A History of Warfare by John Keegan (Summary Attempt)

Primitive War

Keegan tries to give a notion of war from its very primitive form. To do that, he gives a number of examples from a lot of small tribes, small enough to not be called civilizations. One may consider primitive war is outside the range of Clash and useless to study, but as I discovered reading the book, the evolution from the primitive war counts and may lead to different ways to practice war and through that, influence the type of techs a civ will develop. The main analysis in Keegan's book about primitive warfare tell us at least two important things:

War is one more form of expression by a culture. The ways in which war is carried on can change strongly from one culture to another and, as I'll try to show, this link between culture and "war style" is persistent along world history. Not only persistent, but also a major factor in war power balance shifts overtime and also influencing the way in which war technologies evolve. Keegan challenges the view of a human species intimately related with aggressiveness, and war something inevitable crude and violent, like if mankind was destined to move to war when a conflict becomes increasingly important. He does so through dozens of examples, some of them I've chosen for this summary.

Primitive tribes invented a number of ways in order to make war a more "humanitarian" activity. Although in modern times we can see something similar in "conventions" like avoiding use of chemical weapons, the primitive forms were wide more restrictive. For example, a battle between two tribes may consist with only verbal offenses to the enemy and visual demonstrations of power. Throwing arrows or lances was vastly more common than entering in close battle, causing less death. Also, the actual battle could stop if someone got seriously injured in some cultures! Another way in which two tribes could solve their differences was choosing the bravest men, one from each tribe, and let them fight. The winning man gives the victory for the entire tribe. David vs. Goliath in the bible is the perfect example and from this perspective one may think it really happened in the way the bible describe it. Notice David won using a throwing weapon, which goes in the same direction as mentioned above about preferring "distant combat" instead of engaging face to face. The reasons for war were usually minor faults, like someone stealing a woman from the neighboring tribe (like in the war of Troy). When it was about land, the final outcome usually was the mobilization of the losing tribe to a less fertile land. Primitive warfare is full of rituals and these rituals took a big share of the battle time rather than concentrating in killing your enemy. Practices like cannibalism, "shrinking heads" or taking out the prisoner's skin found in African communities or in Native American tribes are examples of the importance of the rite.

A very interesting example of primitive warfare is found in the Aztec empire. The manhood of Aztec warriors was measured in terms of the number of prisoners they could catch. The reason was human sacrifices (practiced in cities not in the battlefield) were highly important. So, Aztec weapons were made and used trying to hurt rather than kill. This is a profound difference in the exercise of war compared to (western) European culture where weapons were built to kill and defeat IN the battlefield. I'll get back to this Aztec example later.

The primitive way of doing war was full of rites and also deeply rooted on "distance war" (lances, arrows) instead of close encounters. War at that level is very "humanitarian" as I putted it above, but some deviations could exist as uncommon expressions. Less ritual war-styles existed and in fact that factor alone was able to give advantage for some tribes. The Greeks were one of them, but that's for later.

Culture And War Techs

The cultural factor and lifestyle played a major role in ancient times. After people were able to produce and manage bronze (what we may consider the first real military tech (in fact the first was the arch & arrow, but that is really far behind in history)), the chariot appeared as THE weapon of ancient times. The interesting thing is chariot comes directly from a special form of living, a particular culture: Settlements were growing in size and number during 10K-2K BC. aprox. Agriculture was giving its profits and the people at the cities didn't interact much with other cities, so war wasn't a real part of living at that time and when, for some reason, a war was needed, it was practiced in the primitive style with rites and few dead. The main danger for settlements came from nomadic tribes trying to pillage cities and live parasitically from the cities. Those attacks, however, were also primitive in their ways. Nomadic tribes lived mostly from hunting and following animal hordes as the seasons changed. The steppe is a type of terrain suitable for grass-eating animals, so nomadic tribes were successful in living in those places. At the same time, the steppe isn't a good place to farm, so cities weren't established there. It is possible that in even older times primitive wars took place between two peoples in good land for farming. The losers, as described above, were mobilized and expulsed to worse terrain nearby like steppes. Anyhow, the thing is a natural frontier was formed between the two types of cultures given by the properties of land. In Asia, The Steppe, that very large portion of land at the northwest of China, south of Russia and to the northeast of Turkey, was the homeland of a series of nomadic tribes with that type of life. They lived from hunting steppe's animals, shepherding and pillaging cities in the limit of the steppe entering good farming land. But the relation between these two cultures was about to change. Horses were (are still?) found in a series of races, but at those times it was about impossible to ride them, so they were seen as just another animal to hunt and eat. The reason was the physical characteristics of the horses. Most of them just couldn't stand the weight of a man over them. Some could, but only sitting at the rear instead of at the middle like nowadays. At the rear you don't get the real mobility and control you have sitting on the middle. Using horses as pulling power was more feasible, but even that was difficult because horses were weak too. Cutting the balls from a bull (an ox) was a much better solution to acquire pulling power. The horses were so useless for men's needs, that they were hunted and served for dinner like any other animal. Native Americans wiped them out long before Europeans arrived only through eating, showing us how unimportant this animal was for other purposes. It was only after a long process of refining horse races that the nomads were able to have a horse capable of pulling a chariot in a useful manner. Why that effort if you have the ox? Because the nomads hunted and had shepherds. They wanted speed to go after animals. On the shepherding side, you also need to move fast to keep wolves and other predators away from your animals. Or just run away, but fast. If predators come and you can't move at the pace at which your herd can run away, you put your animals in danger. Moving fast with your arch around the place is a huge advance in that type of life style. The people at the cities didn't have that need. They learned to live from the land instead of going around after fast animals and soon "forgot" their past tradition of hunting. They consumed meat, but the sort of meat coming from "farms", cows, pigs, etc. Animals ad hoc to the settled life style. Nomads in the steppe soon became masters of the chariot using arch and arrows to submit the beasts while going like a thunder among the herd. It wasn't long after they started to use the new tech against the city peoples to get better bounties in pillage. The helpless citizens were unable to fight an enemy with such mobility while arrows fell like rain over them. The nomads with chariots were so successful that soon their superiority was unstoppable: From south of Nile river nomads with chariots took over the Egyptians. Chariots from The Steppe conquered vast lands in China and founded the very first Chinese dynasty, the Chang. Chariots invaded the Indo valley and destroyed the growing civilization. Mesopotamia was also conquered destroying the dynasty founded by Hammurabi. All these events happened around 1700-1400 BC. So we can actually say that the major civilizations in the world fell all apart rapidly with the new invention. A dramatic change putting all civs in jeopardy.

As time passed, the invention was copied from one place to the other and the invaded citizens started to learn how to use it. The nomads were not able to keep their possessions and were finally drove out from everywhere.... beaten back with their own invention. Their reign may have not been long or prosperous, but through that invention, they passed the civilizations a formidable weapon that was going to start a revolution in the manner in which (settled) civilizations interact. The notion of imperialism was born when the new tech was seen as a tool to invade the neighbor (even a far one, given the more extensive territory you can go with chariots) and increase the empire's land and/or richness.

What I wanted to state here is that the introduction of the chariot comes mainly from a cultural source and it's wrong to suppose the settled civs could develop such tech in the way they were developing writing, astronomy, construction, etc. Cities had been there for (literally) thousands of years and they couldn't develop a simple chariot..... Maybe eventually the people at cities would have developed a chariot, but the question is how late. The process of refining horse races was REALLY long and it's very difficult to imagine why the settled people could ever take that effort. The existence of nomads and their life style made the chariot possible long before the settled people needed such invention, and considering the devastation power of the invention, we should pay more attention to those "pathetic" nomads instead of treating them like barbaric units like in civ2 with no purpose, no culture and no tech development. I'll come back again on the "barbaric" tribes issue insisting on the need for better simulation of this part of the game.

Chariots were slowly replaced as time passed by mounted warriors. This was possible through further refining of horse races making them more suitable for being mounted (stronger horses). Just mounting horses instead of using them with chariots have advantages. It's cheaper because you don't need to build a chariot and the chariot isn't good for hilly terrenes and forests. This advance, however, can be easily seen as an obvious continuation from the use of chariots and culture didn't play a role in that. However, not surprisingly, it was the nomads again, in about 400 ad. (some 2000 years later) who made extensive use of mounted units in the form they were known later and the real people who introduced mounted horses as a military unit.

The Greeks

Even with the introduction of the chariot, war was still made in a primitive way. People driving their chariots screamed and made visual demonstration of their power on the prelude of a battle. In the battle, arrows were the ultimate weapons, even when it was possible to run into the enemy and attack them with swords or any short-range arm (iron was already known). Furthermore, if the chariots found any good resistance, they just turned back and tried again or just went home. Warriors, weather on chariots or not, preferred to avoid frontal combat, a practice that persisted for a very long time in the east. But the Greeks were different. They were less adept to the rites in a battle and more inclined to go for close battles, face to face. Even more important, the Greeks thought a battle should seek a "decisive defeat", that is, destroying enemy's army. This behavior was found long before the "great" war against the Persians, in everlasting internal fights with each other and with other small tribes in the Peloponnesian peninsula. The "phalanx fight" was invented: a direct close attack by an "infantry unit". Compared to the primitive warfare, one should look at the Greek way of fighting like a really barbaric method. Fighting face-to-face trying to achieve a decisive defeat is much cruder than the type of war prevailing in civilization back then. Persian failure to invade Greece can be probably well explained by the naval Greek power, but that doesn't help explaining how a badly coordinated league of city-states could go strike back and invade the Persian Empire. In Keegan's view, this was ultimately achieved by the difference in the way of making war. Persians couldn't contain an attack with their primitive warfare against a people seeking to literally destroy the enemy, killing as many men as possible. Alexander conquered most of Persia in about 20 years. That's an impressive achievement when we think in Persia like a rich empire with "modern" techs like chariots, mounted armies and iron weapons. Keegan's opinion, so, sounds very reasonable to me.

Sometimes we find in the pseudo-democratic politic structure of the Greeks and explanation for their superiority. But that's isn't really true. When the Persians tried to invade the Peloponnesian, the only pseudo-democratic city-state was Athens and all other cities in the league were essentially despotic or oligarchic. Even more, when Alexander started his quest, no city-state, neither Athens, held a democratic political system. It was a despotic rule by Alexander.

The "decisive defeat" method of the Greeks is curious, really. One may think such a method is an "advance" from the primitive status of warfare, giving the Greeks the power of conquest and the option to became a glorious empire. However, the Greeks couldn't form a real empire and soon after they disappeared from (relevant) history. It's also hard to consider it a "tech advance". Why the more advanced civs like the Egyptians or the Persians themselves didn't developed earlier? If those civilization were expanding one should suppose it's likelier they had developed such an "advance" instead of the Greeks, but they didn't. The Keegan's suggestion of considering it more a factor from their culture than a "tech advance" is probably better.

The Greeks weren't the only tribe with an uncommon way to fight. Some evidence suggests a culture of face-to-face combat in even older times in central Europe. Anyway, Greek cultural style of making war spread once the Romans, imitating Greek culture as a whole, built their own empire. That's why the preferred force used by Romans was legions instead of cavalry units or archers. They, of course, perfected the war style. In Keegan's view, the greatest ingredient the Romans added was the use of "officials". Romans trained their forces and from them took leaders to command them in a top-to-bottom fashion like in modern armies. This operational element made their armies more powerful.

Greco-Roman war style set roots in conquered European peoples and the nations that came later (England, France, Spain, Prussia) kept it as one more element of their culture. The culture of face to face remained yet very "local", since in the rest of the world the "primitive" way of making war refused to vanish. A very good evidence of this is the use of body armor. When we think of roman and specially mid-ages European armies, we think of heavy armored warriors, while in the rest of the world this practice was almost null even having the technology for iron working and knowing iron is an extremely common material all around the world. That for sure makes one think about how powerful is the idea of "war culture" influencing the type of military units civs used. The western way of making war added just one more element: Cavalry was started to be used like in the infantry, that is, a close encounter face to face. As described above, fight with chariots and later with mounted units, was carried on with the primitive form, using arrows running around the on-foot units (at a safe distance). The peoples influenced by the Romans altered this using cavalry units to go directly into the on-foot units to massacre them with swords and other type of close weapons. The concept of "Heavy Cavalry" was born, since you have horses with armored men on them.

People From Steppes Kept Coming Back

The nomadic shepherding lifestyle kept alive for thousands years. They kept doing the same things I've described like trying to gain something from the settled peoples. However, it wasn't just pillaging. Trade with the cities started to be increasingly more important and it was usual they demanded "trade arrangements" from the cities. There's evidence of steppes tribes entering to Europe making treaties with the Romans to "keep borders open for trade" in exchange for peaceful relationships. This was very revealing to me because it makes me think in those "barbaric" tribes like "nomadic civs". If they made treaties with settled civs and made trade with them and developed techs (like chariot and mounted units), what's the real difference with a "normal" civ?

Attila and the Huns were one of the peoples from The Steppe that made it to dominate that land and then pushed towards the Roman Empire from Eastern Europe in 400 ad. aprox. The Huns first pushed other peoples from The Steppe into Europe, the Goths, which were actually running away from Hun's power. The Romans first had to deal with them and not long after, with the Huns themselves; an invasion they couldn't contain. The Huns were the ones introducing mounted horses (using archers & arrows) as a powerful military unit. They used it extensively and the Roman legions had to face an army with a huge capability for movement. Another advantage of the nomadic peoples that were crucial in the roman drama was their possibility to "move with their nation". These peoples just moved entirely, leaving no cities or a capital or plantations behind. Their economy was able to move with them, at least for some time. Most of the different barbaric and nomadic tribes entering Europe stayed there, so the mounted unit was assimilated rapidly. Soon after the use of mounted units was changed with the Greco-Roman war style (no arches, preferring swords) and the Heavy Cavalry was born. The Huns weren't the only tribe able to tear down the stability of an empire. Genghis Khan and the Mongols became a major force about 1400 ad. They putted in jeopardy Chinese civ, Indian civ and Persian civ. Genghis and his descendants also initiated new dynasties in China (The Yuang Dynasty) and India (Mogul Dynasty). Tamerlane was other great conqueror from The Steppe and the Turks, also from The Steppe and being oppressed by the Mongols, were able to change again power balance defeating the Arabs and taking Constantinople destroying the Eastern Roman Empire. The ottoman Turks established as a settled civ and prospered in arts and knowledge like any other "normal" civ. They kept pushing towards west entering Eastern Europe and became one of the most powerful empires in history. The Chinese were again invaded by peoples from The Steppe (the Manchus) with the lost of stability it represents, starting a new dynasty. The obvious question is How can we hope to create a game about civilizations if we insist in treating this peoples as unorganized barbaric units going around cities like in civ2? If they were such an important factor in history, don't you think we should give them more attention?

Gunpowder

When gunpowder arrives we again find very significant cultural effects. Contrary to the civ2 tech tree, the cannons were the first to appear, not the musketeer and there's a very good reason for that. At the beginning, cannons were highly unstable and in many cases they just blew up instead of throwing the bale. Soldiers needed a long time to get to know and trust gunpowder enough to dare putting a "small cannon", the musket, near their face and fire it. Also, gunpowder was very "magic" for soldiers for a long time, helping musketeers getting their arrival later in history. Gunpowder was discovered and used for military means at the beginning of the XIV century, and musketeers were available in a relevant form in about mid XVI, some 150 years later. We also have to see that gunpowder was seen primarily as another way to siege cities. City besieging has a whole story of its own. Walls started to be used in early times, 9000 BC. and earlier. City walls and city fortifications for defense were very simple, but overwhelmingly useful. A wall surrounding the city, the taller the better, to keep enemies from climbing it. A pit, wet (better) or dry around the wall. And a tower, inside the walls for a better shooting position. Keegan explains that this fortifications didn't changed for thousands years, until gunpowder comes. The reason was it was an excellent defense. Taking a walled city was real hard. Catapults were an invention used only for besieging cities, but useless. To open a gap in the walls in order to enter, you need to aim to the bottom part of the wall, and asking a catapult a precise hit there and also with sufficient power to tear down the wall, was about impossible. Other way was taking "moving towers" or "siege towers" to the wall and try to extend a bridge to get in the city, but this things were difficult to move, slow and unstable enough to have any importance. A better way was mining the walls at its bottom (I don't know exactly what Keegan means by "mining"), and that was exactly why the pit was built, to make it difficult to get to the bottom of the wall. So, finally, the most effective way to take a walled city was just not attacking, but waiting. Cutting off supply lines into the city left the people inside only with what they had stored in there. Of course, a prepared city had plenty of food and water, so besieging lasted from 3 months to 2 years! Conquerors like Alexander actually avoided besieging, looking to fight the Persian army in the field. When the main army is wrecked, little defense is found in cities and more aggressive techniques can be used like just using stairs to get into them. Well-defended walled cities, in general, were almost impossible to take and only waiting outside was a reasonable choice.

A cannon gave the besieging engineers what they wanted. A blast powerful enough at the bottom of the wall. Cannons were much easier to aim, so direct hits at the bottom were now feasible. A characteristic of the wall, its large height, acted against itself, because the taller the wall, the more destructive its fall and the greater the gap it opens. Also, the destructive fall filled the pit, producing a bridge to enter. The city walls were about to disappear from the world, but they kept alive for another 200 years or so because of an ad hoc anti-besieging tech. To be effective against cannons, the walls needed to be thicker, but that would be a double-edged sword, because it would had made them more destructive if they fell, so they also had to be less tall to avoid its destructive fall, but in that way it made them easier to climb. The solution was the construction of thicker and shorter walls, but with pseudo-towers along the wall with a particular geometry. This P-T (I haven't a good translation to English) had a diamond shape (if seen from above), so the area exposed to enemy cannons is minimized and it's presented in such an angle that the bale tends to bound instead of penetrating it. Over the P-T cannons and other throwing weapons were positioned to repel the attack. At the "rear" of the diamond (closer to the wall), shooters had a perfect view to just outside the wall, and in that way they could protect it from infantry trying to climb it. Replacing the walls to these new ones was a very profitable business. Leonardo DaVinci and Michelangelo participated in this business, but fortunately they finally preferred other types of arts...

But the most interesting thing about gunpowder is how difficult it was to be introduced in armies. In European culture cavalry was the center of it all. They represented the climax of the soldier, the most decisive force in the battlefield and held the notion of "the Knights", so important for their feudal tradition. The musketeers, as their guns and their technique improved, started to be a major threat for mounted units, since the riders were easily shot down from their horses, or the horses themselves killed. However, instead of just forgetting about cavalry, Europeans insisted in using them for a very long time, but were never able to maintain the importance of cavalry. Keegan views the XVI and XVII centuries as experiment days, not only with the role of cavalry but in other aspects too. Keegan shows many examples in his book of "strange" battles that let us see how difficult the introduction of fire weapons was. Within those experiments we see the "dragoon" units, mounted units with muskets, but they didn't prove to be better than infantry. By the end of these experiments, the role of cavalry was reduced to just attacking a fleeing enemy or a badly defended infantry or artillery unit, so they had already lost their main role of older times. What's interesting about this is to see how important is the cultural factor and how reticent people were to adopt a new and better weapon just because of their culture, something you can never see in civ2.

The experiments with gunpowder gave other results. The musketeers took a considerable time to re-fill their weapons in order to shoot again, so they were "slow" units. At the beginning cavalry could take advantage of this, charging against them and force them to fight face to face, where guns weren't really useful. Mixing pikemen units with musketeers was a good solution, so cavalry just couldn't attack with ease. It wasn't long after when a wise guy came up with the idea of a single weapon merging the pike and the musket, the bayonet. The bayonet spread through Europe rapidly, making pikemen obsolete and putting fire-armed infantry in the position of the most important unit. Bayonet, by the way, holds the record for being the weapon with the largest number of deaths caused in the history of mankind...

The composition of armies was also a part of all experiments going on. How many musketeers per pikemen? How many cavalry per musketeer? etc. The 200 years of experiments weren't able to determine those numbers, a complex environment made even more complex with the developments going on all along, like more mobile (lighter) cannons, bayonets and more powerful muskets.

Horses remained still for a long time, but their role passed entirely to transport. We're used to think in the armies back then like soldiers with firearms over horses, but they moved to the battlefield in horses and then dismounted and fought on foot. Horses also mobilized artillery, foods and other army needs, but they never were used again as a "part" of a military unit. The transportation role of horses lasted even to WW2. In WW2 transport was carried on in trains and, in a lesser degree, in trucks to a position near the battlefield, but the horses were the transportation force INTO the battlefield. Do you know how many horses the Germans used (and lost) in WW1? A:1.400.000 And in WW2? A:2.750.000 The Russians used about 3.5 million horses in WW2!! The Americans used much less, since their automobile industry was able to produce enough trucks to send into the battlefield replacing the horses, but the fact that horsepower was a cornerstone in the war effort on the transportation side is undeniable, even for a "modern" war like WW2. However, horses lost their position near the great warriors of the mid-ages.

The most amazing, IMO, example of the link between culture and war is regarding the Japanese and gunpowder. The feudal system in Japan was threatened by a European power with gunpowder (I guess it was Portugal, I don't recall it now). The notion of decisive battles practiced in the west was unknown and bizarre for the Japanese, and the invention brought from Europe, cannons and muskets, were a type of warfare the Japanese couldn't understand as a practice by a civilized people. So what did they do? They learned about gunpowder, used it against the invaders, sent them away and then prohibited gunpowder. Their culture was that strong about the "proceedings" at war. Gunpowder was seen as a major threat to civilization and they chose to not use it, even having learned how to use it!! Gunpowder and the type of warfare practiced at a distance was indeed a threat to political stability in Japan, since the Shoguns, the equivalent of Lords or Warlords in Europe, represented their superiority and their power over the peasants through their swords. I don't remember the name of Japanese swords, but for sure you know they were of a magnificent strength and durability. Shoguns, in a way consistent with Buddhist beliefs, exercised sensibility respect to the environment through poetry and other arts. The art of war was that, an art. Martial arts and fine movements with their swords were the representation of the highness of a Shogun. Allowing weapons like a fire-arms would had let them in a very inconvenient position, forcing them to turn their back to a lifestyle where the warrior and his physical skills were at the center of the political structure.

The musket was indeed not considered a weapon for a gentleman. Within the culture of close combat, the Europeans considered shooters a horrible practice. The crossbow appeared in Europe in the XIII century, aprox. Crossbows have been discovered, however, in Chinese tombs dated several centuries before Christ. The crossbow was such an "evil" weapon that it never was able to convince Europeans of its worth. The crossbow is more precise and powerful than the arch, but the Europeans didn't take it and considered crossbow users "cowards". How a knight can be defeated by a coward shot from a distance just moving a finger? That's ugly! The musket was an even more powerful crossbow and knights saw it with the same dislike.

Navy

I used to think that triremes and that sort of ships were a type of tech existent when man couldn't understand how to use wind, like bronze working precedes iron working, but I was wrong. Sailing is rather old and the use of triremes was for the sole purpose of doing war. Yes, back then you needed to get real close to the enemy ship to engage, since no missiles or cannons were available. The use of oars was fundamental to get closer to the enemy since sailing didn't give you the precision needed for those fine movements. Once near, archers fired and infantry tried to jump on the enemy ship. Triremes were also used hitting the enemy boat using the front part of the ship, something very risky to do with a sailboat. This type of war persisted for so long that, to my surprise, triremes were used until gunpowder came up. In fact, European nations fighting against the ottoman Turks in the Mediterranean Sea used triremes with cannons on them (early XVI century ad.)! The first ships with cannons were triremes with the artillery aiming in the direction of the ship. As gunpowder showed the possibility of fighting at a distance, oars weren't as important as before, and the ship builders realized they could use sailboats (used only for transportation until then) and putted the cannons aiming to the sides of the vessel. The cannons were at the side because if aiming to the front, the power of the blast diminished the speed of the ship. Also, if at the front, you need the enemy to appear in the direction of the wind, and that's too much to ask to your enemy! Of course, sailboats had advantages over triremes, like being able to navigate on open seas, go greater distances and carry greater weight. The first sailboat built to be a combat vessel was ready in 1513. From that point and beyond, the sailboats just included more and more artillery and became a powerful tool to the imperialistic desires of Europe, conquering America, Africa, India and the southeast part of Asia. And only from that date, triremes started to became obsolete...

Four Final Thoughts

1. When the Spanish arrived to Aztec territory, gunpowder wasn't the main reason for Aztec defeat. At that time musketeers almost didn't exist and cannons, few in number and difficult to move and operate, only helped bombarding the cities. Keegan thinks the two major factors were the use of horses, unknown by the Aztecs and considered demons or something scaring as that, and the practices of war itself. I mentioned above that Aztec way of fighting and the way they used their weapons was for the purpose of gathering prisoners, not to kill the enemy. This cultural factor proved useless against people seeking a decisive defeat and the destruction of the enemy army, which was the type of mentality Spanish had.

2. Recruiting men for war has been a problem by itself. There are several things we can say about it. In most of history, the armies constituted a very very very small fraction of total population. Only after the American and French revolutions conscription made possible significantly larger armies. Keegan says conscription is a type of recruiting only available to democratic type of governments because only when the population feel they are fighting for THEIR govt, their nation, built by them, for them, you can get those levels of recruiting. Other important factor in recruiting in earlier times was the extensive use of mercenaries. They are sometimes seen as only an "add-on" to the national army, but I've discovered they represented in many cases the main force. Even more, mercenaries are hired from conquered territories and from neighboring lands with no or little organization of their own. The Persians, FE, hired Greeks to try to invade Greece! The Roman hired Goths to try to repel the Huns. By the end of the roman empire, most of the roman armies were barbaric mercenaries and that helped making roman rule more unstable when they started to demand more than what the Roman could give.

3. The Arabic empire grew up rapidly in its beginning, but conflicts among their leaders started to divide the empire. The Islam prohibits war among Muslims, and only support war against non-Muslims as a mean to submit the world to the "one and truly faith". The restriction to fight with each other was so important that each Caliph found very difficult to convince and command their people against another Caliph. The solution: They used non-Muslim slaves as an army. The new institution proved to be extraordinary and these warriors, called Mamelukes, became one of the most important cast of soldiers in history. They were a key factor winning the crusades when Europeans tried to conquer the Holy Land. However, they were also a problem. Mamelukes understood they were THE force in the area and in many times they threatened the Caliphs to overthrow them in exchange for political powers. And finally, like European knights, they refused to give space to a new invention, gunpowder, insisting in their way of fighting, which finally they couldn't preserve against the power of fire. The cultural aspects of this story are overwhelming, IMO.

4. Although we've described the western war-style highly influenced by the war of phalanxes of the Greeks, and the counter part of the east, avoiding face to face combat and including tactics like fleeing instead of seeking for a decisive and mortal defeat, nowadays the world tends to practice war in a single way. One may think this is just the ending point where every society tends to, but Keegan sees it another way. First, after Europe showed its power in the imperialistic era and their crude and brutal use of gunpowder, empires at the east wanted to imitate that thinking that it was the ultimate way of doing war. Academies and armies in Europe sent experts to train and teach the European style, so, undoubtedly, the east turned its back to their traditional war style and took European’s as the new one. But, What if the Greeks had lost their effort against the Persians? What if for some reason the western style of doing war couldn't prevail? Was it destined to prevail like it has? Second, in Keegan's view, such weapons as a nuclear bomb or, in general, any weapon of massive destruction, are just the obvious outcome of a culture in which war means total destruction of your enemy. One may wonder about how a world ruled by an eastern war style would manage a tech like the relativity theory. If the Japanese refused gunpowder when they met it, is it possible nuclear warfare could be about impossible to exist under such a culture?

Final Comments

I hope this summary attempt of the book by Keegan help you enrich the models you're building. In particular, I'd like you to think about the link between culture and warfare that in my case impressed me deeply. Is it too complex to try to simulate such link?

About the nomads and their role in history, I'm now in a position of considering nomads as a "special civ". It should be possible and fan to play a nomad tribe, try to gather power among nomads, like Genghis Khan, and set for conquest. Once you have conquered land and cities, you may choose to try to establish and settle yourself, becoming a "normal" civ, like the Mongols did. While being nomad you have an economy, you may negotiate with the settled peoples or trade with them. It's a whole new form of playing and I'm wondering how difficult it'd be to include it in Clash...

Rodrigo