I was recently linked to a blog by Bret Devereaux, a historian specialising in Classical history, in which he tackles Game of Thrones and various inaccuracies regarding the portrayal of a medieval society. His justification for this examination is that the perception most people have about how faithful Game of Thrones is to the Middle Ages needs to be critically analysed. In his own words:

To argue that Game of Thrones is more true to the ‘real’ Middle Ages is making a claim not only about Game of Thrones, but about the nature of the Middle Ages itself. And that claim deserves to be assessed.

While that's a laudable sentiment, the problem is that Devereaux is a Classical historian and, although he specialises in military history, he does make a few mistakes that greatly distort the image of medieval warfare and at one point falls into a Richard A. Gabriel style condescending dismissal about the competence of medieval commanders¹ . While I have the utmost respect for Devereaux (and I look forward to his PhD thesis either being released digitally or possibly released as a book), the fact that he distorts medieval history while talking about distortions of medieval history earns him a /r/badhistory post, although I won't be as pedantic as I could be² .

Casualties and Atrocity

What about army losses? The armies of House Tyrell, Lannister and Baratheon are all destroyed on the field – we’ll look at issues of scale in a moment – but for now, if half of their strength were casualties, we might estimate some 80,000 losses from these houses. The losses to the Riverlands, the North, Dorne, the Crownlands and the Iron Islands are less clear, but we might assume they’d roughly equal the proceeding total. To which must then be added Daenerys’ forces, reduced by half at Winterfell to the loss of around 4,000 Unsullied and 30,000 Dothraki (we are told she lost ‘half’ of both).

Based on all of that speculation, we might ballpark a minimum figure for losses in the wars as being 300,000 civilians and around 200,000 combatants (not including losses sustained in Essos). If widespread famine is included – and it almost certainly should be, given the coming Winter – the real figure would be much higher, perhaps well over a million. And we have left out the near total destruction of the Wildlings, the death caused by the army of the dead moving south, or by Ironborn raiding. To this would need to be added excess casualties from disease, which are more severe than battlefield losses – the likely total casualty figures could thus easily be in the neighborhood of 2,000,000 or more.

War in Game of Thrones is thus not only endemic, but also shockingly destructive. Importantly, warfare in Westeros reaches a level of demographic significance – this war is sufficient to cause a real, identifiable decrease in the total population of Westeros (the books provide no tool for estimating the size of Westeros’ population, but a ballpark of 40 million is perfectly reasonable – meaning the war killed something between 2.5 and 5% of the entire population, in just a few years). This is a level of death that future Westerosi archaeologists and historians, excavating villages and reading town records, will be able to identify through the marked loss of population. Wars that destructive are rare in the pre-modern period – most wars are not ‘demographically visible’ in this sense, because the war losses get lost in the ‘noise’ of normal births and deaths.

While warfare in the Middle Ages was frequent, it was not generally this destructive. Estimating the destructiveness and scale of death in medieval wars is nearly impossible to do with any precision because of the nature of the sources. But a few comparisons can be made. The standard estimate for the loss of life due to the Crusades is 1-3 million, meaning that the War of the Five Kings was roughly as lethal in three or four years as two hundred years (1091-1291) of medieval religious warfare in the Near East. Alternately, the Albigensian Crusade – an effort in France to suppress the ‘cathar’ heresy – is thought to have killed anywhere from 200,000 to 800,000 people; the main of the violence took twenty years (1209-1229), but the death toll also typically includes decades of efforts by the Inquisition which were only complete in 1350, a century and a half after the crusade began. Importantly, these wars – which still fall far short of the scale and intensity of war in Westeros – were religious wars, where norms preventing violence against civilians were much weaker.

Most wars were not religious wars, and these tended to be significantly less destructive, especially to the peasant farmers who made up the vast majority of the population. Partly, that was simply good sense: in a territorial war, control over the peasantry and their agricultural production was the goal, so mass-murdering the peasantry accomplished little. Wars between lords could thus often occur ‘over the heads’ of the peasantry (although the danger of raiding or of having food stolen for use by the armies remained acute – we shouldn’t minimize how hard even these wars could be for the people on the ground).

So, the first thing to note is that I have no idea where precisely Devereaux has obtained his figures, but most citations I've seen that match his range come from 19th and early 20th century sources and I'm not sure which kind of demographic witchery has been used. In some cases, it definitely seems to be them accepting the inflated figures given by chroniclers rather than any honest attempt to estimate casualties (Garrison 1922, p106; Prince 1838, p207), while in others no evidence is shown of their working (Robertson 1902). As such, I consider these figures unreliable, especially given the difficulties in estimating casualties outside of battle.

I have, however, made a rough estimate of casualties in the Hundred Years War between 1340 and 1346 (as Game of Thrones takes place over approximately 6 years). Of those battles where an estimate of casualties can be made, ~15 000 men were killed in land battles and ~25 000 men were killed in naval battles, excluding minor England casualties^3. I have no reliable figures for the Brittany, Gascon or Scottish Campaigns, and there are several actions without casualty reports even within the campaigns where we have casualty estimates for large battles, but it would not be unreasonable to estimate 10 000 additional deaths between the three theaters of war. While 50 000 men is not ~160 000 men, it is nonetheless substantial and reflects the intensity late medieval wars could develop in the early years.

Secondly, I'm not sure how Devereaux can claim that war in Game of Thrones is endemic. Robert's Rebellion ended seventeen years before the start of the show, and the only other major conflict since then was the Greyjoy Rebellion. There is also no evidence of "little war" being waged at all, let alone being a constant feature. I'd hardly call two wars in 17 years with little to no small scale raiding "endemic". While I won't argue that the number of casualties in the show aren't excessively large, I don't think that casualties resulting from Ice Elves and their undead minions should be factored into any calculations about the destructiveness of a conventional war, and I have serious doubts about the assumed casualties in the Riverlands, given the small number of ravagers (<1000) and the fact that large scale raids generally kill few civilians compared to "little war" based on garrisons and border zones (Rogers 2002, p46-55).

Thirdly, between the above comments and the following parapgraphs where Devereaux claims that civilians were clearly designated as "not valid military targets", a version of medieval warfare in which a sense of honour prevents substantial civilian casualties, in spite of relatively minor breaches, in contrast to Roman methods of war. This is absolutely not the case. Clifford J. Rogers points out in the article I've previously mentioned that the slaughter of peasants was entirely acceptable within the chivalric ethos - which was, after all, designed to benefit the nobility and not the commons - and that some of the most cruel and brutal oppressors of the peasantry were awarded entry into the highest orders of chivalry (Rogers 2002, p54-55).

While the chevauchees of the Hundred Years' War are the best known examples of the kind of destruction of civilian crops and properties, they were exceptional only in the depth they penetrated into enemy territory and the decisive battles fought at the end of two of them (Crecy and Poitiers). To put it into context, the Black Prince's 1355 chevauchee saw destruction of varying degrees visited on over 18 000 square miles of enemy territory, compared to not much more than 1200 square miles devastated by Edward III in 1339 (Rogers 2002, p37,45). The latter might be taken as more indicative of the normal scale of destruction in warfare, but it was waged no less completely, as the map on page 42 shows.

And this destruction of the countryside was absolutely not unique to the 14th century. The Chason des Lorrains, written between 1185 and 1213, describes the process of ravaging the countryside in vivid detail:

The march begins. Out in front are the scouts and incendiaries. After them come the foragers, whose job is to collect the spoils and carry them in the great baggage train. Soon all is tumult...The incendiaries set the villages on fire and the foragers visit and sack them. The terrified inhabitants are either burned or led away with their hands tied behind their backs to be held for ransom. Everywhere bells ring the alarm; a sure of fear sweeps the countryside. Wherever you look you can see helmets glinting in the sun, pennons waving in the breeze, the whole plain covered with horsemen. Money, cattle, mules and sheep are all seized. The smoke billows, flames crackle. Peasants and shepherds scatter in all directions.

(France 1999, p71)

More examples can be supplied. Henry I of France invaded Normandy in 1054 with the intention of "destroying oppida, burning villages, here putting to the sword, there seizing plunder, and so in the end reducing the whole land to a miserable desert", much in the same way that William the Bastard himself acted when siezing Maine in 1063 and reconquering it in 1073 (Gillingham 1992, p150). In revenge for the burning of his lands and villages by the Count of Flanders, the Archbishop of Cologne and the Duke of Brabant in 1184, Baldwin the Count of Hainaut burned over 180 villages belonging to his enemies in 1185 (France 1999, p97-98). William the Marshal recommended to Henry II to make a show of disbanding his army, then regathering it secretly so that they could burn and lay waste to Philip Augustus' lands unopposed when Philip dismissed his army as well - which they did with great enthusiasm on as great a scale as they could manage (Bryant 2016, p109).

The slaughter of civilians in a fallen town was also nothing exceptional. Caen saw as many as 5000 of its 8-10 000 inhabitants killed either in the town or while fleeing it - and we can be sure of at least 2500 deaths within the town alone - which may have been a smaller proportion of the whole compared to the inhabitants of Saint-Lô, sacked some days earlier with possibly all but the richest inhabitants killed (Sumption 2010, p901-907). In fact, all towns taken by storm during the Hundred Years War and later could expect such scenes of slaughter. This was no different to Comminges in 585 (Purton 2009, p12), Gembloux in 1185 (Napran 2005, p102) or Berwick in 1296 (Purton 2010, p86). If a town was stormed, the population was almost always put to the sword, whether they were Christians, heretics or Muslims.

The reasons for the destruction of the countryside are several, but probably the most important one is that it seriously damaged the economic resources of an opponent, as recognised by J.F. Verbruggen back in 1954 (Verbruggen 1998, p319; see also Rogers 2002 for the economic damage even a destroyed village could inflict). While the fighting men and even much of the population might find refuge in castles and towns, and so deny any strategic victory, it did weaken their ability to fight back the next campaign season, unless something changed, such as in the case of Baldwin mentioned above, where the King of France attacked the Count of Flanders, whose allies the previous year had no desire to get involved. However, it could also be an political tool, such as Queen Matilda's burning of the countryside around London during the Anarchy in order to convince the Londoners to expel the Empress (Bradbury 2009, p119-120), and it could be used to goad enemies into a decisive battle that they might otherwise have avoided (see especially Rogers 2000, as the entire book is based on this premise). If some churchmen occasionally wrang their hands about the methods of war, it should not be taken as the dominant view of the nobility, given how common it was.

Warfare in medieval Europe was generally a relatively small affair. While a lot of attention is paid to wars between kings – the Hundred Years War, War of the Roses, etc. – the vast majority of conflicts were small, between local lords with limited holdings. This kind of warfare often involved ‘armies’ of only dozens or hundreds of men

This isn't wrong per say, but it is wrongly applied. The vast majority of wars in medieval Europe might well have been "little war", but the Wot5K is clearly intended to be on the scale of the Hundred Years' War and draws direct inspiration from the War of the Roses. Like I said, not bad history, just utterly irrelevant to the point about army sizes that follows.

The same sort of small-scale warfare populations the ‘tales of deeds’ (French: Chasons de Geste), like that of Raoul de Cambrai, where Raoul spends the poem attempting to recover the fief of Vermandois (Raoul’s chason also ties back into the previous point about norms of warfare: Raoul breaks the Peace of God by attacking a convent, which causes his best knight, Bernier, to side against him; Bernier then slays Raoul in battle, leading to a blood feud between the families. Note how the transgression of the religious protection owed to non-combatants thus leads to the protagonists’ demise and a permanent rift in the community – the moral is clear: don’t attack non-combatants).

Raoul de Cambrai is one of the most interesting medieval chasons and has a surprising degree of subtlety for a medieval work. It does not, however, have a moral about attacking non-combatants and Bernier's change of side happens because a) Raoul is fighting against his father, b) Bernier's mother is one of the nuns and c) Raoul attacked Bernier after Bernier confronted him over the burning of the convent.

However, while it is true that Raoul's original intention was to sack the nunnery (Crosland 1999, LX/p22) and that this was something his knights didn't approve of ("we are neither Jews nor tyrants that we can destroy the holy relics" ibid, LXI-LXII/p22-23), he was willing to let the matter drop. The whole reason he initially wished to attack the nunnery was because his opponents ("the sons of Herbert") valued it for religious, economic and private reasons (ibid, LX/p22, LXVIII/p25, LXXI/p26). And, of course, the nunnery isn't the main object of his attack, since it resides within the town of Origny and that's his primary target. He desire to specifically target the nuns is never explicitly explained, but is probably intended to be understood as a combination of him being young, hot headed and proud.

After his men's initial refusal to attack the nuns specifically, Raoul does order an attack on the town more generally, but Bernier's mother (Marsent) comes out with the other nuns and negotiates a truce, by which the nuns will maintain Raoul's army while he stays there (ibid, LXIII-LXVI/p23-24). Unfortunately for the nuns and the town in general, three men from Raoul's army snuck into the town and began looting. While two were killed by the townsmen, the third managed to escape and then told Raoul that not only had the attack been unprovoked, but that the townsmen had insulted and threatened Raoul (ibid, LXVIII/p25). As a result, Raoul believes that the townsmen have broken the truce and declared war on him, and that they must be punished. It's not until the townsmen take a huge toll on his attacking knights that he gives the order to fire the town, his his soldiers do so "eager for booty" (ibid, LXIX/p25-26). The nuns are ultimately killed because they flee to the church, which catches fire and burns down around them (ibid, LXX/p26).

Raoul might not be portrayed as correct in his behavior in not protecting the nuns from the fire or his men, and his knights might well have been initially resistant to the idea of raping nuns, desecrating altars, and just generally insulting God (they also later express regret at burning down the church with the nuns inside - LXXIV/p28), but only Bernier ultimately leaves Raoul's service or openly expresses outrage, because only Bernier had to watch his mother burn to death (ibid, LXXI/p26-27), and he only leaves Raoul's service after being attacked by Raoul. Even the other knights, who brought up Raoul's sin of burning the church and the nuns, don't consider the act of burning the church and the nuns as factoring in Bernier's decision beyond the fact that one was his mother, and put Raoul's attack on Bernier at the same level as this (ibid, LXXXV/p31).

Additionally, the chason is clear that the burning of a lord's land is the normal method of waging war, not an excess on the part of Raoul. Raoul's mother Aalais understands that her own lands will likely be ravaged as a result of Raoul's choice to forecfully take the lands granted him by the king (ibid, XLIX/p17), and whereas it is explicitly mentioned that it was a crime to burn the church at Origny, there is no blame attached to Raoul for his initial firing and wasting of Vermandois by the author of the chason or by any of the characters - only Bernier refuses to participate, and that's because the burning lands are those of his father and friends (ibid, LIX/p21-22).

No medieval king had access to those kinds of resources, nor to the sort of administration which could procure such massive amounts of supplies. The Roman Empire could do this – but it required the involvement of treasury officials, local magistrates and a built up system of supply (which was maintained by a large, standing army of professional soldiers).

This is in the context of Renly's march on King's Landing and his absurd 100 000 man army. What needles me, though, is the idea that medieval kingdoms were incapable of supply beyond living off the land. That's simply not true. Louis IX, for example, spent two years stockpiling food at Cyprus before he launched his campaign in order to meet the requirements of his army while on campaign (Tyerman 2015, p259), while Richard I was able to stockpile supplies from all of England in preparation for his Crusade - enough for 10 000 men and 5000 horses and a voyage of several months (Tyerman 2015, p263-264). Hewitt, meanwhile, has demonstrated the sophistication of the English logistical system under Edward III, with supplies drawn from all over England, stockpiled near navigable rivers, grain and empty barrels brought together so that the flour can be put straight into the barrels when milled, then all the supplies from the smaller depots brought into a major port ready for shipping (Hewitt 2004, p50-63). France had much the same kind of logistical machinery (Prestwich 2018, p126-127)

That medieval monarchs lacked the mechanisms to procure large amounts of supplies and get them into place is untrue. Even on a scale as large as Renly is faced with, the machinery would have been sufficiently advanced to provide the necessary supplies, even if it was extremely unpopular with the peasantry and the merchants at the time.

Second, those retainers aren’t ‘on retainer’ to serve forever. They are obliged to a certain number of days of military service per year. Specifically, the standard number – which comes out of William the Conqueror’s settlement of his vassals after taking the English throne – was 40 days. The entire point of this system is that the king gives his vassals land and they give him military service so that no one has to pay anyone anything, because medieval kings do not have the kind of revenue to maintain long-term standing armies. It is no accident that the most destructive medieval conflicts were religious wars where the warriors participating were essentially engaged in ‘armed pilgrimage’ and so might stay in the field longer (God having a more unlimited claim on a knight’s time than the king).

Except that kings were able to pay their armies to stay in the field for extended periods of time - months rather than years, mind - and were doing so pretty much always. As Michael Prestwich notes of England: "given the surviving evidence it is difficult to argue that feudal service provided the major element in the cavalry forces of eleventh- and twelfth-century armies" (Prestwich 1996, p67). The thirteenth century might have seen a greater emphasis on feudal service, but it was gone by the 14th.

Infantry were also paid for their service, generally without 40 days free to begin with (Contamine 1984, p93-101). It's better to say that feudal dues were designed to limit/delay payment, but by the end of the 13th century they were essentially gone and kings had to pay their knights and noblemen (ibid, p77-90). Of course, they had already hired mercenaries and paid knights to extend campaigns weeks and months beyond the free service, so this wasn't so much a revolution as an evolution.

TL:DR

While Bret Devereaux might have gotten some parts about medieval warfare right, he greatly underestimates the violence and destruction of medieval wars, misrepresents Raoul de Cambrai, gives little credit to medieval logistical systems and doesn't really understand how medieval armies were organised and paid.

All in all, a good try, but his Classical background betrays him. No doubt I'd make more mistakes and bigger ones if I attempted to discuss Classical warfare.

Notes

¹ Gabriel really has it in for the Middle Ages. One of the most revelant quotes from his Soldiers' Lives Through History: The Ancient World is "It seems fair to say that no army from the Middle Ages to the Civil War provided their troops with rations as nutritionally sufficient or as varied as did the armies of the ancient world." This is in spite of John Pryor showing that Mediterranean galleys had quite similar rations to those calculated by Jonathan Roth for the Roman army, only missing the olive oil and salt - the latter of which was probably provided by the salt pork (Pryor 2006, p10-12; Roth 2012, p43). H.J. Hewitt and Michael Prestwich have both shown similarly diverse and nutritious military diets for medieval England (Hewitt 2004, p50-63; Preswitch 1996, p247-254), and Yuval Noah Harari has shown that the French diet, if less varied, was at least as high in calories as ancient rations (Hariri 2000, p302-304). This is hardly the only example, just the most relevant for this essay.

² As an example, Devereaux puts the level of technology and society in Game of Thrones as 1000-1450, based on the "the plate-clad knights, courtly ladies, martial tournaments". All of these, however, point to a much narrower period of 1300-1550, and much of the aesthetics, armour, etc are post-1450.

³ 25k at Sluys in 1340, 3.75k at St. Omer in 1340 (French and Flemish together), 600 at St. Amand in 1340, at least 6542 (1542 men-at-arms and knights in front of Black Prince 4000 Genoese crossbowmen 1000 infantry) at Crecy in 1346, 4000 after Crecy in 1346 (given as 4000 by Edward III, four times as many "commons" as at Crecy in a chronicle). All figures from Rogers 2000.

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