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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 807320" data-attributes="member: 6533">I would be very surprised if the size of the Roman imperial army could even approach three percent of the population.   The nature of Roman politics was such that they made a serious attempt to keep the in-arms military as small as possible.At least that was true after Augustine took power with the possible exception of some decades of civil unrest and the period of the five good emperors.One issue with your question is that its fairly hard to find good population numbers for the periods you are asking about.It does depend a lot on culture.  Cultures such as the Vikings and the Mongols can generally muster a very substantial portion of their population and support very remote operations.Western European Feudal cultures, on the other hand can probably muster only a fraction of their men under arms for any operation much less an extended foriegn campaign.In that particular circumstance there will be a mighty disjunction between the number of armed and martial men in the nation and the number that can be gathered for use in the national interest.  This is because of the dispersed nature of the system.  Each local power is likely to have their own professional armed force, and each local power is likely to dedicate only a portion of said force to any larger undertaking than local conflict.  This means that feudal cultures are pretty dang good at resisting raids and invasions since every location will have its own troops, and will be conversely bad at invading someone else since they can only dedicate a small number of men to the undertaking.Mind you this is only true if all other factors are equal other than numbers and distribution when in medieval and ancient warfare there are many factors that matter even more.  Which results in situations like the ridiculously small English armies of the Hundred Years War dominating the hugey powerful nation of France.Muster time is an interesting issue as all the culture of the medieval period followed the practice of creating powerful military powers along their borders that could muster a significant armed force very very very quickly and hold the battlefield while the main force mustered slowly in the center of the country and from other borders.The Carolingian cultures created Marches for this purpose, England had several titles that bore with them substantial armed forces along the Scottish border, in Wales, and in France, and the Mongols would keep several divisions under arms and in camp at all times.  The Byzantines had complicated contracts with permanent units and cities to provide approved officers with strong force in a short period.One of the keys to Mongol success was their ability to defeat or bypass the border armies of their enemies quickly and then attack the main armies as they were amassing.</blockquote>

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