![]() Take, for example, the Imjin War, where in response to both the 15 invasions the Ming moved their Liaodong troops straight away, and then brought in southern troops with expertise fighting 'Japanese' pirates and southwestern aboriginal forces as and when they arrived. Armies were usually sustained at the frontiers through largely self-sufficient military colonies, and troops from other regions were brought in to reinforce, rather than constitute, an existing core force. But on the main point of moving troops across the empire, the Ming did so relatively rarely. ![]() WRT the effects of mobilisation on economic activity, the hereditary military households sent only one able-bodied man for service, meaning that farming could usually still be done in the man's absence as the family was not entirely dependent on a single labourer. To use your example of the Ming, though, the system of military recruitment and mobilisation was evidently designed to combat this. Each will have a corner, but between those corners is going to be a large patchwork of smaller states jealously guarding its independence through balance of power politics. You can absolutely have four 'Great powers' that operate as sort of poles for political alignments among more minor powers, but I don't think it's very realistic for them to directly control most of a continent of that size. If the other regions can't meaningfully contribute to their defense, why should the people share in the same political community? Moreover, if they're so far away that their armies would lack the time to accomplish much of anything before needing to return home, what would they have to fear from breaking off? However, once you have local armies, it raises the question of why there aren't local sovereigns. This leaves less than half the year for actual campaign action, not to mention economic activity (a precious resource in subsistence economies).Īs such, troops from one half of the kingdom can't really be used in the other half regional armies are a necessity. Troops drawn from one end of the kingdom would travel 50 days to the muster point, 50 more to the frontier, and then another 100 days marching home. With daily marches of 15 miles, that's 50 days to move from the center to the frontier. If we imagine each kingdom with 1,750,000 sq km of territory as a circle with the capital at the center, moving from the center to the frontier is about 750 miles. The Roman empire depended on the Mediterranean sea to keep control over its territories the Chinese had a huge array of internal rivers and canal systems to keep transport costs down. The problem of communications over long distances is bad enough, but when it comes to the real core of state power, the ability to field armies, huge over land areas are a major problem. FWIW, I think these are much too large there were historically states in the 14th-15th centuries approaching this size like the Ottomans and Ming China, but they were extremely rare. ![]()
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