Huge classical armies

[darius]

The armies of the romans, macedonians and carthage were huge. The battle of Cannae was a battle involving more than a hundred thousand men. And although Cannae was big it was not unique in its size. Obviously the classical powers had huge amounts of resources and manpower.
But during the decline and fall of Rome army sizes decreased substiantially which would be exepected. But what seems more suprising is that it took more than a thousands years before Europe experienced battles of such a large scale (around the napolenic wars).
What enabled such capital accumualtion in the classical age?
And why did it not return after the fall of Rome?

[hellheaven1987]

Very easy, because economy didn't allow it. During the Dark Age time, economic struture was destroyed because unstable of society, therefore no countries were afforded to maintain a large army. The whole things were started in Late Rome Period, as warfare became more and more smaller. Yes there were several big battle, but most of time, especially WRE, faced small raids around hundreds of enemies. Hence some historians believe the Late Rome Army were more expert in small warfare than their ancestors, but not large scale of battle.

[darius]

Very easy, because economy didn't allow it. During the Dark Age time, economic struture was destroyed because unstable of society, therefore no countries were afforded to maintain a large army. The whole things were started in Late Rome Period, as warfare became more and more smaller. Yes there were several big battle, but most of time, especially WRE, faced small raids around hundreds of enemies. Hence some historians believe the Late Rome Army were more expert in small warfare than their ancestors, but not large scale of battle.

Yes that's a no brainer but why was the medeival and even renisancen economy so small compared to the classical states.

[hellheaven1987]

Yes that's a no brainer but why was the medeival and even renisancen economy so small compared to the classical states.

I don't really know why, but it seems that during Medieval time, especially West Europe during Dark Age to early Crusade, the war is occured in small area. You will find out much of war between England and France around that time was just running around Normandy and part of south France, and it seems that both sides had not enough resource to really go out these areas. Besides that, the wars during that time were much more "private", which means it was usually between the lord and lord, who didn't have really much resource to fight. We would also notice that once the king had much power in late Medieval time, the number of soldiers were increasing too. For example, Ottoman Empire had 100 thousands soldiers during the end of Middle Age, other countries such as Spain also could take out money to support the expedition of New Land. That was totally impossible in the past.

[Mangalore]

The armies of the romans, macedonians and carthage were huge. The battle of Cannae was a battle involving more than a hundred thousand men. And although Cannae was big it was not unique in its size. Obviously the classical powers had huge amounts of resources and manpower.
But during the decline and fall of Rome army sizes decreased substiantially which would be exepected. But what seems more suprising is that it took more than a thousands years before Europe experienced battles of such a large scale (around the napolenic wars).
What enabled such capital accumualtion in the classical age?
And why did it not return after the fall of Rome?

The Roman army at Cannae was in the area of 50 000-60 000 men, , Hannibals army in the area of 30 000 men. About 10 000 Romans did not join battle at Cannae but guarded the forts.

If we take the Consular army as an indicator of an independant strategic body capable to fight and win a campaign the usual army size was around 20 000-30 000 men, which is in fact a far more usual number than the 50 000 Romans at Cannae (who reportedly had supply problems to maintain such an army in the field in their homeland!!), in fact most armies were more in that area with greater troop numbers usually only appearing in major and deceisive wars rather than the norm.

Battles in the area of 20 000 men per army could be seen throughout the middle ages as well(though admittedly more towards the High and Late Middle Ages). However feudalism also contributed to a whole lot of low level battles where only a few thousand men fought each other.

While ancient times indeed had bigger population pools than later times I cannot agree that the magnitude really changed. In many ways however the military culture switched from citizen armies to professional (feudalism) or mercenary armies which in and off itself means fewer people to wage war with.

[joorik]

I guess logistics played a huge part also. Supplying large armies is not easy. You'd need roads, transports and more importantly you'd need local residents to sell you food whereever the army is at that moment. With just wagons etc it's quite hard to tow food for 50000 people from 100 miles away. I suppose roads from Roman times were still usable in medieval times, but everything else was in no shape atall.

[communist]

europe didnt exactly have a big population. and belive it or not, but a single war can take away the economic build up of a few decades. the europeans also emphasised more of a smaller, more professional military which are different to the larger eastern conscripts. dont be surprised by the death tolls of chinese battles mounting up to million around the roman times when the china at the time contained 30% of the world's population, and chinese also usually includes the peasants/non-combatants which can be useful for many areas such as logistics/blacksmiths/fletcher/engineer, and such usually take up 1/4 to 1/3 of the whole army, where the other 2/3 comprise of speacilists and elites, usually anyway.

[sephodwyrm]

I have yet to see a Chinese battle with a million casualties though...XP

[communist]

I have yet to see a Chinese battle with a million casualties though...XP

u bastard ,,u got me there. i shouldve said over a million participants, and the casulties mounting up at chang ping is around about 3/4 of a million. and also for middle aged battles, knights's equpitment can be alot more expensive. and fighting can usually be about pride more than anything else, which wouldnt involve more than a couple of hundread participants

[Marcus Scaurus]

u bastard ,,u got me there. i shouldve said over a million participants, and the casulties mounting up at chang ping is around about 3/4 of a million. and also for middle aged battles, knights's equpitment can be alot more expensive. and fighting can usually be about pride more than anything else, which wouldnt involve more than a couple of hundread participants

I think the ancient Chinese writers might have exaggerated these numbers... every Roman/Greek historian exaggerated, I think it wasn't different with the Chinese.

[Gorecki]

I agree with Marcus Scaurus that the historians exaggerated in how big this armies were.

I think a good example of this is the Battle of Thermopylae where the 6,000 Greek warriors fought along the lines of 200,000-500,000. While I'm not saying Leonidas wasn't a great general or that the Spartans are not tough. Sir Frederick Maurice a Brittish general during World War 1 said that the Persian army could not have surpassed 175,00 because of lack of water. While still large this is fewer than what Herodus wrote.

[Marcus Scaurus]

I think a good example of this is the Battle of Thermopylae where the 6,000 Greek warriors fought along the lines of 200,000-500,000. While I'm not saying Leonidas wasn't a great general or that the Spartans are not tough. Sir Frederick Maurice a Brittish general during World War 1 said that the Persian army could not have surpassed 175,00 because of lack of water. While still large this is fewer than what Herodus wrote.

I don't know Sir Frederick but he's right about the shortage of water. Even with enough water, an army of let's say 150 000 foot soldiers and 25000 cavalry couldn't be supported by the country.

[Big War Bird]

Joorik has it mostly right. The infrastructure of medieval Europe was in terrible shape. Large armies were very hard to sustain. Historian William McNeil points this in his work The Pursuit of Power. Armies of over 50,000 soldiers were not sustainable until the 1500's due to the condistion of the economy and infrastructure. However after that time these large armies should have been sustainable, but there was another problem - the skill of the military leaders. Military leaders of the Renaissance were not skilled in logistics for such large armies. Supplying armies was ad hock, the art of generalship in this area was usually lacking. There were no "War Colleges" teaching the more mundane military art of logistics un til the 1700's. It was not until Napolean's time that military academies had trained enough officers that large armies were consistantly sustainable by many nations.

[Canterbury]

The connection between economics and military power is wildly overrated. The crucial issue is how the nations military technique, population and wealth [in that order] is exploited by its political/social system to create military power. Wealth itself isn't that important, or at least it wasn't until the industrial age, and even then its overrated. The political/social system is the key. For example, during the Second Punic war the Roman republic was able to raise and sustain twenty five legions plus auxiliaries for more than a decade, an army of approximately 200,000 men, as well as a navy that was at least half that size, despite the fact that it did not draw on all of Italy, and only had Sardinia and Sicily as outlying provinces, a population of approximately 4 million. The Western Roman Empire in the late fourth century could not sustain armed forces of that size for any period of time, despite its population of 70 milllion and its vast wealth, because by then the political/system had become so demilitarised that it was impossible to generate the armed forces needed to defend it, and those that did exist were little more than localised defence forces. The WRE fell because no one from inside it was willing to fight for it, and those from outside it, the federates, quickly came to believe that they, and not those paying them, should own what they were defending.

Once the WRE was gone what followed was a sort of Mad Max existence, where the ruling elite maintained a Roman facade but couldn't sustain the substance. Agriculture devolved into subsistence, the cities emptied, the roading network decayed, the aqueducts collapsed. Everything quickly became as primitive as it was before the Romans arrived. Yet that wouldn't have made any difference to the size of the army's the successors were capable of fielding if there hadn't been another crucial change. Instead of an centralised state, which they conquered, or a tribal based society, which is what they started out as being, because of the demilitarised nature of the society they took over the successors quickly became feudalised, a political/social system that cannot produce the huge number of soldiers of its predecesors because first and foremost it is a system of political oppression where the vast majority of people are, by definition, slaves to the armed elite. The last thing you do when you're a feudal overlord is give a slave a weapon and teach him how to fight. It undermines your whole political/social system. That's why the feudal armies were smaller than those of the classical age, or the tribal age that predated it, and that's why the medieval armies expanded in the Late/High era when feudalism started to die out. By the 16th century, not the napoleonic era, the huge battles of the tribal and classical past had started again. The simultaneous improvement in the economy was coincidental, not causual. The vast majority of soldiers who fought in those large battles from 1500 on were recruited directly by a central authority from the whole of society, not from a tiny portion of it by a collection of petty warlords. The armies and navies of Breitenfield and Lepanto were a product of political/social change, not economic.

And no, I don't think much of RTW's recruitment system, based as it is purely on economics. It is frustratingly slow at the start, absurdly easy once the player gets momentum, and simply wrong. A realistic recruitment system would be based on the willingness of the factions population to fight and the ability of that faction to train and equip them [which itself is only indirectly economic], not on money.

[ThiudareiksGunthigg]

Once the WRE was gone what followed was a sort of Mad Max existence, where the ruling elite maintained a Roman facade but couldn't sustain the substance. Agriculture devolved into subsistence, the cities emptied, the roading network decayed, the aqueducts collapsed.

For a while. This was not the case for the entire 1000 years of the Middle Ages.

Yet that wouldn't have made any difference to the size of the army's the successors were capable of fielding if there hadn't been another crucial change. Instead of an centralised state, which they conquered, or a tribal based society, which is what they started out as being, because of the demilitarised nature of the society they took over the successors quickly became feudalised, a political/social system that cannot produce the huge number of soldiers of its predecesors because first and foremost it is a system of political oppression where the vast majority of people are, by definition, slaves to the armed elite.

And this is an enormous oversimplification. Firstly, nothing and nowhere 'quickly' became 'feudalised'. Secondly, despite what high school teachers tell you, feudalism was (i) not universal, (ii) not an economic system at all in some areas, (iii) not even a social system in others and (iv) actually fairly short-lived in any form. Even in the very few places where anything like textbook 'feudalism' existed, it is simply untrue that 'the vast majority of people are, by definition, slaves to the armed elite'.

The last thing you do when you're a feudal overlord is give a slave a weapon and teach him how to fight. It undermines your whole political/social system.

Strange, then, that this is precisely what happened. Regularly. The problem with what you've said is its based on some assumptions which are either untrue or over-simplified or both.

That's why the feudal armies were smaller than those of the classical age, or the tribal age that predated it, and that's why the medieval armies expanded in the Late/High era when feudalism started to die out.

Nope. The reason the Romans in the 200s BC could field much larger armies was a function of their military and political system and the population of Italy at the time. Medieval Italy had a similar or even larger population, but there was no single political entity controlling the whole of Italy. Nor was there a military system comparable to the Roman one. Nor was there, most importantly, any need for large armies.

When medieval rulers controlled large populations - Charlemagne for example - they did field armies in the hundreds of thousands. Check out Bernard Bachrach's Early Carolingian Warfare: Prelude to Empire for details on how big some early medieval armies could be and how sophisticated their organisation and supply were.

Most medieval armies were relatively small because they were drawn from much smaller populations than Second Century BC Italy and vastly smaller populations than the First Century AD Roman Empire.

[Giurza]

one word - conscription....
romans had it, then it disapeared, and reapeared only at the beggining of Napoleonic era (French revolution - reinvented conscriptio)
but this version is not all without flaws...

[joorik]

Well... I suppose knights equiptments was only more expensive relatively because economy had downgraded quite a bit. On the other side medievil armies weren't all knights and other fighters mostly used worse equiptment than Roman armies. Altho I might be wrong in my assumptions, since I haven't really looked into the sources very deep.

[vikrant]

i guess armies faught in crusades were quite huge
{corect me}

[communist]

actually the chinese figures are debatable but that dosnt mean that its definatly exaggerated. and as for supplying the army with water, id say it'll depend upon the general and how resourceful he can be. i mean if it by all means, waiting for a week for it to rain then its still possible to get that much water. and heres the actual wikipedia figures on the persian invasion force, and i am not saying wiki is accurate, but more so that 2 million is quite abit more than just 400,000. so just keep that in mind, that the figure has already gone down from the original statistics.

Fleet crew: 517,610
Infantry: 1,700,000
Cavalry: 80,000
Arabs and Libyans: 20,000
Total 2,317,610

another possibility is that, back then rivers were alot wider. since landscape does go through quite abit of change due to human activity for 2000 years. and as for the chinese casulty list for chang ping, there is no real evidence except for 2 things. 1 is that, qin conscripted every male whos over the age of 15 for that single battle(well, the battle did last for about 2 months. from initial baiting of the enemy, to complete double surrounding the enemy, and starved them for about 40 days until their commander died in a sally attempt and whats left surrendered.), while 400,000+(figure used to be higher) zhao pows were executed afterwards, with about 240(listed) freed to tell the news. at the time, that was the highest casualty ever for the chinese, and basically, after the battle zhao had a extremly high female to male ratio. i mean europe denied that chinese had steel weapons back then, until terracota warriors were found, so i wouldnt just dismiss the eastern figures right away. and heres a link for chang ping if anyones interested
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Changping

[Marcus Scaurus]

actually the chinese figures are debatable but that dosnt mean that its definatly exaggerated. and as for supplying the army with water, id say it'll depend upon the general and how resourceful he can be. i mean if it by all means, waiting for a week for it to rain then its still possible to get that much water. and heres the actual wikipedia figures on the persian invasion force, and i am not saying wiki is accurate, but more so that 2 million is quite abit more than just 400,000. so just keep that in mind, that the figure has already gone down from the original statistics.

Fleet crew: 517,610
Infantry: 1,700,000
Cavalry: 80,000
Arabs and Libyans: 20,000
Total 2,317,610

These aren't Wikipedia's figures but Herodotus's. I think the real number of soldiers in the Persian invasion army of Xerxes wasn't higher than 400 000, spread over Thrace, Macedonia and Greece, and that at Thermopylae, no more than 100 000 men were concentrated.

qin conscripted every male whos over the age of 15 for that single battle(well, the battle did last for about 2 months. from initial baiting of the enemy, to complete double surrounding the enemy, and starved them for about 40 days until their commander died in a sally attempt and whats left surrendered.), while 400,000+(figure used to be higher) zhao pows were executed afterwards, with about 240(listed) freed to tell the news. at the time, that was the highest casualty ever for the chinese, and basically, after the battle zhao had a extremly high female to male ratio. i mean europe denied that chinese had steel weapons back then, until terracota warriors were found, so i wouldnt just dismiss the eastern figures right away. and heres a link for chang ping if anyones interested
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Changping

Enlisting ever male in the country is simply impossible. Well, it can be done, but the kingdom would've faced destruction in no less than a month because the food for both the army and the women and children would run out in about a week. Historian John Keegan states than a country can conscript no more than 10-15% of the adult male population without facing hunger and economic depression in a few weeks. During the Napoleonic Wars, about 12% of the British male population was either in the army or navy, but still there was a shortage of men. If the British government would've conscripted another 10%, too many farms would've been laid waste and the army would starve, in the long term the civilians too.