So I’m reading the Iliad, and the translation I am using makes repeated references to “Nestor, knight of Gerene,” and also various references to unnamed “knights.” What, exactly, do they mean by this?
I always get confused when I hear the word “knight” used outside of Chivalric / European feudal context. In my mind, a “knight” is a Western European nobleman who is wealthy enough to possess quality weapons, armor, horses, and the training to use them. Yet I sometimes hear people use the word “knight” for things like the Roman equestrian or Japanese samurai. In these contexts, it essentially means the same thing: Any wealthy and well armed warrior qualifies as a “knight” even if their society is not strictly analogous to feudal European hierarchy.
In reading the Iliad, their culture does not appear to follow feudal European rules. I understand that most of the leaders are called Basileus, which is often translated as “King.” Yet in practice, this word seems to mean something more like a tribal chieftain or war-party leader, since there are like two dozen “Kings” on the battlefield. Even Agamemnon himself, the Wanax or “High King” acts more like the leader of a coalition or the first among equals. It seems like using any feudal European title for Mycenean leaders is only a rough approximation.
I get that our understanding of Mycenean culture is fuzzy at best, but what exactly did “knight” translate to in ancient Greek? What role did these people really play? Or is this just an example of a Western translator trying to wedge in the best approximation for a foreign concept?
“Knight” just means a citizen-warrior rich enough to provide his own gear and maintain at least one warhorse, i.e. The lower rung of the aristocracy. The horse is the salient part - both as a symbol of great wealth and as a combat advantage. Back then most constitutions divided citizens along property lines, defining X classes based on how much cash they owned (often with different rights granted to each censal class).
The underlined part is true for you and me, but not so for many EFL-speakers, perhaps including that translator. After all, the English word doesn’t refer to horses like chevalier and caballero do. In modern English usage, often “knight” means “any medieval soldier” (something that would have given an actual medieval knight a nasty case of the hollers) or even “any trained soldier” (sigh), and in the time of the Iliad there wasn’t much in the way of actual cavalry fighting (no stirrups yet). Even if they had horses and used them to get to war, those horses were no chargers.
Their being “the lower rung of the aristocracy”, I agree with. They would be someone for whom war was actually expected to be one of the main occupations, people who would be expected to stay trained for it and to be able to provide and lead a group of men, while not necessarily being full time soldiers, guards or mercenaries. And they’d be subject to and live in the territory of one of the “kings”. Nowadays they’d be officers… say, below colonel rank (that would be the kings).
Right, but the Greek and Latin words (hippeis and equites respectively) specifically do.
Uh, what ? I mean, yes, they didn’t do the couched lance+charge straight down the middle thing quite yet, but they most certainly fought on horseback in Ancient times. They didn’t keep horses for the hell of it :), as it was super expensive to care for and feed the bastards and they were useless in peace time. On the battlefield the role of such light-ish cavalry was to wheel around and behind the enemy phalanx and kick them in the butt ; then race after stragglers once a mass rout had been triggered.
But it’s not like stirrups are a *sine qua non *of proper, in-your-face shock cavalry : remember Alexander’s companions ?
Re:Mycenians specifically they might also have fought on chariots (see : Achilles dragging Hector behind his), which may or may not be an indication of where these cats actually came from, chariot fighting being more of an Asian development than a European one.
In the Iliad, Nestor fights from a chariot. I don’t remember any references to people fighting on horseback in the Iliad, but it’s been a while since I read it.
Uh, my ancestors used theirs to travel, to pull vehicles (a pair of oxen could pull a heavier load, and for teams they’d use mules or donkeys), to pull agricultural equipment and to make little horses you could eat. Neither the ancestors nor their horses were exactly 100% warriors. Our land was never really rich enough to allow for a class of either horses or people who did nothing but fight.
All that aside, I think what made **Kobal2 **jump was the notion that stirrups is necessary for effective fighting on horseback, or that cavalry doesn’t play a role before stirrups are introduced. Stirrups arrive in Europe way, *way *late, ca. the beginning of the seventh century, probably with the Avars. That’s the beginning of the Middle Ages. There was obviously a ton of cavalry fighting going on in antiquity, and none of it involved stirrups.
Warhorses and workhorses are different things. A charger is not a courser is not a hunter is not a rouncey etc… Their training is different, the breeding too (they’re not expected to do the same thing, so e.g. a warhorse breeder would emphasize speed and size where a plow or draft horse ought to have endurance and good health), and when you own a “real” warhorse you don’t want to put it to work pulling a cart or plow and risk injuring it.
I mean, you can ride into battle on a plowhorse and it’ll be a straight upgrade to hoofing it obviously (at least until it freaks right the fuck out getting too close to a bunch of screaming dudes bristling with pokey sticks), but I do believe the specific censal category “knight” involved warhorses specifically, or at least that they were meant and expected to fight as cavalrymen on the field.
And what I’m saying is that for minor nobility, there was not much of a “warhorses and workhorses” division. That’s one of the key differences between minor nobility and major houses. For minor nobility, even a horse whose main use was “the lord’s horse” would be put to other uses.
I seriously doubt this part: To me, from my own immersion in an English-speaking culture, the prototypical knight is Sir Stabsalot in plate armor on his white horse; that is, someone who’s definitely nobility who is specifically trained to fight on horseback while the peons what got shit all over them fight on foot. Knights joust in tournaments and engage in courtly love and so on, as opposed to being one of the dirt farmers the knights tyrannize over.
(Yes, I know plate armor is a later development, and that knights were capable of fighting on foot and did not require pulleys to get on their horse even in full armor, and that the feudal system (to the extent it existed) during the Dark Ages (to the extent they existed) was a complex land tenancy arrangement involving contractual obligations as opposed to Lord Humongous riding in as the Romans rode out. I’m speaking purely about the ideas transmitted through cultural osmosis and implicitly associated with certain words.)
Almost all of the major named characters on the Greek side of the fight was an independent king in his own right: there was no hierarchy beyond the temporary one set up for retrieving her per the Oath of Tyndareus.
It’s an argument I’ve had with multiple EFL folk, mainly Americans simply because I’ve spent more time with Americans, but the last time was at translator’s school in Scotland. Bunch of English+ translators insisting that indeed, a watchman would absolutely be a knight* and what do horses have to do with it.
I’m talking about actual usage, not about what the dictionary says.
The trigger for that particular discussion was a text, translated from English to Spanish, about watching for pirates along the Spanish coast, where the line in the original “knights watched from the tower” had been translated as los caballeros vigilaban desde la atalaya, literally “knights watched from the watchtower”. In many locations, there was one (1) knight-with-horse available, he happened to be the local lord, and definitely didn’t spend his time on the watchtowers; in other locations, there wasn’t even any knights but there were watchtowers; and watching was the kind of job often given to elder children (old enough to be responsible, not big enough for jobs requiring size or strength) or cripples.
Not a mistake. The location was Scotland, the EFL translators in question were all English.
Nestor rode to the battle (like many Greek chieftains did) in a chariot, but I don’t believe he actually fought from chariot-back (or actually fought himself at all.) As ancient as the Trojan War was, actual chariot warfare was already considered passé.
In some of the Linear B Mycenaean inventory tablets, various components of chariots are listed. They were considered important enough to list along with foodstuffs, offerings to gods, the famous tripod kettles, etc.
Being able to afford and use a chariot was an important class distinction.
When you read Roman history, you quickly get used to hearing “knights” used for referring to the equestrian class. This class originally made up the Roman cavalry, as they were men who could afford a horse, but the term soon enough gets divorced from any connection to actual warfare (eventually, the Romans would farm out cavalry work to non-citizen auxiliaries). It’s about social and economic status. The equestrians were the second rung of the aristocracy (originally below the patricians, and then, after the patrician/plebeian division stopped being so important, below the senatorial class). Membership was determined by property qualifications. In the later Republic, the equestrian order basically made up the business class, as the ultra-posh senators weren’t supposed to be involved in things like trade.
Not that equestrians weren’t in the army anymore: Obviously, they were, as military service, especially at a command level, was important for any public career. Roman army officers would continue to be drawn from the equestrian class (and army command, in turn, is tangled up with power in all sorts of ways). But a Sir Stabsalot type warrior on a horse isn’t the first thing that should come to mind when you hear “Roman knight”.
I don’t know about that, towers were very large construction projects in medieval times and actually how most lords lived. Peel towers may look tiny to us, but it was the height of luxury when most people lived in thatched huts.
Yes and no. Depends on the exact time period. Originally watchtowers and early mottes were strictly military structures where a handful of grunts and possibly a lower ranking knight would stay, watch and get bored out their arses (Not kidding about that, either - game pieces and tokens are among the most common finds in those digs). They’d typically have stables on hand so messengers could bolt at the earliest sign of an enemy army or Viking sails approaching.
It’s only somewhere around the Xth century that lords moved in full time to segregate themselves from hoi poloi and re-affirm their societal role as warriors ; mottes then turned into half-military, half-prestige buildings, typically with a big public hall on the first floor (no access on the ground floor - in case of siege), luxurious private quarters on the second and finally some spartan guard barracks up top.
Before that, lords were content with having the biggest hall in the village ; or in the case of higher lords bona fide palaces that had much less actual military value though they were nevertheless heavily fortified to impress everybody. Roman *castra *were also in high demand of course - they didn’t build 'em like they used to and all that :D. As time went by, the number of mottes and dungeons increased exponentially as lords competed with each other (and the local monasteries and bishop !) in tower-measuring contests.
Not completely true. While each of the named characters was a king of sorts, leading a group of retainers, there was definitely a heirarchy. Mycenean Greece was certainly not a unified state (the movie Troy depicts it in an extremely inaccurate fashion, among its’ many other errors).
Each city state, with its’ surrounding territory was a political unit, but a variety of different ties existed between them.
[ul]
[li]One city state might conquer another, and afterward treat it as a vassal state. [/li][li]Different city states certainly had treaties of friendship and in many of these cases, there may have been an understanding, tacit or not, as to which was the senior partner.[/li][li]Trading ties certainly existed between cities with a balance of power being established based on the dynamics of the relationship. [/li][li]A very rich city state, such as Mycenae itself could maintain a large standing army which might cause neighboring poorer states to swear fealty to avoid being conquered. [/li][li]The rulers of these city states had various familial ties, based on political marriages. For example, the two brothers Agamemnon and Menelaus - Agamemnon was the elder and ruled Mycenae, which was the family seat. Menelaus ruled Sparta by virtue of marrying Helen, the heir of the previous King. Menelaus , being the younger brother, as well as ruling a somewhat poorer city (Mycenae was described by Homer as “rich in gold”) was subordinate to Agamemnon. [/li][li]Another way that ties were established was through the practice of ‘guest-friendship’. This is shown clearly in the Odyssey. Both Odysseus and his son are guests of foreign kings who, in addition to welcoming them as guests, shower them with gifts. These gifts were understood to be a quid for a future quo, obligating the guest to provide favors or services for the host as needed. If this meant going to war under the host’s leadership then heirarchy (at least temporarily) was established.[/li][/ul]
Agamemnon was the overall leader of the Achaean coalition because when all of these types of connections were considered, he was the top dog. He was also Menelaus’ brother and an oath-swearer bound to retrieve Helen. He likely had the largest standing army of any of the factions, and all of the factions likely had some tie, with a subordinate relationship, to him.
(at least until it freaks right the fuck out getting too close to a bunch of screaming dudes bristling with pokey sticks), but I do believe the specific censal category “knight” involved warhorses specifically, or at least that they were meant and expected to fight as cavalrymen on the field.