Using horses in warfare as cavalry is a stupid idea and that's what I'm going to talk to you about in this video which has been sponsored by our friends at the Great Courses Plus More of them later Now, I want you to cast your mind back back to when the horse had just been domesticated. I don't know exactly when that was and nobody else does either The figure 3000 B.C. is very often cited but 4500 to 2000 perhaps is closer to the truth. And it's somewhere in there probably, it's a bit vague. When exactly an animal becomes domesticated is debatable, too. A lot of people say it's when the animal requires mankind looking after it to survive Another definition is that it's when man is selectively breeding controlling the breeding if you like of the species and selectively breeding for those traits which suit man. So which dogs get to breed are the ones whose behaviors suit working with men And which horses who get to breed are the the type that men want rather than other horses. So somewhere in that period the horse gets domesticated. but I want you remember that your horse
was of course before that a wild animal and when it just being domesticated it's
still fairly wild and not very different from its wild ancestors. So its instincts
are still those of a wild animal and if you've ever been to a rodeo you will
perhaps be well aware that even modern horses if they have not been trained are
very reluctant to have people ride them on their backs and if you try jumping on
the back of some other wild animal, jump on the back of a wild zebra or
ostrich, or buffalo or whatever and you'll find that it really objects to
your being there quite strongly so if some smart aleck said back then "Hey I've got this brilliant idea why
don't we ride these things into battle?" There are a couple of possible
reactions to that one might be the people have said "Wow, that's a brilliant idea
why didn't we think of ourselves, we've got to try it!" But I think it's more
likely that they said, "Don't be such an idiot." I mean it's ridiculous the idea that you
could ride a horse into battle. If you're
an infantryman you got both feet on the ground you can control your movement you
can have a nice big shield, a big spear, and you know exactly when you're going to
move and in what direction because you are in control of those movements and
you can wear lots of armor and you can if you fall over you can just get back
up again. If you're on a horse things are completely different. How are you going to stay on that horse?
How are we going to get the horse to bear the weight of you and all the armor?
because the horses of course what much smaller than that the large things we
have today they're ponies really and a large man in armor will be quite a
burden to such a horse. And how is he going to stay on it? I have once
been bareback riding and I can tell you, that boy you have to grip with your thighs! And the back of a horse is very
rounded and his fur is really quite skiddy. Got to remember velcro with all
the little hooks hasn't been invented yet so you got nothing like that to hold
you on want and you wouldn't want to tie yourself onto the horse bit of rope or
anything, because if you did fall then you'd be dragged and that would be
horrendous! Dragged and kicked and ahh, the injuries so you don't want to do
that. You want to be able to get off the horse safely but not fall off the horse.
You want to get off when you choose So if the horses galloping along and
suddenly stops you don't want to go sailing over its neck and head and land
on the ground in front of it in the big heap for the enemy things just go "stab." You don't want that. Another thing that's really difficult
about that the horses, if you think about it back then is that they're so
scared! Even horses today, if you've been riding at much at all you know that
horses spook at the most bizarre things. You could be riding down the road a car
goes "Zoom!" straight past you much too close. "Idiot!" You may shout something rude
after the driver but he won't hear you but the horse is fine. Then a few
more yards down the road "Ahhh Crisp packet, crisp packet! The horse is panicking because it's a crisp packet! It's a blue one , it's a blue one! It should be salt and
vinegar but I bet that one's cheese and onion and that's just so wrong! Ahh, crisp
packet! And a tractor goes thundering past, doesn't bother the horse
at all but crisp packet! The most bizarre things will spook a horse.
They're very timorous things and and they're quite intolerant to pain.
They don't like fighting and don't like even treading on on people. If in battle their
bodies lying on the ground horses don't want to tread on bodies,
even dead bodies. So the idea of riding one into battle would probably to the
first people who heard it sound like a really amazingly stupid idea. How are you
going to control it or put a bit in its mouth? Okay so we put a bit in his mouth
and spits it out. Okay well obviously that's going to
require a bit more work, but you'll think of a way maybe to control it to with
with some sort of harness that goes around its snout, perhaps with a couple of
ropes. That it won't be that great but you'll have some steering control. Maybe if
you spend an awful long time training this horse. But then you going to ride into
battle on your own? Because that just means you you get there before everyone
else and you're really conspicuous and they're going to shoot you first and your
horse is a really big vulnerable unarmored target and it's intolerable
intolerant to pain and if anyone hits it it is going to bolt and then you're
probably going to fall off or you're going to go hurtling across the battlefield on
your own How is that any help to anyone? And you
could say all right what maybe if we train up loads and loads and loads of
guys we have a cavalry force then we can rumble across the plains and
scare the wits out of the enemy with thunderous hooves and shaking
of ground and so forth yeah right now I could happen then again you might just
get the ironic applause as you all then scatter across the plain and fall off
and the few of you left realize that you can't possibly take on an infantry unit
because how do you actually fight on a horse? You ride up to infantry unit you
then got infantryman all around you very very quickly and they've got so much to
aim at and your angles of attack will essentially got down and that's it. So
it's fairly easy to work out where you have to put your shield in order to
parry, and you're hopeless. What's it going to achieve writing cavalry
into battle? And it seems that nobody did ride cavalry into battle for really
quite a long time after the mess the domestication of the horse but something
that they did use horses for was pulling things. Now, the horse is very good at that
you can get them to pull carts and so forth and various heavy loads and that
was something that was useful in everyday life in farming and in building and so forth and you could of
course train them to pull chariots. Chariots were used in warfare for quite
a long time before cavalry appeared we don't know exactly when the first
chariots were, but again big round number about 2000 BC and they got more and
more prevalent it seems in certainly Middle Eastern and warfare until around
1300 BC around the battle of Kadesh for instance which we know about through
historical reports of it which involved vast numbers of chariots that seems to
be the peak. By the time Caesar invaded Britain the the Celts in Britain
were still using charities but it seems that they were the exception. The
Gauls in what is today France it seems weren't still using chariots. The
last mention i think of warfare setting in the West was Mons Graupius I think. One reason that you would get a horse to
pull something like a chariot is because they are small. If you've got a very
small horse that's not very powerful and you put a big weight on top of it such as a
guy with armor and so forth then it's quite a burden and it's it's going to have
a struggle galloping along with you on its back. But, if you put your weight on
the ground via a wheel and make the ground and the chariot bear the weight
and all the horse has to do is get the wheels to turn around, then that's different, and a couple of
horses could pull you really really fast. Chariots are going to be a lot faster
than cavalry because they're not burdened every time they do
the "up" part of the gallop, they don't have to lift you and your armor up each
time. Instead they can just get it forwards pulling, as long as the terrain
is course favorably flat, and pulling this this light spoke wheeled basket
behind it with you in it. Then you could go really fast and perhaps fight
from there and it seems that people did now in the works at Homer of course, we
read it loads and loads of heroes rushing around the the plains outside
Troy on their chariots and IF the Trojan War happened ,which it might not have, and if it did happen around 1250 BC, which it might not have but that's the that's a commonly
estimated date for the Trojan War, then there would be no cavalry, so all those
references in your translation to cavalry of Homer, are probably referring
to those parts of the army that used horses which is chariots really.
It does seem perhaps that messengers and people like that not running into battle
we used before cavalry as an arm of an army arrived. It could be that in
ancient Egypt you would have a couple of guys on horses riding to deliver
messages it's a little bit faster but right at the enemy and fight from
horseback? That would be ridiculous! On something as timid and vulnerable
as a horse off which you can fall so easily? So how do you keep yourself on a horse?
Well, one way is to use a saddle which helps a bit, you're not quite as skiddy as the
horses back. The first good evidence we have a saddle is around 700 BC in places
like Assyria.They may of course, be older than that, I suspect they are a
bit, but that's the first really good evidence we have for them but the saddle
on its own is really enough to turn you into a cavalryman. And when do stirrups
arrival? The stirrups don't arrive until quite a lot later. More recently than perhaps you realize. I've read about loops of rope that would go around the big toes of a rider
in India as early as the 2nd century, end of the second century BC, but that's not
really a true stirrup as we would know If you just have straps or ropes going
to something like a loop around your toes that puts a lot of strain on in one
small part of the horses back and the horse will get sores from that. It's not
terribly practical. To get stirrups to work properly, you have to have pretty solid
preferably framed saddle which then then translates the downward strain over a broad area
over a large bit of the horse's back so it doesn't get those sores. Now, when
when does the true stirrup get invented as we know it today?
Well, probably China some around 400 and something AD
seems to be the time and why? Well, some versions of history will say
that the first stirrups were used in china so that old frail people could get onto
their horse, so it was just a mounting aid and we have some reason to believe
that Sarmatians some couple hundred years later we're getting onto their
horses perhaps when they were wearing heavy armor using one stirrup, there's a
stirrup just on one side so they would use it to get up onto the horse and once on
the stirrups job was done. It wasn't actually riding aid, it was just a
mounting and perhaps dismounting aid. Is there some other way you can stay on
the horse? Well, yes there is. But first I want to tell you a little bit about the
Great Courses Plus, our sponsor! So that the Great Courses Plus is an online
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