Heavily armored knights hate this one simple trick
by Many-Excitement3246
Heavily armored knights hate this one simple trick
by Many-Excitement3246
6 Comments
Context: for centuries, cavalry were seen as a sort of “be all, end all” on the battlefield.
Following the decline of the Western Roman Empire and the breakdown of the legionary as the primary soldier, heavy cavalry gradually emerged as the most powerful and dominant force on any European battlefield.
For approximately 1000 years, from roughly the 4th century AD to the 14th century AD, heavy cavalry were nearly unbeatable in open combat. It was so decisive an advantage that knights and nobles were always heavily armored horsemen in combat, and these were the most prized and lethal force in any European army.
However, as tactics advanced, this became less and less true. Eventually, a new counter emerged: the pike, and with it, the devastating counter of the infantry square.
Most famously used in 1314 by the Scottish army, but before that at Courtrai and Halmyros to similarly devastating effect, the infantry square and the use of pikes brought a crashing end to the era of heavy cavalry dominance on the battlefield.
Essentially, horses are skittish prey animals and are instinctively hesitant to run directly into a wall of pikes and men, so they often refuse to do so.
Crazy to think it took almost 1000 years for people to be like “hmmm, their horses sure dont like being stabbed”
Joking of course, but still weird it took so long for a direct counter to form
Pointy stick, the good ol’ reliable since the dawn of human kind
And yet Wellington’s army at Waterloo still used infantry squares to repel Napoleon’s cavalry in 1815, so cavalry was still a major part of warfare until relativity recently and long after the invention of the square.
WW1 was when generals quickly learned that sending lots and lots of horses against barbed wire and machine guns was unlikely to end well.
Who knew it, pointy stick always comes out the winner
This is the medieval equivalent of people seeing a few dozen pics of Leopards and BMPs destroyed in Ukraine and proclaiming the tank is finished. No weapon can be victorious in isolation, and nothing doesn’t have some counter.