Warlords and the Roman Republic

Warlords and the Roman Republic John W. Rich 1 Defining Warlords This paper considers the value of the concept ‘warlord’ for the understanding of the Roman Republic. As several contributors to this volume note, the term itself presents some problems of definition, with which I accordingly start. The word ‘warlord’ (at first usually hyphenated) came into occasional use in English from the mid nineteenth century.1 The first contemporary figure to whom it was applied was the Kaiser, translating the title of Oberster Kriegsherr (Supreme Warlord) which designated his role as supreme commander of the German armies and navy. The word is still sometimes used of national leaders as commanders in war, for example in the titles of some biographies of Churchill.2 ‘Warlord’ was used in a very different way by Max Weber’s translators as an English equivalent for the term Kriegsfürst, which he deployed in connection with his concept of ‘charismatic authority’, one of his three types of ‘legitimate domination’. Weber held that in early times such authority had belonged either to the magician or prophet or to the leader in war, or ‘war hero’ (Kriegsheld), and he cited the ‘warlord’ (Kriegsfürst) as one of the main forms taken by such war leadership. Thus, in Economy and Society, the king and his precursor the chieftain is characterized as the ‘warlord’ in his capacity as the ‘charismatic leader in hunt and war’,3 while in Weber’s 1919 lecture on ‘Politics as Vocation’ charismatic leaders include ‘the elected warlord (Kriegsfürst), the band leader (Bandenführer) and the condottiere’.4 The usage of the term ‘warlord’ by today’s political scientists originated in the context of the anarchy prevailing in China after the overthrow of the 1 The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is Emerson 1856: 176, discussing the shifting origins of the English aristocracy (‘Piracy and war gave place to trade, politics and letters; the war-lord to the law-lord; the law-lord to the merchant and the mill-owner; but the privilege was kept, whilst the measures of obtaining it were changed.’) 2 Lewin 1973; D’Este 2008. 3 Weber 1978: 1141–2 (= Weber 1980: 675); see also Weber 1978: 243 (= Weber 1980: 140). 4 Weber 1946: 80 (= Weber 1971: 399). (The translator’s ‘gang leader’ for Bandenführer is clearly erroneous). However, translators of Weber’s posthumously published paper on ‘Die drei rein- en Typen der legitimen Herrschaft’, in which the early German duke (Herzog) is given as an example (Weber 1973: 483), render Kriegsfürst by ‘military prince’ (Weber 1958: 7; 2004: 140). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��8 | doi ��.��63/9789004354050_0�4 Warlords And The Roman Republic 267 Manchu Empire in 1911, and especially from 1916 up to the establishment of the Nationalist government in 1928. During those twelve years the central government had very little control, and effective power devolved to numer- ous local army commanders, both the tuchüns, the provincial military commanders, and those with lesser commands. These commanders contracted alliances with each other and fought frequent wars. They came to be known pejoratively by the Chinese word usually transliterated as jūnfa, implying that they were militarists and concerned only for their own advancement, and contemporary writers in English adopted the word ‘warlord’ as its translation.5 The word jūnfa was in fact a neologism in Chinese, reflecting the influence of western conceptions of militarism and violence in the aftermath of the First World War.6 The term ‘warlord’ has subsequently come into established usage to desig- nate figures perceived as comparable to this Chinese model in contemporary Third World countries. Since the 1980s, interest in such warlords has greatly in- creased, as their activities in states like Afghanistan and Somalia have come to be of heightened concern to major powers, and a substantial political science literature on the topic has resulted.7 Much of this writing has been devoted to issues about how warlords should be defined. There is general agreement that warlords occur in states where the authority of the central government has weakened or collapsed and they are able to act with effective autonomy, and that the warlord’s power is based primarily on his command of a military force, whose members are bound to him through coercion and/or personal loyalty and rewards. Most writers add as a further defining characteristic that each warlord has effective control of a territorial region.8 A good sample definition is that provided by K. Marten: ‘ “warlords” are individuals who control small slices of territory, in defiance of genuine state authority, through a combina- tion of patronage and force’.9 Some further points remain in dispute. While 5 Accounts of the Warlord Era in post-imperial China include Pye 1971; Sheridan 1975; McCord 1993. 6 Waldron 1991. 7 Recent studies of contemporary warlordism include Reno 1998; MacKinlay 2000; Jackson 2003; Rich P.B. 2004; Lezhnev 2005; Giustozzi 2005, 2009; Vinci 2007; Marten 2006/7, 2011, 2012. 8 For insistence (against doubters) that a warlord must have a territorial base see Giustozzi 2005: 8. Vinci 2007: 318–21 prefers to speak of the warlord as controlling a ‘fiefdom’ compris- ing a community rather than a territory. 9 Marten 2011: 303. See also Marten 2006/7: 48; 2012: 3–7. Others offering definitions for ‘warlord’ include Sheridan 1975: 57 (‘a commander of a personal army, ruling or seeking to rule territory, and acting more or less independently’); Vinci 2007: 328 (‘the leader of an armed group that uses military power and economic exploitation to maintain fiefdoms which are .

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