Chapitre 228: Messy affairs

Before the age of absolutism—when monarchs centralized their power so thoroughly that few institutions or nobles dared to oppose them—wars involving entire kingdoms were far from streamlined, often as chaotic as they were brutal. Unlike later national conflicts, where the full resources of a state could be marshaled by a single ruler with sweeping control, wars in earlier centuries were deeply shaped by the delicate and often volatile relationships between kings and their vassals, which many times made it so that the leader of an army, more than a military commander was the head of a confederation of forces each with his own voice , as he had to always heed his ear to the bigger opinion in the camp least he faced the fragmentation of their army before battle.