The “Great Stirrup Controversy,” was instigated by American historian Lynn White, Jr., in his 1966 book Medieval Technology and Social Change. White believed that, without stirrups, a mounted warrior was limited to only hurling javelins and shooting arrows, and that the stirrup enabled mounted heavy shock combat. In turn, this military innovation allowed Charles Martel and the Carolingian Dynasty in the 8th and 9th Centuries to dominate Europe militarily, and as a result prompted Martel to plant the seeds of feudalism to ensure loyalty, military support, and a continuous supply of horses for his cavalry.

However, the stirrup is far less important than one tends to assume. The popular assumption tends to be that stirrups provide a rigid platform, without which horsemanship is, if not impossible, a feat of elite skill. The stirrup, though, makes very few things categorically possible. What the stirrup does is make them easier. This common misconception, I would posit, is likely the result of scholars with little to no equitation experience. Indeed, White’s description of one’s seat on horseback without stirrups -- clinging by pressure of the knees -- belies a distinct lack of time spent in the saddle.

While the stirrup may have helped implement feudalism, it did not bring Europe into feudalism. The use of the stirrup correlated with the increased deployment of Frankish cavalry. However, the stirrup did not cause this increase. The Frankish cavalry coalesced after Charles Martel’s victory over Abd-er-Rahman at the Battle of Poiters in 732, where they encountered high quality Middle Eastern bloodstock that was used to revive the European horse breeding culture that had collapsed along with the Roman Empire. Nor did the stirrup create a radical shift in battlefield tactics that enabled the earliest vestiges of feudalism. Many of the battlefield tactics attributed to the stirrup, such as heavy shock cavalry, and the use of swords and lances, had already been used for centuries, or had been employed in a similar form.

The earliest record of stirrup-like equipment is found in carvings from the Deccan Plateau in India that date to the 2nd Century BCE. These implements were not true stirrups, but leather or rope loops that riders would stick their big toes into. These loops only kept the rider’s leg in its correct position; riders were not able to comfortably put weight into the loop.

Toe loops did not spread outside of India. What we’d recognize as stirrups originated in China, and our earliest depictions of these first stirrups in art date to 300 AD. They were perhaps invented to narrow the skill gap between Chinese and Nomadic horsemen. In fact, we have no evidence that Hunnish horsemen had stirrups.

The Avars brought the stirrup into Europe, where it influenced the Byzantine cavalry. Stirrups are mentioned in the late 6th Century AD Strategikon of Maurice as necessary equipment for the horse soldier. Sassanid Persians adopted the stirrup in the 7th Century, and Arabs adopted the stirrup in 694 on the orders of the general Al Muhallab. The adoption of the stirrup was not universal. Berber cavalry often continued to ride bareback until the 10th Century, and some Syrian tribes went without stirrups until the 11th Century.

The Franks likely adopted the stirrup directly from the Avars, perhaps in the late 7th Century. Stirrups started to show up in the graves of Frankish warriors around the reign of Charles Martel. However, of 700 Frankish warrior graves dated between the 7th and 9th Centuries, less than two percent contain stirrups. Other evidence suggests that stirrups were not universal in Early Medieval Europe. Our first pictorial evidence of stirrups in Europe, St. Gallen’s Psalter -- dated to the late 9th Century -- does not depict every rider with stirrups, yet depicts the arms and armor of the men on horseback as identical. Additionally, the revision of the Salian Frankish code of civil law lists compensation values for military equipment, including horses, saddles, and bridles. However, it makes no reference of stirrups, even though it was written in enough detail to list swords apart from their sheaths. Similarly, Rabanus Maurus, a 9th Century Bishop of Mainz, translated the Roman military treatise De re militari, editing it to only include those parts that were relevant to contemporary soldiers. One of the sections that Rabanus maintained was explicit instruction on how to jump on and off the horse without the aid of stirrups:

The recruits at first try to mount unarmed, then they mount carrying shields and finally very large pole weapons. And this practice was so thorough that they were forced to learn how to jump on and off their horses not only from the right but from the left and from the rear, and in addition they learnt to jump on and off their horses even with an unsheathed sword.

Mounting with stirrups, even with arms, takes no special training, and can be taught to a beginner in a matter of minutes.

The stirrup, then, was not omnipresent during Carolingian expansion and empire. Nor does the stirrup facilitate stereotypically medieval cavalry tactics. Mounted shock troops, for instance, had been deployed since antiquity. Heavy cavalry first truly emerged during the Roman-Seleucid War in 2nd Century BC, although horses had been armored to some degree for one or two centuries before that. The Roman historian Livy describes the mail armor that covered the Seleucid shock cavalry in comparison with the other horses in the Seleucid army:

On the right of the phalanx...were linked up 3000 cavalry, clad in mail armour and known as "cataphracti." These were supported by the "agema," another body of cavalry numbering about 1000; they were a select force, consisting of Medes and men drawn from many tribes in that part of the world….Then came the Dahae, mounted archers, 1200 strong....On the left of the phalanx were...3000 cataphracti and the king's personal cavalry, 1000 strong, with somewhat slighter protection for themselves and their horses, but otherwise closely resembling the cataphracti, made up mostly of Syrians with an admixture of Phrygians and Lydians.

The weight of head to hoof armor limited the horse’s maneuverability and endurance, such that heavy shock cavalry were deployed in massed charges. Despite the expense of heavy shock cavalry, in terms of both horses and armor, cataphracts were successfully deployed across the Middle East and the Mediterranean for almost 1,000 years.

White states accurately that cavalrymen fielded spears and lances before the invention of the stirrup. However, his description of what he perceived to be their only usage -- held to deliver blows overhand -- is not corroborated by modern testing. Using a 4.87 meter long reconstruction of a Macedonian lance, experienced horseman John Duckham, while riding bareback, was able to strike a test dummy at the canter and retrieve the lance, regardless of whether or not the lance was held overhand or underhand. Although fully couching the lance under the armpit was an impossibility due to the lack of saddle, Duckham remarked that the lance was even easier to handle underhand than overhand. A formation of Macedonian horsemen wielding their lances in such a way would have turned them into the equivalent of a mounted phalanx, providing a theory about the success of Alexander the Great’s companion cavalry.

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