Knights of the Old World - Cataphract

Heavy cavalry was, for a very long time, the dominant force on the battlefield. Many of such units have reached legendary status, like the noble French knights, whose effectiveness tended to be heavily hampered by their extreme arrogance, or the Polish Winged Hussars and their renowned charge at the Battle of Vienna. Their era of dominance in warfare would be ended with the development of pike-and-shot warfare, obsoleting the unit while lighter mounted units endured for a bit longer. And while heavily armored cavalry has become a symbol of the medieval period, just like crossbows and the feudal system, it finds its roots in more ancient times.

Before the knights, there were the Cataphracts, a unit that finds its roots in ancient Persia, and was kept by its successor nations all the way to the Eastern Roman Empire. Cataphracts were straightforward: a rider covered in the heaviest armor of their time, riding a horse protected by fish-scaled armor. Even their name doesn’t deal in subtlety, meaning “covered with armor” in Latin. Their equipment greatly varied throughout their history, and while a long lance remained their primary weapon, some were so long that they could reportedly pierce two men at once—way to make one hell of a brochette. For close-quarter combat, sidearms also varied depending on which nation they came from. Romans preferred the sword, because it looked better and was seen as a civilized weapon. The eastern nations, on the other hand, employed maces and other types of blunt weapons, since they were far more effective against the heavy armor of Cataphracts. They could even be found with ranged weapons, with eastern cataphracts wielding bows while Roman ones relied more on hand-thrown darts.

The Cataphracts would truly live up to their name under the Parthian Empire, where both men and horses were quite literally covered in metal, making them not only devastating in a charge but also capable of staying in prolonged combat. The concept left Central Asia when the Roman Empire came in contact with the Parthians, leading to multiple wars. And while the Parthians were a bit shy about using cataphracts, instead relying on their famous horse archers to weaken the legions before sending in smaller groups of heavy cavalry for the killing blow, as seen at Carrhae, they would also serve as a deterrent for enemy cavalry to charge the horse archers, as virtually no other mounted force at the time could face them head on. No, really, these guys were unkillable.

The following Sassanids, on the other hand, were far more aggressive in their usage of Cataphracts, fielding them in far larger numbers and using them more offensively. This was both because, unlike the Parthians, they were far more eager to expand, and because they were richer and thus more capable of equipping heavy cavalry. Their battle tactics generally consisted of sending a first group of cataphracts charging straight into enemy soldiers before pulling back if they held their ground. Horse archers would then harass the enemy while the first group retreated and paved the way for a second group to charge.

Roman armies suffered greatly against these units, as their infantry-based armies were perfectly designed to be run over by rows of cataphracts. However, just like Hannibal learned the hard way, Romans were experts in the face-to-foot style of warfare, enduring losses and adapting. At first, they deployed ditches and caltrops to blunt the charge and injure the horses before incorporating their own cataphract units. After the fall of the Sassanids to the Rashidun Caliphate, Cataphracts lived on with the Arabs, Eastern Romans, Turks and Frankish kingdoms. Over time, the Cataphracts slowly morphed into the European knights and other forms of heavy cavalry which became a hereditary social class, instead of a professional military force.