Why Couldn’t Ancient Rome Invent Stirrups?

Ancient Technology: WARFARE – History Documentary – YouTube

 

I used to do Medieval Warfare games, my main concern when playing in fantasy war games was concentrated mainly on tactical warfare situations.  Shaping events on a battlefield is greatly amusing.  A lifelong love of sword fighting and playing war games causes me to think about war systems and how civilizations rise and fall due to sudden technological changes on the battlefield.  Many things have been invented, 99% of the time, by fighting males.  Today, I want to discuss why even ancient Rome couldn’t figure out something as simple as the stirrup.

 

Alexander the Great who spent nearly his entire life on the back of a horse, couldn’t figure out how to make a stirrup.  All the greatest minds which had access to one of the greatest library systems, set up by Alexander’s buddies, couldn’t figure out one of the simplest technological tools of ancient warfare.

 

The ancient Romans figured out how to make huge siege engines, gigantic tools for tearing down walls, some of the most sophisticated water and irrigation systems which still stand to this day, two thousand years later…and they couldn’t fathom how to ride a horse with saddle and stirrups!

 

This is a key question to ask because what destroyed Rome was…the stirrup.
Mongolia’s Horse Race Evokes Genghis Khan – YouTube

The children in this race video ride bareback without stirrups.  This trains children in the art of moving in harmony with their horses.  Then, when adults, they are trained to ride with stirrups.  Why is this?

 

Well, jumping over bodies of fallen victims of the Steppe people and being able to shoot bow and arrow, use spears and then in close combat, using swords is more stable and one has greater power behind one’s blows if one is firmly afixed upon the horse via saddle and stirrups.

 

In retrospect, the concept of stirrups is blindingly obvious yet it didn’t appear for several thousand years after humans first decided to use horses as transportation animals.  The chariot, first appearing around 5,000 years ago, is a very complex machine.

 

The evolution of the chariot required in the beginning, multiple horses or donkeys to pull the machine, the wheel had to be invented and the axle had to be designed, it is extremely complex and it showed up at the same time as the earliest empires!

 

The ancient Romans used chariots all over the place and had many designs of chariots yet they could not figure out how to make a simple stirrup.

 

This is one of the simplest technologies!  And deadly!  True, first saddles had to evolve.  This was quite a bit trickier.  I used to train horses.  One trick horses universally learn when quite young and I assure everyone, all horses do this immediately: hold their breath when the saddle is mounted and the trainer tightens the cinch.

 

It is funny and when teaching a young horse, always would cause me to laugh.  The trick is, when the horse deliberately holds its breath, one has to ‘burp’ the horse by using the knee in the groin of the horse.  Usually, the horse snorts and gives you a dirty look when you do this.

 

So, why did the plains people of central Asia figure out the saddle and the stirrup while ancient Romans who were extremely inventive in so many ways, yet this eluded them totally and entirely and when the first mounted raiders attacked the Rumanian provinces of Rome which were rich pickings indeed, the mounted raiders swept away the Roman fighting forces with ease!

 

All the barbarians pouring over the Roman Empire, destroying it systematically, were using the stirrup.  The puzzled Romans tried to save themselves via hiring these aliens to fight for them which they did do…only to still attack in between jobs, the Roman people were utterly helpless by this point and couldn’t fight off any of the mounted attackers.

 

And thus, Rome collapsed in the West and was tremendously reduced in size and power in the Eastern half and the rulers there were all former barbarians.  Out of this stirrup holocaust arose a New Europe: the Medieval Knights who were not only mounted with stirrups but could fight on horseback in full metal armor.

 

Oddly enough, the stirrup arose in ancient China, a crude stirrup used to hoist government officials onto transportation for going into the mountains, not the plains.  Chariots can’t climb around the Himalayan Mountains, after all.

 

To this day, people move around those mighty mountains on the back of hardy small ponies.  I have had ponies and unlike large horses, they can climb up and down like mountain goats, and what better way to go around in the mountains than on a horse with stirrups?

 

The evolution of the clunky, large stirrup for transportation to the tool of the most violent warfare as done on the great open plains of Asia.  When the stirrup was spotted by tribes that rode bareback style, they played around with the technology until they created the finely tuned, very light tool we know so well today.

 

Once this happened, it took barely a generation to figure out how to fight while riding with stirrup and very light saddles.  Ancient Chinese saddles were huge and clunky, the new plains people saddles were very light and using stirrups, one could rise up high to shoot arrows, turn backwards and shoot and of great importance: JUMP.

 

Suddenly, obstacles to movement vanished as horses were trained to jump up to five feet or even more, climbing up steep banks thrown up to stop armies suddenly became useless as horses would charge up steep inclines.

 

We see this clearly at the famous battle in England when the Norman knights attacked the British forces behind a shieldwall on a hillside.

 

During the Middle Ages, castles became horse depots where the fighting tools were kept secure.  The siege tactics of the Middle Ages were Roman tactics.  That didn’t change at all.  The other innovation to come from China was gun powder.

 

That changed warfare again, totally and destroyed the need for horses.  It is of great interest to me to see the Chinese very cleverly invented a number of incredible things that changed history only the Chinese never really figured out how to use the invention of gun power and the stirrup, it was always the clever barbarians who figured out nasty uses for Chinese inventions.

 

And then used these to enslave the Chinese people!  Even things like ship building: the Chinese at the dawn of the Age of Exploration when Europeans suddenly began sailing very far from home with constantly improved technology, their original goal was…to go to China and take over there!!!

 

And the Chinese invented novel shipping methods only to suddenly drop it all and hunker down and try to prevent the invading foriegn ships from attacking China, uselessly and hopelessly and finally being totally conquered.

 

So we have, in a nutshell, a dual problem here: why couldn’t other people invent simple stirrups and why did China, the inventor of gun power and stirrups and a host of other things, always fall flat on the face and their own inventions turned against them and being conquered by their imitators using these tools?

 

Seriously, this is a very important question and we can see in events unfolding on this planet why we must figure out why great civilizations can’t think straight or do very obvious things to prevent disaster.  Why empires fall to barbarians is a very, very big topic as we watch Europe plunge off the cliff, openly inviting invaders into Europe and allowing them to utterly destroy civilization there.

 

And why are we trying to do this, too?  Half of our voting public seems to want this Roman-style End of Times.  Baffling to me, utterly baffling.