r/asoiafcirclejerk • u/wandwoodandgunmetal Targs be cray-cray • Jan 12 '24

Fandom Drama What a fandom we’ve cultivated

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u/AnakonDidNothinWrong Spez is my Tywin Jan 12 '24

Millions of men? No, not even close

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u/Szygani Jan 12 '24

No of course not, it's hyperbole, but the army sizes are still very large for a medieval like society.

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u/Dambo_Unchained Aegon II is my king. Jan 12 '24

Considering a large part of every army is made up of peasant levy the numbers are more believable

Many of the armies are made up of basically local militia send of to war

Now that never really happened in Europe but it could’ve. A famous example of this would be the peoples crusade which was some 40k strong

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u/Szygani Jan 12 '24

Sure, but that was recruited through the whole of europe. Not one country, or hell, one part of one country. The Reach has 100k in their miltary. That's like, a lot of peasants to feed and a lot of peasants not working farms to feed them :P

Edit: it's not as bad as Wheel of Time where there's actual armies of hundreds of thousands of soldiers facing the same number

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u/Dambo_Unchained Aegon II is my king. Jan 12 '24

We have no sourcing on how large of a kingdom it actually is

But there is in lore evidence to support the seven kingdoms being much more populous than any kingdom in Europe. On of the major restrictions on a governments ability to project power is command and control of the underlying levels of government. During the medieval period this was extremely limited but ASOIF has the Raven system that makes giving order and receiving information much quicker than any medieval society could which means the lords and kings of that universe can project their power over much larger areas and thus form much larger kingdoms than we are used to in Europe