How Big Were Classical vs Medieval Battles Part 1 England France 3D Documentary

This is a graph showing the size of battles from Antiquity and the Middle Ages, but what secrets can it reveal? For one, the data can be sliced by region to help us contextualize the chapters of its history from a more quantitative perspective. These figures can then be made tangible by showing them to scale with each soldier from a battle represented. Furthermore, we can overlay datasets to compare and contrast macro-level trends across the eras to derive some fascinating insights. But applying such methods to a huge area across 2,000 years is a massive undertaking, and our study will therefore have to be broken up. So today let's start by comparing classical vs medieval army sizes for the British Isles and Western Europe. You can raise your own armies through our sponsor Knights of Honor 2 Sovereign. It's a real-time grand strategy game set in the medieval era that provides a rich, living world to immerse yourself in. 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I can highly recommend it, so play Knights of Honor 2 now and support the channel by clicking the link in the description below. Enjoy! Before we begin, I want to make it clear that the scope of this section will be limited to describing the observation of various army sizes. An analysis of the causes for this phenomenon will be addressed separately. Regarding the data itself, a few disclaimers are in order. The first is an acknowledgment that the figures recorded by History represent only a tiny fraction of the true dataset. The second point is that the figures which we do have are highly prone to bias and exaggeration with few means of corroboration or authentication. Simply put, we are dealing with a limited and fuzzy dataset. Nonetheless, we can use the input of historians to sharpen our understanding of these figures whilst deriving some useful conclusions from general trends. Now with regards to the method of presenting the data, we will be looking at the battles and campaigns associated within specific geographic regions from the 1000-year period of antiquity spanning from 500 BC to 500 AD and comparing them with the 1000-year period of the Middle Ages spanning from 500 AD to 1500 AD. A final disclaimer is that we have applied a data filter to ignore battles which featured under 2500 participants. This is necessary to help clean up some of the noise from incidents which might be better classified as skirmishes or raids. Now with all this in mind, let's proceed with our first area of study. When it comes to the British Isles of early antiquity, the region was reportedly quite populous and its people warlike. Clashes were therefore inevitable. However, during the period of the British Iron Age, we are left in the dark regarding any battle figures. Numerical data points only begin to appear with the arrival of the Romans. The first of these are recorded by Julius Caesar who twice invaded the island. His first expedition in 55 BC was largely an exploratory venture featuring about two legions and totaling 10,000 men. His second expedition the following year proved more concerted boasting around five legions totaling 25,000 soldiers. The British tribes rose in opposition but fought in an irregular manner which is perhaps why we are never given firm numbers regarding their size. They may have at some point mustered a large force but ultimately decided to fight asymmetrically with the chieftain Cassivellaunus reportedly fielding some 4,000 chariots and light troops. If taken at face value this would have equated to around 10,000 warriors. Caesar ultimately proved victorious but failed to make any lasting gains on the island after pulling back to deal with matters on the continent. When the Romans did once again return in the following century they waged a series of increasingly bloody invasions which ultimately forged Roman Britain. The largest of these was the Battle of Watling Street in 60 AD which came at the climax of Queen Boudica's revolt. Here she reportedly deployed an army of 250,000 rebels. However these numbers are wildly inflated and likely included non-combatants. A more reasonable estimate would place the number of her warriors closer to around 50,000. Still an impressive figure which would have dwarfed the roughly 10,000 assorted soldiers which the Roman general Suetonius had managed to marshal together. This battle would be the largest recorded clash in our geographic area of study. In addition it stands as a testament to the Roman military which came out on top of such a seemingly lopsided fight thanks to their tactical deployment and formidable discipline. Another high-water mark of the Roman invasions of Britannia would occur when Agricola attempted to conquer modern Scotland. At the Battle of Mons Graupius in 84 AD the Romans deployed some 20,000 legionaries and auxiliaries against the roughly 30,000 Caledonians. Once more the numerically inferior Romans proved victorious marking the supposed subjugation of the island. As we see however there would be continued conflict in Britannia from either invasion or rebellion. However for the most part we now see a downward trend in the volume of fighting during the era of Roman rule. By the 5th century AD the Western Roman Empire begins to crumble. In 410 AD the legions withdraw from Britain marking a tenuous transition period. During the ensuing era great migrations took place which saw all manner of new arrivals make their way to the island. As the balance of power began to shift there were surely battles. Unfortunately we have few details and figures to describe these centuries worth of military history. Yet we can be rather safe in hypothesizing that battles were comparatively smaller than the preceding era given the fragmentary nature of warfare inherent to these years. To support this idea we can look to the following Anglo-Saxon period. Here Britannia was split into a series of petty kingdoms which were weak enough to be bullied by the Viking raiders which began to arrive at the end of the 8th century AD. Whereas the Romans had invaded with tens of thousands of soldiers the great heathen army which famously ravaged Britannia boasted just 5,000 warriors. They would clash climactically with roughly comparable troops led by Alfred the Great at the Battle of Eddington in 878 AD. Here the fate of the realm would be decided with barely a legion's worth of men fighting on either side. Fast forward another two centuries and we have the next major clash when the Normans make a play for control of Britannia. In 1066 Harold Godwinson of Wessex and his 10,000 men would attempt to hold the line against William the Bastard and his roughly 10,000 Normans. Together their numbers doubled those at the Battle of Eddington but still fell far short of the conflicts from the Roman period. In the end the Normans would triumph and go on to become rulers of the Anglo-Saxon realms. Over the following centuries however this gap would narrow as the various forces of the British Isles increasingly consolidated and reforms of the Plantagenet dynasty took hold. The Scottish Wars for instance saw a major uptick in the intensity of conflict on the island in the 13th and 14th centuries. One of the largest and most famous of these clashes was the Battle of Benochburn in 1314 between the roughly 7,000 men of Scottish King Robert the Bruce and the roughly 22,000 men of the English King Edward II. Here the outnumbered Scots proved victorious paving the way for their independence. Following this warfare seems to have cooled off somewhat on the British Isles until the English Civil Wars which rocked the 15th century. The Wars of the Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster were particularly bloody. These climax at the Battle of Towton in 1461. While contemporary historians claim the battle featured hundreds of thousands of soldiers, modern historians estimate that the total was closer to 50,000. If true then this was the largest clash in Britannia since the days of the Romans. Stepping back now to look at all of our data we can see the roller coaster of British history reflected in its analytics. Applying some basic statistics on our battles of antiquity versus the middle ages yields the following whisker plots. They show how both the maximum and average battles of antiquity boasted at least 10 to 20,000 more soldiers than their medieval counterparts more than a millennia later. While certainly incomplete it's still fascinating insight into how various cycles of political consolidation and fragmentation left their mark on the battlefields across the ages. Now let us consider the close continental rival of Britannia, the western European region of modern France. As with its island counterpart the territory was also dominated by the Celts in its early history with much of their military conflicts going unrecorded. The first recorded battles with troop counts took place at the end of the 2nd century BC and actually involved two foreign powers, the migrating Germanic tribes and the Romans who had advanced to intercept them. Details are sparse but the battle of Orasio in 105 BC was supposedly titanic. Here the Cimbri and Teutones boasted around 150,000 warriors while the two Roman armies and their auxiliaries deployed about 100,000 of their own soldiers. Such numbers totaling to a quarter million men are mind-boggling to imagine. Even if but a fraction of these troops were actually present the battle would still dwarf anything we just covered in the history of the British Isles. Furthermore we are told that the Romans suffered devastating losses in what became one of their worst defeats in history. The sheer scale of the catastrophe shook Rome to its foundations and paved the way for the unprecedented election of Gaius Marius to four consecutive consulships to restore order. It's no wonder then that 40 years later Julius Caesar would advance once more into Gaul seeking fame and fortune by opposing the migration of yet another Germanic peoples through the region. What followed would be a series of multi-year campaigns known as the Gallic Wars which saw the general gradually wade into the region's geopolitics and attempt to establish Roman control. In 52 BC Vercingetorix would lead a large-scale revolt which climaxed the siege of Alesia. Here we are told that Caesar had concentrated his 10 legions and auxiliaries for a total of around 50,000 men. The commentaries claim that this force laid siege to 80,000 Gauls with 250,000 more coming to their relief. However modern estimates place the barbarian numbers closer to about 70,000. Even still it would have been a truly massive battle. With everything on the line Caesar would ultimately emerge victorious breaking the back of the resistance and sealing the fate of Gaul. The following two centuries would see more scattered revolts but by and large Roman dominion established a long period of prosperous peace as the bloody frontier wars moved to the borders of Germany. For the most part the defenses held and kept the interior safe. The only major battles of the 2nd and 3rd century AD would therefore result from various civil wars which saw Roman turn on Roman. As an example the battle of Chalon in 274 AD saw Emperor Aurelian lead 50,000 men to defeat the breakaway forces of Emperor Tetrarchus which numbered around 70,000. This victory would briefly stabilize and reunite the Roman Empire. However within a few decades Diocletian would establish the Tetrarchy in 286 AD formally recognizing an administrative difference between Western and Eastern Rome. While this exact system would not last long this division of the empire between East and West would gradually widen as the years dragged on. Generally speaking it was the West which seems to have deteriorated the most. The 4th and 5th centuries in particular saw successive waves of migrating tribes wash over the lands of Gaul precipitating violence and drastically changing the geopolitical landscape. This was especially true with the highly disruptive arrival of the Huns. Unfortunately while our records mention many battles in this period they rarely contain any numerical data. The major exception to this is the pivotal battle of the Catalonian Fields in 451 AD. Here Flavius Aetius of the Western Romans and their tribal allies took a stand against Attila the Hun and his own vassals. Figures are still shaky but it seems that either side boasted at least 50,000 soldiers if not tens of thousands more. In this critical contest the Western allies held the line. The macro-historical ramifications of this victory are still debated. Older narratives tend to see it as a turning point where the civilized world was saved from complete destruction at the hands of the Eastern savages. Modern scholars take a more nuanced approach pointing to other more important factors which guided history. One idea relevant to our studies though is the thinking that the sheer scale of the battle involved and its attrition on both sides in turn opened the door for other powers to rise up in the aftermath. Indeed it would be the Franks who slowly began to establish their dominance over the ancient provinces of Gaul. They fought frequently with their neighbors but once more specific figures are lacking to quantify the scale of such battles. What data we do have and the precedent for contemporary warfare in Britannia seems to point to these totals initially being in the range of 10 to 20,000 men at most. However each century saw greater Frankish consolidation such that by the 8th century their warfare had significantly grown in scale. At the Battle of Tours in 732 for instance, King Charles Martel deployed around 17,000 men which defeated the roughly 23,000 strong expeditionary force of the Umayyad Caliphate. Once more historians argue over the macro-historical implications of the battle. However it does seem clear that the feud proved that the Franks were now far more capable of sizing up against other major powers of the era than they had been just a few centuries before. Yet the new scale of Frankish armies could also be turned inwards. This was especially true during the frequent bouts of civil war which tore up their empire. One of the largest of these would be the Battle of Fontenoy in 841 AD which may have seen as many as 100,000 soldiers take to the field in a clash between the grandchildren of Charlemagne for control of the throne. It is such self-destructive cycles which weaken the Frankish realms leaving them prey to new foes. Famously the Vikings were one such group which took advantage of the chaos. Over the next century they would wage increasingly aggressive raids and campaigns upon the lands of the Carolingian Empire. The 885 siege of Paris for instance stands as a high watermark in these affairs as an estimated 20,000 northmen descended upon a sparsely defended city. Though greatly outnumbered the Franks managed to hold the city long enough for the imperial army to arrive and scatter the besiegers. The following centuries were characterized by a period of general decentralization. Battles certainly continued to take place without detailed records but were presumably quite small. It was only by the 12th century reign of the late Capetians that power and influence were more considerably consolidated. This in turn led to a gradual increase in the size of battles. The most intense fighting seems to have occurred during the power struggles with the Kingdom of England. The Hundred Years War is the most well-known of these conflicts. The battles of Crecy and Rosbeck were amongst the largest featuring some 40,000 men apiece. However, Agincourt stands as the most famous battle in the wider popular imagination. Fought in 1415 it saw Henry V take the field with an army of around 7,000 men predominantly composed of archers but with a few men-at-arms. Against them advanced some 10,000 men-at-arms, 5,000 archers and several thousand more armed servants of the French. Incredibly Henry would prove the victor in spectacular fashion. Thousands of French nobles were killed or captured thus turning the tide of the war with a renewed period of English dominance. Several more battles and sieges would take place over the following decades. Ultimately however the Hundred Years War would come to a conclusion in 1453 with the English ceding almost all of their continental possessions. Through the end of the 15th century the English would become embroiled in civil wars which distracted their attention while the House of Valois now focused on its own internal consolidation and the geopolitics of the continent. Looking back on the data-driven history of the region we can now recap its trends. Once more let's split the period into those of Antiquity and the Middle Ages and apply statistics to generate our comparative box plots. Here we see quite clearly the precipitous drop in army sizes when going to the later years. From our data set the average battle of Antiquity had three times as many combatants while the largest battle of Antiquity was about 2.5 times that of the Middle Ages. Pulling in the box plots from our prior section on the British Isles we see the same type of downward trend albeit across a smaller scale. For greater context let's now superimpose the full data set from the British Isles as a point of comparison. The first thing that stands out is the huge size differential but let's recognize some similarities here. Both start with a data blackout which gets broken by an initial period of intense conflict accompanying the Roman invasions followed by general decline in the peace which ensued. Both would then see upticks towards the end of the Roman era however a major difference is that the continental regions were far more impacted by civil wars and invasions which accompanied the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Over the following centuries we then see how both Britannia and Gaul saw dips in the scales of conflict caused by their decentralization of power. However we then see how the Franks were able to more rapidly consolidate their realm and thus wage larger wars. In the last 500 years though both seem to converge as their respective levels equalize. Overall this is a rather crude way to view history but I think ultimately it helps us better conceptualize the true size of data which otherwise gets lost in vague historical statements. Stay tuned as we explore more aspects of this fascinating topic. What comparisons should we look at next? Let us know in the comments below or head over to our Patreon to participate in polls, catch script previews, and download all our art. A huge thanks to the current patrons for funding the channel and to the researchers, writers, and artists for making this episode possible. Be sure to like and subscribe for more content and check out these other related episodes. See you in the next one!