Paying soldiers full-time may have helped create the modern state
Medieval Englishmen owed their king forty days of military service, far too short for a campaign overseas. So most paid a fee instead, and that money bought professional troops. Over the following centuries, the cost of keeping permanent armies forced rulers to build tax offices and bureaucracies that some historians see as the roots of modern government.
Standing armies are ancient. Egypt's became a permanent, professional force during the Middle and New Kingdoms, around 2000 to 1500 BCE, and under rulers such as Amenemhat I and Ramesses II introduced specialised divisions, standard weapons and war chariots. In India, the Maurya and Nanda empires fielded some of the largest forces of the Iron Age, reportedly over 600,000 infantry and 9,000 war elephants. In China, the Warring States perfected crossbows so effective they were guarded as military secrets, and Sun Tzu's The Art of War is still counted among the Seven Military Classics.
Greek city-states mostly relied on citizen militias, with exceptions. Thebes kept the Sacred Band, 300 elite hoplites, from 378 to 338 BC, and Philip II of Macedon turned his army into a year-round paid force that his son Alexander led on campaigns of conquest. Rome began with conscripted citizens and ended with professionals who served 25 years. Non-Roman auxiliaries earned citizenship for themselves and their children, and in the late empire such troops, along with foreign mercenaries, formed the army's core.
Medieval Europe depended on nobles arriving with their own followers, which made armies uneven. England's scutage, the payment that replaced personal service, funded paid soldiers, and the forces England sent into the Hundred Years' War were largely professionals. Italian cities came to lean so heavily on hired career soldiers that their armies grew less dependable.
France took a decisive step in 1439, when the Estates General reserved recruitment to the king and approved a new tax, the taille, to pay for a royal army. Mercenary companies had to join it permanently or be hunted down. The resulting force of about 6,000 men was more disciplined than anything before it and helped win the final victory at Castillon in 1453. Even so, most European soldiers were still mercenaries as late as the 1650s, and the taxes needed for permanent armies helped provoke uprisings, among them France's Fronde and England's civil war.
Source: Army
