Between attrition (lost in battle), needing to leave troops behind to control conquered territory, and longer supply lines, shouldn’t the armies have gotten significantly thinner and weaker.
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Pyrhhic victories are called that for a reason from memory. It wasn’t always the case that invading armies got stronger/faced less resistance.
The premise is not really true. One of the most famous examples in history is Napoleon’s catastrophic invasion of Russia, and not far behind is Russia’s.
Going further back and probably less well known is Henry V’s campaign in France that culminated in the Battle of Agincourt. The expeditionary force that Henry led into France had dwindled significantly due to losses in battle and to sickness, which is why its victory at Agincourt was so remarkable.
On the other side of the ledger you have things like Genghis Khan’s conquests. One of the keys to his success was that he did not alienate or suppress the territories he conquered, but instead integrated them. His message to his enemies was “If you join with us, you can keep your way of life and your religion and your languages and customs (and actually, we’ll borrow the best bits), the only difference will be that we’re going to kill your ruling elite and you’ll taxes to me. By the way, we’re going to kill your ruling elite either way. You’re welcome.” Consequently, his army continued to refresh itself as his empire expanded.
Survivor’s bias and confirmation bias. The armies that weren’t strong enough weren’t conquering lands to begin with – you’d expect the ones to go further to be stronger and vice versa. And you also will define “stronger” as “conquered more” and “weaker” as “conquered less”, leading to a rephrasing of your question being: “Why did invading armies seem to conquer more as they conquered more?”.
They don’t. Mystery solved.
Thank you for reading.
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Recruiting the locals, especially the disaffected race/ tribe/ ethnicity/ religion/ town adds to the invader’s army and provides an excellent source of local intel as well as logistical support, outpost guards, and future cannon fodder, keeping your initial troops intact. See The Man Who Would Be King for excellent examples of this on film, or read about Cortez conquering the Aztecs and Pizarro taking on the Incas for historical examples.
Let’s say you have 100 well trained troops pillaging the villages across the land. Each village has 50 troops defending it. You don’t kill all the enemy troops. Let’s say you lose 10 of your own and kill 20 enemies, and then the other 30 surrender. Some may offer to join you. All may offer to join you. Some/all may be forced to join you for threat of butchering their families.
You’ve lost 10 men putting you down to 90, but you’ve gained up to 30 men putting you back up to 120. Over time, and depending on loyalty/training, these troops may genuinely prefer being on your side and under your leadership. Or even if they don’t, they have little choice.
Repeat and the numbers grow greater and the losses grow fewer. Your numbers growing greater and stories of your victories across the land make future villages less likely to even fight back and may just accept that you’re the new guy in charge.
If all those villages banded together to meet you on the field, they’d stand a much better chance at resistance. But these troops are not a standing invader army like yours, so this does not happen.
History isn’t as simple as that, but that’s the simplest way I can explain it.
It needs to be understoof that supply lines weren’t really a thing. One of the reasons war in history was so bad for nations was it involved foraging off of the land, so friendly armies would work as hard as they could to get into enemy territory to forage as much as they wanted from THEIR lands and to preserve their own.
That way, and especially after repeated victories, when they began walking into shouting distance of their enemies, all their foes would see were grins and laughter and excitement/eagerness.
Facing an enemy as confident as that would shake even the hardiest of troops, and the ones that weren’t? Would break.
History is written by the winners. Winners aren’t going to describe their victory as getting weaker and weaker.
Step 1. Invade area
Step 2. Battle
Step 3. If you lose, game over, if you WIN then you get to loot everything around you.
Step 4. Use that loot to hire more mercenaries/soldiers, plus since you already won a big battle people are more willing to fight for you.
Step 5. Repeat this process until you lose a battle or run out of enemies.
It’s moreso that it was pretty common for armies to meet at the border of the defending state or a natural chokepoint, so if the defenders lose that battle, there’s only so many soldiers and conscripts left in reserve. And then as you lose more and more, you’re left with greener troops/conscripts, and anyone who survived earlier skirmishes would be rather beleaguered.
But actually, this is the exception. For every successfully invaded country or region, there’s some idiot who tried to march on Russia in the September.
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