this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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To be fair, it's probably a little easier when there are far fewer people than there are in modern times.
Let's see how easily you get from Tehran to Barcelona without motors
I mean, more people also means more people available for your army. It's probably a wash all things considered.
Conquest is more difficult in the modern day due to military technology increasingly privileging the defender, and organizational technology creating coherent states and national identities which resist absorption into a hostile polity better than the subjects of dynastic regimes.
What? I mean of course there were far fewer people in the Middle East than in modern times, but that's true everywhere. By area there's a lot of desert in former Umayyad territory, but still from west to east you had densely populated areas in Iberia, the Mediterranean coast, Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Persia and India. At its peak the Umayyad Caliphate contained 13% of the world's population, so they were definitely no slouches on that front.
You're saying there were more people in those regions 1200 years ago than today.
Egypt alone has more people in it today than the mongols, Romans or umayyed ever had on their own.
Oh shit I mixed that up. I meant that there are far fewer people there than in modern times.