#warhorse

thecinematichorse:

grison-in-space:

jasmiinitee:

grison-in-space:

feathersescapism:

kittydesade:

flukedoesecology:

jltillary:

elodieunderglass:

slavicafire:

jasmiinitee:

Big Horses are a Very New Thing and they Likely Didn’t Exist in your Historical and/or Fantasy Settings.

You’ve all seen it in every historical piece of media ever produced. Contrary to popular belief, a big black horse with long legs and long flowing mane is not a widespread or even a particularly old type of horse.

THIS IS NOT A MEDIEVAL THING. THIS IS NOT EVEN A BAROQUE THING. THIS IS A NINETEENTH CENTURY CITY CARRIAGE HORSE.

All the love to fancy Friesian horses, but your Roman general or Medieval country heroine just really couldn’t, wouldn’t, and for the sake of my mental health shouldn’t have ridden one either.

Big warmblood horses are a Western European and British invention that started popping up somewhere around 1700s when agriculture and warfare changed, and when rich folks wanted Bigger Faster Stronger Thinner race horses.
The modern warmblood and the big continental draught both had their first real rise to fame in the 1800s when people started driving Fancy Carriages everywhere, and having the Fanciest Carriage started to mean having the Tallest and Thinnest Horses in the town.

Before mechanised weaponry and heavy artillery all horses used to be small and hardy easy-feeders. Kinda like a donkey but easier to steer and with a back that’s not as nasty and straight to sit on.

SOME REAL MEDIEVAL, ROMAN, OTTOMAN, MONGOL, VIKING, GREEK and WHATEVER HISTORICALLY PLAUSIBLE HORSES FOR YOU:

“Primitive”, native breeds all over the globe tend to be only roughly 120-140 cm (12.0 - 13.3 hh) tall at the withers. They all also look a little something like this:

Mongolian native horse (Around 120-130 at the withers, and decendants of the first ever domesticated horses from central Asia. Still virtually unchanged from Chinggis Khan’s cavalry, ancestor to many Chinese, Japanese and Indian horses, and bred for speed racing and surviving outdoors without the help of humans.)

Carpathian native horse / Romanian and Polish Hucul Pony (Around 120-150 at the withers, first mentioned in writing during the 400s as wild mountain ponies, depicted before that in Trajanian Roman sculptures, used by the Austro-Hungarian cavalry in the 19th century)

Middle-Eastern native horse / Caspian Pony (Around 100-130 at the withers, ancestor of the Iranian Asil horse and its decendants, including the famous Arabian and Barb horses, likely been around since Darius I the Great, 5th century BC, and old Persian kings are often depicted riding these midgets)

Baltic Sea native horse / Icelandic, Finnish, Estonian, Gotland and Nordland horses (Around 120-150 at the withers, descendant of Mongolian horses, used by viking traders in 700-900 AD and taken to Iceland. Later used by the Swedish cavalry in the 30 years war and by the Finnish army in the Second World War, nowadays harness racing and draught horses)

Siberian native horse / Yakutian pony (Around 120-140 at the withers, related to Baltic and Mongolian horses and at least as old, as well-adapted to Siberian climate as woolly mammoths once were, the hairiest horse there is, used in draught work and herding)

Mediterranean native horse / Skyros pony, Sardinian Giara, Monterufolino (Around 100-140 at the Withers, used and bred by ancient Greeks for cavalry use, influenced by African and Eastern breeds, further had its own influence on Celtic breeds via Roman Empire, still used by park ranger officers in Italy)

British Isles’ native horse / various “Mountain & Moorland” pony breeds (Around 100-150 at the withers, brought over and mixed by Celts, Romans and Vikings, base for almost every modern sport pony and the deserving main pony of all your British Medieval settings. Some populations still live as feral herds in the British countryside, used as war mounts, draught horses, mine pit ponies, hunting help and race horses)

So hey, now you know!

I love this so much - and now I know why Tall Lanky Thin horses have a terryfying vibe to them, and the “primitive” native pony-like breeds awake in me only hope and trust.

such valid historical finger-eaters here

Okay, so, you got me, I’m a horse person. I used to take riding lessons and would read tons of books about horses as a kid and teenager. You could definitely say I was that weird horse girl, and I really have to say even though this is really informative about the native types of equines in the general European and Middle Eastern areas how FULL OF BS THIS POST IS, SO BUCKLE UP BUTTER CUPS YOU ALL ARE GONNA DO A LEARN TODAY.

So what OP said about the Roman General not riding a Middle Ages war horse is actually correct and here’s why: The Western Roman Empire fell BEFORE THE MIDDLE AGES BEGAN AND IS WHAT TRIGGERED THE BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES IN THE GODDAMN FIRST PLACE. And for those of you who aren’t aware, the Middle Ages was roughly a 1000 year period that consisted of the 5th through the 15th Century; aka. 400AD-1400AD, and ended with the beginning of the Renaissance. (x,x)

First off, NONE OF THOSE ARE HORSES. THOSE ARE PONIES. You cannot ride ponies into battle while dressed in a full suit of armor because their legs would buckle out from underneath them because they simple aren’t large enough or strong enough o be able to carry the weight of a knight in plate armor. Hence the term WARHORSE. OP literally names off a bunch of PONY breeds, and while ponies were used commonly back then as cart and pack animals, they were not used in battle and thus would be bad steeds for fantasy and historical fictional characters that planned on doing any sort of fighting.

Secondly, the Fresian horse breed certainly WAS around during the Middle Ages because it originated in the Netherlands before the 4th Century and is literally known as the ‘Knight’s Breed’ because their size, strength, and stamina that allowed them to be able to carry the extra weight of a knight, his armor, and the armor the horse would be wearing as well. (x)

AND LASTLY, I’M GONNA HELP OUT ALL MY WRITER FRIENDS BY WRITING UP WHAT MIDDLE AGE WAR HORSES ACTUALLY WERE NAMED, THEIR USES, AND WHAT THEY MIGHT HAVE LOOKED SOMETHING LIKE.

ACTUAL MIDDLE AGED WARHORSES: Under the cut because images.

Keep reading

Mad on Main

-Mod Fluke

Oh thank god someone wrote the post so I didn’t have to because the original post just had me all what the actual fuck are you smoking.

OH THANK GOD I had that reaction to the original post but was too tired to go hunt shit up because yeeeeahaha fuck no. Also bless @jltillary for the super useful all-in-one-place link. 

Also: where are the mentions of changes in human height and size over time? I mean, horse sizes have also changed, but not as dramatically as humans.

Note that the OP is completely fucking right about horses historically being smaller than we think of them today, just for the record–horses have grown dramatically in size, in part because so have humans and in part because increasing agricultural output and wealth during the eighteenth and nineteeth centuries encouraged the specific development of very large, heavy draft horses to perform certain industrial tasks before being replaced with machines in the early to mid twentieth century. I do, however, agree that the specific choices they’ve displayed are… not particularly historic, since they’ve predominantly chosen modern pony breeds without necessarily considering the modern context of those animals, either. Or, frankly, the size of what it means to be a pony. 120cm to 130cm is just too damn small; we’re mostly looking from numerous Roman and medieval sources at a range closer to 138-153cm for most of European history, and only the means within that range seem to really change. For context, that is the size of your average Quarter Horse population if you aren’t constantly crossing them on real tall, gangly Thoroughbreds. It’s a very mid-range horse size. 

For context, these Roman horses ranged from 13.1 hands up to 15.3 hands, with an average size of about 14 hands. Here’s an image of a Roman-era Frisian horse against a modern-day Friesian, taken from a paper on Friesian history I’ve cited below:

(Frisian horses did increase in size between the small Roman animal pictured in front and the modern animals, it is true–but throughout medieval Europe, even in Frisia the average equine size continued to range about 13.3 to 15.3 hands or 140-150cm at the withers. Not remotely the size of a modern Friesian! Although this is not the size of the small ponies mentioned by the OP, either.) 

I gotta say LOL wtf at the Lipizzaner under “coursers,” though–they’re warhorses, that’s the point of airs under saddle. They’re built for collection first, strength second, and speed as a distant third. There’s an inherent tradeoff between speed and collection–you can think of that like balance or agility–and in a warhorse, you want to have collection before speed so you can turn quickly and pivot away from a foot soldier or encourage your horse to body slam someone, etc. You also want the poise to pull off, say, leaping up into the air and slamming your hind legs back to kick someone in the head. Lipizzaners are aaaalll about balance and centre of gravity, and it shows in a few notable points of their conformation. 

More on that below. 

In general, the courser lists don’t appear to really understand what these breeds specialize in any more than the list of ponies does. You’ve got the Arabians–who genuinely are animals I’d call coursers, being typically specialized for long-distance endurance, except that the specificanimal pictured is an Egyptian Arabian typically specialized for having pretty heads and trotting around with a flat top like a conformation dog, not so much the current lines of performance Arabians preferred for endurance work which are built a little differently. (Akhal Tekes also fall into this category legitimately, to be fair.) 

You have the Lipizzaner, which as I said is not built for speed orparticularly endurance. And then you have a Fjord, which is an all-around type breed–I’d actually put them right next to the Haflingers in terms of body type, conformation, and ability. They’re best, if anything, for strength, not really speed.  

I would actually put the Lipizzaner as the quintessential modern example of a destrier. Destriers genuinely weren’tas big as people seem to think, and the modern Percheron and Friesian may have roots in old destrier lines but both breeds have inarguably changedsince–the Percheron specialized as a heavy draft horse and the Friesian as a carriage horse, and both are now changing again as people breed either with an eye to riding or, in the case of Percherons, as four-in-hand driving show specialists. The Shire? LOL,no. The progenitor of what we today call the Shire is the Old English Black, which spent considerable time as a carthorse being selected for that skill and everything that comes with that. Gypsy Vanners are similarly descended from British cobs, which means that these are the descendants of animals who have been selected primarily as… small carthorses and draft horses. Very similarly, I should add, to the Haflinger listed above! (The Morgan also, but to a much, much more limited extent. Morgans have always been very multipurpose horses.) 

Look, even if these carthorse and carriage breeds are descended from warhorses and warhorse lines, which I do actually find quite possible… they had a good 350 years past the point when anyone was really engaging in medieval-style warhorse combat for these horses to live on, and you don’t keep horse breeds around just out of historical interest! Horses are bloody expensive, and all breeds and lines of animals change over time to suit current tastes and, more importantly, current uses. No one wants to breed Percherons that are medieval-accurate destriers, eating their fool heads off, when good logging drafts are in high demand. So choosing modern animals to represent medieval specialists is a matter of thinking about the demands of given medieval equine jobs and thinking about the conformation and temperament that fulfill those jobs today. If you’re attached to the notion that Friesians are living replicas of the warhorse from the 1300s, I invite you to consider this much more thorough dissertation of the history of the modern Friesian by a scholar of the breed.

(I see the same thing happen when people want to talk about modern dog breeds in history. Look, I’m sorry, but your fat-ass English Mastiff without enough muzzle to breathe properly and a nose with no holes in it is not the same thing as the war mastiffs the Spanish used to rip the shit out of indigenous people. It’s just not. Most modern dog breeds have been exaggerated to conform to modern sensibilities and modern needs, and as such they don’t bear much resemblance even to their ancestors a century ago, let alone types of dogs kept by medieval people who were actually using dogs to do a job. But it’s very tempting to trace breed lineages back into the misty, romantic edges of yore, so… that’s apparently what we’re doing.)

So okay. Here’s the animals I would pick as showpoints, if I was going to pick a list of modern horse breeds to represent medieval types. I’m making efforts to pick photos that let you get a little bit of a better look at the side of a horse so you can see what kinds of structure we’re talking here. After all, in medieval Europe these horses would be purpose bred, not pedigreed, so structure would effectively have defined them. 

Rouncey

I’m not bothering with the rouncey, because frankly basically any basic hack qualifies; QHs are actually specialized for different things, notably short-distance speed, but frankly they’re so common that you wind up with more or less the same effect. If you’re not particularly any one thing, you count as a rouncey. Here’s a mustang, if you want an image. The mean of medieval and early post-medieval horses does seem to have been about 14 hands: technically pony sized, but not necessarily the small ponies that the OP demonstrated. Fortunately, that is also the size of your average mustang, give or take a couple of inches. 

Courser

Here’s a modern horse that I think would resemble a quite good courser. This is an endurance-bred Arabian with plenty of experience. Note that he is built perfectly level, with relatively light legs (though still with plenty of bone for durability). His neck isn’t too long, unlike the Egyptian Arabian pictured above, which means that he isn’t unbalanced and won’t find it hard to manage his breathing. He has a deep, deep chest–look at how far down his leg it moves past his elbow–which gives him plenty of room for big lungs and heart, allowing him better respiratory efficiency. Note that he does nothave particularly powerful hindquarters. For an endurance horse, you don’t need them–it’s more important to have slow-twitch musculature that can keep going efficiently, and the more evenly the horse is built (that is, the closer its back is to being parallel with the ground), the more efficiently all motion is converted to forward motion. This horse is never going to win a sprint race against a Quarter Horse, but he will be fast across distanceand would have been much prized by anyone who routinely needed to send messengers on horseback. 

Palfrey

This medieval type wasn’t mentioned, but I happen to like it–especially since I’m used to the modern representatives of the type being rather overlooked, especially in this context. A palfrey refers to what we would today call a gaitedhorse, which is particularly comfortable to ride, especially over long distances. (They are also reasonably popular in endurance riding for this reason, although they are not as fast.) This is a Paso Fino mare, chosen because they are reasonably middle-sized and also because they are a Spanish breed, which squares with the tendency to refer to palfreys as similar to or synonymous with jennets, often from Iberia. It’s not easy to identify a gaited horse from a still side shot, so here’s what a gait looks like. 

Destrier

I did say I intended to make a case for Lipizzaners as the prototype medieval destrier, didn’t I? This is a stallion on loan from the Piber stud. So. Let’s point out that Lipizzaners are probably the only line of animals still bred (via the stud at Piber) to perform airs under saddle; while these are framed as being for the betterment of the horse’s riding ability, it is perhaps instructive to consider who first thought training a horse to rear up on its hind legs in a controlled fashion and hop forward with forelimbs raised or to leap through the air and kick as he comes down was a wise idea, and why someone might have thought this at all. It is also worth noting that the Spanish riding style from which dressage comes from is primarily used today in bullfighting, whereupon it becomes immediately evident why you’d want a balanced horse who can immediately shift back on his hindquarters and move in any direction very quickly. 

What I want you to notice about this stallion is that he is not very large–Lipizzaners range from about 14.2 to 15.2 hands–but man, is he compact. He has a short back, a strongly muscled loin, a wide, powerful hip, and a thick, flexible neck. (Lipizanners often startle horse people for looking less like the glamorous Amazons we automatically expect expect and more like chunky, short little fat-necked white blobs; the shorter neck is actually helpful for balance and collection as long as it is flexible.). He also has good depth through the heart girth and while his legs are not particularly long, they are well boned. He is built slightly uphill if you draw a line from the point of his hips to the point of his withers. This is a horse built for agility and flexibility, but not necessarily speed. He is relatively strong for his size–this is a horse who will carry a much heavier rider relative to his height than a longer-backed, and who won’t experience a lot of exertion doing it. And his size is the size we most often find in zooarcheological digs of European medieval military horses.

My friends, this short fat little white pony is probably the most authentic warhorse you’re going to see any time soon. He’ll eat less than any Shire, too, and be much easier to turn and move quickly on the field–particularly given that medieval armor was a lot lighter than the same Victorians creating horses of sizes never seen in recent years liked to imagine. 

Thank you for a good addition! I did go through more conventional “knights’ horses” and some breed history of Fjords, Percherons etc. in some other reblog chains of the post, and the main thesis of the original post was more to show some nice alternatives to the modern idea of a big huge medieval horse than a comprehensive list of this-and-this-only.

The paper on Friesian history looks cool, thanks for the link!

I did look into Ancient Mediterranean art and other Friesian-type native breeds from Europe too, but the original post was maybe less comprehensive than it could have been (which I know, and I never even attempted a complete encyclopedia of horse breeds).

No problem! And like, obviously there’s no real point to digging too hard into obscure Eurasian horse breeds to make this particular point, and I think your list is pretty valuable even if I also think some of them range a little bit smaller than many of these animals seemed to have been on average in a archaeological European context. That’s not the case for all of them, of course, either. As far as I can tell from a quick pass at equine archaeological data, medieval and pre-Georgian horses really tended to range around what we often call “hony” size.

Honestly, what this reading primarily did for me was inspire an interest in when pony breeds got relatively small! It makes sense that you’d see more pony types in areas that are hilly or animals used for relatively light draught work or animals kept primarily by poorer folks; you don’t need a big horse if you’re looking to get the maximal bang for your forage buck, and you definitely don’t need a big horse if you’re primarily not riding it. If you’re dealing with mountains, you can’t go super fast anyway; might as well pick something relatively sure-footed that doesn’t need a lot of pasture that might or might not exist, built strong enough to carry your weight moving relatively slowly or up steep hills. I didn’t feature the type in the post because you’ve done such a good job of it, but that’s much more of a common use in certain traditions than the idea folks have in mind about modern horse breeds living on essentially unchanged from prehistoric times.

The thing that gets me about Friesians in particular is that they’re so obviously carriage horses–look at that knee action! The upright shoulders! The long spindly flash legs! And people act like they’re riding horses built to carry heavy armor, and they’re just not built for it. Look at how light the loin is on the Friesian you posted in your OP and how comparatively long the back is, and compare it to the Lipizzaner at the bottom. Pound for pound, that Lipizzaner is much more capable of carrying someone relatively heavy than the Friesian simply because the Lipizzaner is built compact and with all his connections gone back and reinforced for strength; the Friesian by comparison is drawn out and leggy and light, but looks much more elegant assuming you don’t need much in the way of vertical stress on the animal.

I reblogged this earlier as a placeholder, but really wanted to reply- to a lot of things.

#1 THE FRIESIAN -  I wanted to give a whole-hearted, enthusiastic agreement that the Friesian is really out of place as a war horse. To expound, I’ve posted earlier that the Friesian is a more modern breed, but by that we’re talking, developed within the last ~500 years or so. Proto-Friesians existed in the region of the Netherlands for centuries, but the nature of the BCE, Christendom, and Renaissance eras of horse breeding is that they bred less ‘breeds’ as we know it, and more so types of horses. Years ago, I blogged elsewhere about the Friesian not truly being a Baroque horse horse, and I hold to that - ‘Baroque’ in terms of horses denotes a specific time period, a specific use, and a specific phenotypical as well as genotypical blueprint - that is, the Spanish horse. To quote:

The Baroque Era and the baroque horse are characterized by horses that were widely popular, exemplified a type, and performed the arts. Thus, we have the Lipizzans, we have the Lusitanos, we have the Andalusians, we have the extinct offshoots and severely depleted types of the Spanish bloodlines, including the Carthusian, the Jennet/Ginete (I wonder if the Wikipedia article speaking of the Ginetta is in fact referring to this), the Castilian, the Extremeno, Zapatero - typically, collectively, described as Spanish or Iberian.

Where the Kladruber is concerned, it’s very closely associated with the Iberian horses, hence the intermingling of Kladruber and Lipizzan bloodlines. They were both instituted by the ruling Habsburg family, and it was at the end of the Baroque era that they were crossed with Neapolitan stock, and consequently the introduction of other breeds gave way to the horse that we know today as the Kladruber.

The Fredericksborg had similar origins, and it lost its Spanish type in the mid 1800’s, becoming more the warmblood that we see today. Likewise for the Knabstrup.

Friesians do not have the type. They were used during the Baroque Era, and have Baroque heritage, but they are not in-and-of themselves Baroque. Nor would they have been so popular throughout all of Europe to be used as the penultimate saddle horse for war. The Frisian, on the other hand… Ah, but there is some great information on that above. Loved that paper.

#2 FORM FOLLOWS FUCTION - It cannot be overstated how much horses were bred for type rather than purity of bloodlines. Every single cavalry manuscript on breeding ever (okay, maybe a hyperbole, but still) emphasizes type over specific breeds for the use of war. I was just looking at US Remounts and noticed that, even in first half of the 20th century, well after a good deal of this Victorian purity nonsense began, they were still breeding for types - Light, Draft, Pony. Above mentions the more medieval types of horses, rather than actual breeds of horses.

#3 - “PEOPLE WERE SMALLER BACK THEN” - I want to kick this myth to the curb so badly. ‘Back then’ is a very vague, and in any case, either you’re wrong or people were only a little bit shorter. That said, it’s really aggravating to consistently hear that the smaller horse breeds are too small to be cavalry animals, because they’re not big enough for people to ride the. This simply isn’t true. The Arabian horses are usually considered to not have much substance because of how refined they looked, but there’s a difference between skeletal substance and musculature. Muscles just flesh out what’s already there - and many of the older desert imports actually resembled modern Lippitt Morgans once given a chance to put on some weight and bulk up. As for the Morgan horse, there’s a reason their moniker is The Little Big Horse. 

#4 - COURSER CONFORMATION - this is more a quibble than anything, but I’m not sure I agree that having a level built = the most efficient forward motion. Efficient forward motion is most typically associated with height of the haunches, which we can see in both Thoroughbreds and Arabians - both breeds of which have traditionally (…in some ways less so with modern breeding trends of the last century) excelled as endurance horses. Too much downhill is bad, but just a little bit? Magic speeds. A good example of this is honestly a bunch of the Polish Arabians, which are tested on the tracks before they become breeding stock.