Historic Horse Archer Macro-Strategies?

[Colovion]

I know about the minute aspects of Horse Archer battles and general variations of the Horse Archers sweeping forward, lauching arrows as they approached, then turning and firing more arrows and so one and so forth - but I was wondering if anyone knew anything about the strategies of huge hordes of Horse Archers - those of 12,000+ which would undoubtedly need some kind of organisation to deal with other forces which had a much more structured order of battle.

Were there multiple masses of horses which did an en masse version of the cantabrian circle?

Would they try to get as many horse archers at the enemy at as many places as possible? Would that usually mean encircling the enemy?

Were less horsemen needed for this kind of battle and thus allowing 'regiments' to rest for a day?

All these questions and more - if someone can lead me somewhere or enstill their wisdom on this thread it would be greatly appreciated.

:bow:

[Steppe Merc]

Their is one excellent book I just finished reading about the history of the Steppe horse archers, called Warriors of the Steppe: A Military History of Central Asia, 500 B.C. to A.D. 1700 by Erik Hildinger. It's very good, and enjoyable. It covers the Scythians to the end of the Steppe warriors.

I undestand that splitting of forces happened very often, to create confusion and also for the horses to have proper grazing. They never fought when they didn't want to... they would just dispers and keep on riding off until the enemy was exasauted. They would then group up together again.
Encirceling the enemy was common, as was false retreats to exaust the enemy.

[Watchman]

Well, it dind't quite work all that well in practice. The nomads' most common foes were other nomads, who had all the same advantages, and the Russians, Byzantines, Chinese et all developed long-range cavalry raids, surprise night attacks on camps, converging column strategies etc. to fairly proficient levels to keep their grazing and troublesome neighbors in check.

'Course, two of the three in particular had serious problems with this "quality maintenance" thing, especially as far as central adminstration went, but that's a different story...