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Medieval Society

Changes in the Later Middle Ages

Two forces were at work in the later Middle Ages that wrought fundamental change in the role and conditions of medieval knights. Economic changes brought new pressures and changes relationships among the nobility. And changes in warfare tended to push the knight more and more onto the periphery of the battlefield. The changes took centuries.

A Brief Chronology

There were no knights in the early Middle Ages. There is a lot of room for varying interpretations here, but few historians would be willing to talk about knights prior to the 700s. Some might place their development as late as the 900s.

The heyday of knighthood was roughly 1000 to 1300, or maybe 1400. But as early as the early 14th century we can identify the two fundamental changes mentioned above at work.

Change in Warfare

The most immediately obvious change is the development of gunpowder. This created changes first in fortifications, for the early cannons were almost exclusively used in siege warfare. This did not directly touch on the role of knights. Indeed, much of the change in fortifications had to do more with how cities were fortified rather than how castles were fortified.

Gunpowder directly affected knights in two phases. The first was the development of field artillery in the late 1400s. This was mainly used against infantry, but as knights still sometimes dismounted to charge on foot, it could apply to them as well. The second, more serious, development was that of handguns. These effected a dramatic change because they made armor not only vulnerable but actually burdensome. Within a fairly short period of time, the mounted warrior took off his armor and became the mobile, unarmored cavalry officer of early modern times, relying on sabre and pistol rather than on lance and sword.

That change also finalized another trend in knightly warfare: the shift from the massed heavy cavalry charge to using cavalry on the flanks for a variety of jobs, including pursuit, flanking infantry, and surrounding the enemy. By that time, it was the infantry that had taken over the main duty of the direct charge.

For it was changes in the infantry that wrought the more profound change in the cavalry. Starting in the early 1300s we see marked improvements in the quality of infantry. Any military expert will tell you that well-disciplined infantry will win over cavalry every time. The key is the discipline and, to a lesser extent, the nature of their weapons. Earlier in the Middle Ages, infantry was not trained, not disciplined, and was not regarded as a serious weapon on the battlefield.

We see the change start in Switzerland, where they learned to fight in formation with pikes. This spread up into Germany with the Landsknechts. In a somewhat related development, we see the development of the English longbow, which likewise proved devastating to mounted troops in the 1300s.

By 1400 the trend was clear, though the social shift had not happened yet. The main reason for this was economical: fielding effective infantry is expensive and implies a government that has the administrative apparatus for raising such troops and the money to pay them. This proved to be a real puzzle for the next couple of centuries.

But by 1500 there was no doubt that infantry was the core of an army. Cavalry was still vitally important, but was used mainly to support the infantry whereas in the Middle Ages the roles were reversed. The nobility still comprised the bulk of the cavalry and all of the officer corps of the infantry. But they weren't the sole champions of the battlefield any longer. The pikemen and gunpowder had ended that era.

Economic Change

As fundamental as were the changes in warfare, economic changes were even more important.