Mounted Combat/Useful Notes: Difference between revisions
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On the flip side, however, a horse is a big target. Archers on foot have a much bigger target to aim at than their mounted counterparts, and if the horse was felled, the horse's rider faced a painful tumble, after which still had to get up before some infantryman could finish him off. If the horse fell ''on'' its rider, it was over. Furthermore a horse is not as stable a fighting platform as solid ground, and riders were vulnerable to being toppled; the heavier the armour of the rider, the worse this was for him. Not to mention the number of accounts of wounded horses charging off the battlefield as their bemused rider was carried off the field with the terrified animal!
Horses, however, are generally used en-masse in battle. The horse began to supplant the chariot around the 9th century BC as Iranian tribes were recorded using bows in battle, but it wasn't until the invention of the [
Cavalry remained relegated to judiciously timed flank assaults and archer support, however, until the coming of the late Roman period, when the Huns proved that heavy cavalry could beat heavy infantry. (This was one of the factors, incidentally, which sealed the still infantry-heavy Roman army's fate... though the Eastern Romans managed to adopt a much more cavalry-heavy army.) After the collapse of the Western Roman and Hunnic empires, the Normans initially were amongst the first mounted soldiers who had a decent chance of giving an infantry formation serious pause for thought from the front, breaking the dominance of the infantry soldier through Europe's dark ages, though they preferred to soften such formations up with hails of javelins from horseback and, when that failed, archer support, before punching through the weakened lines. As time wore on and armour (and possibly more crucially, the archer component) got better, this light javelin was replaced by the couched lance, the iconic arm of the medieval mounted knight.
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That said, The [[Polish Soviet War]] and the [[Red October|Russian Civil War]] before that, had considerable use of cavalry / dragoons. In general eastern Europe was more cavalry country then western, and the age of the cavalry reached its conclusion later there.
All that said, mounted cavalry has continued to be used off-and-on into the 21st century, though later examples end up being cases of [[Schizo
Also, it is a common spelling error to refer to men riding horses in battle as "Calvary". [[You Keep Using That Word|Calvary is a hill in Jerusalem]]. Easy way to remember the spelling: In the war movies, you always hear them talk about "Armored Cav" or "Airborne Cav", or talk about "Cav Troopers". Never "Cal".
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