The increasing prominence given such men can be charted in their cultural profile. By the twelfth century across western Europe, lords and even kings were for the first time depicting themselves on their personal seals as mounted warriors, knights, no longer an image of mere soldiery but of social status. The image of the armed knight, in wax, painting, sculpture, stained glass, poetry and funerary effigies, became the standard iconic representation of the ruling military aristocracy. In Byzantium, not only were the martial qualities of Alexius I emphasized by eulogists and artists, but much attention and admiration was directed at the fighting characteristics of the hired mercenaries on which the empire depended, Turks, Slavs and western Europeans. In the Near East, political propaganda caught up with political reality. A political system that relied on hiring paid private armies unsurprisingly revived the theory of holy war, jihad, to which any ambitious leader had to aspire. A succession of ambitious parvenu rulers, culminating but not ending with Saladin, laid claim to the accolade of mujahid, holy warrior.
One obvious practical reason underpinned such respect for the fighting man. The well-trained mounted fighter, even in small numbers, could dominate any battlefield and provide a decisive outcome usually in a modest period of time relative to the static slugging matches of massed, opposing, poorly armed infantry. In the Near East, these cavalrymen would be lightly armoured, using small horses, with the shorter bow as their main offensive weapon. The rapid attack, feint and ambush were their methods. In the west, archers tended to be infantry and, although useful in sieges and to control the tempo of a field battle, until the development of the great longbow were not the arbiters of victory or defeat. The western armed knight was the tank of the period; manoeuvrable; impervious to most of the fire power available to the opposing infantry. Arrows from short bows usually stuck irritatingly but harmlessly into the chain-mail coats worn over leather hauberks or tunics, so that during a long struggle knights were seen to resemble giant hedgehogs. Many famous knightly casualties to arrows came when the missile found an exposed, unprotected part of the anatomy, such as the eye or, most often, the neck when heat forced the mailed warrior to loosen his mailed neck-guard. With plate armour, arrows, even from the later longbows, tended to glance off carefully moulded front surfaces. While direct hits from spears and lances were a threat, the best chain-mail and plate armour were remarkably effective at deflecting sword-thrusts. The main use of swords, spears and maces against mounted knights was to unseat them; without the height and horse advantage, the armoured warrior became vulnerable.
Through genetics, training and diet, knights tended to be physically bigger than infantry. Mounted on increasingly well-bred, specially trained and larger horses, protected by armour and wielding heavy lances, maces and swords, a few knights could hold their own against scores of infantry. The repeated accounts of seemingly miraculous victories or escapes by hopelessly outnumbered bands of knights, while likely to be exaggerated, preserved a truth. Knightly losses in battle were modest except through the massacres that often ensued at the end of fighting. In the massed charge, lances fixed (or ‘couched’) or with swords and maces, western knights presented a most potent weapon. This depended for its effectiveness on the use of shielding ranks of infantry to commit the enemy so far as to prevent his withdrawal, escape or, as when faced with Near Eastern armies, feints and strong field discipline, to prevent a precipitate or piecemeal attack. The numbers involved in battles varied enormously. In the eleventh or twelfth century, an army of 10,000 was very large and difficult to handle over long periods, for obvious logistical reasons. Much larger forces were recorded, not least during the crusades, but these relied on the availability of plentiful forage or, in the invasion of England in 1066 or on crusade from the later twelfth century, the deep pockets and administrations of rulers to transport tens of thousands of troops by sea. Many battles and military forays were much smaller enterprises, consisting of a few hundred, even a few score. Some battles could feature a dozen or so knights. The nature of medieval warfare precluded the huge forces of the classical age, the mass national levies of the late eighteenth century, or the industrialized conscription of modern times.
The cost of western and eastern warriors, men and horses was high. In Europe and western Asia, money payment for fighting on campaigns was common, as were longer-term rewards, such as land, titles and the consequent social privileges and status. This even applied to the mamluks, who technically were slaves; they ended by ruling Egypt for 250 years. Warfare did not comprise pitched battles alone. In fact, most generals tended to avoid such risky and expensive encounters, preferring skirmishes and ravaging to achieve usually limited political or economic objectives. The butchery in most internal warfare, where combatants came from the same cultural and regional milieu or even knew each other well, tended to be limited, unlike conflicts that involved strangers, such as foreign invaders like the Vikings or crusaders. In the absence of effective systems of social and legal arbitration, still less international law, war was endemic and only marginally mitigated in its effects by shared warrior values, later called chivalry in the west but equally recognized in essence in the Muslim world. The main victims of war were non-combatants caught in war and forage zones and the unskilled infantry who rarely enjoyed a fair share of victory (i.e. booty) while suffering incommensurately in fighting. Skilled, trained warriors were worth their reward because they could ensure the best chance of success in most forms of warfare: battle; foraging; defended or forced marches; skirmishing. As war so often was politics and vice versa, with rulers across the whole Afro-Eurasian region expecting and expected to campaign every year, their value was evident.
However, in some circumstances, the mounted warrior was ineffective. Besieging cities or castles with stone walls neutralized him completely. Yet sieges played a central part in the successful prosecution of war, to annexe territory or force an opponent to come to terms. Here numbers, not equestrian panache, counted for all. Medieval warfare depended on muscle power, of men and women, horses, beasts of burden and drawers of carts. Muscle power was the medieval equivalent of modern electricity and petrol. Equally, if the besiegers either had to starve or storm a castle or a walled city into submission, the number of attackers was crucial. In addition to men, sieges required timber to build giant throwing machines and engines in and beneath which attackers could scale or undermine the city’s walls. The technology of siege warfare appears to have been more highly developed in the eastern Mediterranean, especially perhaps in Byzantium where forests and cities were both in abundance. Although fleeting references exist to large wooden siege machines in western Europe before the First Crusade, only during that expedition were westerners extensively exposed to such engines, the use of which they very quickly mastered, probably with Greek help. Timber and carpentry also provided the vital accompaniment to shipping. Western European advances in shipbuilding and navigation supplied the sinews of Europe, where communications ran along coasts and up rivers. The different physical world of the Near East, where political power and much of the internal trade were landlocked and timber was in shortening supply, gave the western attackers after 1095 their one clear military advantage.