Light cavalry

‘Light’ cavalry, usually armed with the lance, and often pretty heavily armoured were, as has been seen, often raised with gendarmes in the early 16th Century, and such troops were soon separated into groups of ‘chevaulegers’ or similar. However troops of this type, like the English ‘demilances’ of the period, were really heavy cavalry using similar tactics to the gendarmes.

True light cavalry, with high mobility, loose open-order formations, and a skirmishing function in battle, were at the beginning of the period found only in the East (where they were universally unarmoured horse-archers with composite bows) and in areas influenced by these Easterners, like Poland and Hungary (horse-archers too), Spain (Genitors) and Italy, where the favoured types were mounted crossbowmen and the originally Albanian ‘Stradiots’.

The development of firearms which could be employed on horseback gave rise to a new breed of light cavalry during the Italian Wars (though very primitive handguns had been used by some cavalry by the mid-15th Century). Mounted arquebusiers seem to have been first used by the-Condottiere Camillo Vitelli in the 1490s, and were quite widespread by the mid-16th Century, when the French even had elite troops of this type.

Such cavalry were trained to skirmish on foot as well as horseback, and by the 17th Century tended to divide into, firstly.

Dragoons, who were really mounted infantry, and secondly troops still called ‘Arquebusiers’, ‘Carabineers’ and so forth, but who had actually managed to turn themselves into heavy cavalry, armed with sword and pistols, rather than with the weapons from which they derived their names.

Eastern Europe continued to provide light cavalry in the 17th Century, and by the 30 Years’ War recognisable prototypes of later light cavalry such as hussars were already to be found in Imperial armies. Most carried curved single-edged sabres originally derived from Tartar or Turkish swords.