This is part one of a two-parter on the experience of horses in war; to make sure you receive part two — or to support this newsletter with a paid subscription — hit the subscribe button below!
The horses never asked for any of this.
Five thousand years ago, they were wild animals, roaming the grasslands. They encountered humans at times, yes, but probably kept a wary distance, as the humans could be dangerous. People, for their part, seem to have long been fascinated with horses. Thirty-five thousand years ago — 25,000 years before humans invented agriculture, cities, and government — we were painting images like these on the walls of caves:
But, around 3000 BCE — a few hundred years before the Great Pyramid at Giza was built — it seems that humans living near the Volga River figured out how to harness the horse. Horses were first used for food — people drank their milk and ate their meat. Then people figured out how to get the horse to do physical labor, hauling loads or transporting people on their backs. The invention of the wheel allowed people to have horses pull wagons.
It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before people figured out how to employ horses in their cruelest activities. In time, horses became an integral part of war.
In War and Peace, just before he tells the story of the Battle of Austerlitz, Leo Tolstoy pauses to think about the Russian Tsar’s horse:
The Emperor’s horse started at the sudden cry. This horse that had carried the sovereign at reviews in Russia bore him also here on the field of Austerlitz, enduring the heedless blows of his left foot and pricking its ears at the sound of shots just as it had done on the Empress’s Field, not understanding the significance of the firing, nor of the nearness of the Emperor Francis’s black cob, nor of all that was being said, thought, and felt that day by its rider.
As the three emperors prepared to fall into Napoleon’s trap, condemning tens of thousands of men to their deaths, Tolstoy took a moment to think about the horses that would also be plunged into the confusion and slaughter. They, unlike the men, had no idea what was happening, or why. Maybe it was better that way.
All of this is to say that the horse — such an elegant, majestic animal — has been man’s constant companion in our darkest and basest endeavors. So, like Tolstoy, let’s spare a moment to think about the horse at war.
Horses first seem to have been used to pull chariots. The chariot was the superweapon of its age — a mobile warfare platform from which warriors could launch spears or arrows. Horses were driven into chaotic battlefields full of other horses, flying projectiles, and churning wheels.
The heyday of the chariot was between 1600 BCE and 400 BCE; I wrote a whole post about chariots a while back, so I won’t repeat myself here:
The chariot fell into decline because people found ways to ride directly on the backs of horses. This probably took place both because people bred horses to be larger and stronger, and therefore more capable of carrying a rider, and because of equipment like the saddle. It’s hard to say exactly when these developments took place, because saddles haven’t lasted in the archaeological record in the same way that the remains of chariots have.
The first society to ride horses into battle may have been the Scythians, a nomadic people who dominated the areas east and north of the Black Sea between 800 and 200 BCE. We can get a sense of how Scythians might have outfitted their horses from this display, showing ceremonial decorations placed on a horse (the decorations date to the third century):
Horses were probably not dressed up this elaborately when headed into battle. We have a few depictions of the fearsome Scythian cavalry. This one is from a Greek pot; the horses look strong and majestic:
This Etruscan figurine, though, shows the Scythian horses as leaner and almost acrobatic:
And this, the most famous representation of Scythian horsemanship, is a gold comb in the Hermitage. It economically represents the chaos of battle, with the horse at the center — wide-eyed, with danger underfoot and on both sides.
The Scythian cavalry terrorized the Greeks and Romans, but the Greeks and Romans soon learned their ways. In these societies, being part of the cavalry — a hippeus in Greek or an eques in Latin — was not just a military role, it was a social class. The cavalry were not just people who fought on horses; they were the people who could afford horses, by definition a more noble and wealthy group.
This Spartan painting of a hippeus gives a sense that these were fairly fancy people:
Among the most elite soldiers in Alexander the Great’s armies were his “companion cavalry.” On the “Alexander Sarcophagus,” created in the 300s BCE — it was somebody else’s sarcophagus, not Alexander’s — artists show scenes from Alexander’s battles against the Persians. Here a Macedonian warrior runs down a trousered Persian; The Persian’s horse crumples to the ground while the Macedonian’s horse rears up, a little crazed.
This mosaic from Pompeii showing Alexander at the Battle of Issus also shows the importance of horses on both sides of the battle.
Once again, the horses do not look very excited to be a part of the proceedings:
Horses were just as integral a part of warfare in eastern Asia. The nomadic peoples of the eastern steppes relied on horses just as much as the Scythians did. Imperial China found itself under pressure from highly mobile horseback archers that could conduct lightning raids and frustrate the larger, slower Chinese armies.
The Mongols perfected this technique, using their horses to dominate Eurasia in the 1200s CE:
China built its own cavalry forces, often using horses bought from the Central Asian nomads in times of peace; it was a challenge for the Chinese military to maintain a large enough supply of horses given its lack of grazing pastures. Perhaps because of this, Chinese cavalrymen sometimes protected their horses with armor, as you can see in this Zhou Dynasty example from around 500 BCE:
This tradition lasted a long time; here’s a Song Dynasty cavalry force about 1500 years later, armored up and ready for battle:
The Chinese weren’t the only society to weigh down their horses with cumbersome but protective armor. The Sassanids in early late-antique Persia outfitted their cataphract cavalry with very heavy — usually metal — armor. These horses weren’t meant to make an army quick and elusive; instead, they turned the horses into heavy battering rams, charging through enemy formations.
Medieval European knights followed this pattern, too, as you can see on this chesspiece from the 1300s. The horse couldn’t have been happy in there — carrying a full-sized man, himself in chainmail, weighed down by armor, with limited ventilation and no peripheral vision, wading into a loud and bloody battlefield.
By this point in history, there were really two very different types of warhorses, each of which had been bred for a specific purpose. Nomadic peoples rode smaller, quicker horses into battle, using mobility to evade their enemies and launch volleys of arrows. More sedentary societies bred horses much bigger, stronger, and slower — these horses were essentially used as tanks on four legs.
This medieval illustration of the Battle of Legnica in Poland between Mongol forces and European knights shows the difference — note how much bigger the European horses are on the right:
Horses have been humans’ close companions for over five thousand years. Unfortunately for them, this means that they’ve had to be a part of our most terrible activities, including war.
Many, many humans have had to fight in wars they wanted no part of, following the orders of distant rulers who were willing to exchange human lives for land or prestige. But let’s spare a moment to think about all of the horses who have been forced to wade into our conflicts, risking their lives amidst the chaos and danger of the battlefield. Nobody ever asked the horses whether they’d like to go to war.
Though the horse was central to ancient and medieval warfare, far more horses were forced to participate in humanity’s modern wars. Next week, we’ll explore the experience of horses in modern, mechanized warfare.
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