Warhorse 'Production'?

I've been reading Charles Oman and have been struck by the amount of warhorses that die. I'm always reading how chargers are mega-expensive and difficult to come by, I'm under the impression of a fighter or tank being similar in relative cost and importance.

Apparently during the first Crusade the knights lost virtually all of their warhorses before they even got to the holy land, but captured 2000 chargers during an early victory. Similarly at Crecy the English archers killed thousands of chargers in a single afternoon. Does anyone know how these warhorses were 'produced', that they were lost so prolifigately yet captured in such numbers? Were there well organised studs which churned out large numbers of warhorses, or did each landed cavalryman breed his own in an ad-hoc manner? Where did all the horses come from to equip the armies of a country like Egypt or Outremer, which don't strike me as the sort of places you'd breed a lot of horses? I'm under the impression that Byzantium got a lot of horses from its Anatolian territories, which was 'livestock ranching' country, is that true enough?
 
Does anyone know how these warhorses were 'produced', that they were lost so prolifigately yet captured in such numbers?
Given the rate at which some of the local 'studs' are turning out TBs and Arabs numbers are likely to be the least of the problems.

Okay, let's take a more serious look at it now: Going on most modern breeds you're talking a usable lifespan of ~20 years for a horse (maybe up to 25 including light trail riding, but thats certainly not applicable to a warhorse). Depending on breed and intended use you're talking about a horse becoming useful (i.e. both physically mature enough to be ridable and sufficiently well trained) between 2 year old (TB trained for racing) and 5 years old (more typical). On this basis I'd think it wouldn't be too difficult for a middling noble to supply himself and his underlings with a useful number of mounts and a steady number of replacements with a dozen or so brood mares.
 
Warhorses got destroyed in wars to the huge loss of their owners. Think of them like modern strategists think of fighter planes or main battle tanks - expensive things that die at way too fast a rate. Replacements were always a logistical headache.

One thing that seems to have been true universally is that the powerful kept and bred horses. It's very much a skilled profession and requires a number of staff and a lot of resources (grain for feed, pasture, stabling) that were not available to the average knight/vassus/thegn. Horses were within the gift of the great and coveted by their followers - good arrangement. By the high middle ages at the latest, horse breeding was also a money investment. The buyers were often people who by virtue of their status were expected or required to have warhorses and the suppliers landed gentry or noblemen, often selling off the surplus of their own stables.

Horses were already in relatively short supply. Even in areas where horses did agricultural labour, they were expensive investments, and where they didn't, they were basically useless eaters competing with humans for scarce oats or barley and with sheep and goats for grazing. Warhorses tpook years to train and in many cases simply could not be had in sufficient quantity. This was not at all uncommon. Some governments developed complex systems for ensuring enough remounts, and even so, it is more than likely not every knight went into battle with a fully trained mount.

If you want to get into detail, I recommend Ann Hyland's Equus (NOT the play) and The Medieval Warhorse. Her conclusions aren't all universally accepted, but she knows what she talks about.
 
The bottleneck for warhorse production is training: it takes years of highly skilled labor to train a good warhorse. A warhorse is expected to do several very unnatural things for a horse (run over other large mammals, run headlong towards a dense row of pointy things, don't panic and run away when you're in pain and people around you are making sudden loud noises, etc), and to obey commands smoothly and unhesitatingly under an immense amount of stress. Horses may have been expensive to breed, but it's the training that really makes warhorses scarse and expensive (far moreso than a ploughhorse, a packhorse, or even a riding horse).
 
For just this reason, there were laws (in England at least) saying that each man of rank had to have at least x number of different types of horse. For instance, I seem to recall that a Duke was obliged to have something like 4 chargers, plus two females to breed, and 12 destriers plus breeding females, and 20 rounceys, or thereabouts. Others, of course, were sold on by the few nobles who managed to keep large numbers, though many were bought from abroad - horse markets could have horses traveling across Europe in a series of trades iirc. So in effect, the higher nobility were able to keep themselves in business, while the knights and lordlings who weren't able (and thus weren't legally obliged) to keep numbers of breeding horses would buy the low-quality horses who had been sold on.
 
I've read that Byzantium had large imperial studs, and I'd assume that the big, well-organised Muslim empires would have similar arrangements. How much was the warhorse trade tied with the rest of the economy? I'd imagine that by the high middle ages in the west there would be enough trade and commerce to have a large and politically important warhorse trade.

To what extent is a charger a charger, or a charger? The 1st crusaders captured 2000 chargers early on in their campaign, were they able just to hop on these horses and go for it by and large? What of the differences one reads about between the shock cavalry of different states; the Franks were the heaviest and were easily able to charge Egyptian mercenary lancers. So would dismounted crusaders just be able to jump on Egyptian steeds and go for it, or were the Egyptian horses too small or slight? I've also been told that the training was different, that the Byzantines and Muslims didn't train their horses to bite, rear and kick like the westerners.
 
I've read that Byzantium had large imperial studs, and I'd assume that the big, well-organised Muslim empires would have similar arrangements. How much was the warhorse trade tied with the rest of the economy? I'd imagine that by the high middle ages in the west there would be enough trade and commerce to have a large and politically important warhorse trade.

Most big states had either a number of stud farms or a system by which they could ensure a steady supply through tax in kind. Much of Western Europe was an outlier, though. Remounts were managed at a fairly low level. That had advantages - you always had someone with a horse - but also disadvantages. I don't think that Plantagenet England would have as easily borne the loss of large numbers of horses as Byzantium or the Sultanate of Rum did.

Horse trading was a big thing, both politically and economically. It did not just apply to war horses, though - a warhorse is just a horse that's been through Basic and Ground Combat school, after all. IIRC there were restrictions on selling horses abroad in several states.

To what extent is a charger a charger, or a charger? The 1st crusaders captured 2000 chargers early on in their campaign, were they able just to hop on these horses and go for it by and large? What of the differences one reads about between the shock cavalry of different states; the Franks were the heaviest and were easily able to charge Egyptian mercenary lancers. So would dismounted crusaders just be able to jump on Egyptian steeds and go for it, or were the Egyptian horses too small or slight? I've also been told that the training was different, that the Byzantines and Muslims didn't train their horses to bite, rear and kick like the westerners.

I don't think that the sizte differential was that huge. Our idea of the monster horse carrying the plate-armoured giant are quite different from what really went on, and the idea of what size an ideal warhorse was were broadly similar around the Mediterranean (not that you could always get it). The only significant difference at the time would have been between steppe ponies and 'real' warhorses. Islamic cavalry troops used shock tactics just like Eureopeans did, they just didn't rely on them to the same extent. There could be a lesson for free-market efficiencies in there, but I don't think I ought to hijack this thread.

Training would have been the bigger issue, but here we have to keep in mind that warfare unfolded at a much slower pace. People had time to get used to new mounts. Also, fighters on both sides were extremely well trained as horsemen. It's not like getting used to a different mount would throw the too badly, especially given a few weeks to get acquainted.
 
From what I understand your average charger was about 15 hands, but strongly built like a Friesian.
 
I don't think that the sizte differential was that huge. Our idea of the monster horse carrying the plate-armoured giant are quite different from what really went on, and the idea of what size an ideal warhorse was were broadly similar around the Mediterranean (not that you could always get it). The only significant difference at the time would have been between steppe ponies and 'real' warhorses. Islamic cavalry troops used shock tactics just like Eureopeans did, they just didn't rely on them to the same extent. There could be a lesson for free-market efficiencies in there, but I don't think I ought to hijack this thread.

??But the usual description of Crusader vs Saracen battles is that IF the Crusaders can charge into the enemy they win due to the weight and strength of their horses and their heavy armour. However, the Saracens on lighter, faster horses could often avoid the charge and prick them around the edges until the heavy crusader chargers were exhausted.

That sure sounds a like a major difference in size to me.
 
It was the same thing at sea. You'd see hundreds of ships fighting, and, if somebody got really unlucky, you'd sometimes see virtually the entire fleet sunk or trade sides. Rome came to own the Med with that kind of stroke of luck against Carthage. There was no such transfer of hundreds of vessels at once during the Napoleonic Wars, but certainly, a huge proportion of the several-hundred-strong Royal Navy was captured vessels. Big captures continued to WWI, when more ships started to be done in by subs that couldn't control the ships they hit, and thus couldn't take them as prizes. WWII cemented that, with even more effective uboats, and planes accounting for many of the rest, another way where you can't take a ship.

The experience angle was a little different, though; it was the crews that had the vital experience. Athens lost a war that way; it had had total naval domination until it launched a strategically stupid war on Syracuse that both created a naval rival in Syracuse and sank, killed, or imprisoned ALL Athens' best sailors. A couple of years later, Athens lost all its fleet in being and thus a war through a duffer action when the crews were all onshore eating.
 
??But the usual description of Crusader vs Saracen battles is that IF the Crusaders can charge into the enemy they win due to the weight and strength of their horses and their heavy armour. However, the Saracens on lighter, faster horses could often avoid the charge and prick them around the edges until the heavy crusader chargers were exhausted.

That sure sounds a like a major difference in size to me.

I haven't seen that in any primary source yet. What I've read is all about the bravery and impetus of the knights, not the size of their horses (some Arabic sources instead emphasise the staying power and bloody-minded aggressiveness of Frankish infantry, not considering their cavalry of great value). I guess it is possible that a statistical difference existed - Westerners valued strength and aggressiveness, and rode stallions by preference, while Saracens preferred a biddable, handy horse and often rode mares or geldings into battle - but there is no indication I know of to think it was that noticeable. A lot of the 'iron men on big horses against nimble pony-archers' narrative hails from the 19th century.
 
From what I can gather this preference for stallions, perhaps some protection for the horse and extensive personal armour meant that when the Franks could actually mount a good charge against their Islamic opponents they could ride down the lighter Islamic horsemen. I understand that the Byzantines were similar with their greater wieght of charge than the Islamic cavalry they faced.
 
From what I can gather this preference for stallions, perhaps some protection for the horse and extensive personal armour meant that when the Franks could actually mount a good charge against their Islamic opponents they could ride down the lighter Islamic horsemen. I understand that the Byzantines were similar with their greater wieght of charge than the Islamic cavalry they faced.

THe weight of armour is a bit problematic. This is true throughout histpry, BTW - the difference between light and heavy cavalry does not mainly lie in physical weight. Around 1100, Western Europe was just beginning to catch up with the Islamic world in terms of armour prevalence as far as we can tell - knights typically wearing a nasal helmet and mail shirt that covered the arms and torso down the thighs, with maybe lower leg protection and long sleeves for the most modern gear. Around the same time, that kind of protection was also common in the Middle East, with what looks like greater preference for forearm protection. Daviod Nicolle (e.g. in Medieval Warfare Source Book II) can't be trusted to be an impartial witness, but he makes a very compelling case and he knows what he's talking about.

Now, in terms of actual additional weight, most reenactors and archeologists agree you can't fight effectively if you carry much more than 40kg of armour on you. If we assume the minimum protection of helmet, shield and short mail shirt (probably on its way out even in 1000) weighs in at around 15-20 kg (figures from Junkelmann), the difference is 20-25 kg. Adding in horse armour, we can maybe jack it up to a 35-40 kg difference. (Note that horse armour seems to have been much more common in the Middle East than Western Europe at that time). That still falls within the range of weight differences between horses of broadly the same height, and this is the maximum. Or, to look at it differently - there is no appreciable difference between a 70kg man on a 450kg horse wearing 20kg of armour, and a 70kg man on a 450kg horse wearing 45kg of armour in terms of thrust at the lance tip.

IMO the main effect of armour was psychological - armoured cavalry would much more readily charge the enemy. That also explains why Western European horsemen, who relied much more heavily on charging the enemy, developed so much of it and came to prefer such large horses. By 1090, though, that development was still in its early days and the Middle Eastern powers led the West in military technology. I don't think it can be safely projected backwards.
 
What about shield size? The Franks favoured a big, kite-shaped sheild and AFAIK Byzantines and Muslims a smaller, round shield like a targe.

In my mind these things are cumulative; a touch more personal armour, bigger sheild, stallions with a bit of armour or a trapper against a bit less armour (perhaps more scale or lammelar armour in your average unit), smaller shield and mares gives the Franks that bit more 'smash' when the impact occurs. Does that make sense?
 
What about shield size? The Franks favoured a big, kite-shaped sheild and AFAIK Byzantines and Muslims a smaller, round shield like a targe.

In my mind these things are cumulative; a touch more personal armour, bigger sheild, stallions with a bit of armour or a trapper against a bit less armour (perhaps more scale or lammelar armour in your average unit), smaller shield and mares gives the Franks that bit more 'smash' when the impact occurs. Does that make sense?

Kite shields are also seen in Middle Eastern depictions, but basically, yes, the effect is there. And again, I would say it is more psychology than physics. The shield doesn't make a big difference (your typical ghulam carries a small round shield because he needs both hands free for the bow, your clibanophoros because he needs both hands for his lance, but the latter delivers one helluva punch). Frankish cavalry tactics depended much more on the aggressive charge, so they optimised their equipment for it, but more importantly they trained their men and horses for it. Middle Eastern cavalry also charged (Usama b. Munqidh describes a memorable, if somewhat silly, moment) but only under certain circumstances and not usually as an opening move.
 
So where does the disparity lie? The Strategikon says that the Lombards/Franks (and Oman says that much of these comments can apply to Crusaders) can rise down cataphracts when on even terms. The Crusaders would confidently attack Fatimid Lancers at 10 -1 against odds. Now obviously the Franks must have hit bloody hard for the Byzantines to acknowledge it, but 10 times harder is pushing it, so did the Fatmid lancers just suck arse? And to bring the thread back to the start again, were the Fatmid lancer's horses crap so leading to this poor performance?
 
Well, horses in general (not just warhorses) were pretty much an important strategic resource back in older eras - "constant demand" and "mass production" would be surprisingly fitting terms...
 
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