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Comment by bernawil | Hacker News Reader

The Byzantines where shocked when they first encountered knights in southern Italy in the 1000s. They where crushed by the Normans. Cavalry charging full speed ahead with crouched lances was a huge innovation. The norm since forever was for cavalry to approach orderly at walking pace to stay in formation. Horses really don't want to trample anything. The whole knight charge became kind of lost art later as we can tell from something like Waterloo where the cavalry faced the squares of infantry and the horses just started circling around them refusing to engage as they got shot down.

Military tactics don't necessarily scale. Knights where probably optimal at the 10k-20k army size range, but there wouldn't be able to scale to the size of say Alexandrian battle (47k vs 120k).

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I assume you are referring to the Battle of Dyrrhachium. The new thing was not the cavalry charge with lances (which was a standard practice for the Byzantines as well) but charging with couched lances. That, when combined with specific changes in equipment, made the charge more effective.

In the bigger picture, the Byzantine Empire lost the battle but ultimately won the war. That marked the end of decline for the empire and started the Komnenian restoration, making the Byzantine Empire a major military power for the next century.

The cavalry charge became a lost art, because people learned how to counter it. Even during its heyday, heavy cavalry was vulnerable to feigned retreat tactics, possibly for psychological reasons. Byzantines used it to defeat Normans at Larissa a year after Dyrrhachium, and Mongols later used it effectively in their invasions of Poland and Hungary. And around the time of the Hundred Years' War, infantry had learned how to hold its ground against cavalry charges.

As I said, the innovation of the Medieval Knight was "charging full speed ahead with crouched lances". "Charging" cavalry, in that sense, was not a thing before. Byzantine Cataphracts fought like all known cavalry of antiquity: they didn't crash into enemy formations, they slowed down and attacked like infantry trying to maintain formation.

  The cavalry charge became a lost art, because people learned how to counter it

I don't know, mounted knights charging where dominant from the mid 1000s until around Agincourt (1415), that's a long time to find a specific counter. What happened imho, is that armies got big again to the point where the charges wouldn't scale anymore. Armies started resembling more the classical period: the landschneckts, and specially the Spanish Tercios resemble Alexander's armies a lot.

And as for being a lost art, the art was really in the breeding and teaching horses to trample through a formation. I imagine it would have been a useful resource in later periods, it's not as there where no <8k unit battles anymore. It's just that since that wasn't the META for the important battles nobody could justify maintaining such an expensive skill.

Crashing into enemy formations was not a thing, because it was not survivable for the horses. Because horses are not large enough to crash through 10 or 16 ranks of infantry, their momentum works against them. Elephants could do that, but not horses. Crashing through a loose formation was possible, as was making a dense formation panic and flee.

As I mentioned, the immediate counter to a cavalry charge was feigned retreat. It worked, because it looked very much like a successful charge. You charge, the enemy breaks formation and flees. You give chase, but you are a bit too eager and proceed a bit too far. Then you find yourself in a trap, exhausted and surrounded.

You mentioned Agincourt, but the Battle of Crécy (1346) was similar but larger.

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