A little about Knights and Tournaments.

A Little About Knights and Tournaments.

Part 1.

Knights… Fearless warriors, loyal vassals, protectors of the weak, noble servants of fair ladies, gallant cavaliers… Unstable in battle, false to their word, greedy plunderers, cruel oppressors, wild rapists, boastful ignoramuses… All this are knights.
And it was around these contradictory creatures that the history of the European Middle Ages essentially revolved. Because in those times, they were the only real FORCE. A force needed by everyone – kings against neighbors and rebellious vassals, peasants, and the church; the church – against infidels, kings, peasants, and townspeople; lesser lords – against neighbors, the king, and peasants; peasants – against the knights of neighboring lords. Townspeople, truth be told, had no need for knights, but they always utilized their military experience. After all, a knight is, first and foremost, a professional warrior. But not just any warrior. In every language, "knight" – reitter, chevalier, and so on – denotes a rider. And again, not just any rider, but specifically a heavily armed rider – in a helmet and cuirass, with a shield, spear, and sword. All this equipment was very expensive: back at the end of the first millennium, when calculations were made not in money but in cattle, a set of armor – then not yet so abundant or complex – together with a horse cost 45 cows, or 15 mares. And that is the size of the herd or own stable of an entire village.
But it was not enough to simply take up arms – one had to know how to use them excellently. This could only be achieved through incessant and very tedious training from a very young age (boys from knightly families were accustomed to wearing armor from childhood – full sets for 6-8-year-old children are known). Consequently, a heavily armed rider had to be a wealthy person with ample leisure time. Great landowners could maintain only a very small number of such warriors at court. And where were the others to come from? For a sturdy man, even if he possesses the required 45 cows, does not do so just to trade them for a pile of iron and a beautiful but useless-for-farming horse. A solution was found: petty landowners were obligated by the king to work for a great lord for a certain amount of time, supplying him with the necessary quantity of produce and craft goods, while the latter had to be ready to serve the king as a heavily armed rider for a certain number of days per year.
Upon such relations, a complex feudal system was built in Europe. And gradually, by the 11th-12th centuries, heavily armed riders turned into a caste of knights. Access to this privileged class became increasingly difficult, based now on lineage, which was confirmed by charters and coats of arms. Naturally: who wants to crowd their space and allow outsiders to a fat piece of the pie! And the piece was fat, and grew larger over time.
In exchange for an oath of loyalty to a lord, a knight received land with peasants working it, the right to judge them, the right to collect and appropriate taxes, the right to hunt, the right of the first night, and so on and so forth. He could visit the courts of lords, amuse himself all day long, drink away or gamble in cities the money collected from the peasants. As for duties... During military actions, he served his lord with his own provisions for about a month a year, and usually even less. For "overtime" service, he received high pay. Military loot – trophies, ransoms for prisoners, the prisoners themselves – went to him. In "off-duty time," he could also work "on the side" – hire himself out temporarily to another lord or a city magistrate. Over time, knights began more and more to shirk their duties. Sometimes, under the terms of a fief agreement, a knight had to serve for as long as his food supplies lasted. And so such a brave man would arrive with a ham, make every effort to eat it in three days, and leave for his castle.
But how did knights fight? In different ways. Generally speaking, comparing them to anyone is very difficult, as they were militarily left to their own devices in Europe. Of course, infantry also participated in battles – each knight brought servants armed with spears and axes, and great landowners hired large detachments of archers and crossbowmen. But until the 14th century, the outcome of a battle was always determined by a few lordly knights; the numerous servants – the infantry – were for the lords a necessary but mere support. Knights did not take them into account at all. And what could a crowd of untrained peasants do against an armored professional fighter on a powerful horse? Knights despised their own infantry. Eager to fight a "worthy" opponent – that is, another knight – they trampled with their horses the foot soldiers who got in their way. Knights treated unarmored riders with swords and light spears with equal indifference. In one battle, when a group of knights was attacked by a detachment of light cavalry, they did not even move from their spot; they simply skewered the enemy's horses with their long spears, and only then rode toward the worthy enemy – the knights.
This is where the "real" fight took place – two iron-clad riders, covered by shields, thrusting forward long spears, clash on impact, and from a terrible ramming blow, amplified by the weight of armor and the horse's mass multiplied by speed, the enemy flies from the saddle with a cracked shield and ripped chainmail or is simply stunned. If the armor held and the spears broke, a sword fight began. This was by no means elegant fencing: strikes were rare but terrible. The remains of warriors who died in medieval battles speak to their power – split skulls, severed shinbones. It was for such a fight that knights lived. They threw themselves into such a battle headlong, forgetting caution and basic formation, violating the orders of commanders (though what "orders" – knights were merely suggested to hold the line; they were asked).
At the slightest sign of victory, a knight would rush to loot the enemy camp, forgetting everything else – and for this too, knights lived. It is no wonder that some kings before battle, forbidding fighters from breaking the combat order during the advance and course of the fight due to looting, built gallows for unrestrained vassals as "visual agitation." The fight could be quite long. After all, it usually broke down into an endless number of duels between worthy opponents, infinitely chasing one another.
But what about knightly honor? It turns out a knight may "attack the opponent from the front and back, right and left, in short, wherever he can inflict damage" – so stated the Templar rule. But if the opponent managed to force even a few knights to retreat, their comrades, noticing this, usually fell into a panic flight that no general could stop (nor, for that matter, manage the battle after the attack began). How many kings lost victory simply because they prematurely lost their heads from fear!
Military discipline was not just a weak point for knights – they had none, and it could not be. For a knight is an individual fighter, a privileged warrior with a painfully acute sense of self-worth. He is a professional by birth, and in his trade – war – equal to any of his class, up to the king. In battle, he depends only on himself, and can stand out or be first only by showing his bravery, the quality of his armor, and the agility of his horse.
And he showed this with all his might. For who could point something out to him or command him? The knight knows everything himself, and any order is a blow to his honor. This self-awareness of the knight was well known and felt by generals and statesmen – both secular and ecclesiastical. Seeing that indestructible riders suffered defeats due to their hotheadedness and own will, flying into attack in scattered groups, and knowing that heavy cavalry is invincible when it strikes with its full mass, the state and church administration took measures to bring some kind of order to these upstarts. The fact was also that knights were few. For example, in all of England in the 70s of the 13th century, there were 2750 knights. Usually a few dozen knights participated in battles, and only in large engagements did they number in the hundreds, rarely exceeding a thousand. Clearly, this meager number of full-fledged fighters could not be wasted or scattered on trifles. And so from the end of the 11th century, during the Crusades, spiritual knightly orders began to emerge with strict rules regulating their combat actions.
But the strongest order was, of course, in the bands and detachments of mercenary knights that proliferated in the 12th-14th centuries, offering their services to anyone and looting everyone in their path during peacetime. (It was precisely to fight these bands that the first real regular armies were created in medieval Europe by French kings in the 14th century – small, consisting of different branches of service, where warriors served for pay permanently.) It must be said that all the strictness of military rules and regulations vanished in those sections dealing with the combat actions of knights. That is, strictness existed, but requirements were most general: do not leave or break the formation, try, within reasonable limits, to defend upon failure rather than flee immediately, and do not loot the enemy camp until victory.
So, how did the knightly cavalry fight? To preserve the formation until the decisive moment of the clash, it approached the opponent at a walk; it was "calm and unperturbed, approaching without haste, as if someone were riding with a bride seated in front of them on the saddle," wrote one medieval author. And only after getting very close to the enemy did the knights push their horses into a faster gait. The slow approach also served to save the horse's strength for the decisive charge and clash. Perhaps the most convenient formation, devised long ago for heavy cavalry, was the "wedge," the "boar's head," or "pig," as Russian druzhinniki called it – they, by the way, loved this formation no less than their Western colleagues.
The "boar's head" looked like a column slightly narrowed at the front. It has long been known that leading cavalry in columns is very advantageous, as this best preserves the power of its massive ramming blow. This is not so much a combat formation as a marching one – when the "wedge" cuts into the enemy ranks, the warriors riding in the rear rows immediately "flow" to the sides, so that each rider does not trample those in front but fully demonstrates his combat qualities, as well as the qualities of his horse and weapon. The "wedge" had another advantage: the formation's front was narrow.
The thing is, knights loved to fight very much, but did not want to die at all – neither for a lord nor for the holy church. They were supposed to and wanted only to win. Their armor served this purpose, essentially. The "wedge" served it too. For when a detachment of knights slowly, "step by step," approaches the enemy, it becomes a magnificent target for the opponent's archers. It is well if the opponent has no quality archers. But what if they do? What if they also have excellent long-range, powerful bows? At Liegnitz and at Crécy and Poitiers, Mongols and English literally shot down perfectly armored knights with bows. And in a "wedge" formation, only a few riders in the most reliable protective gear were exposed to enemy shooters.
Yes, knights died very reluctantly. They preferred to flee or surrender as prisoners in case of failure. Very few perished in European wars – single digits, and only in the largest battles deciding the fates of countries – a few hundred.
And it was not just about armor. By the 13th century, knights felt themselves to be some kind of universal order, a caste for whom no territorial borders or citizenship mattered. After all, borders changed all the time; regions and entire states passed from one king to another, while knights sat in the same castles, spoke the French language, and all as one were considered servants of the holy Catholic church. And killing a brother, whoever he was or where he came from, became indecent. To overcome him – knock him off his horse, take him prisoner and, most importantly, get a ransom – that was victory. What use is a corpse? Wars turned into mass tournaments. But they did not fully turn.
The "crude men" – peasants and townspeople fighting in the infantry – did not allow it. Knights gave them no mercy. But then again, they were not own indebted – they took no prisoners. And when combat-effective infantry developed rapidly in the 14th century, fighting in dense formations, unafraid of cavalry attacks and charging into battle themselves with long halberds – knights fled at the mere sight of Swiss "battalions" and Hussite wagons, recounting with horror and indignation unusual bloody slaughters – for among the Swiss, for example, taking prisoners was forbidden under penalty of death. And when knights also began to use deep dense formations more often, so that a detachment turned into an iron porcupine, they were swept away again – now forever – by infantry armed with firearms.
And now let us look at what and how the knights fought.
In our literature, especially fiction, the opinion is widespread that European knightly armament was terribly heavy and inconvenient. Novelists mock knights in every way: poor riders in their narratives cannot even mount a horse – they cannot walk or get up from the ground on their own. But one cannot blame the writers – they were misled by substantial works of military and non-military historians. In reality, knights were not enemies to themselves, and generally, military affairs do not tolerate inconvenience in equipment. And knightly weapons in this sense differed in no way from any other. It is simply that on them, perhaps more than on any other weapon, all the changes occurring with means of attack and defense – dictated by the development of military science, production, and social relations – are visible.
In the 11th century, the equipment of a heavily armed rider took the form in which it existed with minor changes until the 14th century and served as the basis for further armament development. Unfortunately, very few authentic Western European armors from the 11th-12th centuries have reached us, and we must speak of them through images on art monuments.
Judging by these and surviving samples, the overwhelming majority of knights protected their bodies with chainmail. Until recently, many scholars believed, and some still do, that chainmail began to be widely used and made in the West only from the end of the 11th century as a result of the Crusades, borrowing secrets of its manufacture from the East. Before this time, knights wore "inconvenient (why inconvenient?) leather armor with sewn-on iron plates or rings." A few chainmail armors were imported from the East or from Rus'. In reality, however, chainmail was known and manufactured in Western Europe since antiquity and throughout the first millennium of our era. Another thing is that despite all its conveniences, it is not only cut by a sword and axe or pierced by a spear – it is penetrated by an arrow. Therefore, warriors at the end of the first millennium AD often preferred more reliable lamellar and scale armor. After all, they had to fight endless waves of newcomers from the East – nomads armed with powerful Hun-type bows with heavy armor-piercing arrows. But by the 11th century, the last heirs of the Huns – the Magyars – settled down, ending devastating cavalry raids, and large almond-shaped shields were devised for riders, covering them from the nose to the middle of the shin.
Made of wood, covered in layers of leather and crowned with an iron boss – umbo – such a shield reliably sheltered one from arrows; and if a sword or spear cut it, they got stuck in it or even broke, provided the blow was taken on the boss. Here, chainmail, which perfectly protected against accidental blows, came to the forefront. At first, it had sleeves to the elbows, and legs remained open. And in a sword fight or under a hail of arrows, it was easy to lose an arm or leg. The shield did not help – being so large and heavy, it was difficult to position against strikes falling from all sides.
Then at the end of the 11th century, knights began wearing chainmail stockings on their legs, and the mail acquired long sleeves with mittens and a hood, the so-called "hauberk." The complete covering of the knight's body was finished by a helmet. In the 11th century, it almost always had a wide nasal guard and a dome shape, thanks to which sword blows slid off it. In specialized literature, they are called "Norman," but they are the common heritage of all Eurasia, as they developed as a simplified version of the most common helmet in Eurasia during the first millennium, riveted from four or more segments into a dome and equipped with a pointed finial. Early "Norman" helmets were also riveted; later, they were forged from a single piece.