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Toni Šušnjar
Location: Split, Croatia Joined: 03 Feb 2020
Posts: 12
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 Posted: Fri 10 Jul, 2020 10:44 am Post subject: |
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| Martin Kallander wrote: | | Quote: | | cataphract lancers were likely used against cavalry |
While you probably aren't wrong about this, the manuals aren't specific on how the lances are used. We only know that 16 out of the 504 riders in the cataphract wedge carried lances. They were probably used against whatever the cataphracts engaged, not just cavalry. |
Manuals do show that lancer cataphracts were deployed on wings of the formation, whereas mace-wielding cataphracts were ones used to penetrate infantry lines in a charge.
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Martin Kallander
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| Posted: Fri 10 Jul, 2020 11:11 am Post subject: |
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| Toni Šušnjar wrote: |
Manuals do show that lancer cataphracts were deployed on wings of the formation, whereas mace-wielding cataphracts were ones used to penetrate infantry lines in a charge. |
Just to be clear I'm not saying the primary purpose of these lancers wasn't fighting other cavalry, just that the manuals don't tell us why 16 riders on the wings are given lances which means we can only speculate.
When I said they probably also fought infantry I merely meant it like this: Where do you think those wings go when the four ranks that only carries swords and maces have charged into the enemy infantry? They obviously clash with the infantry as well and since the manuals don't explicitly say they discard their lances at that point the safest assumption is they engage the infantry with the lances.
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Henry O.
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| Posted: Fri 10 Jul, 2020 3:45 pm Post subject: |
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| Pieter B. wrote: | 'Outranging' enemy infantry seems a bit pointless to me.
Great if you decide to completely halt before opposing infantry and try to fence with them but then again if that happened the charge evidently failed. If you charge it does seem more or less irrelevant what weapon you are using.
Say your lance is a meter longer than that of the infantry opposing you. Travelling at a moderate speed of 14 miles per hour that means your range advantage is going to last all of a second before you and your horse successively have to deal with and/or slam in the three or more ranks of successive infantry.
From what I gather the Byzantine cataphracts were specially equipped to deal with infantry and given maces for this job. In the late 1590s Maurice of Nassau felt confident dropping lancers and having all his cavalry equipped with pistol and sword despite being in the midst of the so called pike and shot period.
As for infantry pikes in the 15th and 16th century. These seem to have started out a little shorter at around 12-13 feet at the beginning and lengthening to around 18 feet as a result of infantry competition, not because they had to be grown to deal with cavalry.
I suppose this does suggest that cavalry equipment (with the exception of cataphracts) was largely determined by the need to fight other cavalry with infantry really being an afterthought. Likewise most infantry also seem to be equipped primarily to deal with other infantry. The menavlion or the pikes used by the Burgundians to defend their archers being an exception but perhaps one that proves the rule. |
What made it dangerous according to Humphrey Barwick was that if the lance struck the footman first he would usually either drop his pike or else jerk the point up into the air and miss the horse completely.
For the development of infantry pikes it's maybe a bit of both. With the swiss, it supposedly goes back to around the time of the battles of Sempach in 1386 and Arbedo in 1422 where the Swiss foot armed with halberds and/or short pikes had suffered heavy casualties from men at arms who had dismounted and were fighting with their long lances in both hands This convinced the swiss to gradually field much larger proportions of pikemen in addition to using longer pikes. This is also around the period that breast plate technology is getting pretty good and the attached lance rest starts appearing, which greatly improved the amount of force that could be delivered by a couched lance and potentially made it a little bit easier to handle much longer or heavier lances.
There may have been some tradeoffs though regarding what the lance was best suited to do. If I remember right the 17th c. polish hussars continued to use two different sizes of lance, the extremely long, hollowed out lances, and a shorter 10-12 foot kind of lance that was used against cavalry. According to some accounts at the battle of Fornovo in 1495 the Italian heavy cavalry were at a disadvantage when clashing directly with the French heavy cavalry because although their lances may have been longer they were also "hollow and light" while the french lances weren't.
The super heavy "Men-at-arms" in the 16th century were considered good against both cavalry and infantry, but since the weight of their armor had the potential to tire out their horses pretty quickly you might only be able to get maybe a couple of good charges out of them at the most., so they'd generally end up being placed behind all the other cavalry as the very last line of reserve. So in the very front you'd usually have mounted arquebusiers, pistoliers, or stradiot-type horsemen, then the "lancers" who were generally armed in the exact same way as the men-at-arms only without any horse armor or greaves, and then at the very back the actual men at arms. So the idea was that each of these would be going out first to do skirmishing or conduct repeated attacks again and again wearing down the enemy and looking for weak spots so that the heavy crushing charge by the men-at-arms if it eventually takes place has the highest chance of success.
Although in practice much of the time the battle would already be pretty much over by that point with the men at arms unable to take part in the pursuit, neither of which is very good if you are a young nobleman looking to earn military prestige in combat. So it often became the case that even when the men-at-arms were nominally still around most of them were preferring to join the fight as lancers or eventually even just curiassers. Which is how you get incidents like at the battle of Pinkie cleugh where Patten claims that many of the english cavalry did have horse armor with them but were so eager to get to the fighting that none of them had bothered to put any of it on before charging the scottish pikemen.
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