Dr. Bret Devereaux

Although I suppose it does add to the heroic nature of the march.

The big advantage that they do have moving up the river is,

is that they can bring their supplies with them so they don't have to forage as they go.

And to be clear here, when we say forage, I don't mean picking berries off of trees.

I mean beating up local farmers and taking their food.

When armies are described as foraging, they're not picking berries.

They are extracting food from local populations.

But he has a big river that leads to his big kingdom, so he can just put a whole bunch of food on a barge and pull it up the river.

And he's not bringing very many animals because they're all on foot.

So since they aren't bringing riding horses, they don't have to worry about it being the wrong season for the grass.

Okay.

Right.

And so that's less of a concern.

Yeah.

Because horses are a logistics problem even if you do have grass available usually.

But at least if you have grass by the side of the road that they can eat, it reduces your need to bring feed.

Generally speaking, truly wild horses, like steppe ponies, can subsist entirely off of grass.

That's how horses work in the wild.

When horses enter the settled agrarian zone of agricultural societies, agricultural societies almost invariably do the same thing every time, which is that they breed horses much bigger, larger, and stronger.

This is both to support big riders in armor, but also to do things like pull plows.