War Comes to the City Gates
Towns rarely fought their own wars directly — they mostly funded, supplied, and occasionally suffered them, preferring to pay someone else to do the actual fighting whenever they possibly could.
Merchants, even ones who could easily afford a full knight’s equipment, generally lacked the training to lead an actual military force, and preferred simply hiring mercenaries instead. Italian condottieri (mercenary captains) commanded genuinely eye-watering salaries — one earned 60,000 ducats a year in peacetime and 80,000 in war from Milan in 1467 alone, a sum that covered his soldiers and officers as well. Urban militias, when towns did raise their own forces, leaned toward crossbows and early handguns over longbows, precisely because they required far less training to use effectively — a sensible trade-off for part-time citizen-soldiers defending their own walls rather than professional archers on campaign.
A siege, ultimately, came down to a fairly grim calculation: whose food or health held out first. Even a town that chose to surrender rather than fight to the last could expect a degree of looting, pillaging, and assault regardless — the opposing commander’s promise to restrain his troops was, at best, a best-effort guarantee rather than an actual protection.
It’s worth remembering, when writing a besieged town in fiction, that the real drama very often wasn’t the storming of the walls at all — it was the desperate arithmetic of supplies, disease, and morale happening quietly behind them, long before any battering ram got involved.
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