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Andalusian light cavalry refused to employ them until the 12th century, nor were they used by the Baltic turcopoles of the Teutonic Order in the battle of Legnica (1241). An example of combined arms and the efficiency of cavalry forces were the Medieval Mongols. Important for their horse archery was the use of stirrups for the archer to stand ...
In the Medieval period, the mounted cavalry long held sway on the battlefield. Heavily armoured mounted knights represented a formidable foe for reluctant peasant draftees and lightly armoured freemen. To defeat mounted cavalry, infantry used swarms of missiles or a tightly packed phalanx of men, techniques honed in antiquity by the Greeks.
The High Medieval period also saw the expansion of mercenary forces, unbound to any medieval lord. Routiers , such as Brabançons and Aragones , were supplemented in the later Middle Ages by Swiss pikeman, the German Landsknecht , and the Italian Condottiere - to provide the three best-known examples of these bands of fighting men.
Infantry armed with spears could counter the threat posed by enemy cavalry. At other times pits, caltraps, wagons or sharpened wooden stakes would be used as protection from charging cavalry, while archers brought down the enemy horsemen with arrows; the English used stakes to defend against French knights at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.
The pike square was used to devastating effect at the Battle of Nancy against Charles the Bold of Burgundy in 1477, when the Swiss defeated a smaller but more powerful armored cavalry force. The battle is generally seen as one of the turning points that established the infantry as the primary fighting arm in European warfare from the 16th ...
The infantry would counter-march to make a refused center, while the cavalry would hold or advance to envelop or outflank the enemy. This was similar to the tactic Hannibal employed at Cannae . The chiliarciai were deployed not in the classic Roman checkered Quincunx pattern but in a Hellenistic long line with enveloping flanks.
A shield wall (scieldweall or bordweall in Old English, skjaldborg in Old Norse) is a military formation that was common in ancient and medieval warfare. There were many slight variations of this formation, but the common factor was soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder and holding their shields so that they would abut or overlap.
In medieval warfare, sturdy stakes were stuck into the ground at the bottom of long lines of ditches, positioned with a sharp end pointing up diagonally, in order to prevent cavalry charges in a given area. Even if the stakes were spotted, horsemen would be forced to dismount and effectively give up their advantage as cavalry, and become easier ...