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Your argument is not about the limitations of stirrups, but about the limitations of knights. You can have stirrups without knights, and stirrups definitely add value, even without knights.

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.

> 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.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan

They were using 3-4 horses per rider.

And I think that they weren't farmers but instead nomadic herders?

Mongols didnt really have knights but even so rode with far more horses than knights. Even the poorest would have expected to have 5-10 when out on campaign and officers could have dozens. Also the horses the Mongols rode would not have carried a knight in armour because they were generally much smaller and didnt need fodder in the same way west asian horses did.

Yes, My main point (which I didn't say explicitly) was that the Mongols were much more self-sustaining as their horses could graze on the steppes without significant logistical support.

The Mongols did have 'knights'. They adopted Cataphract style just as other step people did. Their armor was as good or better then European knights armor of the same timeframe. Mongol horses were actually pretty damn strong even when not quite as big as Western war horses.

This pattern far predates Genghis Khan. In the historical record alone, there are multiple waves of steppe nomads conquering agricultural civilizations including the Huns and multiple Turkic cultures. Prior to written history, the ancient cultures of the Pontic Steppe spent centuries breeding the modern horse; these are the same people who probably spoke the Proto-Indo-European language and included the male line ancestors of virtually all European populations.

The invention, and still more the dissemination, of the stirrup is closer in time to Genghis Khan than to the early Indo-European cultures, though.

Sure; mounted warfare existed for centuries before stirrups were invented. Actually it's not entirely clear whether the Proto-Indo-Europeans actually rode the horses or just used them to pull chariots.

Did mounted warfare exist before stirrups? The bronze age was all about chariots, and had little or no mounted combat. I'm not sure if that was because of a lack of stirrups or because horses simply hadn't been bred large enough.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companion_cavalry

Eastern Europe adapted to this and also used mostly cavalry tactics, some countries all the way up to early 20th century.

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.

Plus, expert horse riding requires lots of practice from a young age. The steppe warriors, such as the Mongols and the Comanche, managed this. Regular farmers would not.

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'.

About twenty five years ago on a visit to an out of the way place in northern China I was able to see a demonstration of Mongolian horse riding skill. The target audience was the local tourists.

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.

I'm imagining that it would be something like if Cirque de Soleil was trying to kill me.

It sounds funny at first, but would honestly be nightmare fuel. It would probably feel like an unstoppable, inhuman force.

Which is the way these archers were described historically.

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....

The book Empire of the Summer Moon goes into a lot of great detail about how skilled the Comanche were at horseback riding and fighting from a mounted position.

Highly recommend it for this specific reason and as a great historical book in general.

> You need the right terrain. Forests are not a good place for cavalry. Roads are needed to shift cavalry (and fodder) around.

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).

> You need the right horses. Little horses are no good. War horses are the thing.

to add to this, making big horses takes time, like centuries of breeding.

I’m not sold on these war horses being giant.

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...

There does seem to be some disagreement about it, but I've always read that Destriers in particular were pretty big. But there were a lot of different types of war horses, and a knight would often own several for various different purposes.