Steppe Heavy Cavalry

I know i participated in this debate, Tadsmason still argues there was no differetiation between light and heavy

first evidence of Cataphracts comes from wall paintings in Kwarazmia around 300 BC. Scythians had units of heavily armoured troops that also fought with the Kontus lance as lancers but they were not Cataphracts in the sense that they had no horse armour and not complete body protection.

Sarmatatians and Sythians both had Cataphracts , the Parthians , Bactrians introduced them from Transoxiana

well, if i call Cataphracts as Heavy Cavalry, a certian person on this forum will run the barricades, so i use the term Cataphract...i'm aware that for example Byzantine military terminology refered to fully and only partially armoured cavalry units both as Cataphracts but in "folk language", a cataphract is a fully armoured horseman on a fully armoured Horse.

BTW gentleman, I want to throw in another argument that came to mind lately. empirically, "heavy" cavalry used a different tactic than "light" cavalry, i think so much is clear, BUT that both untis cannot do both tactics at the same time is maybe not so clear...

Originally posted by Imperator Invictus Unfortunately, there is very little real evidence to support this theory and many military historians (myself included) are rather dubious that the type ever really exsisted. They did exist. Both horse armor and rider armor have been found in archaeology or described by ancient writers. There is also a lot of artwork showing heavily armored cavalry, including roman graffiti and Sassanid reliefs. One dispute is how widespread horse armor was, because horse armor appears to be much rarer than human armor. But it appears that there were some units that had fully armored horses.

Fully armoured cavalry exsistd.

My point is that there was little or no real difference between heavy cavalry and catapracts.

Meant to answer this.  cataphractoi was used by Arrian to describe the Alans (a Sarmatian group in Asia Minor) and by several other Roman writers to describe the Roxolani (a Saratian group in Dacia) and  several Roman cavalry units.

In which text do the terms appear. I'm pretty sure "Cataphractoi" has never been used to describe Sarmatian/Alan cavalry, at least in the ancient age.

Mariusz Mielczarek wrote: "Though Greek and Roman writings do not describe it by this term, the name of cataphracti is today also given to heavy armoured cavalry of the Sarmatians and of other states and peoples of the East, not mentioned above, where the presence of heavy armoured cavalry is documented."



Edited by Imperator Invictus - 25-Jul-2006 at 23:10

The original debate wasn't whether light and heavy cavalry existed, it was whether they existed in separate units.

One analogy that they didn't exist in separate unit is like "rifle" units in WWII. For example, among the Germans, you had about 6 guys carrying Mauser kar98 rifles led by 1 sergent carrying an MP40. Obviously, the Mauser  and mp40 had entirely different functions, so at long range, the sergent would simply not do anything. In our case, you would have both light and heavy in the same unit and they split up into different roles.

It would seem foolish for Armoured horses to skirmish,especially if facing fast enemy cavalry

First of all, very few sources directly say whether the cavalry was "heavy" or "light" cavalry, and more importantly, how heavily armored. Secondly, not all heavy cavalry were armored extremely heavily, that is not all of them carried horse armor or very heavy armor. Obviously, extremely heavily armored horsemen could not skirmish, but there is no hard evidence to say how many Mongols were "extremely heavily armored." Moderately heavy cavalry could skirmish, with one example being the Byzantines around 500-600.