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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arrgh! Mark!" data-source="post: 3552502" data-attributes="member: 14559">What people have said here is quite valid, so I won't repeat the fact.Due to the nature of the system, though, there is the problem of having elite forces without a great deal of unit-training in this era.Understand; a Knight trained from age 7 to age 21 in his primary occupation; killing people. His weapons and armour were designed to keep this up for some time. Giving the fact that some knights may have had shoddy training or what not, even still you have a highly elite force. The problem is that each of these knights has his own agenda. The knights valorise single combat.Example: Agincourt. Less than half of the mounted knights even bothered to show up to the battle because there was bugger all ransom in the English army anyway, leaving the unmounted knights to get slaughtered in hand-to-hand combat.Freemen, mercenaries, and other professionals: these men are skilled and elite forces, as the 13th century Condottieri and so on. These men are unlikely to break under basic attack and often adopted decent tactics before the knightly classes. They are however underused and as a class of people there aren't a great deal of them anyway. Their use in battle isn't that great because few people understand how to use them untill the renaissance. These men may train from three to seven times a week.Footmen, archers, and the like are peasant conscripts. They are trained fighters, and likely train every sunday in those skills. They are not however within the social framework of the knightly caste, which valourises combat and so on to the extent the knights train for as long as they do. The peasant armies have low morale, dislike being away from home, and don't have the ability to gain money or prestige from warfare like the middle classes or the upper classes can. Example: The first crusade. The crusaders charged at the gates of byzantium, outnumbering the (elite) byzantine forces. Alexius orders his bowmen to fire warning shots. Two crusading peasants are killed; the entire army routs. In this situation, military tactics are very basic. Your forces are fractious, morale is low, and to boot you are most likely starving (You try to feed 10 000 men and the follwers with whatever you can scavenge!). You hope to get things over quickly; the knights and so on charge with their peasants in tow. The army to break first is slaughtered.Advanced tactics simply are not possible unless you can somehow instill some discipline into your troops. You can only charge, flank, ambush and basically hope for the best. The moment your peasants break you are finished. Medieval battles were desperate, hungry affairs basically. So when thinking about how many men a king may have, think about how the wars themselves are conducted.</blockquote>

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