Posted By admin on July 31, 2010

Roman Military Equipment

How were armies recruited in ancient/roman and medieval times?

More specifically, If one had enough money and wanted to build an army (both in roman times and the middle ages)how exactly would he have gone about it?

Including arming them (where did they buy the arms from and armor/equipment from?), where would you have them trained? Did kingdoms own their own stables and military facilities??

Just how did someone like Julius Caesar (and others) have his own troops and how from just a purse of money to the thousands of troops he ended up with? I'd like to know the whole process if possible. Did he pay for every single spear, sword, shield (from where and was it a single blacksmith,etc). Did he literally buy equipment from businesses,etc

Thank You

Others have answered on Rome -- the shift from a citizen levy to a volunteer professional army, paid by taxation and equipped by public funds using workshops contracted for the purpose. Julius Caesar didn't raise his own army, he was put in charge of the Republic's army and won the troops' personal loyalties by leading them successfully, fighting for their interests politically, and a certain amount of personal benefaction.

In the early Middle Ages, military service was both a privilege and a right of free males in post-Roman kingdoms. You no longer had salaried standing armies in legionary camps. Rather, you had a warrior class supporting itself by landholding but obliged to serve the king in war during campaigning season. The annual Marchfield (at first in March, later in May) assembled the army, conducted major public business, and laid out the plan for war that year. The royal officials in charge of recruiting, training, and delivering men to the marchfield were the counts -- presumably each had a quota he had to reach or some such. The soldiers would be responsible for equipping themselves and Charlemagne's legislation laid out what each had to have. If you were too poor to be able to afford a campaign, there was allowance for three men to equip and send a fourth. Rich and powerful nobles would come with retinues of their followers and dependents. Of course, it was rather difficult to force people to come if they didn't want to -- success depended on either persuading people that there was a common danger to be met, or that there was good plunder, or rewards in land and offices, to be had by fighting successfully (I know of at least one document where Charlemagne expressly grants a man land for distinguishing himself against the Moors in Spain).

For most of the Middle Ages you wouldn't walk into a "sword shop" and buy yourself a weapon off a rack, the way it gets treated in bad movies and Dungeons and Dragons. Rather, smiths were usually dependents of the wealthier lords and would be obliged to forge a certain number of weapons of various kinds in exchange for food and shelter and the other necessities of life. The lord in turn either kept these for himself or "re-gifted" them to his followers. With the growth of towns this probably changed and became more marketized -- I'm not sure how urban soldieries were equipped.

The basic pattern of "levying" armies in this way continued into the high Middle Ages. Great lords and kings often made gifts of military equipment to their followers, the lower knights and so forth. But there also came to be some new factors -- mercenaries, often with specialized skills or equipment (like crossbowmen), and town militias, who would support the king because he gave them autonomy over against the nobility.

Training varied. Members of the warrior class -- all free landowning males, essentially, in the earlier period, becoming more and more of a nobility as time goes on -- would have been taught how to fight at home or been "fostered" out to relatives to be trained. The assumption was that the relatives would be tougher on a boy than his own parents and thus make a better fighter out of him. In Charlemagne's time, at least, there was the "schola" of young nobles at court who were being trained both in arms and in letters. Hunting was also a kind of training for war -- it wasn't lurking behind a tree with a bow, but charging pell-mell through the forest on horseback with a spear in your hand trying to hit a wild boar who just might turn back and gore you. Lower-class levies didn't get much of any training. In fact, it's been argued that the real reason that the mounted knight dominated the medieval battlefield was not that stirrups or lances made the cavalry so much better, but that the lack of training made the medieval infantry relatively ineffective. Horses will not willingly smash into a line of armored men IF those men are disciplined enough to stand their ground.

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