Why Did Western Europe not use Horse Archery?

It's funny how every invading Nomadic army since the Huns, when they invade Europe stop in Hungary raid a little around, but fail to destroy or dominate the sedentary states further west, and the Huns was only able to force that dominance as long as they had some Germanic vassals who could enforce their rule.

Maybe people should just accept that western Europe, which honestly is the part of Europe which mattered historical, is not really a area which lent itself to fast takeover by Nomadic armies and their warfare. Eastern European cavalry was always more impressive than western one, but the first East Europeans (the Russians) who did well against West Europeans was ones who fielded large infantry armies.

Of course let's say that the horse archers is the kind of supermen at warfare. What are the investment? How do it compare to heavy cavalry which we know was extremely efficient against infantry. Let's say that you can either invest years in training some dude to use shot a bow from a horse back or you could simply find a second son of a nobleman, who is a trained horseman, have been trained in trained in the tradition melee weapons. So you simply just needed to pay for that guy's upkeep. I don't know if the horse archer is better than heavy cavalry and he may be cheaper when he have been trained, but it's less time consuming to use a kind of warfare, which the general population (or a minority among them) train for indirect or direct.
 
It's funny how every invading Nomadic army since the Huns, when they invade Europe stop in Hungary raid a little around, but fail to destroy or dominate the sedentary states further west, and the Huns was only able to force that dominance as long as they had some Germanic vassals who could enforce their rule.

Maybe people should just accept that western Europe, which honestly is the part of Europe which mattered historical, is not really a area which lent itself to fast takeover by Nomadic armies and their warfare. Eastern European cavalry was always more impressive than western one, but the first East Europeans (the Russians) who did well against West Europeans was ones who fielded large infantry armies.

Of course let's say that the horse archers is the kind of supermen at warfare. What are the investment? How do it compare to heavy cavalry which we know was extremely efficient against infantry. Let's say that you can either invest years in training some dude to use shot a bow from a horse back or you could simply find a second son of a nobleman, who is a trained horseman, have been trained in trained in the tradition melee weapons. So you simply just needed to pay for that guy's upkeep. I don't know if the horse archer is better than heavy cavalry and he may be cheaper when he have been trained, but it's less time consuming to use a kind of warfare, which the general population (or a minority among them) train for indirect or direct.
I think the important point is oportunity costs are different for different societies. For horse nomads horse archers are almost free. Every man is superb horseman and archer with a string of horses, or else he is not a man. Main cost to using them for war is if something catastrophic happens you could destroy the whole tribe. If you are a settled people who regularly have to fight such you probably end up with an armoured horse archer. Hideously expensive per man to train and operate but can defeat the raiders often enough to make it risky to attack.
Western europe never regularly faced such raids and probably never had societies organised enough to pay for a crust of cataphracts to keep the nomads out. Instead they had knights, expensive but the cost is born by the fief, they of course fought each other mostly.
 
They say that no 'horse archers thread' is considered legitimate if it doesn't have the following quote:


Plutarch, The Parallel Lives
The Life of Crassus

And when Crassus ordered his light-armed troops to make a charge, they did not advance far, but encountering a multitude of arrows, abandoned their undertaking and ran back for shelter among the men-at‑arms, among whom they caused the beginning of disorder and fear, for these now saw the velocity and force of the arrows, which fractured armour, and tore their way through every covering alike, whether hard or soft.

…the Romans could neither see clearly nor speak plainly, but, being crowded into a narrow compass and falling upon one another, were shot, and died no easy nor even speedy death. For, in the agonies of convulsive pain, and writhing about the arrows, they would break them off in their wounds, and then in trying to pull out by force the barbed heads which had pierced their veins and sinews, they tore and disfigured themselves the more.
Thus many died, and the survivors also were incapacitated for fighting. And when Publius urged them to charge the enemy's mail-clad horsemen, they showed him that their hands were riveted to their shields and their feet nailed through and through to the ground, so that they were helpless either for flight or for self-defence.


That's how it felt - being softened by the horse archers.
The Battle of Carrhae, 53 BC
.
 

Quote where I said that, then.

They say that no 'horse archers thread' is considered legitimate if it doesn't have the following quote:


Plutarch, The Parallel Lives
The Life of Crassus

And when Crassus ordered his light-armed troops to make a charge, they did not advance far, but encountering a multitude of arrows, abandoned their undertaking and ran back for shelter among the men-at‑arms, among whom they caused the beginning of disorder and fear, for these now saw the velocity and force of the arrows, which fractured armour, and tore their way through every covering alike, whether hard or soft.

…the Romans could neither see clearly nor speak plainly, but, being crowded into a narrow compass and falling upon one another, were shot, and died no easy nor even speedy death. For, in the agonies of convulsive pain, and writhing about the arrows, they would break them off in their wounds, and then in trying to pull out by force the barbed heads which had pierced their veins and sinews, they tore and disfigured themselves the more.
Thus many died, and the survivors also were incapacitated for fighting. And when Publius urged them to charge the enemy's mail-clad horsemen, they showed him that their hands were riveted to their shields and their feet nailed through and through to the ground, so that they were helpless either for flight or for self-defence.


That's how it felt - being softened by the horse archers.
The Battle of Carrhae, 53 BC
.

A rhetorical description by an author who, as far as we know, had never been in battle against horse archers, might not be the best evidence. Plus, you may want to look at the aftermath of Carrhae, when a Parthian army trying to invade Syria was defeated by Cassius (the same one who later assassinated Caesar) and forced to retreat. The fact that the Romans were able to sack Ctesiphon on five separate occasions might also be relevant.
 

SRBO

Banned
The general consensus seems to be that until the development of gunpowder, horse archer based armies are superior to any other type, mainly thanks to their ability to inflict casualties from a distance and withdraw at will. Significant mounted archery traditions emerged in a diverse range of peoples and geographies from the Eurasian steppes to Persia and Japan. However, to my knowledge Western Europe never utilized horse archery to a significant degree and instead stuck with heavy and light melee cavalry. Why did the warrior class of medieval Europe not adopt horse archery? They had a tradition of highly trained mounted warriors, and were familiar with horse archery and its devastating effects thanks to encounters with the Huns, Mongols, and Persians. Did Europe's geography make horse archery unfavorable? Perhaps specific features of war in Europe such as the level of fortification or reliance on peasant levies made them less effective or difficult to introduce? Could there have been a sort of cultural blind spot to using mounted archers thanks to the legacy of Greece and Rome's infantry based armies? Or perhaps my initial premise is wrong and horse archer based armies are not as formidable as I have been lead to believe?

They were adopted where it could be adopted.

Europe has a huge variety of terrains in a relatively small place, with many mountainous areas where horse archery is not very useful. There's also the fact that it's easier to slaughter a bunch of grass people with a big cannon than to fight them with their own style so they win. There's also the main reason that Mongols/other Asians used it so much was because their land was often objectively garbage tier before ore was discovered, and only able to support a perpetually moving people until we gave them knowledge of growing crops in tricky areas
 
why did the Romans use horse archers, and why didn't the Germans
From what I know the first Roman horse-archer detachments appeared as "ethnic" units recruited from the non-Roman population who were "natural-born" horse-archers. But in decades (and even centuries) the units got transferred or/and the initial tribes lost interest to serve the Empire or just because of the general Roman recruiting principles but in the end this resulted in recruiting men from different ethnic groups into these specialized units. And in spite of them being from sedentary 'nations' they got trained by their elder comrades and thus the horse-archery tradition was carefully preserved. (Although if possible the natural-born horse-archers were preferred for recruitment, especially in emergency, when the Romans didn't have years for training their rookies.)
You can hardly imagine something like that in the medieval Western Europe, I guess.
 
There's also the fact that stirrups and improvement in saddles improved the use of melee weapons, improvement in saddles enable riders to put more force behind their weapon without risking falling from the horse, while the stirrup improved the balance and made it easier to use both hands. So heavy cavalry became better with these technological improvements, which may also be a major reason why medieval Europeans didn't continue the Roman use of Horse archers, even if we ignored the whole lack of nomadic groups to recruit them from.
 
why did the Persians (use horse archers), and not the Arabs.
I guess you mean the Sassanian Persians here.
Actually it took a long time for the Persians themselves (meaning 'ethnic' Persians from 'Persia proper') to master horse archery. And their heavy horse was still better than their horse archery in the end.
The (Achaemenid) Persians bordered nomadic horse archers for centuries, then they were dominated by the Parthians (excellent horse archers) for centuries as well.
* That sounds like a recipe for "what Europe needed to use Horse Archery" by the way.

The Arabs...
The Arabs had a shorter history of bordering horse archers' peoples (while in Arabia proper, before their Islamic expansion). They were not subjugated by the horse archers' peoples, at least not for long.
So no wonder...
Later having their empire they found it easier to use 'ready made' Turkic horse archers.

..So having considered this, I don't think we should be discussing nomadic armies, for that reason. They operate under different constraints.
We should really instead be talking about armies of settled societies that had bow-armed, mounted elites. Those societies would never have the majority of all warriors as bow-armed mounted elites, but they definitely used them. After that we should be contrasting them to the societies that chose different approaches. That way we're talking about the tactical possibilities of horse archery and the cultural acceptance/avoidance of the tool rather than how demographics and economics of settled vs. nomadic societies differ.
... Mongol vs. French is a really really impossible comparison to make.
As a matter of fact I cannot see what's wrong in comparing Mongol vs. French. After all they had a good chance to meet each other on the battlefield if the Great Khaan Ugedei had lived a couple of years (or so) longer.

But, ok, ok, I got your point.

When speaking about settled entities we should have in mind that there are horse archers and horse archers.
I mean in (the Great) steppe it is pretty easy and simple - you're either a good horse archer or a dead horse archer; you know, too highly competitive environment.

Among sedentary peoples it is not that easy: if you see (hear of) a horse archer you can be sure of a few things only - a guy can ride a horse and he can shoot an arrow and... and that's it, nothing else is for certain.

A 'sedentary' horse archer might use his bow as a foot soldier only, using a horse just for transportation (like a dragoon); or he may shoot from his horse while it is still, not moving; he may be able to shoot from his horse while riding; he might use a so called 'Parthian shot', whatever. It's usually safe to suppose that he is not able to use tactics of faint retreat though.
 
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