By the way, this is not meant to offend medieval knight fans because I just want to ask something interesting.

I can never understand why medieval European Christians such as the French, the Hungarians, the Serbs, the Wallachians, the Transylvanians, the Poles, etc. kept using fully-armored mounted knights against the Ottoman empire when knights always got annihilated by the Ottoman Janissaries in hand to hand combat easily even if the Ottoman Janissaries never used guns, cannons, archery, or any type of projectile weapon while they never damaged the Ottoman Janissaries at all. Both knights-on-foot and mounted knights always got easily annihilated by the Ottoman Janissaries in hand to hand combat alone despite always far outnumbering the Ottoman Janissaries while they never damaged the Ottoman Janissaries at all. The Ottoman Janissaries didn't even need the help of other units to beat the knights.

In all honesty, the knights are one of the most overrated warriors ever. They never had any decent training in hand to hand combat or horseback. Their training is no different from that of medieval European peasants. They never had won any victories at all in history. They never gained victory in wars such as the Holy Land Crusade, the Baltic Crusade(The Teutonic Knights never conquered Lithuania because Baltic peoples are superior in skill and warrior bravery.), etc.

When it comes to being cavalry forces, I am sure that they are one of the weakest in history.

In all honesty, I think Ottoman Janissaries are far superior to the fully-armored knights such as French knights when it comes to hand to hand combat. In one-versus-one or group-versus-group, I don't think knights could ever win against the Ottoman Janissaries. Do you agree with this fact?

Anyways, I don't really understand why the Europeans kept using fully-armored mounted knights when they are so pathetic. But the purpose of this post is that I want to ask if there is some other reasons why the Europeans didn't immediately abandoned knighthood such as economic, cultural, etc. Are there other reasons?

Please give me your opinions.

Hello Soul3

There seems to be something of a false opposition here. The reason being that Ottoman Janissaries and fully-armoured French knights never faced each other in combat. If the term ‘fully-armoured’ here refers to plate armour then that mode of cavalry protection was only really used between the 13th and 16th centuries. If it refers to chain mail then that mode of protection has been worn for over 2 thousand years by many warriors across the world ranging from Etruscans in ancient Italy to Japanese Samurai in the 19th century. Not least, of course, chain mail was also worn by the Janissaries themselves.

If we look at the era of plate armour, then even during the Smyrniote campaigns of the 1340s (which included a contingent of French forces under Humbert II Dauphin de Viennois) then combat engagements were mainly naval and siege based and did not really involve mounted units. Neither were Humbert’s opponents Ottoman Janissaries. They were those of the beylik of Aydin which too was more interested in naval and siege warfare rather than in cavalry elements. The beys of Aydin were also very much independent-minded rulers and were as often as not to be found allied to the Byzantine emperor as to the Ottoman sultan. They certainly weren’t Ottomans themselves. Furthermore, the Janissaries weren't founded until years later.

When the Knights of Rhodes were finally ejected from Smyrna in 1402 it wasn’t by either the beys of Aydin or by the Ottomans but by the forces of Tamurlane. Only 4 months earlier he had comprehensively crushed the Ottomans (including the Janissaries) at Angora resulting in the remnants of the Ottoman army having to be ferried to safety in Europe by ships of the Knights of Rhodes and their Genoese and Venetian allies. Unable to compete with the Europeans on naval terms, Tamerlane turned his attention to land-based Smyrna. During the siege, the Knights under their French Master Philibert de Naillac withdrew by sea and when he entered the city Tamerlane took out his frustration upon the city’s civilian inhabitants.
 
P.S. It’s important to distinguish between Knights and knights. The former would refer to those belonging to a specific order, while the latter refers to any having received that honorific title. Also the word knight is not interchangeable with the term mounted warrior. The concepts are distinct.

Vizzer wrote:

Hello Soul3

There seems to be something of a false opposition here. The reason being that Ottoman Janissaries and fully-armoured French knights never faced each other in combat. If the term ‘fully-armoured’ here refers to plate armour then that mode of cavalry protection was only really used between the 13th and 16th centuries. If it refers to chain mail then that mode of protection has been worn for over 2 thousand years by many warriors across the world ranging from Etruscans in ancient Italy to Japanese Samurai in the 19th century. Not least, of course, chain mail was also worn by the Janissaries themselves.

If we look at the era of plate armour, then even during the Smyrniote campaigns of the 1340s (which included a contingent of French forces under Humbert II Dauphin de Viennois) then combat engagements were mainly naval and siege based and did not really involve mounted units. Neither were Humbert’s opponents Ottoman Janissaries. They were those of the beylik of Aydin which too was more interested in naval and siege warfare rather than in cavalry elements. The beys of Aydin were also very much independent-minded rulers and were as often as not to be found allied to the Byzantine emperor as to the Ottoman sultan. They certainly weren’t Ottomans themselves. Furthermore, the Janissaries weren't founded until years later.

When the Knights of Rhodes were finally ejected from Smyrna in 1402 it wasn’t by either the beys of Aydin or by the Ottomans but by the forces of Tamurlane. Only 4 months earlier he had comprehensively crushed the Ottomans (including the Janissaries) at Angora resulting in the remnants of the Ottoman army having to be ferried to safety in Europe by ships of the Knights of Rhodes and their Genoese and Venetian allies. Unable to compete with the Europeans on naval terms, Tamerlane turned his attention to land-based Smyrna. During the siege, the Knights under their French Master Philibert de Naillac withdrew by sea and when he entered the city Tamerlane took out his frustration upon the city’s civilian inhabitants.
 
P.S. It’s important to distinguish between Knights and knights. The former would refer to those belonging to a specific order, while the latter refers to any having received that honorific title. Also the word knight is not interchangeable with the term mounted warrior. The concepts are distinct.

The fact still remains that two-handed-longsword-wielding fully-armored knights always lost to the Ottoman Janissaries and that includes in hand to hand combat. Do you agree with me?

The notion of ‘two-handed-longsword-wielding fully-armored knights’ seems at odds with that of ‘fully-armored mounted knights’ as mentioned in the opening post. The reason is that a mounted warrior would rarely use a two-handed weapon. If such a weapon were to be used on horseback, however, then it would more likely be in the form of a lance or an axe rather than a sword. That said, the 13th century Shah Abbas Bible does include a picture of Joshua on horseback wielding a long, two-handed broadsword and slicing thru a chain-mailed opponent. This, however, almost certainly does not reflect the reality of 13th century warfare but instead is a stylised religious image showing the power of Joshua as a warrior having divine guidance.

 


(Joshua's forces attacking the Canaanite city of Hai)


A knight on foot might well have used a two-handed longsword but such a phenomenon (i.e. a knight on foot) would also have been rare. The assertion, however, that mediaeval European knights ‘always’ lost in these encounters doesn’t bear scrutiny. In the 1380s alone Ottoman forces were stopped by Serbian and Bosnian cavalry at Plocnik and Bileca among other places.
 
Neither was the idea of heavy cavalry being defeated by archers and infantry a new phenomenon in European warfare. English heavy cavalry had been stopped by Scottish infantry at Stirling Bridge in the 1290s and again at Bannockburn in the 1310s. This was decades before the Janissaries were founded. The English themselves had used archers to stop French heavy cavalry at Crecy in 1346 and at Poitiers ten years later. Again this was before the foundation of the Janissaries.

The Janissaries did indeed become the poster boys of the Ottoman sultan’s forces but this needs to be put into perspective. The overwhelming majority of Ottoman forces were not Janissary and many if not most of the victories of the empire were arguably attributable to Sipahi cavalry.

Soul3 wrote:

In all honesty, the knights are one of the most overrated warriors ever. They never had any decent training in hand to hand combat or horseback. Their training is no different from that of medieval European peasants. They never had won any victories at all in history. They never gained victory in wars such as the Holy Land Crusade, the Baltic Crusade(The Teutonic Knights never conquered Lithuania because Baltic peoples are superior in skill and warrior bravery.), etc.

That's not really true. The principal role of 'Frankish' knights (whether Norman, French, English, Spanish, Italian etc.) was as heavy cavalry to break defensive blocks of footmen (mixed pole-arm and archery units) initially using lances in a shock charge. The initial high-speed impact was absorbed by the rider's shield and with him physically supported by a high-backed saddle with strong girth and chest straps for the horse, and by long strirrups in which he was almost standing. The secondary weapon, should the battle develop into a melée, was usually a single handed sword, mace or axe etc, certainly not a double-handed sword as he was still holding and using his shield in the other hand. True double-handed swords were not generally used on medieval European battlefields and they only came into widespread use in the later 15th century when the use of shields had declined (due to more effectve and fully encompassing armour). In particular in the early 16th century they were employed by some elite foot-soldiers, known as Doppelsöldners (double soldiers) attached to Swiss and German infantry pike units, although their name was not because they used two-handed swords but because they received twice the pay of a regular pikeman. However by this time the fully armoured, mounted man-at-arms was already essentially obsolete.

Contrary to what you say, medieval armoured knights were certainly highly trained; indeed since they were of the land-owning warrior class with a steady income derived from the labour of their peasants, training for war was basically all they ever had to do, their proficency in arms being the main reason by which they were allowed to retain their lands and status. They were certainly much better trained (and better armed) than any common medieval European peasant who, even if he was lucky enough to have been issued with a decent sword when he was 'called up', was unlikely ever to be given very much training in its use. But again for heavily armoured knights, however good swordsmen they might be, individual hand-to-hand fighting on foot was not really what they were for. The primary job of a knight was to be able to steer a galloping horse, one-handed or just using their knees, straight at a target and then hit it square-on with a couched lance, while hopefully remaining mounted. Also remember that an effective army always needs a balance of different troop types and mounted knights typically comprised only about 10% of 12th and 13th century Crusader armies. When used in their primary role as mounted shock troops they could be devastatingly effective. During the Crusades in the Holy Land - which comprised mostly skirmishes and sieges but relatively few pitched battles - charges by armoured knights were decisive in quite a few engagements, for example the battles of Dorylaeum (1097), Ascalon (1099), Ramla (1105), Yibneh (1123), Philomelion (1190), Iconium (1190), Arsuf (1191) and others. There were even a couple of occasions during the Crusades when armoured knights were forced by circumstance to charge on foot and were still able to successfully defeat the enemy. Addmittedly of course medieval knights were not invincible and, as is the way of things, there were yet other battles when mounted knights charged Saracen forces, only to end up being unhorsed and completely slaughtered.

In the northern crusades against the Livonians, Prussians, Estonians, Lithuanians etc, I concede that the heavily armoured Teutonic knights, the Knights of the Sword, and those of other military orders, did not distinguish themselves. But you can't blame their poor performance on European knights generally and certainly not on any English knights who, if they were not fighting in the Holy Land were occupied fighting in Wales or Scotland; nor the French knights who were also busy in the Holy Land when they weren't crushing the Cathars in southern France;  nor any Italian knights who were already fully occupied fighting just amongst themselves; nor on the Spanish and Portuguese knights who were successfully pushing back against the Umayyad Caliphate in the Reconquista of Iberia.

The Ottomans really only started to make incursions into Europe (and thus found themselves coming up against European heavy cavalry) in the mid-14th century, by which time massed archery supported by well-drilled units of pole arms were already showing up the limitations of heavily armoured horsemen, although such heavy cavalry would remain in use for at least a century more and at least until hand-held firearms came into regular use. The English understandably still celebrate the decisive victory of their longbowmen over the French heavy cavalry at Agincourt in 1415, but they tend to overlook the final battle of the Hundred Years War, the Battle of Patay in 1429, that saw the English finally driven out of France. Patay was basically a re-run of Agincourt with much the same forces and on similar terrain, however this time it was the English longbowmen and men-at-arms that were defeated and routed by repeated charges of French knights. So in the mid-15th century, even while the writing was already on the wall for heavily armoured knights, they could still sometimes be a force to reckon with. Nevertheless by the end of the 15th century the era of the heavily armoured mounted knight as the ultimate arbiter on the battlefield was effectively over. And it didn't need the Ottomans to demonstrate how inappropriate armoured knights were on 15th and 16th century battlefields: Swiss massed pike units, German Landsknecht regiments and Spanish tercios - all with their coordinated infantry mix of pikemen, halberdiers,  swordsmen, crossbowmen and handgunners - could demonstate that just as readily as any contemporary unit of janissaries.

But for the last hurrah (or should it be huzzah) of the heavily armoured and mounted man-at-arms against the Ottomans, how about the Polish heavy cavalry - the so-called winged hussars - that so decisively routed the Ottoman forces, janissaries included, at the 1673 Battle of Khotyn, or at the 1683 Siege of Vienna?

Meles meles wrote:

But for the last hurrah (or should it be huzzah) of the heavily armoured and mounted man-at-arms against the Ottomans, how about the Polish heavy cavalry - the so-called winged hussars - that so decisively routed the Ottoman forces, janissaries included, at the 1673 Battle of Khotyn, or at the 1683 Siege of Vienna?

You can't use the Polish winged hussars as an example. They are not knights. They're swords was similar to that of the Turks. The Polish winged hussars used sabres. Not straight swords. Plus, they are not even of noble blood. They were not a warrior class of noble blood like the classic medieval western european knights. They were from different social classes and different economic classes such as the nobility, the peasantry, etc. The Polish winged hussars did not begin their training from a young age like the classic medieval western european knights did. Polish winged hussars are just soldiers. They were not warriors like the classic medieval western european knights. The Polish winged hussars were just soldiers.

Maybe it is worth pondering on when knights stopped being knights and became cavalry (in the contemporary understanding of the word; I realise that knights were mounted and thus a type of cavalry). The Ottoman Empire lasted from around the 14th century to the early 20th - it wouldn't have been opposed by knights per se in the 20th century.  Thinking about medieval times, knights were what the European nations had at that time so knights were what was deployed.

I'd disagree that knights were no better trained than peasants.  Knights would have had some sort of training since boyhood - the poor old peasants were just thrown in to fights willy-nilly.