Tag: economics

…What if the best ratio of supply to demand [for materials of war] is not found in the big city, which has to stay peaceful and organized to attract trade and reap taxes, where the state is strong, and men, arms and magic are regulated…? What if instead the deals are to be found on the borders of civilization, where swords and mail are regularly looted from the slain? Stocks in the house of war have to be high, for any day now a warlord could strut by looking to garrison a castle or equip a company. And if magic items are bought and sold, the ones useful in a fight are more likely to command a good price in a place where the line between life and death is as clear as the sea’s horizon.

— The Price of a Hauberk in Gomorrah – Roles, Rules, and Rolls

My previous post dug out a conversion rate of 25 gold pieces (GP) for one koku. That post focused upon the minimum income of a single samurai. As we have a historical record of the kokudaka (tax assessment of the entire country), I can expand my conversion to the daimyō—the landholding baronial class of pre-modern Japan. Under the kokudaka:

• The minimum annual revenue needed to be considered a daimyō was 10,000 koku. So 250,000 GP in agricultural production, annually.
• Many daimyō had revenue in excess of 100,000 koku. 2.5 million GP.
• The future Shōgun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, was daimyō of the eight provinces of the Kanto plain which produced an annual revenue of 2.5 million koku. 62.5 million GP.
• Out of a (1598) national total of just under 19 million koku. That is 475 million GP! Per year!
• Most of that was eaten, of course; Japan’s population at the time was somewhere around 19 million.

It was the 1980 television miniseries Shōgun that introduced me to the concept of koku as a measure of wealth in pre-modern Japan. I purchased the original AD&D Oriental Adventures rulebook when it came out in 1985. I only ever used it for inspiration, though. That never included using koku for player character income/wealth.

It was the 2024 streaming miniseries Shōgun that finally got me curious enough about koku to do the research. My questions were:

1. How many koku of income did a common samurai need to live?
2. How was it distributed to him?
3. What was one koku worth in D&D coinage?

The answers I found:

1. The Samurai Archives Wiki project’s page for koku states a samurai’s annual expenses “was around 1.8” koku. That does not count the one koku he eats, so it takes almost 3 koku to basically live.
2. That same page states “one-quarter of the annual stipend was paid in spring, one-quarter in summer, and the remaining one-half in the winter.”
3. The Oriental Adventures rulebook has two tables in its “Money & Equipment” chapter. The first sets one koku worth 5 ch’ien. The second sets one ch’ien equal to 5 gold pieces (GP). So one koku is worth 25 GP.

So the wage of a “historical” samurai in D&D would be about 70 GP per year. Almost 6 GP per month.

ADDENDUM: 6 GP per month is what the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide lists as the wage for a mercenary heavy cavalryman or mounted archer. So internally consistent between the rulebooks.

See also Fiefs Were Measured By How Much Food They Produced.

The bulk of Japan’s people in the early feudal age were peasants, as in any simple agrarian society. Most of them were serfs bound to the land they cultivated and forced to surrender a large part of their crop to a landlord, usually a nobleman or a monastery. To these masses who tilled the soil, the comparative stability imposed by the early feudal rulers brought little change, but it had far-reaching consequences for the merchants and skilled artisans, whose numbers increased in Kamakura times. The coming and going between the imperial capital, Kyoto, and the shogun’s headquarters at Kamakura, some 300 miles apart, stimulated travel and thereby opened new market areas to the merchant class. This led to the growth of commercial towns, which formed in much the same way as trading centers in medieval Europe. Settlements of merchants gathered at road junctions, at the gates of important monasteries, near the strongholds of noblemen who offered good protection and at natural harbors along the seacoast. The merchants attracted artisans and encouraged them to produce goods that could be sold, sent to other districts or shipped abroad….

— Early Japan, p. 75

Gamemasters who set their campaigns in any pre-industrial period frequently fail to understand that everything is handmade—including tools and the tools to make tools. Even in places with high population, the vast majority are primarily engaged in producing food. The number of artesans in a population is always low. Manufactured items could be stockpiled in great amounts, but that took much time (i.e., years) and dedicated effort—usually at the expense of other things being deprioritized.

Artesans can command high wages, but that is far outstripped by the value of what they make. Their small numbers get lost in the sea of poverty-wage labor. What they have made outlives them—possibly by centuries, sometimes.

Even animals are worth more than people. A dead cow is a greater loss than that of a peasant, let alone a horse. Sad but true.

In such a society, people are cheap while things are expensive. Among other things, the equipment lists in games should better reflect this.

For further reading:

• The Cost of Plate Armor in Modern Money
• Normalizing Skerples’ Medieval Price List
• Why Medieval Warfare was Expensive Business

Since many historians use the infantry’s salary of the time as a reference to estimate the cost of armor in monthly wages, we suggest using a similar means of assessment. According to open sources, a US Army corporal earns about $30,000 a year, which gives us a monthly wage of $2,500. Now, this means that depending on the type, quality, place of manufacture, and finishing, a set of XV century plate armor would cost from $8,000 to $40,000 or more. At the same time, a simple set of armor for a regular foot soldier, especially if some obsolete pieces of equipment were used, could cost around $2,000—but a good one would still be somewhere near $4,000 and more.

But.

When we talk about this price range, we still mean one of the most numerous parts of the armies—men-at-arms—ordinary soldiers, not the true elite, though their status allowed them to be referred to as “gentlemen”. By definition, those who fought in full plate armor were called ‘men at arms’, while a knight is a person granted an honorary title of knighthood by a political leader. And the price difference between the regular men-at-arms’ plate armor and knight’s plate armor is huge! It can be compared with a difference between a regular modern business suit and a modern exclusive designer limited edition bespoke business suit. Such armor was made to order by renowned armorers, and, as a rule, had decals and decorations, even if we are talking about combat, not ceremonial armor, and its cost converted by the above mentioned method was in the range of $100,000 to $250,000.

— The Cost of Plate Armor in Modern Money – Armstreet

Initially, the decay of primary group solidarity within the leading cities of Italy and of the town militias which were its military expression invited chaos. Armed adventurers, often originating from north of the Alps, coalesced under informally elected leaders and proceeded to live by blackmailing local authorities, or, when suitably large payments were not forthcoming, by plundering the countryside. Such “free companies” of soldiers became more formidable as the fourteenth century [C.E.] advanced. In 1354, the largest of these bands, numbering as many as 10,000 armed men, accompanied by about twice as many camp followers, wended its way across the most fertile parts of central Italy, making a living by sale and resale of whatever plunder the soldiers did not consume directly on the spot. Such a traveling company was, in effect, a migratory city, for cities, too, lived by extracting resources from the countryside through a combination of force or threat of force (rents and taxes) on the one hand and more or less free contractual exchanges (artisan goods for food and raw materials) on the other.

The spectacle of a wealthy countryside ravaged by wandering bands of plundering armed men was as old as organized warfare itself. What was new in this situation was the fact that enough money circulated in the richer Italian towns to make it possible for citizens to tax themselves and use the proceeds to buy the services of armed strangers. Then, simply by spending their pay, the hired soldiers put tax monies back in circulation. Thereby, they intensified the market exchanges that allowed such towns to commercialize armed violence in the first place. The emergent system thus tended to become self-sustaining. The only problem was to invent mutually acceptable contractual forms and practical means for enforcing contract terms.

From a taxpayer’s point of view, the desirability of substituting the certainty of taxes for the uncertainty of plunder depended on what one had to lose and how frequently plundering bands were likely to appear. In the course of the fourteenth century, enough citizens concluded that taxes were preferable to being plundered to make the commercialization of organized violence feasible in the richer and better-governed cities of northern Italy. Professionalized fighting men had precisely parallel motives for preferring a fixed rate of pay to the risks of living wholly on plunder. Moreover, as military contracts (Italian condotta, hence condottiere, contractor) developed, rules were introduced specifying the circumstances under which plundering was permissible. Thus, in becoming salaried, soldiering did not entirely lose its speculative economic dimension.

— The Pursuit of Power, pp. 73-74

Emphasis mine.

All samurai had duties and were paid stipends, and from this they had to buy whatever of their equipment wasn’t issued and furnish their household (if they had one). The basis for the economy was rice, and a unit of rice that could feed a man for a year, called a koku, was the universal measure of wealth. Fiefs and estates were described in the terms of how many koku of rice they produced. One koku is 120 litres. The lowest samurai received a little less than a koku (assuming his meals were all on his lord’s estate’s books).

Middling lords, and castle commanders, might receive a stipend of several hundred koku, and with that he had to pay the samurai in his service, supply his garrison, feed his horses, pay his servants, etc. For convenience sake, hard cash was used to make payments, but ultimately it was a rice-based economy. Even the Takeda of Kai, who sat on the most valuable gold mines in the nation, needed rice to feed their soldiers.

— Samurai 1550-1600, p. 7

The cavalry revolution originated in the Middle East about 900 [B.C.E.] and had several implications. First, making war from a galloping horse was a dangerous occupation. In order to be effective, the warrior on horseback needed both hands free to wield a weapon; yet letting go of the reins seemed to guarantee that the fighter would end upon the ground, bruised and helpless. The only alternative was to guide the horse with one’s feet and legs, perhaps using the voice to direct a trained horse. Training both horse and rider took time and practice.

Moreover, a horse was expensive, and not everyone had the leisure time to practice. A horse could consume as much grain as 6 to 8 persons, and the owner was responsible for mating and training the animal. Furthermore, the horse was not very useful aside from its war-making capabilities: its meat and milk could not compare to the cow’s, and it could not pull a plow until the Europeans invented the horse collar about 1000 [C.E.] Therefore, civilized societies that utilized the horse extensively tended to have specialized fighters. In some cases, the warriors might be aristocrats, in others, slaves; but always the big question was how to pay for such an expensive military system.

— Heavenly Warriors, p. 15

[The Persian quisling] Tiridates led Alexander [the Great] into a large building behind the palace of Xerxes [at Persepolis] that served as both an armory for the royal bodyguard and a repository for the king’s wealth. Diffused light filtered through a series of openings in the roof above and washed gently over the tons of gold and silver bullion that had been neatly and methodically stored there. Within the treasury building were 120,000 talents of bullion, the largest single concentration of wealth to be found anywhere in the ancient world.

Darius I had imposed a tribute of precious metals in addition to a tribute of goods on his satraps and on the subject nations of the empire. Instead of converting that tribute into coins that could then have been put into circulation, Darius and his successors had it melted and then formed into ingots of gold and silver. The bars were stored in the palace treasury, and when the kings of Persia needed to finance particular projects, wars, or adventures, the precious metals were cast into coins. It was Darius who had introduced the coining of money into the empire; hence, the Persian coin became known as the Daric. Until that time, the empire had been administered largely on the basis of barter.

Successive generations of Persian kings had dipped into the treasury and spent vast sums on themselves. Over the years, they had spent great amounts on administering and expanding the empire and had dispensed large sums in fighting, hiring, and bribing the Greeks. Yet no matter how much money the kings spent, every year at the New Year ceremony more came in to replenish and add to the royal coffers. In the treasury building at Persepolis, Alexander was shown the full measure of how wealthy the Achaemenid kings of Persia had been and how wealthy he had now become.

— Envy of the Gods, pp. 18-19

For comparision, Alexander started his invasion of the Persian Empire with a war chest of only 70 talents of gold.

In Book I of Thucydides’ history Pericles outlines the limitations of the Peloponnesian adversaries. They had no capital. Unlike the Spartiates, most of the allies in the Peloponnesian coalition were agrarians who needed to farm at precisely the time it was best to fight. In contrast, Athens was a sophisticated polis with vast sums of coinage in both circulation and as specie on reserve. Pericles’ adversary, King Archidamus of Sparta, agreed, and so warned his rural Peloponnesians that they were not equipped to fight a long, multifaceted war with even a seasonal militia. This new conflict, he warned, was quite different: “War is not so much a matter of men as of monetary expense.” He proved absolutely right.

The great irony of the war was that the very requisites for victory—an enormous fleet, money for rowers’ pay, and officers deployed overseas for long periods of imperial service—were inimical to the historic assumptions of rural and isolated Sparta, which heretofore had had no monetary economy. Persia finally filled the void, gave Spartan generals untold amounts of gold, and made up losses in men and materiel almost immediately. As long as Greeks were killing Greeks, the satraps of the Persian Empire were happy to subsidize the carnage.

Yet in the war’s aftermath, with the Persian subsidies gone, the implosion of the Spartan empire was directly attributable to its new financial responsibilities of administering a fleet and distant subject states that were so at odds with its old insular moral code. Money and manpower, not always just courage and class, quite literally won wars. The Peloponnesian War offered another bitter lesson, one that would also arise during the transition of Rome from republic to empire. Consensual government started in Greece as a limited enterprise. These constitutional states were predicated on a civic militia cloaked in amateurism and localism, and determined to protect the property of a minority of its citizens. But as the invective of Athenian conservatives from Plato to Aristotle illustrated, war over decades and across thousands of miles required mobilization, weaponry, and capital—and only the new resources of a more centralized and powerful state could meet those vast burdens.

— A War Like No Other, pp. 303-304

Emphasis mine.

Throughout the period of Abbasid glory in Baghdad (750-861 [C.E.]), the priceless oriental trade from India and China to Byzantium and Europe has passed up the Persian Gulf and through Baghdad to northern Syria. But the administration of Ibn Tulun in Egypt was so just and conditions in Iraq were so chaotic, that the merchants who handled the oriental trade decided to switch their route from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea and Egypt. This was the beginning of the rise of Egypt and the decline of Iraq.

— Soldiers of Fortune, p. 24

The people who initially got control of economic resources immediately monopolized them. They could do anything they wanted thereafter provided that they remained a relatively homogenous and peaceful group. By and large they did remain homogenous and peaceful among themselves. They decided how to divide up the power, how to divide up the wealth, who should be king, and which family should become the royal dynasty. The instability in these societies usually came from external invasions by new peoples, who at various times pushed into these wealthy lands and gained control. Their control usually collapsed or was overthrown a few generations later by the old native aristocracy or by later invaders. But all invaders perpetuated the existing social structure, taking over the prerogatives of the old aristocracy.

— The Civilization of the Middle Ages, p. 3

The role of cavalry had declined in the Spanish army because the Spaniards had increased their infantry partly at the expense of it. Since a properly armored heavy cavalryman could cost four times as much as a pikeman or arquebusier, a small decrease in heavy cavalry could finance a huge addition to the infantry and bring about a dramatic alteration in the proportions between infantry and cavalry. Though a large part of their cavalry consisted of traditional full-armored lancers, the Spanish did have cavalry that performed a light cavalry’s strategic duties of reconnaissance and attack on the enemy’s stragglers, foragers, convoys, and logistic installations. Usually mounted arquebusiers filled this role. Because of the difficulties involved in using the arquebus while mounted, these horse arquebusiers were really mounted infantry. They usually dismounted to use their weapons. But on at least one occasion, after the battle of Ceresole in 1544 [C.E.], mounted arquebusiers pursued retreating heavy infantry and, by dismounting to shoot and remounting to continue the pursuit, managed effectively to simulate the traditional Parthian or Turkish tactics of light cavalry.

— The Art of War in the Western World, p. 192

The rest of western Europe copied this change from the Spanish, leading to the permanent decline of “pure” cavalry in warfare there.