Roman weapons factories

In my new book, War Lord, I have Alaric – the loveable rogue – infiltrate a Roman weapons factory (fabrica) and spy on the other slaves for a time. I’m not going to tell you why, that would ruin the story! But I will tell you a bit about the factories.

So at its height the Roman army was potentially up to 450,000 men. That’s a hell of a lot of kit for the state to make and maintain. So how did they do it?

The Roman Empire at its greatest extent

There were two main ways. When the army was in its traditional and most famous phase (split into legions numbering 5,000 men, red cloaks and rectangular shields etc etc) each legion had its own armoury, responsible for the upkeep of every soldier’s kit. This was made easier by the fact that the legions home never moved. Their base was their base, and that was that. For example, in the Enemy of the Empire books, the Fourteenth Legion is based in Carnuntum in Pannonia, and they were there for well over a hundred years. When you can guarantee the supply of materials and merchants know that supply will always be met, then life was fairly straightforward.

But there were also weapons factories dotted around the empire, often quite close to borders where the legions were based. Here, teams of people (presumably slaves) would be tasked with mass producing swords, shields, helmets, mail – even things like cooking utensils and tent pegs, everything the legions would need in quantities large enough to keep them going.

Re-enactors in classical Roman kit

If you think about just one legion going to war. 5,000 men fighting day after day on campaign are going to get through a substantial amount of javelins and arrows, swords and shields. There’s no way a legion armoury would be able to keep up in times of war.

It is possible that certain factories specialised in particular items. For example, there could a be a factory that exclusively made parts for artillery, or another that only made helmets, or shields. More likely, they were used for a variety of weapons, ensuring supply to nearby legions was easier.

As the empire changed and weakened, the legions were replaced with mobile field armies. It was then that they became entirely reliant on factories, as their legions were cut down and merged into the field armies, and those armies had no fixed base, making production of required kit almost impossible.  

State owned factories were then vital to the success of the army, and having trustworthy people running them even more so. If you want to read more about the goings on in a weapons factory, then War Lord is out on October 20th!

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