Quote Originally Posted by Spiryt View Post
Battles through the a whole lot of medieval period and even well into the Renaissance and beyond were in fact being decided by a handful of "heroes" or maybe rather guys that had good idea what to do with their weapons.

From Huscarls of Germano Saxonic rulers, trough knights and heavy infantry, tercios, Swiss pike squads and landsknechts, Hussars and so on, battles were more often than decided by relatively small, at least on the bigger scale, group of professional or semi professional fighters.

Masses of levies, pages, peasants, camp followers and other guys with spear or some other stuff were in majority of cases filling up the field providing necessary numbers of opposing steel.
I'm cautious when presented with these sorts of claims. It's really hard to know what would have happened if one piece of an army wasn't present at a battle. I think it's natural to focus on elite forces or leaders when describing the events of a battle, and that can lead to a belief that common forces were irrelevant. Even though the battles are not as big as later ones, the armies are large enough to be considered complex systems interacting with each other, and pieces of systems in such interactions cannot be totally separated from the rest of the system.