Stirrup: Difference between revisions - Wikipedia

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The '''stirrup''' is a ring with a flat bottom, usually hung from each side of a [[saddle]] to create a footrest for the rider on a [[horse]] or, much less often, another animal. It greatly increases the rider's ability to control the horse, making this animal a useful tool in communication, transportation and warfare. As a result it is considered one of the basic [[tool]]s used to create and spread modern [[civilization]]. Some even argue it is as important as the [[wheel]] or [[printing press]].

The stirrup was invented surprisingly late in history, considering that horses were used for bareback riding and to pull carts or war chariots since at least 10,000 B.CBC.<!--this is an extravagantly early date--> The stirrup was apparently invented in northern [[China]] in the first few centuries CEAD, at first as a single mounting stirrup only used in gaining the saddle; the first dependable representation of a rider with paired stirrups is in a [[Jin]] tomb of about 322AD CE[[322]]. The stirrup was spread throughout [[Eurasia]] by the great horsemen of the central Asian [[steppes]], perhaps beginning with the [[Alans]]. Stirrups were first indirectly documented in Europe during the reign of [[Charles Martel]] in the [[8th century]], when verbs ''scandere'' and ''descendere'' among the Franks replace verbs denoting "leaping" upon a horse. A pair of stirrups have been found in an 8th century burial in Holiare, Slovakia.

In the use of the horse in warfare, the stirrup was the third revolutionary step, after the [[chariot]] and the mounted horseman. Stirrups changed the basic tactics of mounted warfare and made [[cavalry]] more important. Braced against the stirrups, a [[knight]] could deliver a blow with a lance that employed the full weight and momentum of horse and rider together. Reacting to a sudden and urgent demand for cavalry, [[Charlemagne]] ordered his poorer vassals to pool their resources and provide a mounted and armed knight. Lynn White Jr., in ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1966) suggested that the rising [[feudal]] class structure of the European Middle Ages derived ultimately from the use of stirrups: "Few inventions have been so simple as the stirrup, but few have had so catalytic an influence on history. The requirements of the new mode of warfare which it made possible found expression in a new form of western European society dominated by an aristocracy of warriors endowed with land so that they might fight in a new and highly specialized way."