Crusader Horses

Horses were an absolutely essential — indeed defining — component of a knight’s equipment. The German word for knight (ritter) derives directly from the word for rider (reiter), while the French and Spanish terms, chevalier and caballero, derive from the word for horse (cheval and caballo respectively). While a knight might temporarily be without a mount, without a horse a knight could not fulfill his fundamental function as a cavalryman. Indeed, the symbol of knighthood was not the sword (infantrymen had those as well) or even the lance (they were throw away pieces of equipment), but the (golden) spurs tied to a knight's heels during the dubbing ceremony. Richard Barber notes in his seminal work The Knight and Chivalry that being financially in a position to outfit oneself with arms and horses was crucial to knightly status. David Edge and John Miles Paddock argue in their comprehensive work Arms and Armour of the Medieval Knight that “[a knight’s horse] was the most effective and significant weapon the knight had; the basis of his pre-eminent position in society and on the battlefield.”

In short, knights needed horses — significantly not just one horse but several.  This short post provides a overview of a knight's equine needs.

The warhorse or destrier, is the most obvious of a knight’s horses. This was the horse a knight rode into battle, joust or tournament. This horse was his fighting platform. It was trained to endure the shock and noise of combat. In later years, destriers were sometimes also trained to lash out at enemies with teeth and hooves thereby becoming, as Edge and Paddock note, a weapon as well as a fighting platform. Knights rode stallions, not mares or geldings. This was in part because stallions were considered more aggressive, but also because riding a mare or a gelding detracted from a knight’s image as a virile warrior.

Destriers had to be strong because they needed to support a fully armored knight and because they had to withstand the press of horseflesh in a charge and endure uninjured the impact of charges by other horses. They particularly had to have powerful haunches to absorb the shock of frontal collisions with enemy cavalry or in a joust. This does not mean, however, that destriers were massive, heavy horses similar to modern draught horses.  Archeological and artistic evidence suggests that the warhorses of crusader knights were no more than 14-15 hands high (a hand is four inches and horses are measured at the withers, the bone over the shoulders at the base of the neck).  Furthermore, they had to be very responsive to their riders, and that means sensitive and agile. They can best be compared to modern quarter horses.

Destriers were not a specific breed of horse, so arguably the defining characteristic of a destrier was simply its function — and price. If a knight thought a horse had what it took to be a fine destrier, he was willing to pay a large premium for that — and anyone in possession of a horse with the necessary qualities was going to ask a commensurate price for it as well.  In short, destriers were outrageously expensive. They cost 4 to 8 times the price of lesser or ordinary horses. They cost as much as the armor a knight wore. They could cost as much as the annual knight’s fee — in short roughly the annual income of the gentry.  The equivalent is the price of a top-line BMW or Mercedes today.

Like any horse, destriers were vulnerable to colic and injury, however, which meant a knight was well advised to have more than one destrier — if he could afford it.  Even if he could and did, however, he was likely to have a favorite. The destriers of knights in contemporary romance and legend all have names: Baucent, Folatise, Babieca etc., but perhaps no description is more famous that the Dauphin’s praise for his horse before Agincourt in Shakespeare’s Henry V. “When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots on air; the earth sings when he touches it…. It is a beast for Perseus: he is pure air and fire….”

For all their value and importance, however, a knight spent far less time mounted on his prized destrier than on his palfrey(s). Palfreys were riding horses, transportation not weapons, the means of getting from point A to point B. Since medieval knights rode everywhere -- to oversea their estates, to visit neighbors, when hunting or hawking, to attend court or to go courting. In short, a knight spent literally countless hours with his palfrey(s). Palfreys were bred not for strength and fierceness but for smooth gates, endurance and common sense. They were probably much the same size as destriers, but lighter — marathon runners rather than sprinters, wrestlers more than boxers. 

Since these horses were just as likely to get colic or injured, the need for more than one palfrey was just as compelling as with destriers, but given the substantially lower price of palfreys the possession of more than one was considerably more common. Knights would normally have possessed at least two and wealthy nobles likely had stables of horses at their disposal for transport purposes.

The last and lowliest of a knight’s horses was his sumpter or packhorse. These were essential for transporting equipment, notably armor when it wasn't being worn.  A knight did not travel light. He needed a tent for camping out, a bedroll for sleeping on, basic utensils for cleaning, grooming and cooking, a change or two of clothes, supplies of food and — in more arid climates — water as well. Depending on the purpose and duration of travel, a knight might even take with him simple furnishings to ensure comfort while on campaign or traveling long distances. All that was carried on pack animals, either sumpter horses, mules or donkeys. We know little about these poor beasts of burden beyond that they were common and cheap. They were “hacks” largely interchangeable, nameless, and unloved. 

Dr. Helena P. Schrader holds a PhD in History.

She is the Chief Editor of the Real Crusades History Blog.

She is an award-winning novelist and author of numerous books both fiction and non-fiction. Her three-part biography of Balian d'Ibelin won a total of 14 literary accolades. Her most recent release is a novel about the founding of the crusader Kingdom of Cyprus. You can find out more at: http://crusaderkingdoms.com 

Horses play a role in the award-winning Jerusalem Trilogy:

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The Duties of Kings to their Subjects and Vassals

When we think of feudalism, we tend to think of a hierarchical state with a king at the top enjoying all the benefits. In my entry on The Ideal Feudal State, I pointed out that feudalism was in fact more decentralized and consensual than is commonly thought. Today I want to draw attention to some of the duties of kings.

At the most elementary level, of course, kings owed their subjects what all governments owe their citizens: security and justice.  The security component consisted (then as now) of protection against foreign enemies (invasions, Viking raids or terrorism etc.) and protection against lawlessness and crime. Then as now that first duty bled into the second as fighting crime entails administering justice, but justice is and was not confined to fighting crime alone. Justice also includes a just administration of property, labor, scarce resources such as water, and more. 

The parallel to modern society is imperfect, however, because feudal society was both more personal (men took oaths to individuals not to abstract ideas) and more stratified. Feudal society was not based on the principle that “all men are equal before the law” but rather on the notion that rights and duties depended on one’s social position or class.

Fundamentally, society was divided into three classes or estates: 1) those who worked, 2) those who prayed, and 3) those who ruled/administered (not those who fought, as I’ll explain below). While this stratification oversimplifies both the society itself and attitudes of the time, it is nevertheless a useful structure for understanding feudal society and with it the duties of kings.  

The workers were responsible for the production of (first and foremost) food, other necessities and luxuries. The more sophisticated the society, the more complex this class was, so that it came to include everything from serfs working the land to great merchants and craftsmen commanding fortunes and ruling over armies of tradesmen, apprentices, servants and laborers. Being a member of the “Third Estate” was not the same thing as being poor! But the Third Estate was viewed as subordinate to the other two: in spiritual matters to the Second Estate and in secular matters to the First Estate.

The men who prayed (the Second Estate) were the clergy, and again this segment of society included poor (e.g. parish priests who lived little better than the peasants they served) and “princes of the church” with vast estates and fortunes. Unlike the Third Estate, which was fragmented into different professions with their own hierarchical structures, before the Reformation all members of the Second Estate belonged to one, universal (“Catholic”) church. All members of the Second Estate thus operated in a single, well-defined hierarchy headed by the pope. Since the Catholic Church required celibacy of its members, churchmen could not bequeath their lands, fortunes or offices to their offspring (even if, as we know, they often had them!) On the other hand, because members of the Second Estate were drawn from the other two, and the Church as an institution often provided a means for the children of poor parents to rise to positions of power, wealth and influence.  

The First Estate is often described confusingly as a class of warriors or “those who fight.” While even contemporary sources refer to the First Estate in this way, the description is misleading. On the one hand, 50% of this class, the women, did not fight — but they were still members of the First Estate and often wielded great power, including power over men and fighting forces.  On the other hand, the bulk of fighting men in any host were not drawn from the First Estate, but rather from the Third; they were men engaged in the profession of arms as mercenaries or feudal levies called up for a set period of time. 

It is more useful to look at the First Estate as the secular ruling class, the people who exercised for and in the name of the king his fundamental duties of providing protection and administering justice. Because one man (or woman) could not alone perform either function, the king depended upon the First Estate to provide military capability, enforce the law of the land, and administer local justice. The First Estate was effectively the executive branch, and as such it had a special relationship with the king. Members of the First Estate were not mere subjects of the king, they were also his deputies. Understanding this helps explain why the king and his nobles had a special relationship, a relationship founded on an exchange of oaths. 

To be precise, the exchange of oaths was only with the upper strata of the First Estate, with the barons or tenants-in-chief. They were called tenants-in-chiefs because in feudal theory all land belonged to the king and he merely loaned it to his designated deputies, albeit on a hereditary basis. This meant the land passed from the original recipient to his heirs in perpetuity — until the line of the original recipient died out or he or his descendants failed to fulfill the feudal duties associated with the loan of land (the enfeoffment). In either case the land was forfeit to the crown.

The tenants-in-chief generally controlled far more land than they could possibly manage and owed many more fighting men to the crown than they could personally equip and provide (often in the hundreds), so they in turn lent out their lands (again on a hereditary basis) to other men, who owed them — the barons, not the king — fealty. The lowest tier in the First Estate were simple “knights” holding a “simple” knight’s fief, meaning a fief whose annual income was sufficient to support only a single knight (which was not one individual but a fighting unit, as I explained in an earlier post.) If a fief became too small or poor to support the expenses of a knight, the owner slipped out of the First Estate and down into the Third, becoming nothing but a tenant farmer. (This was to become a problem in the latter Middle Ages.) The landowners holding land from a baron or bishop were called “rear tenants” and belonged to the First Estate, but not to the baronage. 

However, often lost beneath the customs, ceremony, romance and idealism of chivalry is the fact that the relationship between a king and his barons (and between lords and their rear-tenants) was fundamentally one of fee (fief) for service. The Kingdom of Jerusalem shines light on this relationship because many of the fiefs in the Kingdom of Jerusalem were “money fiefs,” highlighting the monetary component of feudal service.  Whereas elsewhere it was more common for a king (or lord) to bestow land that was expected to produce enough income to support a set number of knights, in Jerusalem the king frequently paid a set amount of money outright in exchange for the service of a set number of fighting men. Significantly, La Monte points out in Feudal Monarchy in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem 1100 to 1291, many money fiefs were granted with the provision that “if the revenues specifically granted [were] not forthcoming, the amount promised [would] be made up from...the general revenues of the kingdom.” The distinction between a fief and wages in these circumstances is approaching minimal, albeit a fief could be bequeathed, while wages could not. The more common practice of granting land deemed to be worth a certain income, of course, obscured and weakened this monetary component of the king’s duties to his vassals because the value of land could vary over time based on many factors from acts of God (draught, flood, fire etc.) and through good or poor management.

Regardless of the nature of the fief, the relationship between the king and his barons/tenants-in-chief was a direct and personal one. It requiring the renewal of the oath each time a monarch died and was succeeded. The oath of a vassal was furthermore, neither unconditional nor unlimited. For example, in Jerusalem the king could not command feudal service outside the borders of the kingdom, either for offensive operations (e.g. against Cairo or Damascus) or even in the defense of the neighboring states of Tripoli, Antioch and Edessa. Another important limit on service was that no man was required to personally render knight's service after he reached the age of 60. Critically — and often overlooked nowadays — is that the oath of fealty was a two-way bond. Not only did the vassal swear loyalty to the king, but vice versa. Thus, Richard I of England, as the liege lord of the Lords of Lusignan, was obligated by feudal custom to support Guy de Lusignan’s claims to the throne of Jerusalem.

While the case of a vassal being anointed king elsewhere and then needing support is a rare one, a far more frequent occurrence were attacks on a vassal's lands — by brigands, raiders, enemy troops.  Attacks might come from a common enemy like the Saracens or Vikings, or simply from a neighbor, who owed allegiance to a different king (think of the situation in France during the long wars between the Plantagenets and Capets, or the Hundred Years War).  Simply put, if a vassal did not have the military strength to defend his own territory, he could call upon the king to come to his aid. In the Kingdom of Jerusalem, where the threat of Saracen invasion was ever-present, the constitution explicitly stated that failure on the part of the king to protect the lands of a vassal automatically absolved the vassal of his oath. 

In general terms, then, the duties of a king to his barons was payment and protection, but in the Kingdom of Jerusalem there was (at least) one more duty — one that particularly appeals to me, that of “restor.”  Restor was the duty of the king to replace or reimburse any knight or noble whose horse was mutilated or killed in battle while serving the king. Indeed, it was one of the most important duties of the Marshal of Jerusalem to assess the value of all knights’ and noble’s horses before any campaign/engagement, to assess the value of horses captured during an engagement, then then either replace horses injured or killed with captured horses of equivalent value or reimburse the knight/noble the monetary value of the lost stallion.  This custom highlights the importance horses had to the military establishment and social status in the feudal age; see my entry on crusader horses.

Balian d’Ibelin’s stallions are important characters in all three parts of my biographical novel about Balian, and the duties of kings and vassals is natural a fundamental component of the historical developments.

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The Invisible Component of Medieval Armies: Squires

All illustrations in this entry are from the The Book of the Lovelorn Heart) by Renee d'Anjou and painted by his court painter Barthélémy d'Eyck, 1457.

In a military context, the term “knight” did not refer to a single individual but to a fighting unit composed of a knight and at least one destrier (warhorse), palfrey (riding horse), packhorse and squire. Wealthier knights could afford two or more of each (or all) of these supporting elements. Yet while most people understand that a knight was without a horse lost his utility on the battlefield, the importance of squires is often overlooked. Today I’d like to redress that.

The problem starts with the definition of the word “squire.” Long after squires had lost their utility and role on the battlefield, the term came to mean much the same thing as “gentleman.” It was used simply to refer to rural landowners who were neither knighted nor noble. With more time, it became nothing more than a title of respect, applied to magistrates and justices and the like.

Understanding the role of medieval squires is further complicated by the fact that it was not constant. Rather — like the definition and role of knights themselves — it changed over time and across geography. Thus, while the notion of a young man of noble birth serving in the household of another (usually related) nobleman is the most familiar face of the medieval squire today, in fact in the 11^th and 12th century squires were often waged servants of unspecified heritage.

In short, the term does not describe a clear and distinct class of medieval society, but rather a function or a job that might be performed by a duke’s son or a hired man of low birth. Furthermore, there was nothing automatic about a squire moving from his position/status to that of knighthood. A squires who lacked sufficient means to support himself even as bachelor knights, or who had no prospect of being retained by a wealthier lord, might remain a squire all his life. Another example of this lack of promotion prospects were the squires of the Templars. They were quite simply hired men, who did not take Templar vows and were not subject to the Templar Rule. They could not become Templar knights unless or until two prerequisites were met: 1) they had been knighted, and 2) they had taken vows and been admitted to the Order.

Nor should we forget that squires performed a variety of functions not related to warfare. One of the most important, was that of serving their lords at table, specifically carving the meat and pouring the wine. They also cared for and prepared their knight's clothes, helping him dress and undress. They were messengers and errand-boys, sent both to deliver information, letters or goods and to collect the same. They were often essential go-betweens between their knight and the ladies of his affection, but they were just as often sent to buy things or pay tradesmen and the like. They might also be expected to entertain their employer with music, reading or just playing dice, checkers or chess. In all these functions, they did not seriously distinguish themselves from ordinary servants and their status would not have been elevated above that of other hired men had it not been for their essential services in warfare. 

It was because a knight could not perform his military role without a squire that squires had a higher status, but it was also because that role took them to the very brink of — if not into — battle that serving as a squire gradually evolved into an apprenticeship for knighthood. Thus, while it was not necessary that a squire been a youth of noble birth, it was necessary for a youth of noble birth to serve as a squire if he wanted to have a chance of knighthood.

The militarily relevant services of a squire were first and foremost the care of the all-important warhorse, upon whose health, soundness, and temper a knight’s life depended. Squires were responsible for seeing that their lord’s precious (and very expensive!) warhorse was in optimal condition. This started with making sure he was properly fed and watered, but also meant ensuring he had clean straw in his stall and a blanket in cold weather. It further entailed ensuring that his feet were trimmed and properly shod, that any injuries were treated, that colic was prevented (to the extent possible), and, of course, that he was groomed and tacked up whenever needed.

The second military function of a squire was the care of his lord’s equipment, including his tack but also his arms and armor. A lazy or inept squire, who failed to ensure his knight’s sword belt, scabbard, hauberk, coif, chausses, helmet etc. were in the best possible condition, could cost a man his life. Care of medieval equipment was very labor-intensive and often required specialty knowledge. What kind of fat was best to prevent chainmail from rusting without stinking infernally? What was the best method of removing sweat from the lining of aventails or coifs without getting the chainmail wet (and so likely to rust)? And the like. 

Both of these duties (horse and equipment maintenance) were particularly important and difficult when a knight was on campaign, moving across long distances, sleeping in strange inns or castles, tents or in the open field. Furthermore, when campaigning, a squire also had to look after his lord’s belly and comfort, to ensure the knight himself was as fighting-fit as possible.

Finally, when battle itself was joined, the squire tacked up and brought forward the destrier, turned it over to the knight (helping him mount), and handed up a lance. Ideally, the squire then retreated to the “rear” (the baggage train) with his knight’s palfrey to await developments. His duties were not, however, over. He might be called upon to bring his knight another lance, or even another horse (if he had one), to bring him water during a lull in the fighting, or to drag him off the field if wounded and apply first aid, or, lastly, to recover the body if he were killed.

These duties were anything but risk-free. Quite aside from the risks involved in caring for high-strung, bad-tempered stallions, the responsibility for the horses often entailed foraging for fodder — a duty that frequently took squires into enemy territory. One of the instances during the Third Crusade in which Richard the Lionheart was nearly captured or killed started with the Saracens surprising “the squires” while they were foraging. (Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, Book 4, Chapter 30).

Furthermore, there were often circumstance that precluded a safe retreat to the rear. Ambushes generally placed everyone from the baggage-cart drivers to the commanders at equal risk. Likewise, campaigns deep into enemy territory made engagement without the opportunity to separate the squires from the other fighting men a greater probability. At the Battle of Hattin, the Frankish army was completely surrounded, and the squires had no choice but to fight in the very thick of the battle.

As a result, squires represented not only an essential component of a knight’s battlefield effectiveness but also made up a significant portion of medieval army strength.  They are, however, largely invisible to us today precisely because they were treated by contemporaries as a part of the “knight.” Thus, when describing the composition of a medieval army chroniclers recorded so-and-so many knights and infantry; sometimes (if being particularly precise) they might talk about bowmen vs. men-at-arms, or mention “pikemen” or other infantry, based on the weapons they carried. Only on very rare occasions do squires emerge from the dust of battle, as in the above example, where they are identified as the cause of an engagement involving the English King. 

Nevertheless, because the number of squires were at least equal to the number of knights engaged they represented a significant component of the fighting strength of medieval armies. They were not as heavily armored as knights, and did have the same caliber of horse, but the more experienced squires were undoubtedly skilled — and mounted — fighting men, who, when circumstances allowed, could make a significant contribution.

This is evidenced by a number of incidents in which squires were knighted because of their actions in battle. Of course, battlefield knightings were not confined to squires, at least not in the early centuries of knighthood, but there was a bias in favor of knighting squires before or after battle in the Late Middle Ages because by then squires were increasingly youth or young men of good family pre-destined for knighthood anyway.

In my novels set in the Middle Ages, I try to give due credit to the role of squires:

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