Choose one. Choose one and stop wasting my time. I don’t care about “successfully” and your attempts to expand the argument in that direction are transparent weaseling.
You don’t get it. I’ll concede Waterloo because I’ve got a thousand years in which to find only one battle where horses charged through to spears. I can swing a hundred times and miss 99. I only need one.
Your position is hopeless. You’ve lost. Be quiet or lose ungracefully, I’ll enjoy myself either way.
In summary, the hussars attempted - 8 or 10 times - to “break” the formations. They failed. The link doesn’t say whether they crashed ito the formed infantry - or, as is more likely, charged at them a la Waterloo, hoping they would run, given that a failed charge home would not leave them alive to charge another 9 times - but in any event, the formations only “broke” when Russian morale "cracked’ and they ran.
Whoops! Weaseling wasn’t enough, now you’ve moved directly into outright intellectual dishonesty? That’s sad, it’s only page 2. Love the Dope. Love. It. You’re all done, buddy. Toss it in. Look at it this way, you go down on a long and distinguished list of people defeated by Polish hussars.
Hilarious. The cav. at Waterloo “repeatedly charged” the British squares, too.
“Repeatedly charged” does not have the same meaning as “frontally crash into packed infantry formations”.
Or perhaps you can explain to me how the same Hussar can “crash frontally into packed infantry”, fail to break through, then go back and do it again 8-10 more times?
I wonder how much impact the improved archery of the Middle Ages impacted tha cavalry?
By the 1100’s ypu had skilled archers (longbowmen), who could deliver punishing and accurate volleys of steel-tipped arrows. These arrows could easily penetrate both chinmail and plate armor, and distances up to 200 feet.
There wre also crossbowmen, who had a slower-firing weapon, but one that could deliver a deadly dart (bolt) at even longer ranges.
These weapons would bring down a mounted knight quite handily.
Here, for example, is a description of the likely tactic used in that battle:
Examples of where cavalry would charge home into infantry were flukes, not a standard tactic. The usual circumstance where this would happen is where a horse was killed so close to the square that its dead body would charge home, opening a gap.
Oh, how did I know that like a rat on a sinking ship you’d creep your tiny claws onto the last possible centimeter of dryness? Because like most puffed up armchair generals on the internet, you’re more concerned with looking like you know what you’re talking about and memorizing facts than thinking critically about those facts. I knew you’d claim the cavalry didn’t actually make contact with the infantry, because that’s the only place you have left to run. And here you forgot one thing:
Why would they carry spare lances if they weren’t hitting people with them? Did they just sort of…chuck them at the infantry when they got close enough? Hahaha. No, my little friend. They had spare lances because when lances hit things, like INFANTRY, they break.
The thing I don’t get about people like you is why you just can’t say “Oh hey, Hussars. Learned something new today.” And just move on. Heck I begged you to do it earlier this morning. But no, you have to go on and embarass yourself and get more and more upset about your poor internet armchair generalling, even though anyone with a shred of tactical sense knew you were lost as soon as you took a position equivalent to “no one in two thousand years ever got a horse to charge onto a spear”. Hint: I didn’t have to go farther than Poland. Or is that a comment on the Polish?
Anyway, it’s a dumb position. A terrible one. An indefensible one. Smart people knew that.
No-one doubts that, under the right circumstances, Hussars would “charge” with lances at enemies - and break them.
However, the issue is whether the “right circumstances” and the “enemies” in question include charging at formed, disciplined infantry.
In any event, you are wacking at a straw man. The issue is not whether someone, somewhere, once charged into the spears, but whether this was the very purpose of heavy cav.
My point is that you have yet to find a single case in which this was used as a tactic - much less, one in which it was used successfully - and much less, that the use of this tactic was the very purpose of having heavy cav.
Yeah, the famous ‘dead cavalry’ brigade, who deliberately use the tactic of having their horses shot from underneath them to win battles. There’s a Polish joke in there somewhere.
Though if you’ve got a sufficiently capable infantry army, I wonder if they would often need to inflict a decisive defeat as such. As very capably discussed above, cavalry are expensive to field - and they can’t hold land. If your infantry army controls vital bits of your supply line, won’t the very expensive cavalry die off eventually? Or, more accurately, become combat ineffective.
