With a couched lance at his disposal, however, the knight was no longer an infantryman on horseback. He had become the medieval equivalent of a guided missile.* Riding in tandem with half a dozen or more other guided missiles, he was almost unstoppable. As the Byzantine princess Anna Komnene wrote in the twelfth century, a Frank fighting on foot was easy prey, but a Frank on horseback could put a hole in the walls of Babylon.10 Yet the lance did not develop on its own. It required other technological advances to make it effective: the stirrup and the cantled saddle. Both served the same
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