This is where the real battle took place: two horsemen clad in iron, covered with shields, putting forward long spears, were knocked down from a raid, and from a terrible ram blow, reinforced by the weight of the armor and the weight of the horse, combined with the speed of movement, the enemy with a cracked shield and ripped open chain mail or simply stunned flew out of the saddle. If the armor held out, and the spears broke, cutting with swords began. It was by no means graceful swordsmanship: the blows were rare, but terrible. Their strength is evidenced by the remains of warriors who died in the battles of the Middle Ages - chopped skulls, chopped tibias. It was for the sake of such a battle that the knights lived. They rushed headlong into such a battle, forgetting about caution, about the elementary system, violating the orders of the commanders. Although what orders are there - the knights were only offered to keep the line, they were asked.
At the slightest sign of victory, the knight rushed to plunder the enemy's camp, forgetting about everything - and for this, too, the knights lived. No wonder some kings, forbidding fighters to break the battle formation during the offensive and the course of the battle due to robbery, built gallows for unrestrained vassals before the battle. The fight could be quite long. After all, it usually broke up into an endless number of fights, when the opponents were chasing each other. Knightly honor was understood in a very peculiar way. The Charter of the Templars allowed the knight to attack the enemy from the front and back, right and left, wherever he could be damaged. But if the enemy managed to force at least a few knights to retreat, their comrades-in-arms, noticing this, as a rule, hit a stampede, which not a single commander was able to stop (as well as control the battle after the start of the attack). How many kings have lost their victory only because they lost their heads prematurely with fear!
The knights did not and could not have any military discipline. For the knight is an individual fighter, a privileged warrior with a painfully acute sense of his own dignity. He is a professional from birth and in military affairs is equal to any of his class up to the king. In battle, he depends only on himself and stands out, he can be the first only by showing his courage, the quality factor of his armor and the agility of his horse. And he showed it with all his might. But who here could point him to something, order? The knight himself knows everything, and any order for him is a loss of honor. Such self-awareness of the knight was well known to the generals, statesmen - secular and ecclesiastical. Seeing that indestructible horsemen suffer defeats due to their ardor and self-will, flying out to attack in scattered groups, and knowing that heavy cavalry is invincible when it is leaning in its entirety, the state and church administrations took measures to restore at least some order. After all, besides, there were few knights. For example, throughout England in the 70s. 13th century there were 2750 knights. Usually several dozen knights took part in the battles, and only in large battles they numbered in the hundreds, rarely exceeding a thousand. It is clear that this meager number of full-fledged fighters could not be wasted, sprayed on trifles. And then, from the end of the 11th century, during the crusades, spiritual knightly orders began to appear (see Art. “Knightly Orders”) with strict charters regulating military operations.
But the strongest order was, of course, in the bands of mercenary knights that bred in the 12th-14th centuries, offering their services to anyone and robbing everyone in peacetime. It was to combat these gangs that they were created in the 14th century. French kings for the first time in medieval Europe had regular armies - small, consisting of different branches of the military, where the soldiers served for pay all the time. I must say that all the severity of knightly military routines dried up in those sections that dealt with military operations. That is, there was strictness, but the requirements were the most general: do not leave or break the line, defend yourself in case of failure, and not immediately run away. Do not start plundering the enemy camp until victory.
So, how did the knightly cavalry fight? In order to maintain formation at the decisive moment of the fight, she approached the enemy with a step, was “calm and unperturbed, drove up slowly, as if someone was riding, putting a bride in front of her on the saddle,” as one medieval author wrote. And only having approached the enemy very close, the knights threw their horses into a faster gait. The slow approach also had the meaning that it saved the horse's strength for the decisive throw and fight. Perhaps the most convenient formation was the “wedge”, “boar’s head”, or “pig”, which was long invented for heavy cavalry, as the Russian warriors called it, who, by the way, loved this formation no less than their Western “colleagues”.
"Boar's head" looked like a column, slightly narrowed in front. It has long been known that it is very profitable to lead cavalry in columns, since in this case the power of its massive, ramming blow is best preserved. This is not so much a combat formation as a marching formation - when the “wedge” crashes into the enemy’s ranks, the soldiers riding in the back ranks immediately “spill” to the sides so that each rider does not trample on the front ones, but fully shows his fighting qualities, as well as and the quality of the horse and weapons. The "wedge" had another advantage: the front of the formation was narrow.
