9 - Europe, 1000–1300

Summary

The defining feature of Western warfare in this period was knighthood. This was not because horseback warfare was in any way new in the Frankish lands, or even because the technology of the equipment and use of cavalry had changed in any radical sense, though it is generally assumed that the stirrup appeared as a feature of cavalry equipment at some time in the ninth or tenth century, thus allowing the saddle to become a more effective fighting platform. But the stirrup did not by any means create the knight. What the knight represented was a new social phenomenon which grew progressively more important as generations passed and read new meanings into the status and potential of knighthood.