Fifth century BC.
I’m not sure what you mean. The Iliad is full of passages describing one person driving a chariot while the passenger throws spears or fires a bow. And Nestor certainly fights from a chariot. For instance, in Book VIII, one of the horses drawing his chariot gets killed:
“Idomeneus dared not stay nor yet Agamemnon, nor did the two Ajaxes, servants of Mars, hold their ground. Nestor knight of Gerene alone stood firm, bulwark of the Achaeans, not of his own will, but one of his horses was disabled. Alexandrus husband of lovely Helen had hit it with an arrow just on the top of its head where the mane begins to grow away from the skull, a very deadly place. The horse bounded in his anguish as the arrow pierced his brain, and his struggles threw others into confusion. The old man instantly began cutting the traces with his sword, but Hector’s fleet horses bore down upon him through the rout with their bold charioteer, even Hector himself, and the old man would have perished there and then had not Diomed been quick to mark, and with a loud cry called Ulysses to help him.”
If you’re talking about the real-life Nestor (if he even existed), then all bets are off.
For what it’s worth, I have spent the last several years working my way through the various Cambridge histories (Ancient, Medieval, and Modern); all published between 1905 and 1920, in English. I’m currently in the middle of reading about the 30 Years War. One thing that has stood out to me is the almost complete lack of mentions of “knights”. Even in the medieval history. Armies are described as, say, “10,000 foot, 2,000 horse”. “Knights”, per se, are rarely mentioned.
My own understanding of what qualified a person to be called “Knight” (Ka-niggit?) is based upon other reading, and conforms to what others have already said: a nobleman who could provide his own horse, weapons, and armor. And those individuals are given little mention in the actual histories I’ve read so far. The regular mounted soldiers seem to have fallen under various rules/customs of feudal society that required various fiefs, depending upon their revenue, to provide “a horse, arms and armor” for one or more mounted soldiers. Since a “knight”, as a nobleman, was expected to pay for his own equipment, I have to assume that the rules about equipping a mounted warrior referred to cavalry, not to a knight. (Smaller fiefs, with smaller revenues, were simply required to furnish arms and armor to one or more foot soldiers, i.e. “infantry”.)
If you have an army that includes “X thousand horse”, it’s a pretty safe bet that all “X-thousand” weren’t “knights”. Cavalry, yes. Knights, no. Unless they were noblemen.
To more directly answer the OP, I would (were I reading the Iliad) read “knights” as “prominent players in the war stories”. In translation, it was probably poetic license, using the best word available.
A watchtower might not even have been a permanent construction; they often weren’t occupied year-round. And do you really think that when a tower was indeed occupied and manned year-round, the lord doubled up as watchman?
I agree. I think we’re barking up the wrong tree, as far as answering the OP is concerned, by having a long thread about knights. I think it’s just a creative translation of a Homeric epithet, or several epithets. I don’t even think that any hypothetical projection of the Hippeis class into earlier times has anything to do with it. Here’s a line in translation calling Nestor a knight:
Here it is in the original (starting from 8:80):
Here’s a link to the Greek text parsed, with translation. The part in the original making up the name plus epithet is just Νέστωρ Γερήνιος (Nestor Gerenios): Nestor of Gerenia.
Let’s try this some more. Another bit in translation:
In the original (from 10:143):
This one is more interesting: Here “ἱππότα” is added to the epithet: Driver of horses, or horseman. So he’s Nestor, the Gerenian horseman.
(Those links are a bit wonky, BTW, my apologies. I can’t link to the exact lines, and I don’t always computer well. Hopefully, I didn’t cock them up completely.)
Nestor is associated with horses, and often shown running around with horses or on chariots. I’ve also seen him called “charioteer”, but I’m guessing that’s a different epithet. Anyway, my guess is that “knight” in the translation is just a bit of creative license. (I did see it pointed out somewhere that Nestor is a very old man, and so maybe he shouldn’t be expected to walk to the battle. I guess his knees aren’t what they used to be.)
TL;DR: Don’t take “knight” literally.
Somewhere between 550 and 450 BC.
The problem is that there was the Mycenean period (the age of the Trojan War) followed by a long dark age where we have little history, and then (much later) the emergence of the polis and the Classical period of Greece. When most people talk about the Spartans and the Athenians, or the Persian invasions, or Plato and Socrates, they are talking about the Classical period.
For example, Helen of Troy was a Spartan. Yet the distance between Helen and Leonidas was about 700 years… The same distance as between us and William “Braveheart” Wallace. So the Mycenean Greeks were (in many ways) quite different from the Greeks that came later.
Eh, what? :dubious:
Like I already said, warhorses were rare, specially bred and trained and insanely expensive by the economic standards of the time. You emphatically did not use those for anything that might damage them outside of battle. No pulling stuff, no joy riding, no hunting game… They must have been about as protected as prize racehorses are today.
To give you a concrete, if not Ancient, example : the 7th century Franks had a code of laws that established “weregild”, i.e. the amount of money you were supposed to give back to the offended party if you had killed, damaged or stolen some of his shit. This to substitute for the more traditional circular blood feud. A milk cow was worth 1 Unit of Currency in reparations, a standard mare was worth 3, a warhorse 12.
Yes - and also, how horses were used in warfare changed completely during the interim.
In Mycenean times, horses were used in war in the form of pulling chariots. In the classical Greek period, chariots for use in war were obsolete in Greece - horses were ridden.
I think you’re making an artificial distinction that didn’t exist at the time - I’m reasonably sure, from the scant artistic depictions, that all ancient Greek horses were war horses, they didn’t seem to use them for farm work or much of anything else. I think the only distinction they’d make would be between chariot-trained and riding-trained warhorses. Even the sporting uses only seems to come in with Classical times.
And a warhorse that *hasn’t *been trained and exercised in peacetime (what little of it there was at the time) would be a useless warhorse, so I don’t think they were sitting around idle.
And I think it’s not a good idea to extrapolate anything from even as long ago as the Franks. Remember, the Franks are centuries closer to us than Mycenaean Greece was to the Franks. All Mycenaean horses would have been light horses, for one thing, but the heavier warhorses were just coming in by the end of the Merovingian times. And good stallions always have been worth more than mares…
While I agree the chariot is definitely the primary use of horses in Mycenaean warfare, we do have evidence for horse riding, including in a military context (bottom of that page).
Yes, I’m quite sure the lord was usually present in the tower where he lived and would help defend it if necessary. These things weren’t just thrown up anywhere, they covered strategic locations and served as a projection of power and that’s not a job they would just hand out to any old cripple they could find.
I agree fully with the first sentence and I think it means exactly the same thing as implied in the second sentence :). The Iliad was written in ~8th century B.C. about events that happened centuries earlier, after the switch from aristocratic charioteers to aristocratic cavalry had largely been completed. Projecting backwards with one term to a roughly equivalent status would have been natural.
Interesting! Though they seem to have been more in the way of scouts or mounted infantry, according to that site.
In any event, it would appear that the warfare role of those mounted on horseback over the dark ages replaced that of the chariot, at least in that part of the world; by the Classic era, chariots were no longer used much in the Greek world for war, though they retained for centuries a ceremonial function (and for racing).
Not sure if I’m parsing your post here. But I didn’t mean to pick on you or anything.
I’m just saying that it seems to be a creative translation of an epithet. Characters in Homer usually have those. Achilles is “swift-footed”, for instance, and Aphrodite is “laughter-loving”. Hector is famously called the “tamer of horses” in the final line. Epithets are mostly standard phrases used to make the meter work. I don’t think the original implies that there is such a thing as a “Mycenean knight”, or that Nestor is one, it just associates Nestor with horsemanship.
(As for Nestor’s actual position in society: He’s king of Pylos.)
Ah, I gotcha. “Nestor the Knight” rather than “Nestor, a knight.” Plausible, depending on just how common the term was Homer’s opus.
Well, I didn’t go through the whole text or anything, to look at every reference to Nestor. (I’ll do it later, when I get bored.) I’m just saying that, from the lines I looked at, Homer isn’t calling Nestor a knight. He is, at most, calling him a horseman. Presumably because Nestor is associated with horses, rides on chariots, and dicks around with horses, more than other characters tend to do. Hence, there’s no need to ask what a “Mycenean knight” is, because Homer doesn’t talk about such a thing. And if the translation hadn’t used the word, we wouldn’t be, either. Right now, I really don’t think there’s more to it.
(The historical accuracy of Homer’s depiction of horses and chariots, compared to their actual use in a hypothetical Trojan war, is another discussion entirely.)
The question I guess would be more does Homer refer to anyone other than Nestor as a knight. Granted that Nestor’s got the horsey association. But do other characters get labeled with the same term in a more general way.
So your actual homework is to go through all of that work in the original Homeric Greek, line by line, until you can give us all a definitive answer as to usage patterns. Or, you know, just forget about it and have a mimosa instead :D.
Yikes. Wait, isn’t this the Dope? Surely, someone has already done that. Can’t we just wait for them to chime in?
Then there were the noble orders of Aztec warriors encountered by Spaniards during the Conquest.
Some wore eagle costumes–the Spaniards called them caballeros águilas–Eagle Knights. Those in jaguar costumes were called caballeros tigres–Tiger(!) Knights. (My Spanish is bad enough; I won’t attempt the Nahuatl.)
Modern scholars usually substitute warriors/guerreros. But, even if it was obvious to Cortez’s men that these warriors had no horses–they considered them knights.