The military transformation of medieval Europe: Stirrups vs. social cohesion
benlandautaylor.com
benlandautaylor.com
- There needs to be a lot of you on a lot of horses. This is pretty hard to achieve especially if most people are subsistence farmers. An infantry formation is much easier to conjour from a farming community. To get cavalry you need feudalism, as Anglo Saxon England discovered, much too its cost.
- You need the right horses. Little horses are no good. War horses are the thing. War horses are no good for agriculture and as soon as cavalry stopped being a shock battle winner and switched to being a battle ender instead war horses went extinct. Because breeding them and training them was staggeringly expensive.
- You need the right terrain. Forests are not a good place for cavalry. Roads are needed to shift cavalry (and fodder) around.
- Logistics; a knight needs a riding horse a squire on a riding horse and at least one war horse, and a cart, with fodder, and two donkeys to pull it, and a cartman. You need to have farriers with the formation. Suddenly sustaining your army in the field is much more difficult.
If neither side can do these things then stirrups will not be important. If one side can do it and the other can't then they might be important unless...
1. Castles - if the opposition go and sit in a castle then good luck with the cavalry thing.
2. Long bows - on occasion cavalry forces faced long bows and things went very badly. Not always, on some occasions the archers weren't well placed and got jumped and made very dead, but an archer is much easier to replace than a knight, warhorse, riding horse, squire, riding horse, donkey, donkey, cart, cartman unit.
There was a medieval French saying to the effect of 'if they are not an expert rider by puberty, they can never be a knight'.
The performers looked like ill-dressed scrawny young adults, male and female. All well shorter than the typical person of northern European background. They were riding equally scrawny looking ponies in an arena about the size of a hockey rink. The kids did stuff like ride standing on the pony as it galloped around the field, then would flip to be sideways on the horse, with the body of the pony completely blocking them from one side. They'd fire arrows at full gallop, hiting tiny targets as they would abruptly change direction.
That's when my understanding of Atilla the Hun and Ghenghis Khan went beyond what I'd read in books.
It sounds funny at first, but would honestly be nightmare fuel. It would probably feel like an unstoppable, inhuman force.
There was a common saying: Lord, save us from the arrows of the Hungarians
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulcs%C3%BA_(chieftain)#:~:t....
Highly recommend it for this specific reason and as a great historical book in general.
True in Europe, but this was never a problem for Genghis Khan and his armies [0]. They were primarily a cavalry army, and in effect rode to the next bit of decent grassland as required, without the need for a massive supporting logistical force.
[Edit]. I'm ignoring their siege capability, but the general point holds, that they emphasized mobility.
The big question is of course whether Alexander the Great's famous hetairoi used stirrups or not. According to [0] they're considered among the first shock cavalry, and yet I can't find anything about them using stirrups, so clearly mounted combat, including shock cavalry, must have been possible without them.
What works better (cavalry or infantry) mostly depends on population density, distances between population centers and road network. Less dense, less wealthy countries with large open spaces prefer cavalry. Urban, densely populated countries with good infrastructure prefer infantry.
to add to this, making big horses takes time, like centuries of breeding.
I’d actually never thought about this which is strange considering how interesting I’ve found dogs of war. Doing some quick research it does not sound like medieval war horses were huge.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/medieval-warhorses...
Mongols had stirrups without concerning themselves with all those logistical issues. Many places, including western Europe, had lighter cavalry that still used stirrups.
> an archer is much easier to replace than a knight
Yes, but don't underestimate how hard it is to train a longbow archer; they didn't drop out of the sky either. The reason England had access to so many longbow archers in the Hundred Years War is that a century earlier, Edward I ordered all English villages to train with the longbow every Sunday. That is what created a supply of well-trained longbowmen: a culture of archery. Just like the Mongols had a culture of horsemanship.
Bigger distances, lower population density and WORSE roads = cavalry is MORE useful. That's why Eastern Europe used a lot of cavalry all the way till 1920s (and it still won battles at that point) while west switched to mostly infantry much earlier. Cavalry was always more expansive than infantry, but with larger distances it was well worth it.
> Roads are needed to shift cavalry (and fodder) around.
Roads are needed for people too. And horses can travel long distances faster (if you adapt to it by taking spare horses etc - which almost everybody did eventually).
With population density low enough and roads bad enough - cavalry had huge advantage over infantry (namely - it can be on time where it's needed).
In antiquity especially in the Roman era this advantage was negated to an extent by professional armies, you could drill and train the soldiers over and over again to not break and not flee, thus muting the impact of the cavalry charge. However as society fragmented and the power of the state waned the infantry was more likely to be composed of conscripts and levies that were not professional soldiers and wouldn't be able to be psychologically withstand the impact of a cavalry charge.
This in large part explains the "However, there is no historical consensus on when the stirrup became important in Europe. I’ve seen serious claims ranging from the late 300s to the late 700s." because it was a social rather than physical change that precipitated the rise of the heavy cavalry shock attacks.
The proof of this is that as we see the rise of nation states and a resumption of the power of centralized administration we see cavalry again wane from an important shock force to a flanking and harrying force during the Renaissance. As evidence we see that even in to WW1 many of the generals in the early part of the war were hoping for a breakthrough in the line by the infantry which the cavalry could then exploit by turning on the enemies rear.
Addenda: I just finished reading the article and the author is basically saying the same thing as I am now. Strong central state -> Professional military -> Cavalry charges less effective. Weak central state -> Warrior nobility class and conscript infantry -> Cavalry charges powerfully effective. I'm keeping my comment though because of the sunk cost fallacy.
https://www.amazon.com/History-Warfare-John-Keegan/dp/067973...
Humanity had chariots and horse-drawn war engines and armies that conquered half a continent on horseback but nobody figured out that two leather loops makes you 10x better at riding and fighting from a mounted position. It's not like the technology wasn't there. Saddles had been a thing for thousands of years when someone thought "hey let's make the saddles just a little bit longer, you know, for the feet!"
That's like inventing the firearm and taking ten thousand years to invent the sling.
Or maybe there's a clue hidden there.