This misses the fact that in order to uses stirrups effectively you have to get a few things in place that are not easy to get in place.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
So I don't want to dig up the posts but acoup.blog has long sections about medieval warfare. Basically the change can be explained by this. The primary reason a cavalry charge is so effective is not because of the force itself (despite what Total War makes it appear) but the psychological impact of a much larger beast charging into you at full speed, at a very deep instinctive level your instincts will scream at you to run from this to turn out of it's path. So when you have hundreds of the beasts bearing down on you heavily armored and men screaming at them it is almost impossible to not turn or flinch or flee.
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.
Every time I think about it, it blows my mind that human beings domesticated and then rode the horse for thousands of years before figuring out that stirrups were a good idea.
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.
- 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.