Persian Invasion of 480 BC - articles

[Aryaman2]

Ok, here's an important question. Throughout history, has it always been logistical problems that have limited the size of an army? I'm not convinced that providing logistical support for a large army is as difficult as we are imagining.

Medieval armies were small, but the warring states were also small, and the troops demanded pay in coin. Imagine if all the active fighting forces in medieval Europe, instead of fighting each other, were mobilized to fight for a single cause, the resulting army might be very large. All these forces are being logistically supported anyway, it is only their multiple causes that divide them in to smaller groups, not logistics.

If a large number of small states can support a small army each, why can't a large empire field a correspondingly large army?

You may be confusing two different things, a global force and a field army, at least all my points have always been about the size of field armies. For a global force, the limit lies in the organizational and financial limits of the states, but for field armies logistics is the basic limit, id est, the whole of Medieval Europe for sure can raise a large army, say 150.00, but that would be a global force, no way that force could march together as a field army, it is not a matter of gold, but of logistics, there was no administrative structures, organizational skills, road networks, transport facilities etc to make that possible.