We have again decided to touch upon the theme we developed fairly recently - Frankish warriors of the Dark Ages. This time it’s going to be cavalry - a fearsome force that dominated the fields of glory in Europe for many centuries until the English arrow and Spanish bullet stopped the race of battle horses. Who but the Franks are the closest predecessors of the knights? It was they who, having built their powerful state on the remnants of the Roman colossus, brought these troops to the battlefield to protect civilization from barbarians.
It would be a mistake to assume that heavy cavalry was born in Europe. This type of cavalry is an invention of the East. It was long before the period we are describing that the Parthian cataphracts had trodden into dust the legions of Crassus, clearly displaying the superiority of an armoured mounted warrior over an infantryman. This superiority came as a bitter lesson to the Romans, who only accepted the fact with great reluctance and after a considerable time. Generally speaking, in the ancient World the cavalry played if not a negligible then certainly a secondary role. The Phrygian archers of Alexander the Great, who never missed at full gallop, or Trajan’s Batavian cavalrymen, who crossed the Danube on their horses in full armour, never became the strike force of their day. The explanation to this is fairly simple: the ancient World didn’t know stirrups and therefore the mounted men were fairly easy to dismount. Lacking the benefits of stirrups, the cavalryman could not stand up from the saddle and make a hit at full force. It was only by the end of the 3rd century A.D. that, along with the barbarisation of Roman society, the Imperial army included some cavalrymen with their armoured horses. They carried long spears or contos and were known as cataphracts or clibanarius. These same troops could be seen in Byzantium after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. At this stage they became a real fighting force of the Imperial army, but all trace of armoured cavalry in the West was lost for centuries.
As with other Germanic tribes, the valiant Franks were initially not used to mounted warfare. They came to the Empire and conquered it on their feet. Oxen ploughed the conquered land as horses were the precious possessions of a few. Even the chieftains’ guardsmen rarely mounted horses, and the chieftains themselves – tribal kings and dukes – preferred to dismount in battle, displaying their readiness to share the fate of their subjects. This continued until the dust raised by the hooves of Arab horses hid the sun at the borders of the Frankish state. Charles Martell, ruler of the Kingdom and leader of it’s army, included some heavy cavalry along with the mainly peasant levy to face the incoming enemy. The initial assault of Arabs was halted at Poitiers as they failed to break the Frankish infantry, but the infantry were themselves soon to be pushed under the hooves of history. Though the Christian cavalry played only a small part and the raiders were allowed to retreat behind the Pyrenees virtually unopposed, the infantry died in the eyes of the rulers of Europe. The advantages of cavalry became all too obvious, despite the fact that they were not properly tested in battle yet. However it would be a mistake to say that the infantry completely left the battlefields by the end of the Dark Ages. On the contrary, infantry would be treading the mud on the roads of war for many more years, though while it remained the most numerous part of any army its reputation was in decline. It was the armoured mounted warrior who was considered to be a true and valuable fighter. This was hardly surprising: could a foot levy ever catch up with a mounted Hungarian robber or a swift Arab appearing like a ghost on his light horse? The infantry was neglected to a great extent and the people had to pay a dear price for their security. Beforehand, every free peasant (Frank literally means free) had to attend an annual war inspection in March, but now these inspections took place in May when the meadows had plenty of grass for the convenience of the horses (“may fields”). The aforementioned Charles Martell introduced a reform whereby the mounted warriors were given plots of land (“Benefitias”) under the condition of life-long military service. From this day on the peasants, having lost most of their former freedoms, had to pay with their labour for the carefree existence of their mounted protector. In this manner the mounted knight first appeared.
However interesting it is, we will not go deeper into the history of knighthood here. So, what did a mounted Frank look like and what were his military techniques? In his appearance he differed little from a heavy infantryman of that époque with the possible exception of the heavy and clumsy diamond shaped shield that covering its bearer from head to toe - hardly useful for a cavalryman. The long and heavy knight’s spear, or lance, was yet to appear. A fairly light Frankish spear must have been used in a similar manner to that of the Napoleonic period either by keeping it fixed underarm or in a raised hand, or sometimes as a javelin. The stirrups known in Europe from the time of the Hun invasions were never found in Frankish burials, but does this mean that this valuable piece of equipment was unknown to the Carolingians? Logically this cannot be so. Without stirrups the horseman would have never raised himself above the infantryman and wouldn’t have remained in the saddle in a direct or indirect sense. As far as the horses were concerned, it’s worth mentioning that by the 8th century A.D. farming in Europe achieved certain successes due to replacing the small house animals of the Germanic tribes mentioned in Roman historic works with bigger animals. The saddle used for warhorses was also modified to better support the horseman. Frankish horses were without any armour protection from spears or arrows, and they did not even have trappings that appeared only by the end of the 11th century during the Crusades.
It’s worth mentioning that in the East horses were often covered by either scale or hauberk armour during this period. Also our readers will be interested to know that the armies of the East, especially those of Byzantium, regularly included mounted archers. Before the battle they were lined up behind the heavies, but in attack they outran them because of their lighter armament and shot at the enemy flanks. The rulers of the West, aware of this tactic, had been unsuccessfully trying to root these skills in their own armies. Several capitularies of Charlemagne survive prescribing that his cavalrymen have a bow as an obligatory armament, but the very quantity of these orders and the fact that they are repeated too often prove that they were very poorly followed. Generally speaking the practice of mounting an archer appeared in Europe long after the Crusades, and finally established itself during the 100-Years War. Despite all this we have included a mounted archer in the set. In addition, taking into consideration the fact that during the period that our set is devoted to, knighthood was still in an embryonic stage, having hardly been established as a separate class, we made a couple of mounted levy almost free of armour. Also we included a figure of Charlemagne no different in armour and clothes from the one we had in our previous set just to keep the classic appearance of the Emperor. The club that one of the warriors is armed with wasn’t a weapon of the lower classes at the time. It is enough to mention that the Bayeux tapestry contains images of William the Conqueror at Hastings armed in this way.
The set will contain 24 figures – 12 cavalrymen in 12 poses and 12 horses in 6 poses. The initial production run is 7,000 sets and the colour is bronze metallic.