anonymus
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hey i just read a book called khalid bin waleed sword of allah which gives a very detailed info about the wars with eastern roman empire. Anyhow western historian for ages have been manipulating the strength of byzantine during battle of yarmouk. the real strength was ofcourse was no less then 150,000 while Muslims being 41,000. but the western historians
present the byzantine numbers as 35,000-50,000 which is totally wrong.
The low strength if academically proven may be because of following factors.....
1. Byzantine did not realised the importance of coming battle and sent only provincial army than their core forces.Rise of Islam was quite sudden and rapid and a whole lot of people would have misjudged the power of some desert nomads ( no offence intended )
2.Byzantine also had areas west of Constantinople as part of it's kingdom.It could not have evacuated that area of military as Huns would have moved in.
3.Armys have always ran on the surplus revenue.With the progression of time,the strength of standing armies have fallen as new avenues which appropriate taxes have arose.Strength of Armies in ancient times was about 10% of population while modern armies have less than 1%.
4.The figure of 50,000 probably looks low to you because you must have read biased account of other battles.Example is that of Battle of thermopyale.Herodotus ascribe strength of Xerses army at 2.6 million Vs 7000 greeks.But most of the modern historian believes that strenght of Xerxes army was between 70,000-300,000 and for this number he has to scrap whole of his Empire spanning from India to modern day Turkey.
I have little knowledge about the said battle ( Yarmouk ) and it's prelude.But the case is that i have rarely seen a professional historian of today's world lying as lying damages their professional integrity and being proved academically dishonest is bad for one's career.They usually tinker with interpretation to suit their ideology rather than numbers.