from the Vileship podcast. You need to watch all of The Last Kingdom. We'll give you a few days. And then you'll have to come back. Right. No, I'll just have to come back. And we'll expect lots of blog posts. I don't know how many part series we need on The Last Kingdom, but a lot.

Look, I think the like almost, there must be a term for it it's not deuce's machina when you have a historical an actual historical story to tell but you create a fictional character to move you through various parts of that historical story it overly relies on that with the the dude that they create um especially, of course, as you get into later seasons and he becomes bigger and bigger and the history becomes smaller and smaller. And smaller, yeah. But the first season is, I mean, it's fabulous.

Oh, it's amazing. They even have him fleeing to the, oh, what's the little marshy island? Alcany? Afni? The little noble, it translates roughly to noble island or something that King Alfred actually flees to. Very cool.

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the day. It's really easy. Right now, Aura has a great deal for Mother's Day. Listeners can save on the perfect gift by visiting auraframes.com to get $30 off, plus free shipping on their best-selling frame. That's aurafU-R-A frames.com. Use code ADVISORY at checkout to save. Terms and conditions apply. So I have a question. Let's stick with the Game of Thrones universe and how it maps on to sort of this medieval world. So the way I'm understanding it,

the Romans had something approximating what we could possibly recognize as a professional army. In the imperial period. Right, army. In the imperial period. Right, right, in the imperial period. So then you move into feudal, you know, the medieval world, and people aren't really having professional standing armies then, are they? So if you're sort of calling, and what they called in Game of Thrones, calling the banners, you know, when the ravens go out and you're calling all the noble houses. Who's showing up? How are you, when you're saying,

I'm going to go to war now, who's showing up? How are they equipped? You know, the Lannister army in Game of Thrones had this, they were all in these impeccable red uniforms and in plate mail, you know, breastplates. I suspect that was not the case. No, there would be a range. So, the phrase that I use to describe a lot of medieval armies, particularly in Western Europe, is that they are a retinue of retinues. When the Roman Empire collapses, the Roman Empire had a very top-heavy state-organized structure. It collapses, the bureaucracy vanishes, and the kingdoms that emerge out of it,

their kings have a problem, which is that they don't have this bureaucracy. They have to administer this space. This gets particularly sharp as you get quite a ways down into the 800s. With Charlemagne, he conquers this big empire, and he has no administrative class. And he's like, how do I manage this?

And his answer is to pick some of his buddy military aristocrats and say, like, you, now, you are in charge of this area, and you're going to collect the revenues from that area. You're going to use those revenues to raise soldiers. And then when I call on you, you have to bring those guys. And if you get attacked, I will bring all the other guys and back you up. And then that fellow is going to do the same thing, right? He is going to parcel out his area and it's going to keep fractionalizing on down. And so when you want to go to war, you call your retainers, your immediate sort of subordinates in this hierarchy.

And these would be your, in Game of Thrones, their bannermen. In actual medieval Europe, we call them vassals. Those guys, and the king will have this too, are going to have some number of sort of full-time fighters they maintain in their household. These would be your, quote unquote, knight's bachelor. So named because they don't have their own household yet. And then they're also going to call on their retainers, and they may also raise, there may be a system whereby they can raise

some number of the sort of rural population or the town population to also fight. And all of those people are basically equipping themselves. So they're all going to be bringing whatever they happen to have. So the elites, your knights, your aristocrats are going to show up in sort of top of the line armor with their Ferrari equivalent war horses. You know, if you're saying, you know, because your vassals could be other elites, your vassal could be a town. And so if you're like, Antwerp, show up. Right.

Then, you know, the sort of Antwerp town militia is going to show up. And, you know, they're going to be townsmen, and they're not elites, though they're fairly well off, so they're going to be equipped a little better. You might also go to your villages. Those aren't your vassals those are your serfs that's a different relationship but you might be like every village you know for every 10 households you need to supply x number of people um this was a charlemagne system he divided he tried to divide his realm into the unit was the mansus um and he's like every mansus every four Mansi has to provide one guy for my army. So you brigade a bunch of households together and like, pick one of yourselves, buy him some basic equipment and send him along.

And obviously those guys are going to be more poorly equipped, right? A spear, maybe a shield, a helmet, probably. Some kind of body protection if they're lucky, but you're often talking about what we call a gambeson, which is a quilted cloth body protection, which is obviously a lot weaker than mail or plate. Sorry, by mail, I mean chain mail. No one called it chain mail. They just called it mail.

And so you're going to have this really heterogeneous army where every retinue is going to look different every little unit is going to look different um there's going to be social stratification and so you're not going to have everybody is like this nice neat uniform army but it's really going to be kind of all over the place um which obviously made these armies somewhat difficult to handle um and then so once you've called everyone together, you kind of have to figure out, okay, like which retinues are we bolting onto each other to make larger combat units, medieval armies, the combat units are generally called battles, um, which is convenient. And then, um, you're also grouping Knights together, um, into a smaller sort of squad size, you know, called a Conroy, uh, members of a

Conroy usually train together. Okay, so I literally could talk about this forever because I have so many questions. So I was just listening to this fascinating podcast that Jonah Goldberg had recommended to me on revolutions, and this was talking about the English Civil War. So this is later on, and this is post-medieval. And they were saying that the stratification in ability and willingness to fight in a lot of these armies was really enormous. the interesting question, so there's sort of a two-part question. One is, how common then were these sort of pitched field battles? In other words, where people would actually go in and fight battles in the way that we saw them in the Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars versus you're moving people into a region and you're just laying siege because it's just tough to command these guys in battle. So how common was that? And then when did this, when did it come full circle from the professional armies of the Roman era back again to professional armies? So when did they sort of this, they reemerge. Okay, so for question one, in the Middle Ages, certainly we say sieges are common, battles are rare. You have a sort of another layer, which is a strategy of devastation,

where you maybe don't have the forces to besiege your enemy's castle, but the farms aren't in the castle, the farms are in the countryside. So you just burn all the farms to economically ruin your opponent. You know, that was also an option. But battles were rare. Battles were extremely risky. And you generally, I mean, the thing is, your goal is to control territory. You control territory by controlling the administrative centers,

which are the castles and fortified cities. So those are your goals. If you can besiege those or defend those without fighting a very risky pitched battle, you do it. So you generally only see battles fought when the armies are fairly close in strength. Um, and, or at least they think they are, uh, always surprises in, in war. Um, and they're fought either to enable or prohibit a siege. And, um, so battles,

pitched battles, they happen. Um, but they're relatively rare. Sieges and raids and pillaging are much more common in the Middle Ages. And that remains true really until we get into the 1700s. And into the 1800s, when you start to get the balance between artillery and fortifications is continuously shifting during this period. Especially with Napoleonic Wars. It shifts pretty decisively to the attacker, and so we get a period where it's lots of battles and very little in the way of sieges. For the second question, it's really interesting, the reemergence of professional armies. It's connected in Europe with gunpowder, fairly clearly. It's happening a little bit before gunpowder. You have

in the 1400s, the Duchy of Burgundy, which was an independent state, wages a series of truly disastrous wars against the Swiss. And, you know, the Swiss, they live up there in the Alps. They are not knights on horses. This is a confederation of towns. So these are town militias and they fought with pikes, big long spears, and they formed nice pike blocks and they destroyed the Duchy of Burgundy. I mean, they didn't conquer it, but they killed its leader and the, you know, the remainder was partitioned based on different inheritance laws, part of it going to the Habsburgs and then to Spain and part of it going to France.

And both of them being terribly sore about the other part. But the rulers of Europe look at that and they're like, I want some of that. If you had a lot of money, like you were the Pope, you just hired the Swiss, which is why the Swiss guards still guard him. That's what this is from. Alternately you could try to home grow troops that that fought that way and then as as muskets are coming in they fit neatly into this system a block of pikemen um creates a safe zone from cavalry that the muskets can then operate from um and early on, you know, you're talking like in the 1500s, this is, we call this pike and shot warfare. In the 1500s, it's the muskets

are screening the pike formation, which does the fighting. By the 1600s, the pikes are protecting the muskets who do most of the work as the firearms technology and tactics get better. But, you know, a knight, a mounted aristocrat like that, you need to start training a knight from

boyhood. These need to be aristocrats. You cannot train these. But you can train someone to fire a musket in an afternoon, and you can get him pretty good at it in a few months. You can do this with peasants. But of course, once you've trained him me, now has a marketable skill. And so this motivates a return to professional soldiers. And so we see that in the 1500s and into the 1600s, the armies of Europe professionalize. The soldiers first, interestingly, the officers second. The officers of these early professional armies are just your knights. They stop being sort of heavy horsemen and they start being commanders. But the infantry professionalizes around the use,

particularly of firearms. I always think it's so funny, the three musketeers operate such a place in the zeitgeist, but they're always fighting with their swords. And I'm like, but you're musketeers. but you know, they're always fighting with their swords. And I'm like, but you're,

you're musketeers. You are highly trained, highly trained, uh, uh, gunpowder troops. And the key here, just in terms of the training,

reloading, uh, a match lock. Our quibus is a 28 step process that you have to perform while you have loose grained black powder that you're using. It's not in a cartridge and you are holding a match, uh, a cord of salt Peter soaked rope that is lit on both ends. Yeah, no, that sounds good. The chances of blowing yourself up or not trivial.

I've actually had the chance to fire a match lock. It's, it's a kick, but, um, but yeah, so you need some training and you need to be able to do that rapidly while other people are trying to kill you um because the tactic that emerges as we get into the 1600s or what's called the counter march it emerges independently in a couple of places it's most associated with a fellow maurice of nassau from the the low countries um dutch is you take a certain number of guys with muskets. These are big, heavy muskets. They're heavy enough that you actually have a tripod that you use to hold these at shoulder level, which also frees your hand for, remember,

the lit match. And they're so slow firing that it's like, well, what if we got six guys in a line? The first one fires, he immediately goes to the back, starts reloading. The next one fires he immediately goes to the back starts reloading the next one fires he goes to the back by the time you get to the first man again one the whole formation is moved backwards that's why we call it a counter march and he's now reloaded and can fire and then stretch this originally six men deep stretch this as wide as you can make it and then stick a pike block in the center to protect it and this is what you're doing. But to do that, to be able to reload and fire on time in the same time as all the men around you, because those ranks are shifting on timed intervals, that required a lot of training.

And once you knew how to do that, like I said, you have a marketable skill. You are now a soldier. That is your job. That is your career. And with that, we will simply have to let Brett and David make their bro date. I assume you'll both bring your swords to it. I know that you have a sword also, doctor. It's in your picture on your website. Yes. So you'll have a lot to do. I feel like I should help arrange the play date. Let me know if I should talk to your mom. I have two swords. I have two swords. I'm not sure how many you've got. I only have the one, but I need to get a Gladius.

Of course you do. Okay, boys. We'll make sure to order your favorite pizza. David, I hope you enjoyed this human gift that I got you today. Fabulous. Amazing. Thank you. Thank human gift that I got you today. Fabulous. Amazing. Thank you.

Thank you. Doctor, thank you for being my human gift. Thank you for having me. This was great. Much appreciated. This was a lot of fun. This was great. Bye.