When
looking at the militaries of the ancient world, such as the great legions of the Roman Republic,
or the grand sprawling Phalanxes of Alexander the Great, the sheer numbers are staggering,
with armies numbering in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands. However, centuries
later in the western Europe of the middle ages, armies had become significantly smaller,
counting in a few thousand at the most. Why did the scale of warfare shrink so drastically between
antiquity and the medieval era? In this video, we will explore the various answers to this question.
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Attempting to estimate the exact numbers of soldiers different armies were composed of in
the past is rarely easy, as these numbers are given to us by chroniclers and historians from
centuries past, who can often be misleading, as they would either boast or reduce numbers
to make a victory seem even more majestic, or a loss to be more easily digestible and less
catastrophic, depending on what the one who recounts the battle wants to convey.
Even once one arrives at a good estimation based on historical sources, it is still hard to
distinguish official combatants from noncombatants accompanying the army, whether they were there for
logistic support, such as porters and cooks, or as freebooters or in search of loot and fortune.
Having premised these elements, we will now tackle the main question: why do the armies of
the medieval era seem so small when compared to the armies of the empires of the classical era?
During the second Persian invasion of Greece, when King Xerxes's army defeated the Spartan-led Greek
army at Thermopylae, modern historians believe that the Persian King of Kings was accompanied
by around one hundred thousand soldiers, a very sizable army for its time, though still less than
the unrealistic two and a half million claimed by the Greek historian Herodotus, who like many
other sources of the classical era greatly inflate the numbers of armies up to ridiculous numbers.
Some four hundred years later, at the Battle of Philippi fought between the Second Triumvir of
Marc Anthony and Octavian and Caesar's assassins, modern historians believe that both sides fielded
legions numbering around sixty to eighty thousand men. Even as late as the end of the
fourth century, the Roman Empire under Julian the Apostate invaded the Persian Empire with an army
of over 60.000 troops backed by an incredible feat of logistics to keep the force going.
Let us now compare these numbers specifically to the armies fielded by the Kings of Western
Europe in the Middle Ages: for example at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214,
Philip the King of France managed to raise around 6500 men against Emperor
Otto IV of the Holy Roman Empire who brought with him 9000 men.
During the 100 Years' War, the English armies that attacked France usually numbered around ten
thousand men and often half that when they were not accompanied by a prince, while the
French royal army managed to muster around twenty thousand men a few times but had usually less.
Of course in both of these examples, we are not seeing the sum total of all the military forces
available to those kingdoms, and different elements limited the number of total troops
that could be brought on the battlefield, as the French king Philip the Second had to leave a third
of his men to his son to confront an English expedition elsewhere, while during the Hundred
Years War the Plantagenet monarchs were often hampered by shipping capacity. Still, overall,
we can see a distinct decrease in medieval army size when compared to their ancient forebears.
To partially explain this, firstly we need to remember that to raise, pay and supply an army,
a ruler needs the financial and material backing from the State it governs,
and here we can see the first difference between the ancient and medieval worlds. The empires of
antiquity were both geographically larger and more populated than the kingdoms of the middle ages,
able to draw resources and manpower from a larger pool, and governed by an efficient bureaucracy
based on centuries of governmental evolution. Bigger empires and resources also meant better
transportation networks for the purposes of communication, logistics and internal
movement. This allowed easier mobilization over greater regions, as troops could be moved and fed
with greater ease. The Roman empire at its height is estimated to have a standing army of 400.000
men, but these were distributed throughout its many different provinces and locally supplied
from them. Meanwhile, medieval Europe was more politically fractured and less centralized than
ancient Rome ever was, as Germanic migrations split up the Western half of the erstwhile
empire into a handful of smaller kingdoms, while in the ninth century, after a brief
revival of a more centralized administration brought about by the Carolingian Dynasty,
the dissolution of said Carolingians gave rise to the Kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire,
both states which featured a landholding aristocracy that was broadly autonomous from,
and often even in conflict with, the royal central power. Overall, medieval states were also just
geographically smaller in comparison to their ancient counterparts, while the central government
was generally weaker, save for a few exceptions during Charlemagne’s reign of his empire or a few
localized attempts like the Kingdom of Naples. This meant fewer resources and fewer troops.
While the high and late middle ages are generally well attested to, estimating the size of armies
in the early middle ages is extremely hard, as sources from this period are scarce and
extremely unreliable. Various chronicles mention how during this era, hosts as small
as one hundred men could cause significant damage in some regions, as rural settlements were small.
Ottonian sources from the tenth-century mention fifty slaughtered knights as an enormous setback,
indicating that entire armies at the time probably numbered in the low thousands.
As for the total number of raisable troops, we have documents claiming that the Ottonian Empire
could raise 20000 armed saddled men, while another document from the Anglosaxon kingdom of Wessex has
been used to extrapolate a field army of around 5500, but historians point out that these numbers
were, in fact, just theoretical strengths on paper and that the actual numbers were probably lower.
Other academics have attempted to extrapolate numbers by looking at what the economy of western
Europe could sustain at a time. Following the sixth century, Europe had fallen into a general
economic depression, particularly in northern Gaul and Brittany, as towns declined and large
swaths of terrain were abandoned. As a result, settlements were small, so an army of, say, 5000
men could represent many times the size of a town in an area, and the presence of such a force in
such a relatively depopulated region could be devastating, as the soldiers would forage an
area to sustain themselves, which usually meant squeezing food and supplies from the already
sparse local peasantry. It has been theorized that because of the supply situation between the
6th to 10th centuries, most armies during that time were no larger than 5000 to 6000. Granted,
larger empires such as the Carolingians could probably deploy more armies at a time,
and in the case of defense, it might have been possible to double the numbers.
Let us move on from the early middle ages, and into the high middle ages of the 9th and 12th
centuries. During this era, wars were mostly local conflicts, like feuds between neighbouring noble
families or rival city states in Northern Italy. As such, the number of men who fought in those
battles were generally small due both to pure necessity and the number of actors involved.
However, one exception during this time was the Crusades, which saw armies of up to 20 or 30
thousand men participate in the grand struggle for the Holy Land. Of course,
it needs to be noted that these armies were composed of many different smaller contingents
and armies from different countries and regions. In general, the high medieval armies of western
European were characterised by small hosts whose most important element was the heavy cavalry
supplied by the landlords and their retinues, who were accompanied by levies of commoners.
These crucial cores of heavy cavalry were expensive to maintain, meaning that their numbers
had to be limited. In some regions, initially in northern Italy, the lowlands, and later in other
areas, the emergence of larger towns also increased the importance of urban militias.
What bound these nobles and cities to the ruler was an oath of loyalty that could be weak, and
pay was often the reward of lands and war spoils. The requirement of loyalty from their subjects
meant that a ruler's army could vary considerably depending on his internal situation and internal
support was required to field the entire army of the realm. For example, in the Battle of Bouvines,
Emperor Otto IV of Germany allegedly only brought a few knights from his personal retinue, with the
rest of his army being supplied by local allies in the Low Countries. The reason for his low personal
troop count was his low support in the Holy Roman Empire as he was engulfed in the feud between the
Guelphs and Ghibellines at the time. This would also continue in later periods such as during
the Hundred Year War, where the number of troops that defended the English-held province of Gascony
depended greatly on the level of support the English Plantagenet kings enjoyed in the region.
Around the 12th century, the military capacity of medieval kingdoms began to grow,
as a monetary economy was established throughout Christendom, while royal governments developed
greater control over their vassals. This allowed rulers to pay troops and keep them in the field
for greater periods of time, longer than what the feudal obligations initially entailed.
This meant that the medieval rulers could wage longer campaigns, such as the English forays
into France during Hundred Years War, which had campaigns spanning around a year long,
financed by taxes raised in the country and later allocated by Parliament. During the high and late
middle ages, mercenaries also became more common, as the French hired Italians and Scots during the
latter part of the war. Still, it was not always easy to find the funds to finance these soldiers,
and the introduction of regular pay did not phase out the right to plunder,
which was not uncommonly mentioned in military contracts as part of the official pay,
especially during the English raids into French territory, the devastating chevauchées.
Having discussed broadly some of the reasons for the smaller size of medieval armies,
let us look at some specific examples across the middle ages: beginning with a case study of the
size of the Bulgarian army throughout the middle ages. At the time of the First Bulgarian Empire,
the average number of soldiers a Tsar could field was about 12000 to 20000 men, while their southern
neighbours and rivals, the larger Eastern Roman Empire, could field approximately 25000
men. Centuries later, the Second Bulgarian Empire could field approximately 15000 men,
depending on the situation. Another example we will analyze is England: Between the 1270s and
the start of the thirteen hundreds, Edward the First of England campaigned in Scotland
and Wales with armies ranging between 5000 and 11000 men, with cavalry being less than 2000
men. During the siege of Calais of 1348, after the victory at the battle of Crecy, around 30000
men participated at different times, however only around 10 to 11000 men participated at a time,
so it can be extrapolated that the English King Henry the Third, before the Black Plague, had
around 30000 men able to fight while being capable of fielding around a third of these at a time with
his finances and the kingdom’s navy. For the rest of the War, the English found it difficult to
field armies larger than 10000 on the mainland, most often hampered by the difficulty to find
sufficient numbers of ships to ferry the troops, as these had to be drafted from the merchants.
So in conclusion, why were medieval armies so small? The causes can be found in the territorial
and political fragmentation the continent was embroiled in, and the difficulties rulers
had to supply their armies. All these and more contribute to the relatively smaller scale present
in medieval warfare compared to its ancient equivalent. More videos on Medieval history
are on the way, so make sure you are subscribed and have pressed the bell button to see them.
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