"The Age Of Cavalry, C. 400 CE–1350" Topic

"The beginning of the age of cavalry in Europe is traditionally dated to the destruction of the legions of the Roman emperor Valens by Gothic horsemen at the Battle of Adrianople in 378 CE. The period that followed, characterized by the network of political and economic relationships called feudalism, was an age during which the mounted arm assumed an ascendancy that it began to relinquish only in the 14th century, with the appearance of infantry capable of taking the open field unsupported against mounted chivalry. Cavalry, however, was only part of the story of this era. However impressive the mounted knight may have been in battle, he required a secure place of replenishment and refuge. This was provided by the seigneurial fortress, or castle. In a military sense, European feudalism rested on a symbiotic relationship between armoured man-at-arms, war-horse, and castle.

The tactical dominance in Europe of the heavy mounted elites had a number of complex causes. It is clear that a basic reorientation of the means of production and of the social distribution of the means of armed violence was involved. Horses required large quantities of grain, and in an agricultural economy where returns on seed grain were as little as 2 to 1, mounted shock action could not have solidified its dominance without improvements in agricultural production. Perhaps ironically, these improvements seem to have involved the development of a means of harnessing the horse to agricultural transport and the plow—particularly beginning in the 14th century, when seed-to-yield ratios began to improve…"
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