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The last French Knights - Gendarmes

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If today the gendarmes in France are known as lawn enforcers within the military domain and mostly act outside of the cities, their name is much older than that. You see, for most of the era of medieval warfare the Kingdom of France was considered the heart of chivalric warfare. For centuries, the French had set themselves as a major power in Europe; in a time when cavalry dictated the battlefield, they fielded the best on the continent. However, the good times wouldn’t last as France’s knightly prestige would be severely damaged by the coming of one of the biggest calamities in our history: the British. Our story starts with the advent of the Hundred Years’ War, an agglomeration of smaller conflicts started over a succession crisis. You see the last three kings of the House of Capet, Louis X, Philip V and Charles IV, though it would be hilarious to die without a male heir. However, it was less funny for French society, which required a man sitting on the throne, and while the first tw...
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The End of Medieval Battles

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The history of warfare is full of adaptation, innovation and evolution to find new a more effective ways to kill your opponent. And sometimes, such innovations can lead to rather bizarre units, like the dual riders of early horsemen by Assyria as mentioned in the previous post, or the Korean Hwacha which fired rocket-propelled spears. While most of the time these strange experiments tend to create sub-part or situational products, from time to time a true breakthrough was created. One of such examples was the method of warfare that dictate much of Renaissance Europe, Pike-and-Shot with the most famous being the Spanish Tercio.   With the closing days of the medieval age and the coming up of the Renaissance, European warfare had developed a solid meta on the battlefield, taking on another strategy. This took the form of elite pikemen, generally of Swiss origin, mixed with heavy knights within the most popular being the French Gendarme... no not these guys. Indeed heavy cavalry,...
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Chariot Warfare - Battles of the Bronze Age

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Just like Cataphracts inspired the medieval knights in Europe, horse riders evolved from a similar unit employed in warfare during the Bronze Age: war chariots. During the Bronze Age, the time of the first civilizations, chariots were the dominant force on the battlefields. They were the earliest form of truly heavy units, able to crush infantry formations in a devastating charge while also providing fire support, either from javelinists or archers. The first report of chariots used in warfare came all the way back from Sumer, taking the form of a war cart. Despite being relatively inefficient on the battlefield, as the cart was too slow and was relegated to transport, the idea of a mobile platform stuck. The first proper chariots came from one of the great hegemons of Bronze Age Anatolia, the Hittite people. Starting as Indo-European nomads, they were the first to pioneer the usage of chariots, from construction to tactics, before being adopted by their neighboring nations. Taking the...
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