THE SADDLE AND STIRRUP

At first, horses were bred for meat and mares for milk, and even at this early stage, they were already domesticated animals whose reproduction was controlled by humans. Sometime around 4,000 years ago, horses were domesticated by the Sumerians, who harnessed them to their war chariots. These were not designed to move in the midst of a battle; instead they were used only to transport leaders and heavily armed warriors to the battlefield, and it makes sense to compare the chariots not to the Roman quadriga, but to a rather clumsy cart.

Strangely enough, chariots themselves were invented even earlier, but they were pulled not by horses but by kungas (a cross between a domestic donkey and a wild onager), which were obedient to the driver, fast, and tough. The only problem was that kungas could not reproduce, requiring people to repeatedly catch a wild onager and mate it with a domestic donkey. Thus, the solution to the problem of finding a reliable engine for chariots was clear—wild horses, whose reproduction and breeding did not present such difficulties, would have to be domesticated.

Domesticated small horses were used as pack animals in the Middle East between Mesopotamia and Asia Minor from about the twentieth century BCE. Who had the brilliant idea to use horses as a means of transportation, that is, for the transport of noble and not-so-noble riders, and where this happened is difficult to pinpoint. Nevertheless, there are at least two theories about the primacy of horseback riding.

According to one theory, the first people to tame wild horses and the first to sit on their backs were the representatives of the Botai culture, named after the archeological site near the Kazakh village of Botai. They lived there around 5000 BCE, even earlier than the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, and it was them who began to master the art and science of controlling a horse harnessed to a chariot.

However, the horses of the Botai people were not related to modern riding horses but were instead ancestors of Przewalski's horse, which later became wild. They did not have saddles, but they did have something like bridles.

It is not very clear where or how the Botai culture disappeared along with their riding skills—either they were conquered and killed or they were assimilated into other peoples. In the Middle and Late Bronze Age, no traces of this culture were found, and there are also no signs that the people who later lived in these places rode horses. Only wild Przewalski horses remained as a living reminder of the past.

The second theory, supported by the research of archeologist Volker Heyd of the University of Helsinki in Finland, suggests that the first horsemen appeared in the fourth millennium BCE, far to the west of Kazakhstan. The representatives of the Pit Grave culture (or Yamnaya culture), who lived on the steppes of western Eurasia, already knew how to harness a horse. It should be said that historians, unfortunately, do not know what these ancient peoples called themselves since they had no written language. That is why archeologists must name them either by the place where they were first found (like the Botai people) or by the way they buried their dead (the Pit Grave culture). We must assume that if one of these ancient people were alive today, they would be very surprised to hear that there was a chapter in a textbook about them!

In any case, these nomads domesticated and bred horses, and so they had to learn to ride horses to drive herds—how else could they keep up with the herd? Archeologists have studied the bones of people who lived on the Eurasian steppes between 3021 and 2501 BCE, found in Yamnaya culture burials, and on twenty-four of the 217 skeletons studied, they found injuries that could have been caused by a fall from a horse, a hoof strike, or a horse bite.

To eliminate the possibility of error, six sets of criteria were developed, which, when combined, would provide a relatively reliable indication that the individual was a horseman during his lifetime. In addition to these injuries, the list also included the characteristic wear and tear caused on bones and joints by repeated impact and compression during a rough, jerky ride. They also noted wear on vertebrae and distinctive marks on the pelvic and femoral bones at the attachment points of muscles, indicating the physical strain usually experienced by riders.

Cavalry, more or less in the modern sense, began to emerge from Mesopotamia, and about 3,000 years ago, such a military branch appeared in the Assyrian army. It is not accidental that in Arabic the horse is called faras, while both the cavalry and the people of the Persians are called farusiyya, making the Persians literally ‘a nation of horsemen’. Incidentally, the English word ‘horse’ may have come from the same source as well. The Parthian kingdom (located in the territories of modern Iran and Iraq), with its capital in the ancient city of Nisa, was the source of one of the specially bred breeds of war horses, which were called Nisean horses.

The Hittite text Kikkuli of the Land of Mitanni, found on a clay tablet from the ruins of the archive at the city of Hattusa, describes the 214-day training cycle for war horses. This cuneiform tablet was created around 1400 BCE and is one of the earliest known records of systematic equine training. Of course, the early cavalry needed more complex equipment than shepherds or caravaners—a simple bridle is not enough in battle. But the invention of such a harness took so long to occur that the cavalry of the ancient world was frozen in the position of an auxiliary group of troops, inferior in combat importance to infantry, archers, and chariots.

Around 700 BCE, the Assyrians began using dense, soft blankets to protect the horse's back from chafing and the rider from the horse's acrid sweat. This was more comfortable for both the horse and the rider during long campaigns. Such blankets were later used by many of the world's cavalry, from the hetairoi (translating to ‘companions’) of Alexander the Great to the Roman cavalry. The blanket was fastened to the horse with chest and tail straps.

The first saddles, very primitive at that time, were invented by the horsemen of the Pazyryk culture, who lived on the territory of what is now Kazakhstan, Russia, and MongoliaiThe famous mummy of the Siberian Ice Maiden of the fifth century BCE, also known as the ‘Princess of Ukok’, after the name of the plateau where it was found, belongs to this ethnic group. During excavations of settlements of this culture, in addition to a wooden deck with a mummy of a woman, six skeletons of horses in saddles and harnesses were found in the burial chamber. The horses were apparently meant to accompany their noble mistress to the afterlife.

Nomadic Sarmatian tribes used soft leather saddles. The nomadic Xiongnu people of the steppes north of China invented hard wooden saddles by the end of the third century BCE at the latest. The Huns, the likely descendants of the Xiongnu, also used saddles on a wooden frame with high, arched buttresses (called louts) at the front and back to hold the rider in place during battle. There is even a theory that the Romans lost battles to Attila's warriorsiAttila was the leader of the Huns in the fifth centuryin part because they did not know about saddles and used the same blankets as the medieval peoples.

Roman cavalry could only be used to flank and pursue the retreating enemy, not for devastating frontal attacks. Without reliable support in the saddle, fighting with a spear or even a sword was uncomfortable, but the risk of falling from the horse while awkwardly swinging a weapon or while parrying the enemy's blow was quite real. Thus, while the legionary infantry, with its dense formations and shields, remained the mainstay of the Roman armies, the cavalry was the foundation of the army for the nomadic Huns.

And yet, in 451, at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, the Romans, in alliance with the Visigoths, managed to defeat the Huns and temporarily halt their triumphant advance across Europe. The nomads had retreated to their fortified camp, and Attila ordered a funeral pyre to be built from the wooden frames of their horse saddles. He intended to burn himself alive rather than fall into enemy hands, and in the end, he didn't. However, it was thanks to the Hun invasion that hard saddles with front and back louts spread to eastern Europe. And it was these saddles that made the cavalry the most powerful part of any army, giving the rider freedom of movement and a secure seat.

With the emergence and rise of armored knights in the Middle Ages, the structure of the saddles also changed. In order to prevent the ‘iron warrior’ from flying out of the saddle with a hard lance strike—action, as we know, is equal to reaction—saddles were made with very high louts. The front lout, made of iron-clad wood, reached up to the knight's chest, and he held on to the loop of the lout with his left hand. The rear lout became a high backrest up to the middle of the back, providing reliable support.

Mass cavalry units, which did not use bulky and heavy armor, later required different types of saddles. The Asian version of these saddles was practically without high front and rear louts, allowing the rider more opportunity to turn in the saddle to wield sabers and shoot arrows. This type of saddle was ideal for the off-horse riding skills seen among the peoples of the Caucasus and Central Asia. On the other hand, the European saddle design developed to include high louts, thanks to which the rider sat more tightly in the saddle and it was difficult to knock him to the ground. With the development of light firearms and the abandonment of the practice of spear throwing, the priority shifted more and more to Asian-style saddles, which gave the rider greater freedom of movement.

The saddles used by cowboys in America must be mentioned separately. They fit more closely to the horse's spine and even covered the shoulder area. Such an adaptation to the horse's anatomy allowed the rider to spend many hours in the saddle without harming his four-legged friend, which was essential for cattle driving, a cowboy's main work. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, special saddles for equestrian sports made an appearance. Sport saddles allow the rider to lean forward, making it easier to overcome obstacles on the racetrack.

We should take a moment to speak of women’s saddles, the first examples of which appeared in Europe in the fourteenth century, becoming very popular in the eighteenth century. While the women of the steppes could easily ride like men, the women of Christian Europe, who did not wear trousers, avoided such a position because it was difficult in long skirts. Thus, women initially rode horses sitting sideways behind a man. The early versions of a woman's saddle resembled a kind of cushion with a wooden back—it was really a chair with a wooden footrest tied to the horse's back from the side.

Later, saddles became more comfortable, but they were still not as reliable as men's, and many high-ranking ladies occasionally ignored etiquette and rode in a man's suit and saddle. Empresses such as Elizabeth I of Great Britain and Catherine the Great of Russia are known to have done so. It was not until the early nineteenth century that the Frenchman Jules Charles Pellier invented a specialized saddle for women with two front louts. The upper one is held by the right leg, and the lower one follows the shape of the left leg and provides support when galloping. This design allowed women to maintain a ‘chaste’ position, with both feet on the same side, while riding safely to hunt and even jump over fences.

Stirrups came into use much later than the saddle. They first appeared as a footrest to make the saddle more comfortable, and thus their emergence is directly related to the spread of rigid saddles. The first stirrups were very different from the ones we are now used to. In ancient India, for example, from the second century BCE, stirrups were used in the form of a small ring into which the rider inserted the big toe of his bare foot when mounting the horse. In fact, a relief in the Bhaje Buddhist Caves (in the state of Maharashtra in western India) from the second century BCE shows a horseman with just such a stirrup. In other countries with harsher climates, people did not go barefoot, and the invention did not spread beyond India.

According to an established opinion in historical science, a single stirrup on the left side of the saddle appeared among the nomads of the north Chinese steppe in the third century CE, and the first pictures of a rider with metal paired stirrups, very similar to modern ones, were found during excavations in the tomb of the Chinese Northern Yuan dynasty in Liaoning Province, dating back to 415. An even earlier single stirrup was found in tomb No. 18 of the Western Han dynasty. So why was the single stirrup attached to the saddle on the left side and why was the horse mounted from that side? Well, it was for a very simple reason: most people are right-handed, and warriors carried the sword on their left side, making it more convenient to grab the sword with the right hand. But it would be impractical and inconvenient to mount from the right side because the baldric (the belt of the sword) would be in the way.

The Avars brought stirrups to Europe around the sixth century, but Europeans still perceived them as a special ‘ladder’ for climbing into the saddle. The Strategikon, a military manual written between the sixth and seventh centuries and generally attributed to the Byzantine emperor Maurice, states that saddles should have two iron stirrups, referred to by the Greek word σκάλα, meaning ‘ladder’. But both stirrups were to be attached to the same left side of the saddle: one to the front lout and the other to the rear one.

But how can a warrior rest his feet on the stirrups in battle? It’s not really possible. The rider holds on by the strength of his thighs, which grip the sides of the horse. Charlemagne, the king of the Franks who lived from 768 to 814, and his entire army did not use stirrups. Even illustrations from the Utrecht Psalter of 820–835 show riders attacking without stirrups, although stirrups were already well known in Europe by that time. Archeologists in eastern France have also unearthed the graves of 704 warriors who died between the end of the seventh and the beginning of the ninth century, and of these, 85 were undoubtedly cavalrymen, but only four graves had stirrups, while all the riders had spurs.

Interestingly, riding without stirrups was mentioned in all pre-revolutionary charters of cavalry units in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is true that stirrups are convenient, but a good rider does not need them and knows how to keep his balance without the support of his legs. The strength of the position in the saddle is provided by balance and schluss (holding in the saddle by pressing the knees and thighs against it), and experienced riders can use only balance. In other words, stirrups, which are now mandatory, were not a serious revolution in cavalry, unlike a rigid saddle, although they certainly make the riding experience more comfortable.