Cataphract

Chronicled by many historians from the earliest days of antiquity up until the High Middle Ages, they may have influenced the later European knights, through contact with the Eastern Roman Empire.

[1] Peoples and states deploying cataphracts at some point in their history included: the Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Medes, Parthians, Achaemenids, Sakas, Armenians, Seleucids, Attalid, Pontus, Greco-Bactrian, Sassanids, Romans, Goths, Byzantines, Georgians, Chinese, Koreans, Jurchens, Mongols, Tanguts and Songhai.

In Europe, the fashion for heavily armoured Roman cavalry seems to have been a response to the Eastern campaigns of the Parthians and Sasanians in Anatolia, as well as numerous defeats at the hands of Iranian cataphracts across the steppes of Eurasia, most notably in the Battle of Carrhae (53 BC) in upper Mesopotamia.

Κατάφρακτος (kataphraktos, cataphraktos, cataphractos, or katafraktos) is composed of the Greek root words, κατά, a preposition, and φρακτός ("covered, protected"), which is interpreted along the lines of "fully armoured" or "closed from all sides".

The term first appears substantively in Latin, in the writings of Lucius Cornelius Sisenna: "loricatos, quos cataphractos vocant", meaning "the armoured, whom they call cataphract".

[4] Roman chroniclers and historians Arrian, Aelian and Asclepiodotus use the term "cataphract" in their military treatises to describe any type of cavalry with either partial or full horse and rider armour.

Some historians theorise that cataphracts and clibanarii were one and the same type of cavalry, designated differently simply as a result of their divided geographical locations and local linguistic preferences.

[citation needed] The reliance on cavalry as a means of warfare in general lies with the ancient Indo-European inhabitants of the Central Asian steppes in early antiquity, who were one of the first peoples to domesticate the horse and pioneered the development of the chariot.

These early riding traditions, which were strongly tied to the ruling caste of nobility (as only those of noble birth or caste could become cavalry warriors), now spread throughout the Eurasian steppes and Iranian plateau from around 600 BC and onwards due to contact with the Median Empire's vast expanse across Central Asia, which was the native homeland of the early, north-eastern Iranian ethnic groups such as the Massagetae, Scythians, Sakas, and Dahae.

[9] The successive Persian Empires that followed the Medes after their downfall in 550 BC took these already long-standing military tactics and horse-breeding traditions and infused their centuries of experience and veterancy from conflicts against the Greek city-states, Babylonians, Assyrians, Scythians, and North Arabian tribes with the significant role cavalry played not only in warfare but everyday life to form a military reliant almost entirely upon armored horses for battle.

The evolution of the heavily armored horseman was not isolated to one focal point during a specific era (such as the Iranian plateau), but rather developed simultaneously in different parts of Central Asia (especially among the peoples inhabiting the Silk Road) as well as within Greater Iran.

Reliefs discovered in the ancient ruins of Nimrud (the ancient Assyrian city founded by king Shalmaneser I during the 13th century BC) are the earliest known depictions of riders wearing plated-mail shirts composed of metal scales, presumably deployed to provide the Assyrians with a tactical advantage over the unprotected mounted archers of their nomadic enemies, primarily the Aramaeans, Mushki, North Arabian tribes and the Babylonians.

[11] Archaeological excavations also indicate that, by the 6th century BC, similar experimentation had taken place among the Iranian peoples inhabiting the Khwarezm region and Aral Sea basin, such as the Massagetae, Dahae and Saka.

Whether this development was influenced by the Assyrians, as Rubin postulates,[12] or perhaps the Achaemenid Empire, or whether they occurred spontaneously and entirely unrelated to the advances in heavily armored cavalry made in the Ancient Near East, cannot be discerned by the archaeological records left by these mounted nomads.

The cataphract was widely adopted by the Seleucid Empire, the Hellenistic successors of Alexander the Great's kingdom who reigned over conquered Persia and Asia Minor after his death in 323 BC.

[17][18] In 38 BC, the Roman general Publius Ventidius Bassus, by making extensive use of slingers, whose long-range weapons proved very effective, defeated the uphill-storming Parthian armored cavalry.

[19] At the time of Augustus, the Greek geographer Strabo considered cataphracts with horse armor to be typical of Armenian, Caucasian Albanian, and Persian armies, but, according to Plutarch, they were still held in rather low esteem in the Hellenistic world due to their poor tactical abilities against disciplined infantry as well as against more mobile, light cavalry.

[23] A key architect in the process was evidently the Roman emperor Gallienus, who created a highly mobile force in response to the multiple threats along the northern and eastern frontier.

[24] However, as late as 272 AD, Aurelian's army, completely composed of light cavalry, defeated Zenobia at the Battle of Immae, proving the continuing importance of mobility on the battlefield.

[25] The Romans fought a prolonged and indecisive campaign in the East against the Parthians beginning in 53 BC, commencing with the defeat of Marcus Licinius Crassus (close benefactor of Julius Caesar) and his 35,000 legionaries at Carrhae.

[26] This tradition was later paralleled by the rise of feudalism in Christian Europe in the Early Middle Ages and the establishment of the knighthood particularly during the Crusades, while the Eastern Romans continued to maintain a very active corps of cataphracts long after their Western counterparts fell in 476 AD.

But no sooner had the first light of day appeared, than the glittering coats of mail, girt with bands of steel, and the gleaming cuirasses, seen from afar, showed that the king's forces were at hand.Cataphracts were almost universally clad in some form of scale armor (Greek: φολιδωτός Folidotos, equivalent to the Roman Lorica squamata) that was flexible enough to give the rider and horse a good degree of motion, but strong enough to resist the immense impact of a thunderous charge into infantry formations.

Ammianus Marcellinus, a noted Roman historian and general who served in the army of Constantius II in Gaul and Persia and fought against the Sassanid army under Julian the Apostate, described the sight of a contingent of massed Persian cataphracts in the 4th century: ...all the companies were clad in iron, and all parts of their bodies were covered with thick plates, so fitted that the stiff-joints conformed with those of their limbs; and the forms of human faces were so skillfully fitted to their heads, that since their entire body was covered with metal, arrows that fell upon them could lodge only where they could see a little through tiny openings opposite the pupil of the eye, or where through the tip of their nose they were able to get a little breath.

While they varied in design and appearance, cataphracts were universally the heavy assault force of most nations that deployed them, acting as "shock troops" to deliver the bulk of an offensive manoeuvre, while being supported by various forms of infantry and archers (both mounted and unmounted).

In many armies, this reflected upon social stratification or a caste system, as only the wealthiest men of noble birth could afford the panoply of the cataphract, not to mention the costs of supporting several war horses and ample amounts of weaponry and armor.

The end result was a far smaller force of Parthian cataphracts and horse archers wiping out a Roman army four times their number, due to a combination of fire and movement, which pinned the enemy down, wore them out and left them vulnerable to a deathblow.

The army of Emperor Nikephoros II Phokas reconstituted Kataphraktoi during the tenth century and included a complex and highly developed composition of an offensive, blunt-nosed wedge formation.

It is for this reason that Byzantine military manuals (Praecepta Militaria and the Taktika) advise where possible, for the use of a second wedge of Kataphraktoi which could be hurled at the enemy in the event that they resisted the initial charge.

Despite these advances, the Byzantine army, often unable to afford newer equipment en masse, was left ill-equipped and forced to rely on its increasingly archaic military technology.

Comprehensive armor for horses made of metal might have been used in China as early as the Three Kingdoms period, but the usage wasn't widely adapted as most cavalry formation requires maneuverability.