Medieval Warfare and Popular History

Game of Thrones did something impressive and damaging at the same time: it convinced millions of viewers that they were seeing the Middle Ages "as it really was." The historian Bret Devereaux argues that almost nothing about Westeros is actually medieval — it's early modern through and through, wearing a medieval costume.¹

The Scale Problem

Start with army size. Renly Baratheon fields a host of 100,000 men. Mace Tyrell marches with 70,000 Tyrell soldiers. For reference, the French army at Agincourt in 1415 — one of the most famous battles in history, where the French king committed his best forces — numbered perhaps 35,000. The English force was about 9,000. At the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396, a grand alliance of more than a dozen European powers facing the Ottomans put maybe 40,000 men on the field total. The entire Ottoman standing army at its early modern peak consisted of about 108,000 troops.¹

Medieval armies were small because the feudal system that raised them was structurally incapable of scaling up. A king called his vassals; each vassal brought his retinue (average size in England circa 1300: five men); the king's army was this retinue of retinues. The standard obligation was 40 days of military service per year — after that, everyone went home. There was no centralized supply. Each retinue brought its own food, its own wagons, its own pack animals. Keeping even a few thousand men in the field for months was a logistical nightmare.¹

The logistics alone destroy Westeros's medievalism. Mace Tyrell's 80,000-man army marching 850 miles down the Roseroad would consume roughly 189 tons of food per day. The army could carry maybe 20 days' supply. That means pre-positioned stockpiles totaling over 12,000 tons along the route — the kind of administrative infrastructure that no medieval kingdom possessed. The Romans could do this. Early modern European states learned how. A feudal kingdom with a retinue-of-retinues army could not.

The Destructiveness Problem

Warfare in Westeros is shockingly destructive by medieval standards. Conservative estimates put the War of the Five Kings at roughly 500,000 total casualties — equivalent in a few years to what the Crusades produced over two centuries. Tywin Lannister orders the Riverlands set on fire without a second thought. Daenerys incinerates King's Landing. Targeting civilians is treated as normal.¹

But the Middle Ages actually developed the first formal protections for non-combatants. The Peace of God movement (10th-11th century) gave religious protection to peasants, clergy, women, and widows. The Truce of God restricted the days on which warfare could take place. Were these protections always honored? Obviously not. But the norm existed. A medieval commander who burned peasant villages understood he was violating it. In Westeros, no such norm is ever mentioned.

The reason most medieval wars were relatively limited goes beyond norms to incentives: in a territorial war, control over the peasantry was the goal. You didn't mass-murder the people whose agricultural labor you wanted. Wars between lords often occurred "over the heads" of the peasantry — dangerous for anyone caught in the path of an army, certainly, but nothing approaching the demographic-level destruction that Game of Thrones depicts.

So What Is Westeros?

Devereaux's answer: the early modern period, roughly 1450-1789. The clues are everywhere once you look. The armies have uniform equipment — presumably state-provided — and have been drilled to march and fight in formation. They stay in the field for months or years, implying professional soldiers paid from central revenues rather than feudal levies with a 40-day clock. The scale of destruction matches the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), which depopulated much of Germany by around 25%, or the Eighty Years War, which turned the Low Countries into a devastated no-man's land.¹

The Thirty Years War also provides the closest parallel to Westeros's treatment of civilians. Early modern wars were larger, longer, and fought by armies whose governments often couldn't pay or feed them, forcing soldiers to supply themselves from the local population. Worse, many of these wars were religious, and religious wars weaken the cultural norms that otherwise constrain violence against civilians — the enemy, being heretics, aren't protected by the rules that apply to fellow Christians. Spanish soldiers who went unpaid for months sacked Antwerp — their own government's regional capital — to recover their back wages through looting.

Martin has acknowledged the War of the Roses as his primary inspiration, which is itself telling: that war occurred from 1455-1487, already well within the early modern period. But even the Roses involved smaller armies and less civilian destruction than Westeros depicts. The real historical rhyme is with the great wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, when state capacity had grown enough to raise armies of tens of thousands but not enough to reliably supply them.

Why This Matters

This isn't just pedantry about a TV show. The reason millions of people believe Game of Thrones depicts the "real" Middle Ages is that it confirms a pre-existing bias: the past was a brutal hellhole, we've progressed beyond it, those people were basically animals. Devereaux calls this "an unearned sense of superiority and often a dangerous hubris — 'we're not like that anymore, that can't happen anymore.'" But the forms of mass violence depicted in Game of Thrones are not artifacts of an ignorant past. They're features of state-building and religious warfare that emerged with modernity, not before it.¹

The medieval period was violent, certainly — but in specific, constrained, and often surprisingly rule-bound ways. The early modern period that replaced it was more destructive by orders of magnitude, precisely because the states were more capable. This pattern — that greater capability means greater potential for destruction — connects to the broader question of civilisational collapse: the popular narrative that older societies were simply more fragile than ours usually gets the causation backwards.