Dear Maester steven, in a post a few weeks ago you stated medieval calvary would defeat a Roman legion, and this is evidenced by Crassus’ defeat by the armored calvary of the Parthian empire. Taking this into account, why do you think the Romans never developed large scale calvary units or tactics?
There’s a couple factors, a lot of which boil down to the intersections between culture and warfare, but technology is also involved.
First, we have to talk about technology. For most of their history, Rome did not have access to the stirrup. Without stirrups, mounted combat is extremely difficult – any time you swing or hit with your weapon, or are hit in turn, you risk falling off your horse. It’s not impossible to fight without stirrups, but it takes a hell of a lot more training because you have to learn to grip the horse with your legs in time with your attacks and defenses.
For most of their history, Romans simply preferred to spend their time training in some of the best infantry drills the world had ever seen – which after all, had allowed them to conquer almost all of what was the known world – and subcontracted out their cavalry to auxiliaries from places, like Numidia, that had invested their time in perfecting the difficult art of pre-stirrup mounted combat. Think of it like a military version of comparative advantage.
And then when the Eastern Roman Empire managed to survive the devastating invasions of the 6th century, they did something amazing: they changed their entire way of warfare on the fly. They borrowed the tools of their enemies – the recurve bows favored by the Huns and the Persians and the stirrups of the Avars – and used them to construct a highly-trained, well-equipped professional mounted soldier armed with both bow and lance (and sword and axe and mace) whose skill and flexibility could offset the Byzantine’s perpetual manpower disadvantage, and redesigned their tactics and strategy around them.
Next, we have to talk about culture. For most of the early Republic, soldiers were expected to provide their own arms, and horses were incredibly expensive. So expensive that there was an entire Roman social class right below the senators called the equites, whose status derived from the fact that they had enough money to equip themselves with horses. Thus, Roman cavalry was always going to be a minority affair, because most of their soldiers simply couldn’t afford horses.
Once Rome shifted to a professional military, the cost transferred to the state and Romans had a very large military indeed. (Consider the Battle of Phillipi, where as many as 400,000 soldiers took part) Mounting this number of men would have been incredibly expense, and before the advent of the stirrup wouldn’t have seemed worth the effort, when Roman foot soldiers were just as effective and far cheaper to equip and maintain.
Now, this gradually changed for a couple reasons. First, as the empire expanded, Rome came in contact with more and more peoples who fought on horseback, first expanding their auxiliary forces and later on (as those people were gradually Romanized) their own cavalry forces. Second, as the empire expanded, foot soldiers couldn’t adequately defend extended borders against fast-moving mounted invaders. So the Roman army had to change. The relatively slow and quite expensive Roman legion was abandoned in favor of a new system that divided the military between the numerically larger limitanei (who guarded border fortifications and acted as a first line of defense against invasion) and the elite comitatenses (the mobile field armies stationed in the interior who could be scrambled to fight invasions that had gotten past the limitanei before the invaders could reach major cities).
Given this division of labor, you increasingly got specialization whereby limitanei were most useful as infantry and
comitatenses were most useful as cavalry. So even before the advent of the stirrup, there was already movement in the direction of emphasizing cavalry, simply due to the need to protect longer and and longer borders.
As a slightly related addition, this transformation, emphasizing speed and flexibility, depended on the training and discipline of the soldier, and the intelligence and observation skills of field officers and unit captains. Hannibal’s exploitation of rigid thinking led to engagements like Cannae. This need for intelligence and quick thinking was the claim to fame for maneuver generals like Belisarius or Khalid ibn al-Walid. Military science was key, and manuals of engagement from this era survive to the present day, showing us just how key recognition of ground, formation, and equipment were in this era.
-SLAL
@racefortheironthrone The point about cavalry prior to stirrups doesn’t seem to make sense when you consider that the Parthian and Sassanid Cataphracts, and those of the Alans and Sarmatians, were capable of fighting quite effectively without stirrups, making use of horned saddles much like Roman Auxiliary Cavalry appear to have done. Alexander the Great’s Companion Cavalry achieved great feats without having stirrups either, and the cavalry utilized by the Seleucid successor kingdom and the Persian Empire before them both, were also able to contribute greatly without stirrups as well, as Robert Gaebel points out in Cavalry Operations in the Ancient Greek World. The point about the Roman Cavalry of the Eastern Empire also ignores that stirrups don’t appear to have seen significant use in Europe until the 8th/9th centuries, and were not staples of mounted warfare in western europe until at least the 10th century. It also doesn’t explain then how Belisarius’ mid-seventh century cavalry could have operated so effectively as hybrid horse archer/lancer units whilst not possessing stirrups to aid them.
Regarding the Limitanei and Comitatenses, the decision to create these units had a lot less to do with an alleged inability of the Legions to defend their borders against mounted foes (they’d done quite well against the Sarmatians, Alans and Parthians in the past), and more to do with the aim of Diocletians’ reforms, and that was to reduce the power of roman generals. The issue was that the large legions of the past could provide a substantial army to a would-be usurper, but at the same time would leave the borders unguarded in the event of a coup. So the solution was to reduce the size of units, making them less powerful but somewhat more handy to maneuver, and to designate forces, the limitanei, whose job it was to defend the border on a permanent basis. Even then, Limitanei units were clearly still respectable fighters or could be, as mention is made of their being called upon to campaign as Pseudocomitatenses. And even still, the Comitatenses were hardly that far into the ‘interior,’ as forward defense remained very much the go to response, based on A. H. M. Jones’ research into the Late Roman Empire and it’s army.
Disciplined infantry like the Roman Legions, were and are more than capable of taking on and defeating a mounted foe. It took a risky feigned retreat by William’s cavalry to break up the formation of Godwinson’s Fyrds and Huscarls at Hastings, and Publius Ventidius Bassus made skillful use of his Legionnaires and missile troops, along with rough terrain, to defeat Parthian cavalry at Mount Gindarus.
I didn’t say you couldn’t fight effectively without stirrups, just that it takes a lot of training to do so, because you have to grip the horse with your legs and feet in time with swinging your sword or absorbing a blow with your shield, etc.
Also, given that Belisarius’ life (505-565) overlapped with that of the Emperor Maurice (539-602), if we credit the Strategikon to Maurice, then Belisarius may well have had stirrups, as the Strategikon mentions their use as a standard part of Eastern Roman gear.
I disagree regarding the Limitanei and Comitatenses. I know that Luttwak doubts the mobility argument, but other scholars take the alternate position, given the difficulty of preventing raiding parties from bypassing static border defenses.
And yes, disciplined infantry can defeat mounted foes, I’m not suggesting that they can’t. However, it’s much more difficult to do so, and the odds of a defeat increase. Moreover, and this was my point above, when you go beyond the battlefield level, it’s very hard for infantry to perform the role of defending territory against mounted raiders, because cavalry can outpace infantry so easily.
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