Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

from the twelfth century, it became increasingly common across Europe to build fortresses out of stone rather than timber and earthworks.15 But stirrups were no less important for being part of a general improvement in military hardware. They allowed individual riders to stay in the saddle at greater speed and to fight with greater ferocity, and the result was that knights became dominant on the battlefield, and highly valued by emperors, kings, and other aristocrats. Finally, as the demand for knights rose, their social position, rank, and presence began to alter as well. The most contentious part of the story of the knight’s origin, however, is not how stirrup technology spread. It concerns the degree to which the rising preference for heavily armed, mounted warriors directly caused a social revolution in Europe, and ushered in the “age of feudalism”: an all-pervasive, notionally pyramid-shaped system of social organization, in which lords granted land to their vassals in exchange for formal promises of military service, and the vassals then subcontracted it to poorer men in return for further service, either in the form of military assistance or agricultural labor or both.16 Most historians would now hesitate at drawing a direct link between these two phenomena, and some argue that feudalism as a concept is far too simplistic a model to explain how medieval society really worked. Yet it is still just about uncontroversial to note that at the same time as horse-mounted w...