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Comment by darkerside | Hacker News Reader

This is yet another example of humanity's silly tendency to demand a "reason" for things, as if history were a spherical core in a vacuum. History deals less in "because" than it does in "and then".

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The stirrup was a great innovation, though. It is hard to say that innovations such as gunpowder, ocean-going vessels, the printing press, antibiotics etc. didn't have a significant impact on history. And stirrups probably belong in that category; they made a certain type of warfare much more efficient and probably led to breeding of much heavier horses than before.

The Wikipedia article mentions this is debatable as well - there are scholars claiming that in experiments stirrups don't make a major difference, and that there is evidence of armored cavalry before stirrups were invented.

That once stirrups came into use anywhere, they never fell out of use, demonstrates utility. It is then the historian's work to explicate and bound that utility, not to dispute it.

Not saying factors don't exist, but this is not a X therefore Y situation. Millions of factors combined to tip history in a certain direction, over and over.

I like to think of these sorts of things as enabling various courses of history, rather than as strictly causing one or another. Maybe the stirrup made these things possible; the choices of the Carolingians, and of everyone else at the time, might be more like 'causes'.

IMO anthropomorphizing crowds is just as faulty as anthropomorphizing history

And yet some things do have causes.

This isn't saying much without examples. We're wired to look for cause and effect, and to seek levers of control over our environment, even when they don't exist. Of course some things have causes, or at least it's easiest to focus on a single cause.

Same way that Newtonian physics is all you really need for your day. That doesn't make it perfectly accurate.

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