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Military Motivation and Frontier Maintenance
Fireside this week! I find I have my thoughts more or less together for the last part of the Imperator series, but I have not yet gotten them into a satisfying order – a common hazard of writ…
Without a religious creed holding them together, there’s really not a lot of reason this highly trained, cohesive band of armed men wouldn’t just turn south and set up shop as a group somewhere more hospitable (or stay where they are, but just begin ruling as secular elites with wealth, wives and inheritance, like Albert von Preußen). This is a thing – bands of armed men, made cohesive through shared suffering turning on civilian society – that happens with astonishingly regularity and the fuse on that bomb, historically speaking, is short. Generally, retiring long-service professionals don’t move back into the imperial core – they settle (with their money and land) on the frontier, near their former bases, marrying local and having families (whose sons often end up in the army!).
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