Question about conscription

Military conscription has been around for quite a while. However, it is of my understanding that in the Ancient World, even the conscripted had to purchase their own weapons. My question is-when did this change? When did armies start issuing equipment to soldiers, and what changed to cause/allow for this?
 
State provision of arms is incredibly ancient. Old Kingdom Egypt had a couple of state arsenals for the manufacture of weapons.
 
There's, roughly speaking, three models for equipping an army:

  1. Each soldier is responsible for equipping himself.
  2. Units are organized by local governments, nobles, or wealthy private individuals who are responsible for equipping their recruits.
  3. The central government equips the entire army with standardized equipment.
All three models go way back. #1 was probably most common in ancient and classical times, but the other two models definitely existed as well.


The earliest example I can think of of #3 was the post-Marian (~100 BC) Roman Army. The pre-Marian army had been primarily model #1, which had gradually been stretched thinner and thinner as the number of Roman citizens with enough wealth to equip themselves for war became insufficient for the manpower demands of Rome's military expansion, but meanwhile the profits of conquering and looting Rome's neighbors gave the state and the aristocracy enough surplus wealth to equip others. The Marian army started out as a Type 2 force (the general Marius raising and equipping an army at his own private expense because he couldn't recruit a traditional Type 1 force), and Marius's military and political successes lead to this transitioning into a Type 3 army, which it remained for the next several centuries, until the adoption of the Theme system in the ERE changed it back to a mixed Type 1/Type 2 model.


Europe in the middle ages was mainly a mixed Type 1/Type 2 model: nobles and knights equipped themselves at their own expense, but they often also equipped the supporting forces of armed retainers and peasant levies that went to war behind them.


Renaissance armies were often Type 2, with elements of Type 3. For example, Elizabethan/Jacobean England raised regiments by commissioning people as Colonels, granting them sources of income to support their units, and giving them the responsibility of raising and equipping their men. The transition to a full Type 3 army in England came during the English Civil War, when Cromwell reorganized much of the Parliamentary armies into a professional force with standardized equipment.


In general, the driving forces for moving to a Type 3 force seem to be:

  • The central government has enough money and power to fund its own forces.
  • Manpower demands are steep enough that the government can't afford to rely on people who can afford to equip themselves.
  • The adoption of tactics that work better with standardized equipment.
The rise of gunpowder was a major driving force for all three in the Renaissance: it strengthened the central government relative to the aristocracy by reducing the reliance on a military caste that specialized in hand-to-hand combat and by rendering pre-gunpowder castles obsolete, it made mass armies more effective (it takes a decade or more to train a knight or a man-at-arms; it takes six weeks to train a musketman), and the need to keep soldiers supplied with ammo made standardization critical.
 
Top