The Chinese claim a lot of things, but their sources aren’t what you’ call credible. They have a huge, round number, but no backing evidence, and no evidence of the kind of logistical capacity to support armies that large, even for a very brief time.
For contrast, the largest armies reliably recorded elsewhere before the modern era ran about 100,00 men, and not generally in one place for very long, or the army required massive water transport and moved extremely slowly, such as with the Persian Army. Chinese sources from ancient times often have truly incredible numbers, in at least one case claiming an army of a million men. Now, maybe if you were willing to strip the entire Yellow River region of food could you support that. But not for long and the army couldn’t actually do anything. And doing so would require turning millions more into porters just to get food for the army. And would be followed by a massive famine that archeology would notice and would probably have led to a considerable population collapse and complete political change.
100,000 men? At immense expense, for a single battle, and quickly dispersing. 300,000? hell no. And let us note that the original claim at this battle was 800,000 just for Cao Cao’s force alone, which rather strongly implies we’ve fallen into outright fiction.
Game of Thrones is not set in say, a c.1100/1200 setting but really more like a c. 1500 setting. If you read between the lines, this is really a society that is at the height of the high middle ages. They seem to lack gunpowder but other than that, these are high middle age sized cities and countries that we’re talking about, which would mean far larger populations than say, 1066 England.
It’s undoubtedly true that around the 11th century European army sizes were generally small. Dueling armies with more than 10,000 men each would be unthinkable (yet not unthinkable in GoT), and in fact 5,000 men was a large force. However there are lots of reasons for that, and a setting on an entirely different planet with very different seasonal cycles than Earth (don’t they have a summer that lasts for years?) with a very different historical development than Earth’s Europe and there’s really no reason to say the army sizes are implausible.
Prior to the modern era large army battles were pretty rare. Just as an example, the Battle of Gettysburg had almost certainly one of the largest number of troops on a single field in the entire history of the Western Hemisphere. (It’s debatable of course because some Civil War battles had more total troops deployed but arguable about whether or not they were all fighting in one battle or whether the battle was more of a disconnected series of skirmishes towards a generalized goal.)
Up around the 18th century, some of the big battles in the Seven Years War, War of the Austrian Succession and etc involved several battles with 40k-60k troops on a side and there is really nothing like that back in the Middle Ages or even Renaissance Europe. (In the Italian battles of the WotAS you had some battles pitting 100k each side against one another.)
In the Ancient European/Mediterranean World a few big battles like that were fought (Cannae being one most all historians agreed fielded a far larger number than probably any European battle from then up until the 18th century), but even then they were rare. The Roman army was large in total, but it was never all deployed in one place. Even when multiple legions would be sent out on a campaign they almost never all fought together.
In the days when people were lucky to own 2 pairs of clothes and good boots, in the days before snow plows cleared the roads - where would you put a winter force each night? How fast are you going to travel if you have horses struggling through snow laden with tents? Who can afford tents for a thousand men unless you are the Roman Empire? Who’s going to cut firewood? Even with modern clothing, flailing around in snow means your clothes are soaking wet pretty fast. How would you dry the only clothing of 1,000 men each night?
I agree, fighting in winter with any sized force is a non-starter…
I know we’ve seen global warmings and coolings in the last 2000 years, so would a winter battle necessarily mean trudging through deep snow? Especially in europe. Or would it be one of those situations where you were on clear ground - but the danger in such a case is that you could be approaching your destination when the weather turns nasty and does dump a foot of snow on you…? Snow cover could come and go, it wasn’t necessarily like upstate New York covered several feet deep from November through March.
In the days of polar fleece and electric dryers, we forget that back then even 33F was not a good temperature to be out in the wind… and wet.
The Battle of Crecy was influenced by a simple rainstorm which hampered the crossbows on the French side.
Interesting comment-yes, Crecy was a disaster for the French, because their bowmen (hired Genoese crossbow men) got their bowstrings wet (rendering the crossbows useless).
On the English side, the longbow men had waterproof wraps to protect their bowstrings. This meant that the French knights got slaughtered by waves of well aimed arrows-while the mercenary Genoese cut and ran.
I’ve often wondered how that battle would have gone if the rainstorm hadn’t caught the crossbow men in the open.
While the longbow was a much faster firing weapon, the quarrel bolts shot by the crossbows were deadly-one pierced an armored knight-went through his body and killed a man behind him.
Without the rainstorm, the Genoese crossbowmen would have been slaughtered somewhat less lopsidedly, but slaughtered all the same. In trained hands, the longbow had several advantages, not just rate of fire.
Principal among them is that the narrow fronting of a longbowman, whose weapon takes up vertical space but is not very wide, allows one to place more longbowmen on a given length of line than crossbowmen.
Furthermore, at long ranges, arrows are more stable than crossbow quarrels, primarily because the arrow is longer, allowing the vanes to exert more leverage on the arrow’s center of gravity. Short version: at long ranges, when the projectiles are dropping down in an arc, quarrels are more likely to tumble, losing energy to drag and losing accuracy.
Let’s not forget the longbow had a reputation for penetrating power as well – and that in the longbowmen vs. crossbowmen exchange of projectiles, neither is wearing heavy plate armor (although the crossbowmen are sometimes depicted in breastplates).
To sum up: the longbowmen were present in greater numbers (Wikipedia estimates 7000 English longbowmen vs 1500 Genoese crossbowmen, and while numbers are suspect, there were surely more longbowmen), packed more densely on the firing line, each archer producing more-accurately-aimed projectiles at a rate of 7 to 10 times more often.
The Genoese normally went into battle with an attendant called a paviseur who carried a pavise, an almost body-length shield used to protect them against counter-fire among other things. However they had been left behind on the road along with substantial portions of the French infantry. So the Genoese were firing into a prepared defensive position ( the English archers were screened by a line of baggage carts as well as shallow pits ) while they advanced, themselves fully exposed. Plus the horn crossbows of the 14th century were out-ranged by the longbow anyway ( 15th century steel models would later be more competitive in that area ), let alone lagging far behind in rate of fire. The rain didn’t help, but it probably didn’t make the difference, probably just hastened the rout as crossbowmen became aware that their weapons were becoming useless anyway in the midst of mounting casualties. The Genoese were almost certaily doomed once they engaged, rain or no rain. At any rate the poor bastards got ridden down in part by the Count of Alençon who may have suspected treachery in their entirely sensible retreat. Then they were scapegoated for the loss in the immediate aftermath of the battle and many were slaughtered at camp until cooler heads countermanded the order.
The battle was lost because it was fought when and where it never should have been. The French king was well aware of this and had refused to engage years before under similar circumstances, not incidentally completely stymieing the earlier English campaign in the process. But public pressure ( from his nobility ) demanded he engage for honor’s sake this time because he had failed to boldly attack the enemy those earlier times. It was extremely foolish, but then politics often are.