You write "I forget whether in Charlemagne's time the Franks had switched from using their horses as mobile conveyances to the battlefield to using them for shock charges on the battlefield. (Certainly they had long done so by Hastings.)"

No, they had not "long done so by Hastings". What they had done was learn both sorts of tactics - but as late as William Rufus' taking of Carlisle from the Scots a generation after Hastings, they still used the former approach when they thought fit (and, as I recollect, on occasion during the contemporaneous First Crusade).

Now the French knights of the Hundred Years' War - they resisted the ideas of not being superior simply by being cavalry.

At Hastings there is an interesting question. At a key point in that battle the Normans' Breton troops retreated, and the Anglo-Saxons broke ranks to pursue them. But the pursuing Anglo-Saxons were then enveloped and destroyed, and this was probably the turning point of the battle.

The question is, were the Bretons cavalry, and if so, was this a fake retreat of the type characteristic of all steppe cavalry from the Scythians to the Mongols?

There is good reason to believe that it was, because the Bretons (retreating from Britain under Anglo-Saxon pressure) settled in Brittany about the same time that a contingent of Alan mercenary cavalrymen (originally a steppe people) settled there, and intermarried with them, and often did provide cavalry contingents to French armies. (The Bretons were not Gauls).

Source: Bachrach, "History of the Alans in the West". (Tetlow's "Hastings" describes the retreat as a real retreat.)

http://history.vineyard.net//allen/Allen_Alan_surname_history.html (A somewhat eccentric version of the story)

The matter has long been controversial, but present-day historians seem inclined to the view that cavalry shock tactics were not completely developed by the time of Charlemagne. http://scholar.chem.nyu.edu/tekpages/texts/strpcont.html

The logic of the situation--a rearguard defending a mountain pass--suggests dismounted action.

The question is whether medieval cavalry a) rode to battle and then dismounted, or at least merely rode up to their enemy and poked or bashed them, or b) whether they charged them with a couched lance (under the armpit) so becoming, horse and man, a single, armored weapon. This depends on the stirrup (which keeps the knight on the horse after the shock of impact). Historians have scrutinized the Bayeaux tapestry, for example, looking for stirrups and couched lances, with mixed findings.

zizka

The Bretons were not Gauls?
Why do you say that? Are you saying the Alani were not Gauls? I bet they were.

Just curious

Bretons were Gauls, in the sense that the Romans used the term: Celts, usually to the north (even in what is now Italy). Also, they were neither ethnically nor culturally very distinct from the Gauls Caesar subdued (that is, while different from them, the difference was continuous and within the range of variation they themselves had). However, by the fall of the western Roman Empire Romanisation was far less advanced in the western parts of Britain than in Transalpine Gaul, let alone Cisalpine Gaul, so they were distinct from the locals they settled next to. As for the Alani (which surprises me, that they should be involved), they were a very different people.

And no, the question is NOT whether cavalry shock tactics had evolved by the time of Hastings; it is whether they had displaced other tactics used by horsemen, e.g. mounted infantry (dragoons). They had not.

The Gauls were Celts, and the Bretons were Celts, and both lived in France. However, the Bretons were not remnants of the Gauls. They were refugees from Britain who had fled the Anglo- Saxons.

The Alans were northern Iranians kin to the Scythians. (Aryan, Alan, Iran are cognate). Theuy called themselves As, and the Ossettes (in the Caucusus) are probably their descendants. At the time of Attila, many Alans went into Roman service.

It is often claimed that the Alans (or the related Sarmations) brought stirrups and cavalry shock tactics to Europe.

Bachrach claims that the common French name Alan traces back to the Breton-Alans. By conjecture, Breton heroic romance (enormously popular in the middle ages, and the ancestor of our pulp fiction) might have had an Alan (steppe) influence.

Just because I have been recently deconstructing who is who in the Middle Ages here are some links. I know the difference between a Celt and a Gaul, Gauls are people who forget their language.(g) But who exactly are the Gauls the Romans claim are around the Black Sea?
As per stirrups, I don't study war no more. As for Charlie Magni it's the medieval warm period and the Irish isn't it(g)

Respendial
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alans
http://southosetia.chat.ru/en_histo.html
http://www.northvegr.org/lore/frank/015.html
Gregory of Tours
Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus, whom we have already mentioned, in his story of the capture and destruction of Rome by the Goths, says: "Meantime when Goare had gone over to the Romans, Respendial, king of the Alamanni, turned the army of his people from the Rhine, since the Vandals were getting the worse of the war with the Franks, having lost their king Godegisil, and about 20,000 of the army, and all the Vandals would have been exterminated if the army of the Alamanni [note: Alamanni for Alani] had not come to their aid in time

http://www8.brinkster.com/vk011/ossetia/page2.html

Iapetos
http://www.theoi.com/Ouranos/Iapetos.html
The undermost limits of earth and sea, where Iapetos and Kronos seated have no shining of the sun god Hyperion to delight them nor winds’ delight, but Tartaros stands deeply about them.” –Iliad 8.479f

Brian -- If you've gone this far you really oughta read Bachrach's book. Lots of fun stuff.

I've read some things about the Black Sea / Anatolian Gauls. Seems to be a messy question. There is a rumor that Alexander the Great's father Phillip was murdered by a Celt (possibly in Alexander's pay). Another Celt miffed Alexander by saying that the only thing that frightened the Celts was the possibility that the sky might fall on their heads -- i.e., they didn't fear Alexander.

The Latin word Gaul supposedly means "wall" = "outside the walls" and is cognate to Welsh, Wallonia, Wallachia, Galatea, Galicia, etc. The Romans were supremely insolent and sloppy in their designations of the inferior nations (wogs in British). So anyway the Anatolian Gauls/Celts might have been some other foreign people, not Gaulish or Celtic by our standard. (Is Celt the Greek word for whoever these people were?)

This is way more fun than being accused of Stalinism by Thomson and some of the other pests on this site. Or do you disagree?

PS. As to the specific question, it's well established that the Ossetes/As/Alans spoke a "Northern Iranian" language. These languages were related to Persian but significantly different. Ossete may be the only one still surviving. The Scythians, Sarmatians, Sakas, etc., also spoke Northern Iranian languages.

I somewhere heard:-

- The terms Galatia, etc., come from the milk drinking habits of the Gauls as observed by the Greeks, in turn arising from their cattle herding unsettled lifestyle. The term "Gaul" comes from these.

- "Wog" is indeed an English word, a derogatory term for any kind of foreigner, but it goes back quite far. "Welsh", "Wallace", etc. were originally just variant spellings of an irregular plural, but have since come to have specific meanings.

- "Alemanni", "Marcomanni", etc. are transliterations of Germanic self descriptions "All the men" (i.e. real people, non-wogs), "March men" (people living on the woggish borders), etc.

- The Bretons WERE remnants of the Gauls, in the sense the Romans first used the term - they were the remnants driven out of south west Britain who headed south; those groups were once also called Gauls, and Gaul was just another word for Celt until it too got more specific.

Anecdotal, of interest but very far from guaranteed. Si no e vero e ben trovato.

By the way, I remember seeing an article in History Today that speculated that some of these Bretons had actually formed a settlement on the northern Spanish coast (i.e., not remaining from before like the Galicians), only losing their identity somewhere along the line. Can anyone remind me just where this might have been and what it was (supposed to be) called?

This is getting quibbly, but when Caeser divided Gaul into 3 parts he didn't include Britain, and I believe that the Romans called the Celts of Britain Britons. By the time the Bretons reached France, I'm pretty sure that the local Celts were all assimilated / exterminated.

I appreciate that Caesar did not call the Britons "Gauls" when he was describing Gaul. Nor, come to that, did he make specific reference to Cisalpine Gaul when he described it that way. In fact, he was only describing that part of Gaul he was conquering at the time. For instance, when he referred to groups like the Belgae, he did not simultaneously say "Gauls"; yet he noted that there were Belgae on both sides of the Channel.

It is this sort of continuity I was bringing out. Indeed, if Robert Graves was accurate (dubious!) one main motive of the Romans for conquering Britain was to stop the support British groups were giving their kin in Gaul.

I suspect one cause for confusion is that we translate both the place "Gallia" (qui in tres partes divisa erat) and a tribal person "Gallus" (apud quos tumulti erant) as "Gaul".

Rats. It somehow dropped my personal details from the post just above.

I guess my point was that the Gauls, like the ALans, were newcomers to Brittany when they got there. In that circumstance a real Alan influence on the Bretons would seem more likely, than if the Alans had had to horn their way in into a firmly-established society with deep roots in Brittany.

Wonder how the Bretons feel about Ms. Spears? After all they've been through, to give their name to something like that. (But maybe they love the virginical little tart).

By the way it wasn't a Breton invaision, nor was it a celtic invaision, it was a Norman invation.

The Norse Men

The turning point in European history, however, was the Norman invasion of England in 1066. England had seen Scandinavian invasions before; these invasions and the subsequent emigrations had carved out an entire Danish kingdom in the north of England, the Danelaw. When the Norman descendants of Scandinavian raiders returned in the eleventh century, they gained control over Anglo-Saxon England and would eventually be responsible for English supremacy over most of Britain.

1066 also was the last Norse invasion of England (Harold Hardrada, who had earlier been a figure in Byzantine history as a mercenary). He was defeated by King Harold of England in a surprise attack. By the time William of Normandy came along, the Anglo-Saxons had already been pushed pretty hard -- they had to rush back to meet the Norman attack.

Like William and H. Hardrada King Harold was ultimately of Norse descent. His father Godwin had usurped the throne.

Already 1n 1060 other Normans had invaded Muslim Sicily after having occupied Byzantine areas on the Italian mainland. Soon they would threaten the Pope. They were pure freebooters with no religious pretext, but maybe the Crusaders a few decades later got the idea from them.