Arms and Society in Antiquity 19
provide. The great horses had to be fed of course, and natural pasture
was scarce in most cultivated landscapes. But by consuming planted
fodder crops—alfalfa above all—the great horses no longer competed
with humans by eating grain.^19 The cultivation of alfalfa therefore
cheapened the cost of keeping big horses enormously, and made it
feasible for Iranians to maintain a numerous and formidable armored
cavalry on cultivated ground. Such warriors were capable of guarding
local peasants from most nomad raiding parties, and had a clear self-
interest in doing so, since their own livelihood depended directly on
the work of the peasants they protected.
Heavy armored cavalry, Iranian style, was therefore definitely
worth the cost to populations exposed to steppe raids. But where city
walls protected the politically active portion of the population, the
military supremacy that such a system of local self-defense conferred
upon the possessors of great horses was sometimes unacceptable.
Hence the new techniques spread only slowly to the Mediterranean
coastlands. Roman armies experimented with the new style of ar
mored cavalry, beginning in the time of Hadrian (r. 177–38),^20 but
“cataphracts” (as these fighting men were called in Greek) remained
very few to begin with. Moreover, in Roman and early Byzantine
times they were paid in cash rather than allowed, as in Iran, to draw
their incomes directly from the villagers whom they protected and
among whom they lived.^21 A thoroughgoing feudal reorganization of
Byzantine society did not occur until after A.D. 900, lagging far behind
Latin Europe, which had taken that path within a century of the time
that Charles Martel introduced the new style of cavalry to the Far
West in A.D. 732.
To be sure, the Franks used the great horse in a new way. Instead of
carrying bows, the knights of Latin Christendom preferred close-in
combat with lance, mace, and sword. This departure from eastern
- A field planted to alfalfa in effect cost next to nothing, for grain fields had to be
fallowed every other year to keep down weeds. By planting alfalfa in the ground instead
of leaving the soil fallow, a useful crop could be garnered while bacterial action on the
roots of the alfalfa actually enriched the soil with nitrogen and so made subsequent grain
harvests richer than would otherwise have been the case. Even the amount of work
required to plant and harvest a field of alfalfa was not notably greater than the mid
season plowing necessary for a field left fallow; for it was only thus that the natural
seeding of weeds could be interrupted and the soil readied for grain. Alfalfa kept back
unwanted weeds almost as well as mid-season plowing simply by shading the soil with its
leaves.
- John W. Eadie, “The Development of Roman Mailed Cavalry "Journal of Roman
Studies 57 (1967): 161–73.
- This Byzantine policy resembled the way the New Kingdom of Egypt reconciled
the superior technology of chariot warfare with Old Kingdom traditions of bureaucratic
centralism.
