Got a Real-World Weapon, Armor or Tactics Question? Mk. XXV

[wolflance]

However as near as I can tell, mounted crossbowmen still generally continued to be seen as a sort of "inferior" light cavalry compared to lancers, even for skirmishing/harassing roles. By the Italian wars, the best light cavalry tended to be from Eastern Europe who had a great deal of experience from constant skirmishing against the turks and tartars. And while many of these horsemen learned to shoot the composite bow as well, they were most prized for their skill with the spear or lance during an ambush or skirmish and their strong lancer tradition. Polish and Cossack cavalry continued to use lances through the napoleonic wars.

Mounted crossbowmen (and harquebusier/pistolier) were invaluable for the sedentary army that lacked a horse archery tradition to have a modicum of mounted missile firepower - they were no substitute for the real deal though.

Lance already enjoyed a sort-of prestigious position among the Europeans, so I am not surprised that they found the lance skill of Poles and Cossacks to be most valuable - even if they had a much more diversed skill set.

Plus, for ambush and raid you would prefer to ride close and chop/impale the victim (likely defenseless peasants etc) anyway.

Lance parries
Juts because you can sometimes parry a lance doesn't mean it's easy. Manuscripts have all sorts of techniques in them, would you claim that parrying a longsword with a dagger is easy, too?

Not saying it was easy, just that:

a) IMO it is about as hard as parrying most other weapons.
b) it was likely actually attempted in the past.
c) I'd say parrying longsword with a dagger is actually HARDER than parrying a couched lance with a short spear.

Original question was about jousting lance against lance charge - parries there are a bad idea, as evidence by no one doing them unless they had no chance with standard charge tactics (way shorter lance as show in Fiore, for example).

Someone mentioned Paulus Hector Mair a few replies back, and I go dug around wiktenauer for his treatise - apparently he taught parrying couched lance with another lance, although not in a way I envisioned it (the parrying knight actually grip his lance with two hand).

Mongols vs knights
We know basically nothing about European horses of the time, but if we go forward to 1400s, knights seemed to favor large, impressive sprinter types for their warhorses (well, large for their time, which means 160 cm for the very largest), while mongols had more of an endurance runners. If this were the case earlier, then knights could well catch a portion of mongol light horse, provided they were well rested, but then swiftly fall behind because there is an awful lot of those light horsemen.

That will be the case if both knight and horse archer are moving in the same direction, i.e. if the knight is chasing after the tail of horse archer, then his sprinter-type horse may well have the acceleration advantage to catch up with the Mongol (disregarding encumbrance difference etc)

More often than not however, when the knight was moving toward the Mongol, the Mongol would move out of the way to the knight's left hand side (since that's how he could aim his bow most conveniently), forcing the knight to change direction, so no "sprinting" happened in the first place.