Hey guys
I thought I'd start a thread that could be useful to writers of Ancient and Medieval TLs, about the sizes of armies in practise on the battlefield. How many surviving trustworthy sources are there for the period roughly from 1000BC-1500AD that discuss the size of a force available to a general? Not, this would not consist of paper field strengths of armies, but of actual ones that a general would be dealing with on the battlefield.
As my own contribution, I'll discuss the late Roman military manual called the Strategikon, written under (and quite possibly by) the Emperor Tiberius Maurice (582-602). In it, it is assumed that an average sized army will consist of somewhere between five and ten thousand men, with a force of fifteen to twenty thousand being a very large army. I know that military manuals enjoyed a renaissance in tenth century Byzantium, with On Skirmishing Warfare being a particularly prominent example, but I can't remember the figures they provide off the top of my head.
So, what other decent and useable sources are there out there for other societies?