Editing Medieval Stasis (section)

=== Fantasy authors are bad Medievalists and historians, part 2 ===

The vision of medieval times that exists in fantasy is a gigantic pile of anachronisms, pop-history, and misconceptions. Much of this is due to Fantasy's scope of time being seriously out of whack even without innovations like gunpowder or industrial technology. See, our monkey brains aren't very good at really comprehending spans of time longer than a handful of decades (hence why your childhood and youth memories always appear a lot more recent than they actually are, yes, 1990 really was 30 years ago). So we tend to mash up entire "eras" of history into indistinct blobs in our headspace, even though the entire concept of a historical era is more or less for academic convenience and categorization. The Carolingian Empire founded by Charlemagne was as far back in the past relative to Joan of Arc as she is to the present day. And technology and culture certainly did not remain static in those intervening seven hundred years. Paris went from a fairly small city of a few tens of thousands to a bustling metropolis of nearly a quarter of a million people, mail or banded armour was largely replaced by solid plated armour, gunpowder was popularised, sugar was introduced to the European diet, the Magyars went from eastern horseback-mounted pagan invaders to a solidly Catholic and Europeanised mainstay of central Europe as the Hungarians, and eastern Europe was Christianised in a rather gory and unpleasant process, to name just a few of the drastic changes over the years. Of course, any Crusader Kings 2 player could tell you how ridiculous the idea of the political map of a faux-medieval realm remaining static for centuries is. 

Let's now take the common complaint among Fantasy authors that guns render castles and knights in shining armour obsolete. Full Plate armour coexisted with man-portable gunpowder weapons throughout literally the entirety of its military service and was phased out because of reasons of cost as armies got bigger, not because it was ineffective against guns. Making a fully articulated suit of plate armour fitted to every soldier is expensive and time consuming, so as armies got more standardized as countries centralized, with equipment being given by the military rather than soldiers being left to figure it out themselves, it was deemed easier to just give people the basics needed to protect their bodies. In that case, ditching the limb armor to reduce costs while keeping the helmet and breastplate like the Swiss Landsknecht and the Spanish Tercio. Hell: in Japan, the increasing prevalence of guns is what made the Samurai go from only partially metallic lamellar armour to full metal plated suits in the first place. 

Furthermore, Plate armour by and large did not coexist with other types of metallic armour. It straight up replaced them all because it was just flatly better. Whether it's just a breastplate, a suit of half-plate (half referring to how much of the body is protected), or full plate, there was basically zero reason to wear anything else. Once the metal casting technology for plate armour became widespread, other forms of armour largely disappeared save for covering joint areas because plate armour is simply better in every way and is cheaper to make. Full coats of mail or scale didn't coexist with efficiently made plate armour; there's no need for a chain shirt when a solid steel breastplate offers superior protection for no downside, and full plate is actually considerably more comfortable and lighter than a full coat of mail.  So that adventuring party where the Barbarian is wearing chainmail for mobility and the fighter is wearing full plate to tank better at the cost of agility? Simply didn't happen. You're mixing your dark ages and your late medieval/renaissance era armour styles. Mixing armor did, however, happen with conquistadors, and ''may'' have occurred with other small groups of fighting men. This was due purely to costs, not armor types having pros and cons, as used obsolete gear was far cheaper than armor anyone actually wanted. The equipment log for the 287 combatant Coronado expedition lists five suits of full plate (four belonging to Coronado himself), four suits of plate armor for horses (all Coronado's), 16 sets of partial plate, 56 pieces of sleeveless chain armor for the torso (two vests only), one suit of sleeved chain armor, and 250 gambesons. Archaeologists have found a medieval kettle hat in New Mexico, which would have been obsolete for hundreds of years before it got there.

As for Castles, anyone who seriously believed that cannons made strong walls obsolete would be laughed out of any gunpowder-era military engineering course; hell, even as late as the World Wars, fixed fortifications were a very daunting task for artillery to try and crack and often required specialist super heavy guns or ultra high penetration air-dropped bombs to break. After the development of gunpowder artillery, contemporary militaries simply converted their castles into star forts or polygonal fortresses (where the walls are made sloped and are backed by a lot of sloped compressed dirt. Meanwhile, in China, average city walls were already several meters thick and filled with lots of compressed dirt and gravel compared to the famous walls of Constantinople (which were two to three meters thick at best and less stuffed). This meant that the Chinese had less incentive to refine their artillery for centuries (which came back to backfire on them when modern howitzers and specialized shells were used against them by the Europeans when they sent out colonial expeditions). Have you ever heard the term Forlorn Hope? It refers to the supremely unfortunate soldiers who get the job of being the first to rush into the breach of a fortress when after what is typically days, weeks, or even months of non-stop cannon fire they ''finally'' break open one of the walls. Which is rather obviously a suicide mission for the first wave. If it were easy to crack open fortresses with cannonades there would be no need for them. 

What actually changed about Castles is that as countries became more centralized, control over military forts passed unto the Kingdom/Empire proper and out of the hands of local nobles, meaning that fortresses largely stopped also being houses for the resident Baron or Count of whatever. This had the benefit of ensuring that local nobles had a harder time rebelling because the fortresses were loyal to the Capital, rather than being their private property. It wasn't until well into the 20th century with the invention of the atomic fucking bomb that a line of fixed fortifications was no longer regarded as a serious obstacle to a truly determined attacker and that was only if the attacker was willing and able to drop one on the battlefield. With conventional munitions, even today with all our missiles and precision weapons, a fortified line is something that most attackers would rather bypass than breach. Of course, most defenders know this and essentially use fortifications to funnel attackers into battlefields of their choosing.  

And what about industrial technology? Surely that has no place in my pre-modern setting or would be obsoleted by magic! That too was driven in large part by increased centralization. Artisanal production is relatively fine if you never need to send products very far away from where they're made and are only meeting relatively small amounts of local demand and the occasional distant but super wealthy patron. But as realms centralize and unify and economies grow interconnected, suddenly monks copying maybe a handful of books a year at a premium isn't enough to meet the needs for more literature. You need higher output, which leads to mass industrialization and standardization of production which requires growing mechanization of production to ensure that quality remains consistent. This drives the greater reliance on machines in producing things and these machines make it easier to make better machines until you can meet the demand or until you get to the point where you're starting to reach the limitations of your power source like wind, muscle, or waterpower. As medieval societies got bigger, you saw more windmills and watermills to get more power for all this work. 

Fantasy settings, however, offer magic and alchemy which should realistically, unless there are heavy restrictions on the commonality of either, make for ideal power sources to make for even better machines until you end up in industrialism via such powers. Whether they do this on their own or are used to augment mundane technology is mostly irrelevant. And indeed, powerful mages and alchemists are likely to end up as the predominant class as they control access to these all important resources. So societies that don't want to rely on either would likely double down on trying to find alternatives to having to rely on them, much like how Merchants pushed for quite a lot of what we take for granted in modern society to wriggle out from the thumb of the Aristocracy, like moving centers of production into cities not owned by nobles so they didn't have to pay the local Baron and would have better access to labourers not tied to the land as they sought to maximize profit in their class interest. 

Societies are products of the conditions in which they exist. Things are the way they are because of responses to needs and pressures or perceived needs and pressures. They are never really static because the wheel of history is constantly turning and even something as simple as fluctuations in population size can result in radical transformations. Did a big war just depopulate a country in a fantasy setting? Well, gee whiz, now the labourers in the country have a much greater position of power and influence due to the scarcity of their services, which can lead to undermining the entire basis of medieval feudalism and pave the way for late Feudalism or even early Capitalism. Or perhaps something else entirely if the setting conditions allow for it (probably not a regression to Classical era slavery though; that required huge surpluses of labour.)