DEBATES ON THE CAROLINGIAN FRANKS’ ARMORED CAVALRY IN WESTERN HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE SECOND PART OF THE 20TH – BEGINNING OF THE 21ST CENTURIES: SELECTED ISSUES

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the late 20th – early 21st centuries’ historiographical polemics around the origin and development of the Frankish armored cavalry in the Carolingian era. The discussion broke out around the theses about the military superiority of the Frankish armored cavalry (composed of people from the upper strata of society) of the Carolingian era and, as a consequence, about the rapid spread of the military technology cultivated among the Carolingian horsemen-aristocrats, accompanied by their inherent stereotypes and behavioral patterns of Latin Europe. These issues were raised in the early 1960s by the American scholar Lynn White (1907-1987). The main factor of the military, technological and political transformations that took place in the kingdom of the Franks during the 8th century, according to White, was the process of introducing a stirrup into the equipment of the Frankish cavalry. Since then, almost every work on the history of chivalry and medieval military affairs published in the Western world begins with discussing this. The main purpose of this article is to analyze the course of a dramatic historiographic controversy surrounding Lynn White's stance on the development of armored cavalry in the Carolingian world and the history of chivalry in general. These theses found both ardent supporters (Robert Bartlett, Alex Roland, Dominic Barthelemy) and uncompromising critics (Bernard Bachrach). There has been no academic consensus on the issues of the armored cavalry’s genesis and force level in the Carolingian era. However, the polemic clarified several important issues related to the history of chivalry and chivalric military technology. First, it is its evolutionary and lasting nature, not the revolutionary and sudden changes that took place in the society and the army of the Carolingian kingdom in the 8th – 9th centuries. Secondly, it is the direct dependence of socio-economic life in medieval Europe on military technology and, more narrowly, on the development of weapons and concepts and practices of its usage. And thirdly, the influence of the concepts of military and cultural determinism on Western medieval studies of the second half of the 20th – early 21stcenturies. However, a quietus to the argument about chivalry in Carolingian world has not been given yet.