Medaeval War Tactics

[Watchman]

Feudal warriors like knights could be termed "semi-professionals" methinks. The early knights were basically the household guards and retainers of the feudal barons, and spent a lot of time attending to assorted duties around their employer's dwelling (or tending to their fief, if enfeoffed with land) when not practising their fighting skills. Ditto for the lower feudal warrior ranks, the sergeants.
The whole point of the system was after all the maintenance of a body of trained warriors capable of economically sustaining themselves.

Mercenaries would have been the only "professional" soldiers in the sense of it being their only occupation.

Anyway, by the end of the 11th century European heavy cavalry - knights - had AFAIK gone completely over to the couched lance (the overhand and throwing-spear approach was still around by the Battle of Hastings, 1066, but was apparently abandoned soon after). The early lance was not meaningfully different from any long cavalry spear (the "wasp-waisted" heavy tapering lance was a much later developement that accompanied the invention of plate armour), and served as such readily enough; nor was the couching technique particularly new or confined to Europe. What the Europeans began to do differently was specialising in shock action with it, and altering their cavalry tactics accordingly; the basic two-rank attack line (with lighter cavalry following close behind in support) described in later sources was probably around this early already.

In other words, the knights became specialists in linear frontal assault; the downside was that the resulting tactical formation was rather lacking in agility, and encounters with solid infantry capable of repelling the attack sometimes led to quite spectacular failures.

IIRC this developement started in France, and was quite succesfully exported by the Normans; by the Crusades it was the signature of European heavy cavalry.

Knights were commonly enough dismounted in sieges, and sometimes in field battles as well; period German knights were noted to be particularly willing to do this and highly competent as heavy infantry, doubtless due to the prevalence of forests (where cavalry have major trouble) in their homelands.


European infantry of the period was a mixed bag. Generally speaking the quality tended to be low in heavily feudalised regions where the heavy cavalry dominated, a trend carried over from late Carolingian times already. The commoner infantry levy of such parts tended to be of rather low quality, and incapable of standing up to a cavalry charge or better foot. There would have been the infantry sergeants (low-ranking feudal troops) and the upper end of of the independent peasantry who would have been much better equipped and of higher fighting calibre, but they would not have been very numerous; certainly warlords preferred to augment their domestically available quality infantry forces with mercenaries whenever possible.

In northern Europe a major source for such capable hired heavy infantry was the Low Countries. The region was heavily urbanised and had little in the way of feudalism (being economically and geographically somewhat unsuited for the system), and relied primarily on infantry militias for its defense; many of these made a career selling their skills to feudal warlords short of solid foot soldiers. Northern Italy was much similar in the south.

Generally speaking period infantry was divided into close-order spearmen and missile troops. The primary job of the former was to form a solid bulwark shieldwall to anchor the line, which the cavalry (the primary offensive arm) could use as a rallying point and the missile troops could shelter behind. Much period heavy infantry was "unarticulated", that is, incapable of performing offensive maneuvers without excessively compromising their formation. This meant that while they could advance to attack against their similarly cumbersome opposite numbers, they were rendered immobile in the face of enemy cavalry as moving would have upset the ranks and allowed the horsemen to smash the disordered unit apart. Primarily the infantry offensive action was left to the missile troops, whose job (besides countering their opposite numbers) was above all to weaken the enemy ranks; later on the northern Italians would indeed rely chiefly on the crossbow (covered by heavy spearmen) for the destruction of the enemy.

The higher-grade infantry of the Low Countries, northern Italy, Scandinavia (which out of necessity retained much of "Viking" approaches to combat long into the Middle Ages) and probably Germany were probably well enough drilled that they may have been (and definitely were, in the case of Scandinavia at least) capable of "articulated" offensives, though.

infintry battles were 1v1? (whole line charging then pick target)

Normally heavy infantry fought in a dense shieldwall (as mentioned above); there's not much room for individual combat there, rather unit cohesion and teamwork is everything. Dismounted knights, being considerably better armed and trained than most foot troops, would have been better capable of carrying themselves in more open-order and indivdualistic fashion if necessary, but normally fought in similarly dense ranks (they were in fact often spread out among the common foot to stiffen the line and add some punch to it).

Actual open-order melees would have been rare, and primarily limited to rugged terrain where solid formations could not be maintained (people usually avoided using heavy troops in such ground anyway), or rare instances where units lost cohesion and became intermingled without either side immediately breaking.