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This story about the finding of the body of a Lombard soldier was interesting:Thousand-year-old Lombard warrior skeleton discovered buried with horse in ItalyBut this in particular is, well, amazing (to me). The Lombards advanced on what was left in the 6th century after Rome had long since fallen. Picture this:
Under the leadership of King Alboin, the Lombards stormed across the Alps in the spring of AD568 with an army of around 500,000.
Is that 500k number actually correct???
In general, when speaking of armies prior to about 1600 it is prudent to reduce the reported numbers by a factor of 10 to get close to actual numbers. That would make the reported 500,000 man army number 50,000, which is still huge for a 7th century army. Consider that armies in the Hundred Years War averaged around 5-10,000 and this was when the armies could draw on established states not much more advanced from 1000 years previously. The 500,000 or 50,000 number, whichever you accept no doubt contains a large percentage of family and camp followers. Remember that until they settled in the remnants of the Roman Empire the Lombard's were nomads, so any figures for army size most likely included the numbers for the whole society and not just sword-carriers.Truly huge armies did not really appear until the Napoleonic Wars. Of course, there are obvious exceptions such as the Mongols, Romans, and Persians. Simply put, the logistics of fielding huge armies defeated most ancient and medieval people, it was simply too difficult to equip and supply massive forces before early modern times.
True, but IMO it's not too unfeasible to say this was the total combined force. Under Lombard King Alboin, the Saxons alone contributed 20,000 warriors when they invaded Italy. What did the other Germanic tribes add to his forces?
That's interesting – I hadn't heard about the “reduce by 10” factor for pre-1600 battles. However, I'm guessing that this tends to be the proper thing to do when we get our information from pre-1600 sources, with the rationale being that those sources would have inflated battle numbers for any number of reasons. What I quoted was not a pre-1600 source but the modern-day UK Telegraph. It could be the case that the journalist from the Telegraph simply took from a pre-1600 primary text, but more likely it was from a recent secondary source.
I will not go into my opinion of the quality of research done by the modern media. The “reduce by 10” is my personal rule of thumb, and is based on my understanding of the logistical and command restraints of ancient and medieval armies.Think about it like this. How much food would be required for only the people of an army of 500,000? To get an idea look in your pantry, the average American household has enough food for about three to four days at home, including perishables. Now multiple what you have at home by whatever is need to reach 500,000 and imagine the huge amount that really is, and that is only enough for 3-4 days. You also have to consider fodder for animals. It is impossible to feed an army that size off the land without so much dispersal that they become ineffective. That was also before the advent of modern food preservation as well. I am not saying it could not be done. However, moving an army that large was a daunting task all by itself then, and still is. It is not as simple as just getting up and going. It must also be remembered that the Lombards were an entire society on the move with all that entails.
The overly large numbers come from primary sources like Tacitus, Polybius, Josephus, Herodotus etc…They were not practitioners of modern scholarship. They wrote with an agenda. They were prone to embellish for two reasons: 1. they wanted to make their historical events more important for selfish reasons or 2. because they were depending on hearsay and second hand information that was both unreliable and exaggerated.
The more I think of this number of 500k the more ridiculous it sounds. From what I understand the Romans, at their height, had perhaps 450,000 troops – and this was after the reforms of Diocletian and Constantine after the Roman borders were beginning to decay. To support anything close to 500,000 troops for a group such as the Lombards would mean that their initial population would have had to be so large that they would have formed a great civilization in their own right.
Another thing to consider is that the first battle in European history that we can reliably say had over 500,000 participants on sides is the Battle of Koniggratz in 1866. The Battle of the Nations at Leipzig in 1814 came close at something like 450,000 total combatants. It must be realized that in the days of subsistence agriculture, mass armies were simply not possible. There was not sufficient food or fodder to allow them to form and march. It is only in modern times with modern agriculture and preservation methods that mass armies have become possible, and even then the creation of such an army strains the resources of whatever nation raises it. Simply look at the government control of the economy required to support the armies of any of the combatants in either World War to see how difficult it is to raise, equip, train, and employ such a huge army.
