"Take shield and armor and rise to help me"
Psalm 34: 2
Military affairs at the turn of the eras. Do not think that at the turn of the Middle Ages and the New Age, absolutely all the cavalry put on armor and armed themselves with pistols and arquebusses. On the contrary, many subspecies of light cavalry arose, and national subspecies, specifically related to the situation in a particular country, but immediately fell into the field of knowledge of the commanders of other states. They also began to be hired, so that over time, the names of the national units became internationalized and began to denote just one or another type of cavalry.
Hungarian hussars: every twentieth
For example, Hungary, whose king Matthias I Corvinus (1458-1490), spent a lot of energy on the war with Maximilian I. Hungarian archives contain a whole list of payments related to the second half of the 15th century, which military officials made to soldiers of Corvinus's army. And here in it there is an image of a lightly armed horseman, with a long spear, sword and compound bow, sitting in a high oriental saddle and dressed in a colorful Renaissance costume with feathers and a characteristic shield in his left hand. It is written next to it that it is "hussar". That is, such hussars with spears and bows apparently fought … against the imperial cuirassiers and reitars.
Hussars served in the cavalry not only in Hungary, but also in Poland, Lithuania, Bohemia and other eastern countries, although nowhere else these people were mentioned under a special name. In Hungary, the name Hussars was probably originally applied to any soldier called up to serve by the Hungarian king. However, during the reign of Matthias Corvinus, hussars meant a special and easily recognizable type of horseman who served in the hussar detachments. Later, their name spread to neighboring states.
There are several hypotheses about the origin of the name hussar. It is attributed to both the Avars and the soldiers of Byzantium. However, many historians believe that the root of the name is related to the Hungarian word husz, meaning twenty. When the king called on the nobles to fulfill their feudal obligations to the crown, they had to arm one warrior for every 20 recorded able-bodied serfs. The same was true for the free royal cities, and for the fishermen on the Danube, who were supposed to supply people for the royal fleet.
Mathias later replaced the unreliable feudal army with more loyal mercenary troops. Together with the Bohemian infantry and the German armored cavalry, the most numerous were light Hungarian horsemen, who were called hussars already purely by tradition. Once a lightly armed rider means a hussar. Only earlier the hussars were formed on the basis of feudal law, but now they have become mercenaries.
There was no other country in Europe whose history and destiny were so closely associated with horses and riders as Hungary. Much of its territory, now known as the Pannonian Valley (and once called the Gateway of Europe), saw the Huns, Avars, Magyars, Tatars and Cumans march, and they all left many traces of their military experience and riding skills here. Hungary itself could only be conquered or defended on horseback, so life in these places has always been associated with riding skills. It is understandable that such a historical situation greatly influenced both the appearance and the manner of the battle of the Hungarian hussars.
In battles to fight against the Turks there is no better horseman than stradiots
In the 15th century, Venice was a rich city-republic and managed to gain control over the eastern shores of the Adriatic thanks to its advantageous geographical position and powerful merchant and military fleets. After the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 and the subsequent fall of the Byzantine Empire, Venice captured many islands in the Aegean Sea and fortified its possessions in the eastern part of the Adriatic. As a wealthy city, she could maintain a professional army that kept her neighbors at bay. At the peak of its power, the republic had 200,000 citizens, and it ruled over an area inhabited by 2.5 million people.
As the Ottomans moved further west, Venice faced raids by the light horsemen of Delhi and the Tatars, whom it could not successfully fight. In 1470, the Greek and Albanian stradiotti or estradiotti offered their services to Venice - light armed horsemen who already had experience of war with the Turks, knew the tactics of Turkish riders, and themselves … fought in the same way.
From the stradiots, detachments of 100 to 300 people were formed, which were located in the garrison cities that lay on the routes of possible Turkish invasions. Stradiots were mobile, they acted suddenly and decisively, so they were best suited for reconnaissance and border protection.
Later, under the name of the stradiots, Venice and other Italian states (Milan, Siena, Pisa, Genoa) adopted the equestrian detachments of Croats and Hungarians, and they were commanded by such famous commanders as Hunyadi Janos and Miklos Zrigny. At the Battle of Fornovo (1495), 2,000 stradiots attacked from the rear and destroyed the supply lines of the French army. At the Battle of Agandello (1509), the largest cavalry unit of the Stradiots numbered 3,000 horsemen, and at Pavia (1525), 500 Stradiots attacked the French position from the left flank and thereby contributed to the overall victory.
The Italian states, which could not afford to buy the services of the stradiots, had to compensate for this in other ways, for example, in 1480 Naples decided to hire 1,500 Turkish light horsemen, which was cheaper, but the Spaniards used to hire Guinette riders of Moorish origin, although in In 1507 they also hired 1000 stradiots.
The equipment and armament of the stradiots was a mixture of eastern and western. Only Croats wore a local type of sword called the skjavona, while all other light-riders used sabers of a wide variety of origins. Their full armament consisted of a long spear, an oriental composite bow, and a saber. The use of a shield and other protective equipment was optional for warriors, and helmets and chain mail were not widespread.
Vlach cavalry
The first inhabitants of the territory that we now call Romania called themselves the Wallachians, and they formed three independent states on it at once: Wallachia around 1324, Moldavia in 1359 and Transylvania at the beginning of the 15th century. At first they were vassals of Hungary, and then turned into a battleground for the interests of Hungary, Poland, Austria and Turkey. The Ottoman Turks also appeared on the borders of Wallachia at this time, but finally it came under their rule only in 1526, after the Battle of Mohacs. Prince Vlad Tepes (1418 - 1456) (also known as Count Dracula) gained his fame primarily due to his cruelty in the fight against the Turks, and it was from him that the Turks learned to put their prisoners on stakes, and not kill them at once. After the Turkish occupation, the Wallachians shared the fate of all peoples occupied by the Turks. But there were also their own characteristics, for example, local feudal lords (rulers) often rebelled against the invaders and went into the mountains and forests together with their armed detachments.
Several modern engravings by de Bruyne, made between 1575 and 1581, help us today to reconstruct the appearance of the Wallachian cavalry.
It was also light cavalry, which borrowed much of its equipment and horsemanship from the Ottomans. In addition to teaching their horses to walk, trot and gallop, the Vlachs taught them to walk like camels, simultaneously moving both legs to one side. Even today you can find horses using this gait, but this is considered a bad trait.
From the end of the 16th century, the Wallachians served as mercenaries both in the army of the Ottoman Empire and in the armies of its enemies - Poland, Hungary and Russia. They were organized into squadrons (or hundreds) of about a hundred people. Once upon a time there were 20 hundred of them in the Polish service in Ukraine, and a bull's head was a popular motif on the flags of the Wallachian units. Like the Ottomans, they refused to use firearms for a long time, and their main weapons remained the spear, saber and composite bow. For protection, they wore chain mail shirts and used a light round shield.
Under the dragon flag …
And it so happened that during one of the many Italian wars between 1552 and 1559, the French army occupied Piedmont. The French Marshal de Brissac, who was threatened by the Spanish troops, ordered his brave infantrymen, arquebusiers and musketeers, to mount their horses and thus brought them out of the blow. Thus, he created a kind of mobile infantry, which used horses only for movement and fought on foot, like ordinary infantry. In the 17th century, other states followed the example of France and formed mounted infantry units, calling them dragoons. In one story about the origin of this name, the French endowed one of these new units with a dragon pennant, often used in Byzantium and the Carolingian state. According to another theory, their name comes from the short-barreled musket they used called the dragon.
The first dragoon regiments were organized during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), although the Dutch had dragoons as early as 1606 and the Swedes in 1611. Their organization and armament were almost identical to the infantry units. The first three regiment commanders were named the same as in the infantry - colonel, lieutenant colonel and major. Dragoon regiments usually had 10 to 15 companies, each of which numbered about 100 people, which made them stronger than their real cavalry regiments, which rarely had more than 500 soldiers.
In the first decades of the 17th century, the uniform of the dragoons differed little from the clothing of the infantry musketeers. Actually, it could not be called a uniform, just people tried to dress the same in order to save money. After all, the clothes for the regiment were ordered by the colonel and they were sewn to order. Shoes and stockings were replaced by boots with spurs, and the hat was sometimes replaced by a helmet, but this replacement hardly allowed them to fight on a par with the men at arms; moreover, only the officers had pistols, while the privates had muskets and swords. Also in the dragoon's equipment was a small pickaxe that could be used to tie a horse to it when the rider was acting as an infantryman. It is interesting to note that until 1625, the Austrian imperial dragoons included pikemen in cuirass and helmets, as well as officers with halberds. Dragoon horse horses were small and cheap and could not withstand real cavalry horses. From time to time, the dragoons were taught to shoot on horseback, but it was more of a training "just in case." Nobody specifically aspired to such a battle.
True, the Swedish dragoons were an exception: their main role was to provide fire support for the cavalry, and they rarely dismounted in battle.
