Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

Knights
Knight and related words (whose underlying senses are “boy” and thence
“male servant”) have been used in English since shortly after the Norman
Conquest of 1066 as the equivalents of the French chevalier and its cognates
(e.g., Italian cavaliere, Castilian caballero). All of these words were
derived from the Low Latin caballarius (horseman), which had been used
since at least A.D. 800 in the empire of the Franks to designate a type of soldier
introduced into the Frankish armies ca. 740: a heavy cavalryman, initially
protected by a round wooden shield, conical iron helmet, and mail tunic
or brunia, and armed with a long lance with an iron head and a long,
straight, double-edged slashing sword called a spatha in Greek and Latin
and a *swerdom in Old Common Germanic. At what point in their history
the Frankish caballarii deserve to be called by the modern English name
“knight” is a matter of dispute among historians, but down to at least the
later tenth century it is better to refer to them as “protoknights,” since they
still lacked some of the technical military characteristics of the classic knight
and all of the social and ideological characteristics of classic knighthood. In
most regions where caballarii existed, they did not begin to acquire these
additional characteristics until around 1050, and it is only from that time
that the term knight (whose Old English ancestor was coincidentally first
applied to them in 1066) should be applied to them in any context.
The Frankish caballarii or protoknights had been modeled directly on
the klibanarioi of the Byzantine Empire in southern Italy, who themselves
were derived directly from the cataphracti of the later Roman armies, and
indirectly from the heavy cavalry of the Parthians and ultimately of the Sarmatians
of the third century B.C. The early caballarii resembled their Roman
and Byzantine precursors in being nothing more than cavalry soldiers
who were provided with the best available armor, arms, mounts, equipment,
and training, and who fought in units whose principal purpose was
to overwhelm and terrify their enemies through a combination of weight,
momentum, and virtual invulnerability. The true knights of the period between
1050 and about 1550 continued to function in the same way, using
a greatly improved version of the traditional shock tactics made possible by
technical improvements in their equipment, and the core definition of the
knight always included an ability to fight in this way. Given the nature of
warfare in the period, protoknights and their successors were frequently
obliged to fight dismounted, and became equally adept in the secondary
role of heavy infantry. Nevertheless, although knights eventually adopted
additional striking weapons—the mace, battle-ax, war-hammer, dagger,
and club—they would continue to rely primarily on the lance and sword,
and would never make regular use of projectile weapons like the bow,
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