Horses

 These days most people do not see a horse on most days.  Riding lessons are for the well-to-do (or for actors appearing costume dramas).  But in the Middle Ages horses were everywhere.

Domestic horses, scientists have now determined, were first found sometime around 2000 BC, in the Steppes east of the Black Sea.  Such domestic animals as sheep, goats, and cattle had been around a lot longer, but until then horses were primarily a food item, hunted by being speared or run off a cliff.  The rock of Solutré in southern Burgundy, seen below, is believed to be one where horses were hunted in this way, as a lot of horse skeletons have been found there.  (Native Americans ran buffalo off cliffs in the same way.)

Domestic horses really change everything.  It is far easier to travel long distances on horseback than on foot.  The nomads of the steppes of Central Asia, who used domestic horses first, found them both a good way to travel and an important aid in herding their other domestic animals.  Cowboys in both North and South America followed in this tradition.

From Central Asia domestic horses spread east to China and west to Europe and the Mediterranean basin and Arabian peninsula.  Around the Mediterranean, horse transport primarily used chariots in antiquity.  Roman roads provided a fairly smooth surface along which horses could trot, pulling a lightweight chariot.  Armies however were primarily made up of foot soldiers, though their leaders rode on horseback.  (I have to wonder if the fact that Romans wore nothing under their togas reduced their enthusiasm for horseback riding.)

One challenge facing horseback riding is the danger of sliding off, if the horse goes too fast or suddenly plunges or rears.  Today that challenge is at least partially resolved by the use of stirrups, that stabilize the rider's perch.  Riders on the steppes seem to have developed the stirrup around the fifth century AD, although it took several hundred more years to reach western Europe.

The stirrup revolutionized warfare and made possible the appearance of knights, medieval fighters on horseback.  Although the majority of fighters in every war were still foot soldiers, one now had cavalry as well, fighters who could wield spear or sword from horseback, thanks to the stirrup.  Knights were primarily aristocratic or, at least in the eleventh century, employed by aristocrats, because horses were expensive.  Not only did they need rich food like oats, but iron horseshoes and iron stirrups were not cheap.

By the thirteenth century, horses were sometimes used in agriculture, although oxen remained the principal draft animal.  Because horses move faster than oxen, one could plow more acreage in the same amount of time, yielding more crops.  Of course this advantage was lessened by the fact that some of those more abundant crops had to be oats to feed the horses, and horses are inherently more skittish than oxen.

The use of horses in agriculture required the development of better horse collars that put the pressure on the chest, not the neck of the horse.  Chariots had harnessed horses in a way that could choke them if anything too heavy was pulled.  Better horse collars, like saddles and stirrups, came out of Central Asia.

Horses reached the Americas with the Spaniards.  Native Americans had either carried their possessions themselves or had had dogs pull sledges (no wheels in the Americas before Columbus).  But the Indians of the plains recognized the value of horses by the seventeenth century and established their own herds, either of horses that had escaped the Spaniards or ones stolen from them.  In South America, horses provided a new form of transportation, as the native llamas and alpacas cannot be ridden except perhaps by a very small child.

(Ironically, horses' ancestors had originally developed in the Americas and crossed the Bering landbridge into Asia, many tens of thousands of years before they were domesticated. But there were no horses around when white men reached the Americas.  The ancestral horses left behind in the Americas had either died out by themselves or were killed off (and doubtless eaten) by indigenous people.)

Horses continued to provide the major form of transportation through the nineteenth century.  New York City had serious problems with heaps of horse manure and the bodies of dead horses, who expired after long and arduous lives of pulling buggies and carts.  Armies as late as World War I employed horses.  Only with the invention and spread of internal combustion vehicles did horses cease to be the major way to travel.  The Amish still use buggies drawn by horses, and horses are still used for herding in parts of the American west, but horses are now primarily used for racing or for leisure activities.  But they still have their uses.  If someone breaks a leg hiking in the backwoods stretches of the Appalachian Trail, horses have to go in and pack the wounded hiker out.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval knights, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval Warfare

There were a lot of wars in the Middle Ages.  (The same thing of course could be said about the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.)  They were not nearly as destructive to infrastructure as modern warfare, and a lot of them were small and local, but they were certainly hellacious both for participants and for innocent bystanders.

One major distinction between medieval and modern warfare is that the medieval male aristocracy defined itself militarily by the twelfth century.  That is, anyone who was rich and powerful also wanted to be seen as a warrior, specifically a knight, someone who fought on horseback.  This is unlike today's wealthy men, who seek various ways to avoid having to go to war.

Gunpowder and cannons started being used in warfare in the fourteenth century, but before then the chief weapons were swords and lances.  Lances were used to knock other knights off their horses once cavalry began to dominate warfare.  Swords were used to slash and kill--the fencing you see in Three Musketeers movies is post-medieval.  You could also kill people with arrows, although armor provided a lot of protection.  Because archers killed from a distance, a bow was considered a coward's weapon.  This did not keep all medieval armies from marching with a contingent of archers.

Most battles were fought by the infantry in the early Middle Ages, and at least theoretically all free men were supposed to be ready to march off to war if needed.  The Roman army had been a foot-soldier army, and this preponderance of infantry continued until the stirrup made horseback fighting viable in the tenth and later centuries.  Major battles were won by the infantry, and in the battle of Hastings of 1066, when the Normans conquered England, the Anglo-Saxon infantry came extremely close to winning.  (They probably would have won if they hadn't just fought and won a battle in the north of England, then marched south very fast to face the Normans.)

Cavalry then dominated warfare throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but with the spread of cannons in the late Middle Ages infantry again became very important.  They weren't wanted for their fighting skills so much as to be cannon fodder, to march against the cannons, get shot and die, giving the cavalry and the archers a chance to charge while the slow reloading was going on.  (There were no rifles or handguns for centuries to come.)

In extended wars (like the Hundred Years War), the armies lived off the land, burning crops and devastating the countryside.  But for smaller wars, especially in the twelfth century when the Crusades were still seen as a viable way to be a warrior without killing Christians, there was at least an intermittent effort to avoid attacking the helpless.  For the peasantry, however, war was always awful.

A lot of battles involved castles.  Castles, like knights, first appeared in the eleventh century.  They were primarily defensive, and castle architecture tended to develop just fast enough to keep ahead of advances in siege technology.  Many castles were never attacked at all, and those that fell usually fell due to betrayal or to the garrison being starved out.  Castles could also be used as staging areas for sorties and attacks.

Naval battles occurred in the Middle Ages but were rare.  The Mediterranean was notoriously unpredictable, and few other than Vikings would venture far out into the Atlantic.


© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval knights and warfare, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Peace and Truce of God

Today is Memorial Day, when we remember those who are no longer with us, and honor veterans.  These days, with an all-volunteer army, veterans are mostly middle class or lower class, not from the ranks of the wealthy or well-connected.  In the Middle Ages, in contrast, the fighters were from the elite, the aristocracy.

What do we want our soldiers to fight for?  Peace.  (Seems ironic, but that's how it appears to work.)  Everybody wants peace (though you might not know it from some video games), peace to raise food and raise their families.  The big thing that Old Testament prophets expected from the Messiah was an era of peace.  In the 1950s, American postmarks said, "Pray for peace."

Medieval people also wanted peace.  The peace they were concerned about was not so much an end to war between nations (at least until you get to the Hundred Years' War) but rather an end to local fighting and brigandage.

Right at the end of the tenth century, at exactly the same time as castles and knights first appeared in France, French bishops started what is called the Peace of God movement.  The coincidence of these three (castles, knights, and Peace of God) was not accidental.  Western Europe had managed to recover from the Vikings and other disasters, and now it faced new challenges to peace.  Knights, fighters on horseback, could work serious damage on the countryside, then retreat behind castle walls where no one could catch them.

The bishops realized they could not physically overcome the knights.  So they did what seemed like the best alternative--shaming the knights to give up hurting people.  The bishops held what they called peace councils, inviting everyone from a region to attend, bringing along the relics of all the local churches.  Here they persuaded the attending knights to swear great oaths not to harm the harmless--people in the church, peasants, women, merchants.  Since in promising not to harm those who couldn't fight back, the knights realized they could still fight each other (more fun anyway), they agreed.

It was not of course a perfect solution.  But it did decrease the overall level of violence and made the regional counts, in their capacity as judges, much more likely to be extremely stern with knights who broke their oaths.  For the entire eleventh century, repeated peace councils were held.  During this period of (relative) peace, castles proliferated.  If you think about it, you need a peaceful period to build a castle.

Emboldened by their success, around 1050 the bishops began the Truce of God.  Here councils sought to get knights to swear they wouldn't even attack each other except at certain times:  not Lent, not Advent, not Sunday, not Friday (and probably not Saturday, as between Friday and Sunday).  Monday through Thursday were good.

The Truce was a lot less successful, but it was a nice try.  With the beginning of the Crusade movement around 1100, churchmen encouraged knights not to kill each other at all, not even a little bit, but to restrict their violence to Muslims.  The twelfth century was a period in which it was clear (in theory anyway) that Christians really weren't supposed to kill Christians.  By the late thirteenth century they'd pretty much abandoned this notion, but it was a nice idea.


© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more about  war, peace, knights, and so much more, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Crusades

To a modern American, the Crusades were something very long ago and far away.  For those in the Middle East today, they are an ongoing issue.

With the rise of Islam in the seventh century, effectively ending the Roman Empire, the Middle East, north Africa, and the Spanish peninsula, all of which had been under Rome, became controlled by Muslim emirs and caliphs.  A century or two later, Christians in Spain slowly began trying to conquer the peninsula, working from the north to the south, a process not completed until 1492.  In the meantime, Christians and Muslims got along fairly well in Spain when they weren't fighting each other.

But it seemed disturbing to Europeans north of the Pyrenees (who didn't really worry about Spain) that the Holy Land was not under Christian control, as it had been until the seventh century.  Pilgrims had always been able to visit Jerusalem and Bethlehem, but by the eleventh century this didn't seem like enough.

The First Crusade was launched in 1095.  Originally the pope who called for the expedition to the Middle East was just responding to a request from the Byzantines, the Greek Orthodox Christians in what is now Turkey, for mercenaries to fight the Turks.  But in urging knights, uneasy about how killing people might imperil their souls, to go fight Muslims, he gave them a way to save their souls by using their fighting skills in the Middle East.

To everyone's surprise, including theirs, the First Crusade was a success, capturing Jerusalem and establishing the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem.  It lasted until 1187, when Turks under Saladin conquered it.  The Third Crusade was launched in 1189 as a failed effort to get it back.

King Richard the Lionheart of England was on that Crusade and loved every minute of it.  The image above is of his castle of Château-Gailliard in Normandy, the construction of which (after he got home) was inspired in part by castles in the Middle East.

Today, to modern Americans, the word "Crusade" means a moral struggle.  But to Muslims in the modern Middle East, it means Christians invading Muslim territories.  In the aftermath of 9/11, President George Bush announced a "Crusade" against terrorism, which made perfect sense to Americans, it meant we were going to stand up to terror.  But to Muslims, it meant Christians planning to kill Muslims.  (A former graduate student of mine is working for the National Security Agency.  She got to President Bush just too late.  He never used the term again, but the damage was done.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on Crusades and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Horses and Horseshoes for Medieval Knights

In the popular imagination, medieval knights rode enormous horses, like modern draft horses (such as Clydesdales or Percherons).  But this is not the case.  As the term "draft horse" should suggest, these are bred to "draw" heavy loads, plows, wagons, harvesters and the like.  They have very wide backs and would thus be very awkward to ride, as your legs would stick out sideways.

Instead medieval knights rode horses closer in size to the modern Morgan horse, a full-sized horse, certainly, but not an enormous one.  A horse with a little Arabian blood was considered excellent; Arabian horses came from Muslim-controlled territories in Spain.

The picture above is a statue of a Morgan horse from the national Morgan center in Vermont.

A well equipped knight would actually have several horses, including pack animals, one to ride just to get someplace, and a warhorse for battles or tournaments.  Horses intended for ladies to ride were supposed to be docile and slightly smaller than horses for men.  Both men and women rode mules, crosses between horses and donkeys, though mules did not make good warhorses.  Women generally, though not exclusively, rode side-saddle.  Horse training was a specialized activity, and knights would develop close relationships with their horses, with which they worked every day.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, when plate armor had become very heavy and cavalry had become fairly useless in actual battles against cannons, somewhat larger horses were bred for tournaments, to carry a knight whose armor weighed so much that he might have to be winched up onto his horse, rather than being able to mount.  But the horses were still not the size of Percherons; Percherons do not gallop well, and the rider's legs have to reach down to the stirrups.

As I noted in a previous post, knights were only possible once horseshoes developed and became widespread in the tenth century, to replace the bronze horse sandals that the Romans had used.  Horse sandals had little wires that one could twist to keep the sandals on, but not surprisingly they tended to fall off a lot.  Horseshoes, made of iron, were nailed to the horse's hooves as they still are today, providing protection so that the hooves did not wear down, fatally crippling the horse.

Iron was scarce and expensive when horseshoes first developed, so that a horse with four shod hooves was worth double the price of an unshod horse, the origin of the idea that horseshoes are lucky.

Click here and here for more information on knights.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on medieval knights, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Knighthood Training

As I noted in an earlier post, when knights first appeared in the eleventh century, they were essentially henchmen on horseback.  But during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, knighthood and nobility gradually fused, as each group wanted to be more like the other.

We know relatively little about how service knights were trained, but we do know quite a bit about the training of noble knights.

Little boys would be taught simple reading and arithmetic by their mothers, along with their sisters, but around the age of six or eight, they would be sent away for knighthood training.  Generally boys were trained in groups, perhaps at the castle of their father's lord (say, a count), or perhaps with an uncle.  Maternal uncles were preferred to paternal uncles, because a paternal uncle was at least a potential rival to one's father, whereas a maternal uncle was not.

Starting with ponies and wooden weapons, they would be trained to ride and to fight.  They would learn to ride at an opponent while carrying a long lance, hoping to knock him off a horse; here they started by aiming a lance at a ring.  They would grow accustomed to wearing armor, such as in the image above.  This scene, from the abbey church of Vézelay, depicts the story of David and Goliath.  David is cutting off the giant's head, and the giant, in long chain mail tunic and helmet with nose-piece, is wearing twelfth-century armor.

At the same time as they were learning to fight, boys would be educated, in reading, some writing, and some theology.  They might practice writing love poems to the wife of the castle's lord.  She probably enjoyed the attention of such adolescents, as long as they kept their proper distance.

(Click here for more on chivalry.)

By their late teens, the boys had finished their training.  They would be formally "knighted" in an elaborate ceremony that involved a tournament and a party that might go on for days.  Religious elements were introduced into the knighting ceremony, in a desperate and not altogether successful effort to suggest that being a knight was fundamentally about something other than killing people.

Young men were often knighted as a group, with comrades who would be their best friends for life.  They were tough and superb fighters; even their enemies were agreed on that.  In the twelfth century, when you really were not supposed to ride around killing people, a lot of new knights headed off on Crusade, or else followed the tournament circuit, while waiting for their fathers to die so they could inherit.

Click here for more on knights' horses.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

Medieval Knights

Knights, like castles, first appeared right around the year 1000 in western Europe (they were not found in England until after the 1066 Norman Conquest).

Basically a knight is someone who fights on horseback.  The original, eleventh-century knights were not aristocrats, but rather henchmen on horseback, men who fought on behalf of the lords of the castle.  (Click here for more on knights' horses.)

Fighting on horseback really only became a possibility with the development both of the stirrup, probably in the ninth century, and advances in iron-mining and metallurgy in the tenth century, to make horseshoes affordable.  Without stirrups, one will slide off a horse's back far too easily.  Without horseshoes, a horse's hooves will wear out unless it is kept strictly on grassy surfaces.

Hollywood now portrays all knights in plate armor.  But that kind of armor only developed at the end of the Middle Ages and in the early modern period, when warfare was carried out with cannons and pikemen on foot, not cavalry charges, and the heavy plate armor protected people in jousts, mock battles that no longer had anything to do with real warfare.

Twelfth-century knights wore chain mail, generally a long tunic made out of metal rings.  It was heavy and uncomfortable but would stop either a sword or a lance from penetrating.  Their helmets covered the top and sides of the head and had a long nosepiece.  Shields might be round or might be tall and kite-shaped, as in the image below.

These knights were carved on a church and were intended to represent the vices (if one looks closely one can see "…PERBIA" coming in from the left, the second half of the word superbia, meaning pride).  The register above them shows images representing virtues.

Knights of course were proud; the church architects were right.  And the service knights of the eleventh century desperately wanted to be like their aristocratic masters.  Meanwhile, the noble lords of castles admired knights--their ability to fight on horseback, how cool they looked galloping across a field with a lance held high and cape whipping in the wind.

During the course of the twelfth century, nobles began to define themselves militarily, as knights, not just as people marked by great wealth, power, and noble birth.  The knights, if they possibly could, married younger daughters of nobles, giving their children noble blood.  By the thirteenth century, knights and nobles had essentially fused into one group.

(For more on chivalry and knighthood training, click here and here.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more about horses, fighting, knights, and so much more, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.