Army sizes

[Endre Fodstad]

I have all of Delbrücks works, and while they're a great read, it's about as useful as Oman or Gibbons these days. He writes in a period where just about everybody accepted the renaissance and humanist view of the middle ages as a cultural hole in the ground, after all.

Sadly, few authors today dare write works on medieval warfare on the scale that those old encyclopedists liked, and a great many historians accept their outdated views on the period instead of searching for newer works. For example(and this is a very local example) when a major exhibition on the reign of Margrete I(Kalmar Union boss lady) was touring scandinavia, the exhibition book one could buy included two articles on medieval warfare and combat. One was an norwegian copy of parts of Delbrück(written in 1932), and the other was an article by swedish colonel, gymnastics teacher and florette fencer Nils.E Hellsten, from 1941, where his romanticised view of the viking era leads him to praise the "organized armies and highly developed martial arts" of the vikings(i.e. he read the sagas in the most positive light he could) while slaughtering all medieval warfare and martial arts as unsophisticated, brutish, and amateurish. Lovely.

EF

 

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Well, in a 500 pages reference work on Spanish medieval history by Iradiel and others there is half page dedicated to medieval warfare, with the indication that "archers threw arrows", anyone beats that?

 

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Originally posted by Aryaman
Well, in a 500 pages reference work on Spanish medieval history by Iradiel and others there is half page dedicated to medieval warfare, with the indication that "archers threw arrows", anyone beats that?

Really gets right to the point!

Only half a page? Well, that's beacuse warfare wasn't important in Spanish medieval history. LOL

 

[Slargos]

Originally posted by Kaiser Wilhelm


What was that fort?

The fortress in question is likely Sveaborg, a modern and nighon impregneble fortress in eastern Sweden (southern Finland, for the geographically impaired) that could very well have staved off the russians in the war of 1809 and saved Finland.
But any fortress can be taken by treason. Such is the stuff of life.

AFAIK, it was only half-staffed at the time, so I think the total garrison would be some 15 000 troops.

 

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Originally posted by roachclip76
Correct me if i'm wrong, but i figure most of the northern european armies were smaller because it was much more sparsely populated. Which is why roman armies of the past could have been bigger. Just out of curiousity, how big were the mongol armies?

A bit indirectly I want to point at this wisdom. This is one of the problem that we have tacled (at least I hope so). Each province can generate a Regiment. The troop type composition and its n : o men will depend upon the province... Is it rich? What terrain type? What did it historically produce (troop type)? What manpower level does the province have?

This will give us a great varity of Regiments. Note also that provincial attrition will stand in relation to these values. So if you, as the German King, send up a Italian City-Vassal Regiment to teach those pesky Swedes a lesson in Småland, then you might learn what attrition is all about in those remote and vasteland forests of ours.....

/Greven

 

[Styrbiorn]

Originally posted by Slargos


The fortress in question is likely Sveaborg, a modern and nighon impregneble fortress in eastern Sweden (southern Finland, for the geographically impaired) that could very well have staved off the russians in the war of 1809 and saved Finland.
But any fortress can be taken by treason. Such is the stuff of life.

AFAIK, it was only half-staffed at the time, so I think the total garrison would be some 15 000 troops.

That's exactly the fort I meant.

 

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Another nugget. thanks Greven, Sounds wonderful. Keep 'em coming.

 

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Originally posted by Slargos


The fortress in question is likely Sveaborg, a modern and nighon impregneble fortress in eastern Sweden (southern Finland, for the geographically impaired) that could very well have staved off the russians in the war of 1809 and saved Finland.
But any fortress can be taken by treason. Such is the stuff of life.

AFAIK, it was only half-staffed at the time, so I think the total garrison would be some 15 000 troops.

Thanks, and no, I'm not geographically impaired

 

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Back to the problem of garrisons, in medieval times there were several systems. For instance, the english ocupation of Normandy under Henry V, there were around 1.200 english troops scattered in dozens of castles. Those troops were paid by the castle owner, an english chieftain, using the local resources, so they didn´t detract from the main english army nor from the english treasure. The major cities, like Rouen, were defended by the local militia.
Another example, the reconquista in Spain. There the normal procedure was to expel all muslim population from the cities and settle there a christian only population,acting as a de facto garrison (all cities were fortified naturally) while muslims were forced to live outside in the countryside. Castles played almost no role here.

 

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Weren't the Byzantines able to muster 100,000 man armies at some point? I seem to remember reading that somewhere. Although it might have been one of those ancient, exaggerated sources.

 

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Ive seen figures for Romanus IV's army during the Manzikert campaign given as 60,000-100,000, but I havent read enough to form any idea as to the true numbers, especially since Ive seen other estimates stating there were around 30,000. The Byzantines were generally more capable of supplying larger armies than their western counterparts, but even so, 100,000 men seems impossible in 1071, when even 30,000 was almost just as unbelievable. It was by all accounts a "huge host", but what that means exactly is beyond me.

Just for comparison, it would be interesting to find out how big Manuel I's army was at Myriocephalon...

 

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Originally posted by Greven

This will give us a great varity of Regiments. Note also that provincial attrition will stand in relation to these values. So if you, as the German King, send up a Italian City-Vassal Regiment to teach those pesky Swedes a lesson in Småland, then you might learn what attrition is all about in those remote and vasteland forests of ours.....

/Greven

I just hope that it will change overtime... 400 years is quite a lot of it.

 

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Originally posted by Maur13

I just hope that it will change overtime... 400 years is quite a lot of it.

Some, if not all, of that change probably would be introduced by tech advancement.

 

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There are certainly a lot of different numbers given by different historians about the byzantine army at Matzikert, a recently published greek book i read about that battle states that the most propable is that the army was around 100.000 but then 30.000 something went to guard another part of anatolia and kick out any remnants of pillaging turks, and the other 70.000 or so fought in Matzikert.
Some arab historians even claim that the army of the greeks was 1.000.000 people of course they go on to claim victory for allah