Need this for a novel I'm writing, and I can't find a straight answer anywhere. Does anyone have an idea?
It kinda depends on terrain, the size of the force, how far they're planning to go, whether they need to be battle-ready when they arrive, if they have artillery pieces and stuff to bring, the size of their baggage train, if they are being harried by enemy cavalry, and the nationality in question.
I'm not an expert on the early eighteenth, but Napoleon's 130,000 marched 448 kilometers from Smolensk to Moscow between August 28 and September 14 of 1812, pausing on Sept. 7 in Borodino where he reduced the sizes of the Grande Armee and the Russian army. That pace puts him at about 24 kilometers a day. Even given the tough campaign and terrain, L'empereur moved his armies really damned fast. If you look up any of his campaigns, you can often consider his pace an upper bound in similar conditions and terrain to what you're looking at.
See also: Gunther E. Rothenburg, The Napoleonic Wars
The Ottoman campaign into Hungary in 1663 departed from Edirne and ended at Esztergom (before beginning the active campaign phase). Over the course of 119 days, only 52 were spent marching. On average, the army only marched for 4.44 hours per day. Using the modern route, that would translate into an average pace of 4.9 km/h when actually on the march, covering 21.83km (13.56 miles) on a day spent at march.
The 1638 campaign in Mesopotamia left Uskudar (roughly opposite Constantinople) and ended at Baghdad. Over the course of 197 days, the army spent 121 days at the march, averaging 4.49 hours of march per day. The key difference here is that the Mesopotamian campaign had nearly an identical number of days spent at rest (76 to the Hungarian campaign's 67) despite spending more than twice as many days marching. Again using a modern route, the army traveled at an average pace of 4km/h, covering 17.96km (11.16 miles) per day.
If you average in the rest days, the Hungarian campaign is closer to 9.5km per day to the Mesopotamian campaign's 11.02km per day. Figures are drawn from Rhoads Murphey's Ottoman Warfare, 1500-1700, a book that I've found to be ridiculously useful.
It's worth noting that the Ottoman armies in question were large, involved an unusually high ratio of cavalry to infantry (compared to other settled states, such as Austria or England), and benefited from imperial granaries located every three leagues on the "highways" to war.
The reason the Hungarian campaign featured significantly more rest days is because there are so damned many rivers. Esztergom isn't visible on the map but it's located slightly northwest of Budapest on the southern bank of the Danube. Which meant the Ottomans had to cross just about every river, few of which had permanent bridges they could exploit. The Tigris-Euphrates Basin, which stretches as far as eastern Turkey, is nowhere near as convoluted as that.
It's worth noting that these were campaigns fought at the fringes of the empire. An army was obliged to move more slowly because it needed to arrive ready to fight. The return trek was a fair bit faster, especially since the Ottoman troops were burdened with fewer supplies and likely had a bit more pep in their step. Or, in the case of the 1663 campaign, were desperate to get back home as soon as possible -- that campaign turned into a complete debacle because the army remained on campaign for too long and the fickle Hungarian autumn punished it something fierce.
In general, foot soldiers can sustain a march of between fifteen and twenty miles per day almost indefinitely, provided they have a days rest once every week or five days. This is a pretty universal march rate, from Xenophon's Ten Thousand (who averaged something like 18 miles a day over the course of their entire march to Cunaxa and then to the Black Sea) to Alexander the Great's army (who managed an average of 19.5 miles per day) right down to the British in 1914 (15 miles per day for large groups).
The limiting factors are the size of the army, the condition of the road, the baggage and the terrain. An army of 40 000 men marching four abreast will take up more than ten kilometres alone, without even taking the baggage into account. The baggage could stretch for another five or ten kilometres, so that the front of the army is almost at its destination by the time the rear leaves camp. As a result, if you only have twelve hours of daylight, you don't want to be marching more than ten hours, or else the rear of the army will be arriving and setting up camp in the dark.
Terrain can also slow a march. Steep terrain can cut march speeds by as much as 50%, or else increase the amount of energy expended by your soldiers by a similar amount in order to maintain speed. If the roads are poor or muddy (or, worse, both), then speed can also be dramatically reduced.
Of course, faster marches are possible for small, well trained forces, especially if they are carrying minimum equipment. Arrian 3.29.7 tells of a small picked force doing ten day's marching in four (as much as 42.5 miles per day, according to Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army), and there are references to German infantry marching 30 miles per day during the start of WW2 and being held back by the slower speed of their pack animals. These rates aren't sustainable in the long run and will cause considerable numbers of casualties from exhaustion, blisters, sprained ankles, etc, but they are achievable in the short term.
In short, you're looking at 15-20 miles per day, depending on the size of the army, the condition of the road, the terrain and the weather.