why did armies revert from professional, standing armies at the

>>2654143
Professional armies require large economies of scale. Even Rome didn't have a professional army until the Marian Reforms.

>>2654162
this

also just the fact that cavalries can get to another point quicker

>>2654143
Sulla, Marius, Caesar etc etc.

the problem of a standing army is obvious.

>>2654143
greedy fucking nobles hording the money and weapons and keeping the peasants weak and untrained so that they could horde everything with literally no restrictions on their power. Only an actual government with a large scale economy can create a national army. Medieval ages was a bunch of rich nobles hording what was there's and creating the most ridiculous border porn scenarios with countless independent little kingdoms. They had shitty ways of uniting the armies through loose allegiances like the HRE or they rallied behind the Pope but basically it was too decentralized and nobody had enough to field that sort of situation and any sort of radical change in the status quo will receive a reactionary counterpush from the traditional feudal societies, nobody could get too big without some petty neighbor doing everything they could to put a stop to it.

Looking back at the Roman empire and then looking at a map of medieval times, it's hard to image how they even held that much territory under one banner in the first place. I think part of the reason is the development of castles and independent power bases, so people turned to local rich people for protection instead of the empire with a capital hundreds of miles away that will send an army 6 months later after the barbarians already sacked your province. Even in roman times they struggled to keep it together, and it was hardly a sustainable situation. Even to this day nothing like it has ever been seen, and anything that comes close doesn't hold a candle to how long they lasted. Mongols, French, British, and German Empires are relative specks in history by comparison.

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