Art De La Guerre

[KevinD]

In historical sources, a especially Chinese dynastic histories, there is a narrative where the kingdom/dynasty/empire is founded by a wise and virtuous leader who through his positive qualities motivates great performance from his army, but that over time the system degenerates and the leaders become corrupt and lazy and their armies poorly trained and motivated. You can see this in many if not most Chinese lists (Ming, Yuan, Jin, Song, Tang…) where the dynasty starts out with a healthy mix of elite troops with special abilities but by the end some or all of these are removed from the list and replaced by mediocre units.

However, this narrative of dynastic decline is very helpful to the next dynasty who can say, yes our predecessors were great at first but then they became a bunch of corrupt degenerates who thus lost the Mandate of Heaven which has passed to us as wise and virtuous rulers who inspire great performance because we are wonderful - the proof of which is that we won. It was very convenient that the official dynastic history of the previous dynasty was written by the new dynasty which had a vested interest in portraying this cycle if fall from greatness into degeneracy by their predecessor. However, a critical look at these histories often leaves one wondering how much truth there is in these official characterizations if the ancien regime.

This does just happen with Chinese history, but elsewhere too. Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of Rome is essentially the same story in a different setting.

So, I think list writers should be careful of degrading armies of regimes that we now know were on the brink of collapse. Of course sometimes regimes did fall because they fell into a vicious cycle of corruption and decay. But often this was not really the case and the old regime just rolled the dice one time too many and got unlucky and was crushed by some upstart.