Throughout the period this would be very high indeed in Eastern armies; Tartars would always, and Persians and Mamelukes usually, have 100 per cent cavalry. The
Late 15th Century (Gothic) armour for horse and man (Wallace Collection).
Turks generally backed their cavalry with foot soldiers but normally employed more horse than foot, and in their standing army cavalry outnumbered infantry. The same would be generally true of Eastern Europe — Muscovy, Poland and Hungary.
In Western Europe there was some variation between nations — the French in the 16th Century usually fielded a lot of cavalry, the Spanish and English were generally short of horse — but there were some general trends. In the Italian Wars period the proportion of cavalry tended to fall (France from 2/3 to about 1/11, Spain from 1/5 to 1/12). Thfs may have been caused by the successes won in these wars by artillery and arquebus, temporarily placing cavalry under a cloud, because there was a later recovery. Henry IV of France in 1609 had about 1/7 cavalry in his regular army; and Imperialist armies of the 30 Years’ War seem to have had up to 1/3 cavalry. This proportion was stated to be the ideal by General Monck, and was actually achieved in the Parliamentary ‘New Model Army’ of 1664, while the Cavaliers often had a higher proportion, up to nearly 50 per cent.
World History
