Persian Invasion of 480 BC - articles

[Aryaman2]

Robert
1) I said it at the start, in the past thread, I forgot to say it everytime.
2) Not only poets, I include historians. The problem with ancient historians is that we can´t compare their numbers with that of documentary sources, from medieval times onwards we can, sometimes, and everytime we can they are grossly inflated.
3) The armies of Constantine or Licinius are given by literary sources, not documentary. The numbers I gave before for the growth in size from XIV to XVIII century are based only on documentary evidence.
4) It was more efficient because the requirements of the army were much lower by restricting the size of the baggage.
5) Theoretically the Persians had the advantage of fighting at home, but "Alexander would never commit his entire army for a campaign that had not surrendered to him in advance" Donald W. Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army, page 120.

There are 3 ways to supply an army advancing into enemy territory
1) Requisition/plundering. Very ineffective, forces have to spread over a large area.
2) Setting supply depots in advance, as did Alexander, you can do this in friendly territory, or taking a surrender in advance.
3) Using supply lines, that system didn´t develop until second half of the XVII century, allowing the growth in army size I have explained. The system requires a net of depots in the rear, a large transport column and an especilized supply corps. The army advance along a road it gets the supplies by supply trains from a supply head 5-7 journeys away, everytime the army advance further a new supply head is stablished. This is the system used from then until present days, and has nothing to do with what ancient armies used.

[P. Lilius Frugius Simius]

Khairete!

Interesting thread, and one that interests me, because I'm facing a Nanowrimo challenge this November which is close to this subject.

... The Persians may not have had a good feel for the capability of motivated heavy infantry, but they were quit good at logistics.

Well, considering the Persians (including general Mardonius, Artabazus, etc) had first hand, abundant experience fighting against hellenic armies (since the 512 Danube and Thrace expedition to the battle of Marathon, including the whole of the Ionian Revolt, which comprised armies of most Ionian cities, plus Athens and Eretria, Chiprus, and most cities in the Helespont, Ionia, Lidya, Caria, and a good deal of the Cyclades), I fail to see why would the Persians fail to have a perfect feeling for the motivation of Greek heavy infantry.

Let's not forget that many Greek armies were part of the Persian army at the Xerxes's expedition, including most Ionian subjects, Thrace (if they could be considered Greek, which probably not), Macedonia, Thessaly and maybe even Boeotian.

Nature of Persian army (This is main Delbruck theory, besides logistics) The size of the Persian empire has nothing to do with his army, that was a "feudal" army composed by the noble persians and their retainers, together with some non Persian vassal lords and their retainers. The basic component was cavalry, so it must be a small army by nature

Why must a cavalry army be small?

Because horses need lots of food, water and care. Way more that onagers (for example, which would be a big part of the supply train of any Asiatic army), and are usually only useful for limited war operations (pursuit of a rotting army being the most prominent, some other limited roles by the time, as flanking operations, as mobile archery platforms, or, in some special times, as a hammer against infantry formation, even when cataphracti weren't that useful then as they would be under the Sassanids).

Infantry is easier to manage, easier to move around, basically as fast or even faster for the longer distances, with lower water and food needs, and just basic care.

There's a reason cavalry was the realm of knights and rich men for most of Human History, and it's that.

Hope this helps.

PS- thanks for the links, always useful!

[Robert Vermaat]

1) I said it at the start, in the past thread, I forgot to say it everytime.
2) Not only poets, I include historians. The problem with ancient historians is that we can´t compare their numbers with that of documentary sources, from medieval times onwards we can, sometimes, and everytime we can they are grossly inflated.

So you have compare every source from medieval history? Somehow I doubt that. But even if you had, to extrapolate back to ancient times is no good methodology. Therefore your conclusion that every historian writing about army numbers is useless (you said it, not me), is worthless. It goes against everything that's being taught about historical methodology.

I remember we had this discussion before. Now I can stay silent every time you make these wild claims, but I guess I can't do that.

3) The armies of Constantine or Licinius are given by literary sources, not documentary. The numbers I gave before for the growth in size from XIV to XVIII century are based only on documentary evidence.

Documents written by whom?

4) It was more efficient because the requirements of the army were much lower by restricting the size of the baggage.
5) Theoretically the Persians had the advantage of fighting at home, but "Alexander would never commit his entire army for a campaign that had not surrendered to him in advance" Donald W. Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army, page 120.

yes, so?
The Persian had much larger resources, so they probably could afford these large baggage trains. So far I've nowhere read that their army came into difficulties because of that train. It may well mean ('may') that their logistics were efficient enough.

My point thast, sure, Alexander had a 'leaner' and smaller army, but his logistical lines were a) longer because he had to get it all from home or b) far more insecure because he had to get the remainder by plunder and requisitions, taking pains not to alienate those who suffered from that.

2) Setting supply depots in advance, as did Alexander, you can do this in friendly territory, or taking a surrender in advance.

Sure, but that did not happen all too often, especially not in territory that had to be conquered.

3) Using supply lines, that system didn´t develop until second half of the XVII century, allowing the growth in army size I have explained. The system requires a net of depots in the rear, a large transport column and an especilized supply corps. The army advance along a road it gets the supplies by supply trains from a supply head 5-7 journeys away, everytime the army advance further a new supply head is stablished. This is the system used from then until present days, and has nothing to do with what ancient armies used.

No, but 'supply lines' did exist nonetheless, in the sense that provisions, arms and especially reinforcemnts could and were brought up from the rear. But instead of depots they used towns and settlements, or transport (men, horses!) from their home lands. But like I said, the Persians did not need that.

[Aryaman2]

2) I didn´t say every source, I said sometimes, when you have both documentary and literary sources on the same fact. For instance, Bernardo da Forli says that the French force that stormed Mordano in 1494 was 14.000 strong, however a French pay roll of that same force showed 1.992 soldiers. This can be done only occasionally, but everytime I have had the chance literary sources are grossly inflated. Besides that, as I said, those large numbers are in contradiction with the numbers written down in pay rolls and muster rolls since XIV century onwards, which are very consistent, you don´t find, for instance, any documentary evidence for an army of 100.000, or 50.000, before the second half of the XVII century.
Ancient authors most of the time talk about numbers in round figures, they don´t discriminate between a field army an the whole force, or kills/wounded/POWs/Missing. To sum up, if you compare the kind of information they give to the kind of information it is acceptable for an XVIII century source, for instance, the is a world of diffrence, they would be considered totally inadequate.


3) Documents written by an administrative organization in charge of either paying the troops or taking a muster of the present troops.

4) Alexander had no supply lines, as no army in ancient times had, they had communication lines, which is a completely different thing. I repit As DW Engels paragraph "Alexander would never commit his entire army for a campaign that had not surrendered to him in advance" I recommend you his work for a better understanding of the supply system of ancient armies.
Alexander and the Persians faced for most of the campaign a similar logistical situation in the sense that they would be able to place depots in advance to their route of marche, the ammount of supply that could be gathered along a given route is, however, limited, and the Persians reached that limit earlier than the Macedonians with an army ladden with a far larger baggage and with a larger proportion of cavalry.

[floofthegoof]

Ah, this again... A very fun discussion!

I've said my piece here:

Xerxes 5,000,000 men

All I'd like to add is that from Herodotus, I don't get the feeling that these are nobles and their retainers. For example, H. says they crossed the hellspont bridge in 7 days *under whip*. You can't do that to nobles, can you? From Herodotus I get the picture of a giant mass of slaves and peasants, some of whom, coming from the more remote corners of the empire where the Persion language is unknown, might not have had any idea what was going on. Yeah you had your Immortals and cavalry and what not, but most of the troops seemed to be just 'guys' rather than actual troops. They DID all starve! When people say, "You can't have that big of an army, they would starve." Well......yeah.

[Sean Manning]

Aryaman, I think there are particular difficulties in judging the size of medieval armies which don't apply in the classical period. Forces tended to be small and irregular because of the variety of recruitment methods and the small size of the political units involved. Most methods of recruitment, like calling upon allies or calling out a feudal levy, got an unpredictable number of troops who might leave when their obligation to serve ran out or the political situation changed. Thus in many cases neither side's leadership was likely sure how many men it had, let alone how strong the enemy were beyond "few", "about our number", "many." The fact that many sources were written by people with little military experience didn't help matters. I also understand that often when we compare literary sources on major medieval campaigns we can usually find something reasonable, and that official records often have their own problems.

Classical armies usually had stabler and larger sources of recruitment, and if a city's contingent for some campaign had been drasticaly under the agreed upon strength we would likely hear of it. They were also better organized than all but a few medieval armies. In the case of Alexander or the Thirteen Thousand, we have sources (or sources who read sources) who were involved in the administration of the army and presumably had access to contemporary records. My understanding is that most Classicists feel we can trust reliable sources on the strength of ancient Greek armies, bearing in mind that losses to disease etc. may be ignored and units may be assumed to be at full strength when they were not to give round figures or make calculation easier. Obviously we must use historical comparisons and logistical consideratons to check any figure for plausability.

On efficient logistics, Vortigern, I would consider efficient logistics those which permit the maximum force to be moved where needed with the minimum expense and delay. Clearly, if the Persians brought along masses of noncombatants and conveniences, this reduced efficiency because these people needed to be fed and watered and moved through passes and across bridges. Xerxes' army moved slowly (one way we know the number of people involved was substantial) and this had some strategic influence on the campaign. The Achaemenids were clearly very skillful logisticians, and this helped compensate, especially as most of their foes were no more efficient and worse organized until Philip II reformed the Macedonian army.

[Felix]

A couple of comments:

Medieval armies were larger before the Black Death than afterwards; the largest medieval English army that was mustered was early in the Hundred Year's War, and had some 32,000 men. By the by, most armies of the High Middle Ages required some monetary compensation or straight wages for the soldiers, so payrolls had to be kept. Not that many survive, but some do - and paymasters are pretty fair bean counters. The numbers given by chroniclers can be unreliable, but in a number of cases the muster rolls can be found and reasonable estimates can be made.

Efficient logistics have to be separated from efficient organization of forces. Servants and hangers-on have to be fed almost as much as soldiers. If 100,000 mouths are involved, the food problem is pretty much the same if 20,000 are fighters or 80,000 are fighters. The Persians must have known something about logistics, or they never would have got as far as they did.

[Aryaman2]

Sean Manning\\n[quote]Aryaman, I think there are particular difficulties in judging the size of medieval armies which don't apply in the classical period. Forces tended to be small and irregular because of the variety of recruitment methods and the small size of the political units involved. Most methods of recruitment, like calling upon allies or calling out a feudal levy, got an unpredictable number of troops who might leave when their obligation to serve ran out or the political situation changed. Thus in many cases neither side's leadership was likely sure how many men it had, let alone how strong the enemy were beyond "few", "about our number", "many." The fact that many sources were written by people with little military experience didn't help matters. I also understand that often when we compare literary sources on major medieval campaigns we can usually find something reasonable, and that official records often have their own problems.

Classical armies usually had stabler and larger sources of recruitment, and if a city's contingent for some campaign had been drasticaly under the agreed upon strength we would likely hear of it. They were also better organized than all but a few medieval armies. In the case of Alexander or the Thirteen Thousand, we have sources (or sources who read sources) who were involved in the administration of the army and presumably had access to contemporary records. My understanding is that most Classicists feel we can trust reliable sources on the strength of ancient Greek armies, bearing in mind that losses to disease etc. may be ignored and units may be assumed to be at full strength when they were not to give round figures or make calculation easier. Obviously we must use historical comparisons and logistical consideratons to check any figure for plausability.

quote]
Very interesting comments
1) Yes, medieval armies tend to be small, to the factors you point I will add they were strong in cavalry. I talked about them because it is where my researched started, but the right point of comparison would be the armies of the 30 Years War, they had reasonably good organization but they still didn´t use supply lines. Large field armies were about 15.000-20.000. It is not a problem of raising recruits, but a problem of supplying them. For instance, in 1632 king Gustav Adolphus of Sweden commanded an army of 180.000 in Germany, but that was all spread in garrisons an small field armies, the main field army under his direct command was just 21.000. In a classic source, even if well documented, tipycally we would read that the King invaded Germany with an army of 180.000, without details of how it was divided in many small detachments, so that readers tend to asume the whole army was the field army. Other details, like that of sick of missing, are also lacking generally.
The big mislead is when we take classic sources and try to compare them with modern sources on the same level, they are not. We know much more details about modern sources, and because of that knowledge we can discard some wild claims of ancient authors. When you read the details, for instance, of moving an army of 40.000 in the XVIII century and you learn the enormous logistical effort it entails you understand that claims of armies hundreds of thousands strong are fairy tales.

[Aryaman2]

Medieval armies were larger before the Black Death than afterwards; the largest medieval English army that was mustered was early in the Hundred Year's War, and had some 32,000 men. .

Felix
When I started my research I also noticed that armies of early medieval times tended to be larger, and so I thought of the Black Death, however I am now convinced that the difference is one of sources, for the early period we have almost exclusively literary sources, as for Ancient times. I have never come accross an army of 32.000 documented in musters or pay rolls. An example of a well documented pre-Black Death army, the army Edward I raised for the invasion of Scotland in 1300, at its peak (because another thing we learn on documentary sources when they extensive is that armies tended to flutuate in numbers on a given campaign very much) it had 9.220 infantry and 584 cavalry. A month later, with not a single important action fought, it had 5110 Infantry and 728 cavalry (Lib Quot p275)
A famous example was Agincourt, we had documentary sources for the English army that put its strength at a maximum 9.000, but for the French army we had only literary sources with estimations from 25.000 to 300.000, allowing all sort of wild theories about how lethal was the long vow, a sort of mediaeval machine gun. Recently, Anne Curry made a research on French documentary sources and she found out that the maximum strength of the French army was 12.000.

[drsrob]

[...]
Nature of Persian army (This is main Delbruck theory, besides logistics) The size of the Persian empire has nothing to do with his army, that was a "feudal" army composed by the noble persians and their retainers, together with some non Persian vassal lords and their retainers. The basic component was cavalry, so it must be a small army by nature
[...]

Imo this remark deserves some additional criticism.
The original Persian Army definately was not a cavalry army. Persians were infantrymen. Only when the Persians had conquered the Median empire did they start to include cavalry.
Cyrus the Great created a cavalry arm by forcing the nobility to become horsemen. The major part of the Persian army remained infantry however, including the 10.000 immortals

[hoplite14gr]

As for non-combatants:
They have their use too.
Let us not forget that many Ionian and Cypriot cities were reduced when the Persians created masive earth mounds and made their walls auntennable.
If Xerxes had calculated that he would face siege actions perhaps labourers would be eqully important as fighters and they do not need to be engaged in a field action if sufficent fighters are present.
To the classicall Greeks who had limited resources for siege warfare even these labourers were big problem especially for small cities.

Kind regards

[Sean Manning]

In a classic source, even if well documented, tipycally we would read that the King invaded Germany with an army of 180.000, without details of how it was divided in many small detachments, so that readers tend to asume the whole army was the field army. Other details, like that of sick of missing, are also lacking generally.
The big mislead is when we take classic sources and try to compare them with modern sources on the same level, they are not. We know much more details about modern sources, and because of that knowledge we can discard some wild claims of ancient authors. When you read the details, for instance, of moving an army of 40.000 in the XVIII century and you learn the enormous logistical effort it entails you understand that claims of armies hundreds of thousands strong are fairy tales.

I agree that even the best ancient sources have their limitations, but if we are to know anything we must use them as best as we can. I also agree that many sources neglect garrisons etc. and how they weaken a field army, although those on Alexander for example usually do not. The same process of weakening, of course, happened during Napoleon's invasion of Russia. I also agree that much scholarship on the size of Xerxes' army didn't include a systematic analysis of logistical concerns.

The Persians had years to stockpile food, planted supply depots in Thrace and Macedon, and crucially could ship grain across the Aegean uncontested. The last is a decisive point and is why I think figures over 100,000 people in the Persian expedition can't be thrown out. Someone needs to analyze the capacity of sailing ships and Greek ports to see how much grain this could supply. I think that few historians have questioned that the Persians raised 600 triremes (very possibly the rest of Aeschelus' 1207 were the 650 ships used in the boat bridges) and that would be 120,000 men at a conservative 200 per trireme. The Greeks had 300-400 at Salamis, and would have hardly been inclined to magnify their strength.

As one last datapoint, Peter Connolly notes that Mardonius' camp at Plataea would have held 120,000 infantry and 2,500 cavalry at the density of a Polybian Roman camp. Assuming Persian camps were less organized and dense than Roman, this gives an upper bound for the number of men left behind to finish off Greece.

[Felix]

... I have never come accross an army of 32.000 documented in musters or pay rolls. An example of a well documented pre-Black Death army, the army Edward I raised for the invasion of Scotland in 1300, at its peak (because another thing we learn on documentary sources when they extensive is that armies tended to flutuate in numbers on a given campaign very much) it had 9.220 infantry and 584 cavalry. A month later, with not a single important action fought, it had 5110 Infantry and 728 cavalry (Lib Quot p275)
A famous example was Agincourt, we had documentary sources for the English army that put its strength at a maximum 9.000, but for the French army we had only literary sources with estimations from 25.000 to 300.000, allowing all sort of wild theories about how lethal was the long vow, a sort of mediaeval machine gun. Recently, Anne Curry made a research on French documentary sources and she found out that the maximum strength of the French army was 12.000.

In response:

"The largest armies raised in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were no more than a few tens of thousand men strong. The largest English royal army of the Middle Ages was probably the host raised by Edward I for the Falkirk campaign of 1298 - perhaps 3,000 heavy cavalry and over 25,700 infantry;45 but once the unwieldy and poorly disciplined infantry armies of the Anglo‑Scottish wars had been abandoned, very few English field armies exceeded 10,000 men. Most of the classic chevauchees of the fourteenth century were conducted by armies of half this size.46 J.R. Strayer has doubted whether Philip IV of France `ever had more than 30,000 men concentrated in one theater of war',47 whilst surviving pay accounts suggest that, in September 1340 in northern and south-western France combined, Philip VI fielded 28,000 men-at-arms and 16,700 foot soldiers. The very differently composed permanent French army of the late fifteenth century numbered 20,000 to 25,000 fighting men!48 The permanent peacetime armies of Milan and Venice in the fifteenth century fluctuated in size from about 10,000 men to over 20,000, though it was not impossible to mobilize larger numbers.49 In 1486 King Matyas Corvinus of Hungary's standing army, mustered at Vienna, numbered 28,000 men, over two-thirds of whom were cavalry.50 "

from http://www.deremilitari.org/resources/a ... ayton1.htm

Many armies were under 10,000 men, but some were not; and the numbers at Agincourt were substantially less than the numbers at Crecy, before the Black Death.

We actually know quite a bit about some medieval warriors, as can be seen from an article beginning:

"At Ipswich on 17 June 1340, a week before the battle of Sluys, an English knight, William Tallemache, attached his seal to an indenture recording his receipt of an Essex manor in return for life service in peace and war with William de Bohun, earl of Northampton.[2] Tallemache was a seasoned warrior, a veteran of the War of St Sardos, Scotland and Edward III's first expedition to Flanders.[3] He had already served, as an esquire, in Northampton's comitiva on several occasions, but in the spring of 1339 after months of inactivity in Flanders he seems to have become restless.[4] In May we find him transferring to the service of Sir John Molyns under whose banner he fought and received the accolade of knighthood during the brief autumn campaign in the Cambrésis.[5] Perhaps it was this dalliance with the ambitious and unscrupulous Molyns that spurred Northampton into offering Tallemache a secure place in his affinity.[6] Whatever the earl's reasons, within days of the indenture being drawn-up and sealed, Northampton and his new retainer were in the thick of it at Sluys, risking, as one of that earl's letters put it, `vie et membre' in the king's war.[7] "

http://www.deremilitari.org/resources/a ... ayton2.htm

[Anonymous]

What bothers me about the assertion that Alexander's army was larger than the Persian ones it fought, is that a conviction that our ancestors were inveterate exaggerators of numbers (which they may have been, although I don't personally believe it) has led you, Inaki, to ignore completely the fact that Persia was a great empire, fighting on its own territory, you let this theory blind you to the self-evident. As I have said before, if you minimise the achievements of the Greeks, you also minimise those of the Persians, who were demonstrably excellent organisers.

[Aryaman2]

Felix
The examples listed by Ayton have some problems, AFAIK not one of them is a direct muster roll or pay roll, but instead they are inferences of deductions.
For example, the forces of Edward I at Falkirk, there is a pay roll that list all the Horsemen in the Roayl Household, and the jnumber is 1.300, to that the feudal levy has to be added, but estimations are greatly variable, normally between 500 and 1.000, the 1.700 estimated by Ayton clearly are in the high top estimation.
For the infantry there is no direct pay roll, but instead we have the summons to the Northern counties, but those always failed to produced the required numbers (at least everytime we had muster rolls to check them) In 1.300 Edward I summoned 16.000 but the maximum he had enlisted at any time in the campaign were 9.200. In 1322 Edward II summoned 39.000 infantry from all over the Kingdom, but only 4.449 were mustered finally.
The French examples, besides being deductions, are on global forces, not on individual field armies. As an example, in 1451 the force for the invasion of Guyenne was 6.555 Horse and about 7.000 foot, however this force was divided into 3 field armies.
The Italian examples are very misleading, they are mainly condotta, not real forces. The Hungarian example if I am not mistaken is from literary source, but I would have to check that.
So, I would say the list is somehow manipulated to support Ayton thesis