Oberst Tharnow wrote:Read
A short History of War.
A nice explanation about changes in warfare, including army size.
Size of armies
Logistics and transports are the most important reason for changes in army size.
Oh, and lots of figures for historical armies include the supply personell and camp followers. Given that, at times, those were at a 2:1 ratio to actual soldiers, you can slash down lots of those figures by a large margin.
To anyone who has had the idea of clicking on those links, do not believe a word they are saying. This is the classic example of people writing about something they do not understand anything about and I wonder how much you, Tharnow, really know about the subject if this is your idea. Heck, the size of armies page is full of mistakes and assumptions, and their idea about the late roman empire is straight from the 1920s.
I cannot warn you enough of those pages. Heck, let's look about how they describe the roman army since the second century:
Throughout the first and second centuries, the Roman strategy succeeded in repelling the repeated attempts at penetration by the Germans. It was not until 260 A.D. that the first significant penetrations succeeded when the Franks moved into Spain, the Alamanni moved into the Alvergne country, and the Goths crossed the Danube in large numbers. The Roman army, long garrisoned along the imperial frontiers, had begun to decay.
And of course they decayed because of...what, exactly? Why did they decay? How did they decay?
Many of the frontier posts had become large towns with large civilian contingents within them.
Eh....this had been taken place since 12 B.C. The point is....?
Training and discipline declined.
Aurelian and the performance of the roman army, especially the specialist late roman army, would beg to differ.
By the second century not more than one percent of the Roman army was comprised of native Italians, the rest being drawn from other nationalities of the empire still strongly socialized to Roman values and methods.
I see the authors are ignorant of the research done on the recruitment of the legionnaires, as well as the fact that roman authors encouraged recruiting from gaul and illyria because the people there were better recruits. This was not a decline, but an improvement in quality.
By the middle of the third century, however, the army had become hollow, and the German tribes broke through in great numbers to settle large tracts of imperial land.
By the middle...how nice to fail to mention that this was a period of internal unrest and that that was the problem, not a "hollow army". Bah.
The Roman response was to reorganize the army with militia troops, the limitani,
THE LIMITANEI WERE NOT MILITIA TROOPS. Goddamm it, that issue has been settled since the 1960s.
garrison the forts, and hold strong horse-born reserves at key garrisons within the empire that could rush to a point of penetration and stop the enemy advance.
A mixture of Luttwak as well as the belief there were cavalry reserves. Nevermind that this was done under Gallienus and was done 50 years before the limitanei....oh, and the reserves were not there to prevent barbarian incursions. Goddamm it, another issue that has been settled since over 30 years ago.
Most of the army by this time was comprised of barbarian soldiers in the pay of Rome.
WRONG. Studies have shown that at most 15-25% were composed of barbarians. And that does not mean those were more disloyal or worse soldiers.
As Roman reliance upon these barbarian military forces grew, the organizational structure and values of the legion began to erode until
WRONG. Where is the evidence for that?
, by the 4th century, the legions were no longer organized along traditional Roman lines.
This is getting ridiculous. Was Diocletian not a roman emperor? And define what the heck a traditional roman line means.
Instead, they reflected barbarian weapons, tactics, values, and were commanded by their own tribal chiefs.
WRONG. Goddamm it, hasn't this person read anything else besides Gibbon?
The fiction that they were paid allies of Rome continued until the 5th century when renewed waves of barbarian invasions crashed over Europe, effectively putting an end to the Roman military system.
The Roman military system continued to exist until the time of Heraclius. That is 300 years you forget to mention, you stupid idiot.
The gradual barbarization of the legions had an enormous impact on Roman military organization. The decline in the administrative and support structure of the legion led to its replacement with a number of barbarian military practices.
Such as....? The whole idea is idiotic.
In effect, the tribal military forces within the empire became a state within a state that was beyond the power of the central Roman state apparatus to control.
Suuuure it was.
The Battle of Adrianople administered a military coup de grace to a social order that was already dying from within.
This is beyond laughable. The Battle of Adrianople happened in 378 - way before the end of the roman empire. And it is funny that it was supposed to have been a coup de grace.....when the romans continued to use the same tactics and equipment almost 400 years later.
Those pages are nothing more than pages with no substance and a lot of nice-sounding buzzwords. If I had to grade them, they would not even be worthy of a first-semester student.