Why did knights suck so bad?

[Patron]

Knights were the epitomy of hand to hand warfare. They were mounted of giant horses, guilded in the most advanced and expensive armour available and trained from infancy in weapons and exercises which had evolved for nearly 1500 years of constant war in europe and in other environment in different strategic situations. The only improvement modern science could add is new materials, helmets in ww2 were based on knight's helmets because they were that advanced.

Yet all knights ever did was fight each other and conquer jerusalem, for a while. In theory they should have been like the mongols, sweeping across the globe and mowing down anything they can come into contact with, in theory. In fact the "primitive" nomadic mongols were superior in combat when they came into contact with western knights. In hundreds of instances knights have charged into swamps or bottle necks and ending up tripping over each other before being hacked to death by peasants armed with pole weapons or longbows, charging into pikes, dying of dehydration, starvation and plague, sinking to the bottom of the sea in their armour and all sorts of instances of military incompetence and stupidity.

Knights were organised, they would form into a circle formation if they found themselves flanked, they trained in the use of all sorts of weapons, pikes, halberds, light cavalry tactics, assaulting walls etc.. Surely someone sometime must have realised if knights didn't charge headlong into death traps all the time they could become the most effective fighting force possible?

[ajaxfetish]

I imagine that conquering vast reaches of the world would have more to do with social organization than individual combat competence. The localized, fragmented social structure of Western Europe made world conquest highly unlikely. The crusades were the closest thing they managed, and they were terribly hard to get off the ground and generally short-lived.

Also the battlefield situations you mentioned mostly had to do with strategic decisions made by incompetent or backward-looking commanders and had little to do with the individual knights military ability. When used properly, knights were the most formidable troops in Western Europe and among the most formidable in the world.

Ajax

[m52nickerson]

I have no doubt that this will be move, but here we go.

Knights were very well trained, and well armed. The heavy armor they wore was a major factor in there victories as well as there defeats. Weapons an tactics were always being developed to deal with armor. Polarms, war hammers, crossbows, all came out of the need to deal with armor.
Then you had the fact that there were different orders of knights. Each with slightly different rules and organization. They all were basically ruled by a church that was more interested in a few goals rather then fighting in any type of strategic way. I mean at one point the pope out lawed crossbows.
So there armor held them back, to a point. There rules held them back, and there church held them back. They never had a chance.

[Roark]

1. Disunity
2. Pride
3. Greed
4. Politics

[ajaxfetish]

Oh yes, I'd meant to mention pride, too. Thanks Roark. Often tactical expediency was ignored in favor of personal fame.

Ajax

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

1. Disunity
2. Pride
3. Greed
4. Politics

You've summed that up alot more quickly than I could.

[miho]

And there weren't so many of them. There were a lot more peasants with polearms and crossbows.

[Mithrandir]

Pride, incompetence,expenses...

and moved to the Monastery.

[Rosacrux redux]

I'd take this to the next level:

Social and technological progress rendered the knights obsolete. Especially socioeconomic progress - maintaining one single knight (a guy who didn't produce anything, just consumed a huge share of the net product - a 150 serf families had to work night and day just to support a single knight and his men at arms) to the expense of a 100 or more guys, was not feasible nor wanted after the west re-evaluated the medieval social structures and went back in time to reestablish Graeco-Roman democratical and republican models.

It was counterproductive and technological progress rendered it also countereffective (but not before the knights had long become obsolete due to social reasons).

[English assassin]

Personally I think we answered this one at Agincourt...

[cutepuppy]

And at Courtrai, Sempach, Bannockburn, Nicopolis, Morgarten, Hattin,...

[Brutus]

1. I doubt knights were ever the absolute best warriors on the planet. They may have been rather formidable when used in the proper ways, but as always, there are other types of military men who can defeat them with ease. Knights were in effect 'designed' to deal with each other and would have had to fight in concert with other types of soldiers to be efficient. Most instances of knights completely faltering on the battlefield is when they tried to fight 'non-knights' without any support from other arms.

2. Lack of funds and numbers: The knights, being an elite, were indeed very few in number when compared to, for example, Mongol warriors. Also, being a knight is obscenely expensive. One has to pay for one's armour, weapons, horses (yes, multiple ones), retainers, etc. There simply wasn't enough to go around.

3. Lack of vision. I seriously doubt if any medieval European ruler ever contemplated conquering the entire world. Medieval man had no concept of the world as a whole (at least, not as we see it today). Sure, they knew of some world conquerors (the best known is and was Alexander the Great), and they knew the concept of 'us' (European christendom) and 'the other' (the Islamic world, pagan tribes, etc.), but they probably never desired to 'rule the world'. Nevertheless, medieval christendom and its knights actually did conquer large bits of planet that previously were not theirs: Spain, large parts of Eastern Europe and the Holy Land. Most likely, the pope's (in particular Urban II) effort to divert the knight's energy to other regions of the world is what culminated in the crusades, and to my knowledge they were in effect the only real example of a planned (actually not even really planned) 'conquering spree' I know of.

4. Lack of organisation. There is one thing knights liked to do best: fighting other knights. It's hard to get them united against a common enemy. The best example of such an effort is in effect, again, the crusades (especially the first one), and even those proved to be a miserable failure in this respect. Quarrels at home were the reason for more then one crusader to return from his quest. It's just easier to attack your neighbour instead of someone far, far away whom you've never met before.

5. Knights were a social as well as a military elite and as such were subject to all the vices that accompany such status, such as pride, avarice, greed and the likes. Also, because of this they usually had pressing business at home, one of the reasons people during the later crusades preferred to stay home.

6. One might die whilst on a conquering quest. Another reason I believe why people became less than enthusiastic to go on crusade. Especially because if one was far away, one is also far away of fame at home and a proper christian burial and all the nice things accompanying that that make you go to heaven.

There are probably more reasons as well (I could probably think of some juridical as well), but I've got to go now, so maybe later.

[Watchman]

The European knight developed into what was possibly the single most effective shock cavalryman in the world. Alas, that was a bit of an overspecialization, and led to a bit tunnel-visioned approach to the massed lance charge (namely trying to use it in situations where it probably wasn't a good idea). Add to this the fact that knights were feudal troops with all the accompanying issues with things like discipline, training, communications and cohesion, and you can see why large numbers of them could become tactically rather intractable. But then again feudalism is a pretty sucky and inefficient system to run anything with; it's not really so much a system in itself as something that was improvised to deal with the lack of a system.

Generally speaking their biggest problems always stemmed from the fundamentally fragmented nature of the feudal structure. The assorted lords mostly deployed their troops against each other in an attempt to take over each others' territories, and the extremely complex webs of interlaced feudal obligations in practice meant that a baron who in the last war was the first to gather under your banners might well be staying entirely neutral in the next one or join the enemy should his personal interests dictate and feudal obligations allow. Moreover, even the knights, among the most professional and well-trained of feudal troops (not counting some mercenaries), were actually a sort of part-time militia; their obligations to serve their feudal superiors were only for a certain number of days a year, after which they - like any other troops - had to be paid or they'd go home; and most feudal lords didn't have the kinds of liquid assets needed. This also meant that their actual experience with the nitty-gritties of "soldiering" were rather limited. While they weren't quite as much "sunday soldiers" as the old Greek hoplite militias had been, the feudal troops were ultimately just trained and equipped part-time amateurs and not true professionals.

That showed too. In the Late Middle Ages the effectiveness of feudal armies started rising rapidly if and when they were put on a more organized and professional footing, commonly with quite detailed specifications of equipement, chains of command and so on. The Burgundians were one of the best at this (although they got eventually trod on by the emergent Swiss), but for example the French army became a rather leaner and meaner machine after the Ordonnances du Roi reforms were passed (given that then they kicked the English off the mainland inside decades). The English had been on a more "professional" footing from the beginning of the Hundred Years' War already (troops sent over the Channel were essentially state-paid mercenaries who often made a career out of soldiering), and the fact that the French weren't was one of the Brits' biggest advantages in the HYW.