Sometime between 1550 and 1564, the images in Figure 1.1 were made in the region of Tlaxcala, just east of current-day Mexico City.
Figure 1.1 (a) Tzapotítlan and (b) Ayotochcuitlatlan.
Recounting the events of the conquest, local artists highlighted the perspective of the Tlaxcalans who, after an initial confrontation with Hernan Cortés, became crucial allies in the campaign against the Aztec Triple Alliance.Footnote 1 These images, which also hung on the walls of the city hall in Tlaxcala, closely depict Spaniards on horseback, including details down to the brands on the horses’ haunches and the varying styles of seat and tack used by the riders. They also capture clearly the iconography of the man on horseback, reminiscent of contemporaneous equestrian portraits of European royalty (Figure 1.2). Conquistadors poised on horseback with armor and lance closely resemble the portrait of Charles V on horseback, emanating the glory of the Spanish crown.
Figure 1.2 Titian, Emperor Charles V in Mühlberg, Oil on Canvas, 1548, Prado Museum.
The horse was an impressive animal in itself, and its presence also communicated information apparent to Spanish conquistadors about status and power, but such visual semiotics would have had to be deciphered by diverse Indigenous cultures. These Tlaxcalan artists not only accurately represented the physical shape of the horse and its harness but also rendered a clear understanding of the social and political function horses had for the Spanish.Footnote 2 These images underscore Iberian horse culture as one way Spanish imperial power was represented in colonial territories, at both the highest level of imperial iconography and the level of local government.
The image of the conquistador on horseback has been emblazoned in the popular Western imagination, beginning with the first chronicles celebrating Spain’s success in colonizing new lands. This heroic image harkens back to the knight in the medieval Christian conquest of Iberia, a figure similarly built around the horse and military conquest. The military innovation of armored knights, made mobile on horseback, shaped the political and social organization of feudalism in the early Middle Ages.Footnote 3 In the late Middle Ages, the cultural values of chivalry encoded the horse’s importance, as horses and equestrian arts became a shorthand for the values, behaviors, and attributes associated with the noble estate.Footnote 4 The image of the conquistador on his mount in Figure 1.3 evokes this medieval symbolism and the underlying history of military service on horseback in the construction of political and social hierarchies.
Figure 1.3 Three soldiers, or Spanish conquistadors, on horseback, identified as Pedro de Valdivia, Francisco de Villagra, and Gerónimo de Alderete, in Alonso de Ovalle, Historica relación del Reyno de Chile (Rome: Francisco Cauallo, 1646), plate following p. 322.
Many histories of the conquest and colonization of Latin America have considered Spain’s territorial claims and missionary zeal an extension of practices and ideologies developed in medieval conflicts between Christian and Muslim polities in the Iberian Peninsula, the so-called Reconquest.Footnote 5 More broadly, the treatment of Spain as “exceptional” within European history, influenced by its unique institutional and cultural influences as a southern Mediterranean crossroads, has led to a historiography that – until relatively recently – also emphasized Spain’s continuing medievalism in relation to other early modern European colonial powers.Footnote 6 The image of the conquistador on horseback, thus, connotes a medieval outlook in Spain’s early expansion overseas and an obsession with horse-derived noble status. Obsession with status in Iberian history has been treated as a sign of a larger cultural rejection of new capital economies essential to modern state-building, a cause of Spain’s decline in the seventeenth century and its circuitous path towards modernity.Footnote 7
Newer histories of the early modern Iberian world have worked to reclaim innovative influences in its imperial ambitions, alongside the dark underbelly of racism and coloniality that also characterize modernity.Footnote 8 Scholars of the history of science have traced elements of commerce and scientific knowledge emerging from Iberian expeditions and colonial bureaucracy that contributed to areas of cartography, ethnobotany, geology, and medicine.Footnote 9 The advent of globalization commencing with Iberian exploration and conquest has been used to note the relevance of the Spanish empire, and also aspects of commerce and economic practices of Spanish colonization that contradict the charge of medievalism.Footnote 10
At the same time, medieval historians have noted ways in which medieval Iberia’s historical institutions diverged in important ways from the classic European model of feudalism.Footnote 11 While nationalist histories of Spain have characterized the Middle Ages in terms of a Reconquista, a crusade to take land from Muslim invaders, revisionist scholarship looks more closely at the forces inevitably crossing such a divide, casting doubt on Spain’s characteristic medievalism. In this vein, the concept of an Iberian frontier defines a site in which continual change – conflict, upheaval, realignment of loyalties, and assimilation or cooperation across factions – fostered social and institutional innovations.Footnote 12
This line of thought also invites a new look at the historical image of the man on horseback in interpretations of Spanish expansion beyond the Iberian Peninsula. Even if the conquistador on horseback represented the expansionist zeal of colonial conquest in a way reminiscent of a medieval crusading religiosity, the same pairing also brokered some of the innovative and modern realities of a globally connected world. Returning to the archives to peel back layers from this iconic image brings to light the complex and sometimes surprising association of horses with war, nobility, and conquest, making room for a new interpretation of human–equine relationships in Iberian peninsular and global histories.
A closer look at documented experiences with horses, foregrounding both the historical animal and embodied, interspecies interactions in everyday practices, reveals rich historical and material imprints in surrounding social structures in Iberia. Typically, historians have considered the horse a cultural symbol of medieval ideals and a practical tool for military conquest and empire-building. Yet, both the horse’s symbolism and physical utility were frequently challenged in practice. These realities reveal a wide range of possible motivations and choices for Iberian human–horse configurations, beyond strictly symbolic or utilitarian profiles, and the uniquely embodied ways in which horses shaped governance in Iberia.
1.1 Deconstructing the Equine Ideal: Knights on the Medieval Iberian Frontier
The famous Siete Partidas (produced 1252–1284), a statutory code that summarized standards of law and jurisprudence throughout Castile under Alfonso X, emphasized a close association between the horse and nobility, admonishing that “among all things that knights have to know, this is the most noble: to know the horse.”Footnote 13 By the thirteenth century, interactions with and knowledge of horses were considered central to personal qualities of nobility, and values of chivalry further reinforced this link between horses and the military estate, memorialized in the famous equine partners of knights seeking their fortunes in the literature of courtly romances.Footnote 14 The horse symbolized nobility, in a fashion similar to other European courts. But the horse’s role also emerged from a specific military context in Iberia: military engagements against Muslim rulers and the jockeying among Christian kingdoms, both of which had legal and political benefits for social rank. Accounts drawn from archival records indicate that horses not only represented social status, but they were also a means for social mobility, and practical relations with horses in this frontier context often diverged from the ideal representation of nobles, knights, and their horses. While the socioeconomic structures of feudalism consider the horse essential to the knight’s role and the nobleman’s identity, decrees and petitions in medieval Iberia also document knights vigorously protesting requirements that they own and ride horses. Likewise, many nobles asserted their controversial preference to ride mules, against the wishes of their king, even though the horse was supposed to symbolize ideals of chivalry and the natural nobility of the military estate. Finally, actual uses of horses on the battlefield fluctuated in reaction to strategic and tactical trends over the centuries, despite the narrative that heavy cavalry would have dominated the field of war until it was replaced by modern firearms and state-supported armies. These tensions indicate that the horse was a contested symbol and its physical presence a tool for negotiation, both signs of its imprint in Iberian culture concerning social advancement and governance of frontier communities.
1.1.1 Knights and Horses: Negotiating Status in Frontier Municipalities
Despite the wide application of feudalism as a model of social and political organization, medieval historians have questioned whether it applies to the Iberian Peninsula, particularly when examining the long-standing internal conflicts between Christian and Muslim kingdoms and the formation of several distinctive polities.Footnote 15 The traditional notion of a single retributive “reconquest” that pitted Christian knights against Muslim invaders does not accurately represent the nearly seven centuries of conflicts, and histories of la frontera (frontier) demonstrate that it did not take the form of a clear territorial or ideological boundary, but rather a zone of porous and tense interrelations that were in flux and in motion over time.Footnote 16 Reviewing several distinct periods of military conflict helps to more accurately define the frontier space in which economic, legal, and political structures surrounding the horse were both established and contested.
The expansion and consolidation of kingdoms between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries gave rise to what has been called “a society organized for war.”Footnote 17 Following early attempts to settle lands in the Duero and Ebro valleys in the ninth century, and the shocking tenth-century incursions of Almanzor with his supply of thousands of North African mercenary soldiers on horseback, opportunities to serve in military campaigns for competing kingdoms supported a transactional economy that enabled nonnoble men-at-arms to gain the privileges of knights, regardless of their social origin of birth. To increase their mounted units in Castile and León, kings granted special privileges to men who were willing to keep a horse, and similar practices emerged in Pamplona and Barcelona.Footnote 18 In the eleventh century, the dissolution of the caliphate in Córdoba created shifting alliances and posturing among competing Iberian polities, and ultimately extended these frontier cities from Burgos to Toledo.Footnote 19
The granting of fueros (privileges in a municipal charter) formalized and replicated these patterns in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The weakening of the Almoravid dynasty and its control over the former Caliphate of Córdoba in the eleventh century created new opportunities for territorial gains, and spurred some of the early unions that would shape the kingdoms of Castile, Aragón, and Portugal in the twelfth century. In conquered or newly allied municipalities, fueros – legal privileges that distributed land and power to new residents – recognized men-at-arms as knights and rewarded service with permission to ride a horse. In particular, the influential model of the Cuenca–Teruel fueros granted status to a foot soldier for unhorsing a Muslim rider, improving his options in future combat; allowing a share in the division of booty; and granting rights to use municipal lands. The concept of the knight (caballero) in Castile derived from this tradition: During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a knight could, in essence, be any man on horseback.Footnote 20
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, after a coordinated allied victory at Navas de Tolosa in 1212 stopped the advance of the militant Almohad invasion from North Africa, territorial advances all the way south to Seville took advantage of a period of disunited Muslim states (taifas) and civil disturbances. The competing advances of Castile, Aragón, and Portugal also prompted more formal strategies for dividing and administering lands. The social and legal apparatus around this phenomenon – variously called the caballero villano, caballero de premia, or caballero de cuantía (nonnoble knights or a nonnoble cavalry) in Castile and Andalusia – became a channel of upward mobility for nonnoble knights.Footnote 21 Due to the monarchy’s relative weakness at the time, the king of Castile and León fortified frontier institutions like that of the nonnoble knights by offering them additional privileges in order to temper the military strength of feudal and seigniorial lords. In 1348, the Cortés of Alcalá stipulated two essential requirements to become a caballero: to have a fortune of at least 12,000 maravedis, and to maintain a horse and arms in readiness.Footnote 22 In exchange, one would be eligible for the legal privileges of certain tax exemptions and participation in municipal government. The horse originally defined the status of the knight by distributing land according to military service, but in this institution, the horse was also the key to being eligible for both government posts and tax exemptions in frontier municipalities.
In fact, the most notable feature of the cavalry of nonnoble knights was their direct tie to a central monarchy, in contrast to vassal–lord fealties that were supposed to supply mounted men-at-arms for the king’s hosts.Footnote 23 The king’s support of these nonnoble knights meant that the municipal militia supplemented military campaigns, but also their associated confraternities recognized by the king supplemented the ruling elite of a city. By the fourteenth century, the formation of secular and municipal confraternities of knights further refined these legal privileges. Claims to having provided a horse in a past military conflict were a constant refrain in books commemorating individual members of these urban orders of knights, despite the relative lull in expansion and frontier conflict during this same period.Footnote 24 Urban confraternities of nonnoble knights adopted chivalric ideals and documented their members in the interests of social advancement. This arrangement also fostered a close, and even exclusive, association of nonnoble knights with urban municipal government positions. Long-term control over these offices afforded them legal leeway to pass them on to family members. Confraternities generated a new channel for protecting the social gains made by providing a horse, including direct access to municipal government posts that could be passed on as a hereditary marker of status, among other benefits for nonnoble knights.
Enforcing the corresponding obligation to provide horses also generated a body of legal precedents used in negotiations over status and privilege between municipal knights and the king’s representatives. Militia privileges fostered an urban patriciate and enabled nonnoble knights to identify with elements of noble status. However, enforcing their obligatory use and maintenance of horses also meant requiring nonnoble knights to carry permits that certified they owned the horse in question; these permits had to be notarized, recorded in municipal registers, and reviewed regularly.Footnote 25 In turn, nonnoble knights occupying positions in municipal government frequently affirmed their own exemptions from horse ownership. Not being forcibly compelled to provide a horse for military service exemplified the coveted nature of noble liberties and privileges. Counter to the reigning image of the horse as central to nobility, knights who gained status from the frontier provision of horses and urban confraternities supported by the king often preferred to claim the privilege of not having to provide a horse. Knights’ resistance to procuring horses illustrates their power to gain exemptions in this frontier context, and legal exemptions from horse ownership evidence of the substantial leverage that the caballero de cuantía wielded once gaining access to municipal political office for themselves and their peers.
As they enforced, protested, and made concessions about legal privileges related to horses, the monarchy and urban elites were brought into a sustained negotiation of power with one another. Horse-centered negotiations of privilege between the monarchy and nobility during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries took place after the most active gains in frontier territory had abated. Despite a brief phase of coordination among Christian kingdoms during the thirteenth century, this rhetorical mode of “reconquest” would not reemerge until the consolidation of the Castilian and Aragonese crowns in the late fifteenth century, and a final ten-year campaign of conquest for the remaining Muslim polity in the peninsula under the Nasrid dynasty.Footnote 26 The Catholic Monarchs issued new decrees in 1492, 1493, and 1499 that recalled their predecessors’ ordinances and refined the elements necessary to enforce the requirement that knights own horses. In 1499, they raised the stakes against the “rebellious and disobedient” justices who were insufficiently attentive to these regulations. Most notably, they reprimanded the leaders of municipal governments, primarily royal corregidores (royal magistrates) and local alcaldes (city justices), for being lax in enforcement after the conquest of Granada.Footnote 27 Such regulations responded to complaints about men who were supposed to maintain horses but did not, who falsely claimed ownership of horses, or who used favoritism, extortion, and bribery to get around militia inspections (alardes).Footnote 28
To enforce the requirement that a knight own a horse, the kings emphasized the horse’s critical importance to defining personal qualities of nobility. However, accusations of fraud demonstrate that knights with estate values who qualified for the privileges of the cuantía did not always hold themselves to the obligations of horse ownership and did not restrict themselves from the liberal use of the mule. Concessions made in two decrees indicate how kings and elites negotiated this conflict. The first, in 1539, reduced the restrictions on riding mules for the interests of men of high status: If their horse met a new standard of being a certain size (cierta marca), then they could use mules on the road for travel between cities, with as many servants on mules as required; similarly, men could be sent by mule on behalf of their master, if they carried testimony of their lord’s possession of such quality horses. The king also made concessions to practicality: Servants were explicitly permitted to ride mules to water, provided they were not under saddle.Footnote 29 Ultimately, however, the king had to cede ground for image as well. The second decree, in 1548, conceded that the requirement that everyone ride a horse, or at least a mule of the size of a warhorse, was impractical. In fact, “men of letters” should not be forced to ride on horses, for they were said to destroy the horses they did ride and to be poor horsemen (“desigual y muy feo”).Footnote 30 Thus, despite the crown’s wish for every man to be mounted at all times on horseback in order to best represent the honor of the nobility, many elements were in fact subject to negotiation.
The monarchy had a long-standing interest in the ways that horse ownership affected municipal governance and regulated the lower boundary of noble or elite status. From the point of view of knights and nobles, appeals to exemption spoke of social mobility and forms of leverage within municipalities against the king. Conversely, the king emphasized the symbolic importance of the horse for the noble estate and its role in the king’s militias, access to land, and political office. The horse’s association with nobility had specific military origins, but more significantly, it was established as an underlying criteria and language of negotiation in the relationship between municipality and monarchy in the context of territorial expansion.
1.1.2 Nobles Riding Mules
Not all knights rode horses, nor were all knights riding horses considered noble. The ideal of the man on horseback was a social construct that these actors contested and challenged in turn. In a parallel development, nobles likewise skirted expectations that they exclusively ride horses. Noblemen used mules with frequency, both for their practical advantages and to symbolically assert their privilege in the noble estates against the monarchy. Despite contemporary rhetoric around the horse as the particular bearer of nobility, mules played a prominent role in Andalusian and Castilian culture. Tension between the king and nobles over riding mules undercut the ideal of the horse and made evident competing political interests.
As a beast of burden, rather than a heroic steed, mules raised fears about the effeminizing effects of peaceful husbandry in contrast to martial exercises. Moreover, as a humble laborer of mixed parentage (horse and donkey), mules readily crossed the demands of “caste” and lineage, and thus threatened purity and nobility. This mixing “kinds” or “species” also resulted in hybrid sterility, contradicting the divine directive to “go forth and multiply.” Iconographically, the horse was associated with the noble role of masculine military virtue, while the mule represented emasculated labor. This fear was not only a matter of symbolism but also a construction of legal discourse. When, in 1330, Alfonso XI established the first secular order of knights, the Orden de la Banda, it forbade the riding of mules by men of a certain social status. Clergy, women, and ethnic and religious minorities were in turn expected to ride mules. Similarly, as an indication of their subjugated status, former Muslim subjects who came under Spanish rule were explicitly prohibited from riding horses.
Yet, mule riding was common and popular among men in Spain. For travel within the chains of mountains interspersed in Spain’s unforgiving geography, the mule combined advantages of speed and strength from its horse parent with a sturdy constitution and hard hooves from its donkey parent; these features enabled it to contend admirably with roads that were not suitable for wheeled transport. In fact, Spanish mules were considered of especially good quality, and Juan Valverde Arrieta pinpointed the introduction of the mule to 1252, at the height of Castilian expansion into Muslim territory.Footnote 31 Influenced by Berber traditions, Catalonia and Andalusia bred donkeys of larger size than average, which put Spain at the forefront of the mule-breeding industry.
Legal petitions presented from the fourteenth through the sixteenth century confirm this preference for mules. Against the backdrop of crises in the fourteenth century in Europe – including the Black Death’s reorganization of agricultural labor and production, and an ongoing civil war between heirs of the Trastámara dynasty in the Crown of Castile and León – the number of protests in favor of riding mules led to a reversal of the king’s prohibition on mule riding in 1351. It was reinstituted shortly thereafter, in 1385, and the debate would continue to repeat itself over the next two centuries.Footnote 32 In the fifteenth century, Antoine de Lalaing, who accompanied Felipe el Hermoso on his tour in Spain before marrying Juana of Castile, thought this preference for mules was a point worthy of ridicule: “Esta reina, viendo que sus caballeros montaban la mayor parte mulas, y cuando les convenía armar y montar caballo iban adiestrados lo peor del mundo” (In this kingdom, I saw that their caballeros ride for the most part mules, and then when they have to wear arms and ride horses, they are the worst mounted in the world).Footnote 33 The fifteenth-century union of Castile and Aragón also led to new decrees and institutions from the Catholic Monarchs who were attempting to rule both domains. In 1499, the Catholic Monarchs bemoaned how many subjects were content with mules. Even their incoming Habsburg heir, Charles V, made a stringent law in the early sixteenth century, that “no one nor any persons in our realms of any estate or condition can ride on a mule, pony or hackney (mula, haca, troton, hacanea) with saddle and bridle.”Footnote 34 Protests against the law brought concessions in 1534 and an outright repeal in 1539.Footnote 35
In reality, these decrees prevented very few noblemen from riding mules. Perversely, in fact, the prohibition against mule riding, which also required ownership of at least one horse in order to also own a mule, converted the mule into a symbol for an alternative formulation of elite status. The monarchy’s attempt to enforce horse ownership by prohibiting the use of mules prompted nobles to claim themselves exempt from the law as a privilege of their noble status. Mule riding itself became a form of noble privilege. In order to enforce the Crown’s regulation, the king or his municipal representatives would have to determine who either possessed the required amount of horses or had been granted exemptions based on their status in order to ride mules freely.
On a rhetorical stage, the horse symbolized the wealth and power of the noble estate – the rigorous discipline necessary to control the spirited and proud horse was viewed as generating soldierly virtue, while the leisure and luxury of the courtier traveling easily on the sure-footed mule was seen as indulging the senses. Yet, confraternities of nonnoble knights that exempted themselves from horse ownership and nobles who rode mules to defy the decrees of the king demonstrate that practical relations with horses on the ground often resulted in practices that fall outside of the dominant iconography of the noble knight on horseback. In considering the arena of actual practices with horses, these examples suggest that the imagery of the horse frequently cast an outsized shadow compared to its physical reality.
1.1.3 Changing Fortunes of Horses in War
The preceding two sections offer examples where the horse’s role in negotiating social status differs from its expected symbolism. What about the horse’s central military importance to the noble estate? Dominant historical understanding of the structural demands of feudal relationships between lord and vassal hinges on the material expenses of obtaining and maintaining horses for war. The horse’s declining importance is a familiar coda closing out the medieval period, as more efficient standing armies of infantry and firepower replaced the horse (and the noble knight) in a modernizing, territorial state.Footnote 36 However, histories of warfare throughout the Middle Ages have undermined this technological interpretation of feudalism, decoupling both the stirrup from the early adoption of cavalries and the use of cavalries from feudalism.Footnote 37 Even if the horse is viewed as a military technology that held political importance, amplified by modifications to tack (bits, saddles, or stirrups) and armor in the early Middle Ages, the military use of horses by mounted troops and cavalry units from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries repeatedly rose and fell. Far from a singular decline in use tracking the relevance of the noble estate, modulations in the use of horses responded to developments in other military technologies such as armor, firearms, fortifications, and battlefield formations. These prosaic realities of fighting with horses suggest that the horse’s symbolic role for Spanish nobility was not so closely tied to practical military uses of horses.
First, obtaining horses for war was a difficult endeavor. The availability of horses varied significantly by region across medieval Europe, and moving horses over long distances was challenging.Footnote 38 The Iberian Peninsula maintained a reputation for having a robust population of horses from the times of Roman Hispania to the medieval Muslim caliphates (200 BC to 1000 AD), although the type and quantity of these horses depended on proximity to the peninsula’s centers of breeding, concentrated for the most part in southern Andalusia. Supplying horses on one’s home turf was simpler than for foreign campaigns; moving horses over longer distances impacted the condition and health of the animal for battle, depending on the amount of weight it had to carry and its own physiology. For this reason, a knight would not ride his warhorse to the site of battle, wasting its muscle tone, but “pony” it alongside a lighter and more economical mount to travel long distances.Footnote 39 Shipping horses over water was faster than overland travel, although confinement in the hold of a ship also endangered equine health because of their sensitive digestive tracts and, depending on the length of the journey, could affect their fitness. Supplying the grain and forage necessary to feed a large number of horses added substantially to the cost of a campaign, and frequently required requisitioning supplies in the lands the armies passed through.
On the battlefield, a horse’s primary role was to transport warriors, and in a late medieval or early modern army, there were far more warriors mounted on horses than warriors trained to fight from horseback. Mounted men-at-arms were often trained to fight on foot, and infantry or archers used horses for transport on their own or as units attached to heavy cavalry. For the cavalry itself, the expense and difficulty of transporting horses to battle sites in good health was not the end of their logistic challenges; infantry were usually required to protect the knights while they mounted their warhorses, or while they changed between exhausted horses and reserve mounts that were held behind the active line of combat.Footnote 40 Training for battle on horseback required specific skills for riding and managing horses, yet acquiring and employing these skills differed substantially from the refined expertise implied by the symbol of the horseman endowed with innate nobility and rights to govern. Riding better than the average man would be to your advantage, but in a cavalry charge, such finely tuned adjustments would be lost to the furor and unpredictable conditions of combat.Footnote 41
Cavalry units intended for mounted battle tactics also had distinct requirements and uses. “Light” and “heavy” cavalry differ in significant ways. Light cavalry were typically mounted on smaller and faster horses, wore less plated armor, and carried javelins. Heavy cavalry carried more armor, and thus moved at a slower pace on more powerful mounts.Footnote 42 The relative advantages and weaknesses of each type of cavalry unit were exploited for different reasons. On one level, these were tactical choices based on the number of men and horses, terrain, or needs. Light cavalry were often deployed on reconnaissance missions, for example, while heavy cavalry would be more suitable for a battlefield selected to meet the opponent with flat and level footing, in order to elevate the impact of a charge of several abreast on set, opposing lines. On the other hand, mounts carrying heavy cavalry could only exert their power over much shorter distances. In order to have devastating impacts at strategically important points, they required substantial support.Footnote 43
Historical accounts about the dominance of the knight on the battlefield presume that heavy cavalry, supported by the stirrup and steel-plated armor, was a sufficiently superior form of power. Heavy cavalry formations had revolving fortunes, however, in response to evolving weaponry. As early as the eleventh century, the advent of the longbow among the English famously presented a formidable challenge to heavy cavalry because arrows reached the ranks before mounted lances could.Footnote 44 This medieval “revolution” in archery coincided with the mounting of archers on horseback, who sometimes joined light cavalry units alongside the standard heavy lancers. Two centuries later, during the Hundred Years’ War, an “infantry revolution” indicated a rise in the tactical importance of using units on foot, armed with crossbows.Footnote 45 Firearms, first used on the battlefield in Europe during the Hundred Years’ War, also had a devastating effect on the French heavy cavalry, which was famously decimated by English archers and cannons in the Battle of Crécy.Footnote 46 Gunpowder and firearms would become the knight’s most famous nemesis, as it enabled killing at a cold and impersonal distance and thus entirely bypassed the code of chivalry for engagement with the enemy. In fact, the peak in the symbolic importance of the ideal of a knight in full armor in the fourteenth century coincided with a decline in the tactical importance of heavy cavalry in actual battlefield conditions.
Nevertheless, the development of stronger armored plate technology in the late fifteenth century enabled a resurgence of cavalry, and cavalry strategy and tactics continued to evolve.Footnote 47 Forged by specialized craftsmen in blast furnaces made of tempered steel, this customized plated armor increased the importance of heavy cavalry in the ongoing wars between France and Spain over Italian territories in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The stronger yet lighter plated armor, which deflected direct blows from puncture weapons like the halberd, did not go unchallenged. The continued use of artillery led architects to modify how they constructed fortifications to face cannon sieges (the “trace italienne”), which sidelined the use of heavy cavalry in some conflicts.Footnote 48 As had occurred centuries earlier, France’s heavy cavalry suffered disastrous losses in the Italian Wars. During the Battle of Pavia (1525), the king of France, Francis I, was taken captive and held for ransom by Charles V, a victory often attributed to the development of Spanish tercios, units of pikemen and muskets that used square formations to break heavy cavalry charges. Tercio successes were also noted against the German heavy cavalry at the Battle of Rocroi in the seventeenth century.Footnote 49 Rather than removing cavalry from the field entirely, however, European armies reverted to tactics of the flanking moves with lighter cavalry in response. A light cavalry that harassed opponents with hit-and-run tactics, especially when armed with pistols, could be effective against long pikes in a sweeping movement known as the caracole. Cavalry were still effective, given the inaccuracy of personal firearms in this period, but their tactical uses changed. Instead of shock combat using heavy cavalry charges, combined infantry and cavalry units developed to support the strengths of a fully armored knight, and ultimately the cavalry also began to carry firearms along with their other weapons.Footnote 50
Just as a “cavalry revolution” was thought to characterize feudal warfare, a “military revolution” of infantry and artillery over horses has been used to characterize the emergence of the modern state. Coined in a 1967 essay by Michael Roberts, the “military revolution” identified a shift away from mounted warfare towards professional standing armies, as a tipping point from medieval to modern warfare in the mid-sixteenth century.Footnote 51 The reorganization of the military into group formations with artillery in infantry tactics diminished the role of the nobility and permitted the rise of the modern fiscal-military state. Pointing to the extended attrition experienced in the brutal Thirty Years’ War in Europe, European historians argued that standing armies and salaried soldiers funded from centralized forms of tax collection had already replaced the older configuration of mounted knights, and this functional shift explained a schematic “crisis of nobility” in the seventeenth century once losing its presumed military function. However, Robert’s version of the military revolution was focused on a specific infantry variation, the “linear” formation of deep assault columns used by Gustavus Adolphus (1594–1660s). While these assault columns required the coordination and training of greater numbers of professional infantry supported by the state, it was also the case that, in breaking enemy lines, they produced new opportunities for heavy cavalry charges to follow to devastating effect, and thus actually reemphasizing the value of “shock cavalry.”Footnote 52
In these various archery, infantry, cavalry, and artillery “revolutions,” changes in tactics, armament, and economic context affected specific uses of the horse, but the horse was not replaced by any one of these as much as its use was adapted to them. Indeed, horses did not truly decline in military importance until they were replaced by motorized transport vehicles that could handle difficult terrain, a revolution that did not emerge until the twentieth century.Footnote 53 If the functional military importance of the horse waxed and waned over the centuries, depending on innovative battlefield stratagems and technological developments, it also suggests that the symbolism of the horse, as a signifier of nobility and chivalry, operated independently of the horse’s actual military uses. Horses were invaluable in the social perception of elite status, and the kings promoted the symbolic association of nobility with riding horses. But practical legal, political, and military relationships with the horse at times diverged from this symbolism. The real historical impact of the horse is found in these more peculiar and specific relationships, ones shaped by the material and embodied imprint of the horse.
1.2 Horses for the Kingdom: Scarcity and Breeding Regulations
In 1492, the Castilian Crown complained of a serious shortage of horses, and the ruinous effect that such a lack of horses would have on “the nobility of the cavalry Spain has always had.”Footnote 54 Even following their successful incorporation of Granada, the Catholic Monarchs proclaimed:
Se amenguaban los caballos que en nuestros reinos solía haber y porque si ha esto se diera lugar muy prestamente se perdiera en nuestros reinos la nobleza de la caballería y se olvidara el oficio militar…
The horses that used to exist in our kingdoms are diminishing, and if this happens, the nobility of chivalry in our kingdoms would be lost and the military profession, for which the nation of Spain achieved great fame, would be forgotten and do great harm…Footnote 55
The Catholic Monarchs again railed against the loss of horses among the warrior class of Castile, describing how, after the fall of Granada, many subjects had sold their horses and others had stopped breeding them. In response, they ordered every man in Castile – “be he even Duke or Marquis or Count or of other major or minor estate” – to own a horse that could serve as the mount for a man-at-arms. Similar complaints and orders were repeated every few years from Charles II and later Philip II.
The financial and logistic challenges of maintaining a supply of horses, alongside noblemen’s objections to riding them, highlight key moments in which the horse itself was absent. In an ironic parallel, the horse is also often absent from the historical archives; records for keeping stables provide some counts and costs of feed, and account rolls indicate numbers of cavalry units, but these are rarely richly detailed. It is difficult to quantify the scarcity of horses within Spain, and, in fact, most sources discuss the abundance and quality of horses in the Iberian Peninsula, despite possible environmental constraints, especially in comparison to availability of horses in other European countries. Possible sources include military campaigns and accounts and tax figures. However, counts of troops and supplies are notoriously inaccurate, the tithe on new livestock in the frontier kingdoms rarely refers to the number of animals, and the required registers of the knights were not kept with regularity to provide a sufficient set of data.
Yet, these absences do not undermine the horse’s significance. Key forms of governance developed on the evolving frontiers of the Iberian Peninsula between the eighth and sixteenth centuries – legal terms of social status, units of measurement for acquiring property, and requirements for participation in municipal bodies – that were materially indebted to the horse. Horses provided a gateway to social mobility, access to municipal government, and particular ties of obligation between kings and social elites; they also served as a physical means of measuring and administering territory in much more concrete ways than the general symbolism of the horse. If the perceived scarcity of horses threatened the social and cultural quality of nobility, this rhetorical weight both justified greater military expenditures, and served to rein in claims for noble liberties and privileges. It is also certain that the Castilian monarchs elevated this rhetoric of scarcity for their own end, as reproducing these social and political structures of governance in new territories also required reproducing horse populations.
In new conquest municipalities, the horse had served as a unit of measurement in the distribution of land (a caballería was roughly the amount of land allocated for grazing a horse, or caballo) and for the collection of taxes (the diezmos collected 1/10th, or a tithe, of the increase in livestock, such as horses). Newly conquered territory was classified as the realengo: The king was able to claim, for his own personal jurisdiction, land gained in conquest to be granted to towns, military orders, or individuals. This claim included livestock and its natural multiplication in newly acquired territory, taken in the form of a tithe known as the diezmos.Footnote 56 In addition to establishing the diezmos in 1351, the crown restricted all other sales of horses from their kingdoms and imposed requirements for licenses to move horses beyond their jurisdiction. In Castile, these requisite licencias de saca were reserved for the king or his representative as early as 1385.Footnote 57 Equine export restrictions were applied stringently in the kingdoms of Jaen and Murcia, as actively contested frontier territories subject to military campaigns, diplomatic treaties, and civil war during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.Footnote 58 Given the political importance of horses under the king’s dominion, these regulations controlled the movement of horses and assured local horse breeding populations. Practically, royal measures focused on legally requiring horse ownership and limiting the movement of horses, even within provinces in Spain, to maintain strong local populations.Footnote 59
The responsibilities of the conquest municipalities to the king were measured in terms of horses, and, consequently, “good” municipal government practices also included horse breeding.Footnote 60 Horse breeding overseen by conquest municipalities used municipally held “commons.” The herd in any given town would not be very large; estimates range from three to seventy horses.Footnote 61 Using the method of short-distance transhumance, horses seasonally moved between sites: in the agostadero, or summer pasture, they were taken to the mountains or hills of an adjacent region, and in the invernadero, or winter pasture, they were taken to reserved pastures close to town. This method of keeping horses in free-ranging conditions meant that only a few were trained or handled regularly. Local mares were gathered for insemination by selected stallions every year, typically in June, in exchange for a stud fee known as the caballaje. The king took an interest in these municipal horse breeding ventures. For example, in 1271, Alfonso X permitted residents of Ubeda who maintained a stallion to also keep three mares free of taxes.Footnote 62 Outside of this season, mares otherwise would be kept in the common pastures and used for tasks related to transport or field labor, such as the fall harvest, under the watch of a yeguero (keeper of broodmares). In the late winter, members of the town council would appoint veedores (overseers) to select stallions for their physical health and anticipated breeding potential. The town’s alcalde and regidores oversaw the entire process, with assistance from local herradores (farriers).
To support the provisioning of horses, the monarchy shifted its approach from simply prohibiting knights and nobles from riding mules to actively requiring them to own and register their own horses. Horse registries in the fourteenth century originated from the need to certify knights’ and nobles’ ownership of horses so that they could then be issued permits for riding mules.Footnote 63 The crown’s scrutiny of horse registries increased over time, so that by 1493 all horses needed to be registered in an annual municipal inspection. Towns in seigniorial and royal lands required owners – though they rarely complied – to send their registration (which included the horse’s color and age, and the owner’s name) to the central court every six months. These instructions also prohibited the use of mares to breed mules (punishable by temporary or permanent exile), in addition to requiring the local caballero de cuantía to register all of their horses and appointing overseers to select stallions for breeding.Footnote 64 The same town officials who registered the knight’s cuantía and their horses were also required to maintain the registry’s information about the breeding and foaling of their mares.
From this administrative perspective, horse breeding was considered part of the “common good,” and it was largely a collective rather than an individual practice. Regulation dealt broadly with the social order that produced horses. Horse breeding, with its ties to municipal governance, formed an integral part of Spanish expansion. The horse’s body served as a form of measurement for the administration of territory, both in a discursive sense in the objections, legal injunctions, and rhetorical emphasis on scarcity, which influenced, for example, requirements of nobility – and in a physical sense – in the embodied measurements used to distribute land and to manage ownership, riding, and breeding. The horse’s presence or absence was, therefore, an important point of tension in the historical development of political institutions in a frontier context.
1.3 Framing an Iberian Horse Culture
This chapter has highlighted military and legal uses of the historical horse – negotiation of status on the frontier, evolving military tactics, and horse breeding in conquered territories – that are obscured by the heroic image of the knight on horseback. The horse’s many functions – as an iconic symbol, a military tool, a facilitator of social mobility, a proxy for nobility, a bodily form of measurement, a gatekeeper to political office, and a body that was itself being bred – are entangled materially with social systems and power structures, highlighting its imprint in Iberian history. Considering the context for the horse’s place on the battlefield, in social hierarchies, and in cultural ideals makes visible a wider range of motivations, choices, and possible outcomes in these relations. Significantly, Iberian horse culture had two fundamental elements illustrated in the examples in this chapter: defining the terms for social negotiation and social mobility and structuring frontier and municipal governance.
First, the horse facilitated, and in turn became the legal language of, negotiation over noble status by the king, nobles, and nonnoble knights. The king mobilized the symbolic, noble ideal of the horse to motivate and regulate membership in military orders of knights and nobles, evident in legal requirements for horse ownership by knights and nobles. The monarchy also used its alliance with municipalities and urban confraternities of knights to advance royal imperatives for horse breeding in conquered territory in the name of the common good. For knights and nobles, the horse served as a medium for negotiating social status. The horse provided knights with social mobility, the ability to participate in municipal government, and access to confraternities of military orders. Knights also used the language of exemption to horse ownership to claim status in the municipal elite. Nobles similarly protested against the monarch’s power in riding mules instead of horses. The emphasis on scarcity in late medieval decrees should be read as the monarchy’s attempt to enforce its authority through the presence and use of the horse, suggesting that knights and nobles needed to ride horses and conquest municipalities needed to breed horses to avoid the social and political disorder that would follow if horses did not underpin this system of governance.
Second, forms of governance instituted in frontier territory illustrate the deep, embodied imprint of the horse. Military uses of horses varied over the centuries, but perhaps more importantly, in the historical context of the frontier, horses served as a foundation for administering new territories. Land was distributed according to requirements of horse ownership. The municipal regulation of breeding became integral to governing in conquest jurisdictions. The measure of the horse shaped land grants, access to political office, and municipal standards for governing for the common good.
Riding and breeding horses, as well as using horses to control other populations, suggests a biopolitical influence that defines the horse within a hierarchy of human-centered concerns, such as when humans used horses as agents of conquest or as proxies for social status – that is, to assert authority or the power to govern formal relationships. At the same time, dynamic tensions within the symbolic, utilitarian, and political nature of these interspecies relations repeatedly emerge to challenge norms of control. Did the horse support or subvert authority? Historical access to the lived experience of an individual animal is necessarily indirect, and although individual interspecies interactions were common – knights, nobles, and breeders recognizing and responding to individual horses – archival documentation of these relationships is relatively scarce.Footnote 65 Limitations notwithstanding, archives offer insights into several arenas in which historical horses engaged with human individuals and impacted the social, cultural, and political structures conditioning those interactions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Embodied entanglements of horses and humans generated contradictory and contested outcomes. The horse was not merely a body being regulated or a tool for regulating society; rather, it left an active and indelible imprint in political and social structures. This interpretation of an embodied imprint means that horses, collectively, had a discernible degree of historical co-agency – one that could potentially destabilize the forms of authority that had created it. As the Iberian frontier expanded in the fifteenth century through expeditions to Latin America and North Africa and the Wars of Granada, the horse was far from an obsolete remnant of a former mode of politics. The horse continued to leave its imprint in language, social negotiations, and embodied realities or legal consequences of interspecies relationships. Tracing how this unfolded in the earliest New World expeditions is the subject of Chapter 2.
