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By the year 1000 the West that is, Europe north of the Mediterranean and west of Greece, orthodoxy had become a startlingly new and distinct civilization and society, much letter dubbed feudalism. At its core was the world’s first, and all but invincible, fighting machine: the heavily armored knight fighting on horseback. What made possible fighting on horseback, and with it the armored knight, was the stirrup, an invention that had originated in Central Asia sometime around the year 600. The entire old world had accepted the stirrup long before 1000; everybody riding a horse anywhere in the old world rode with a stirrup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But every other old world civilization – Islam, India, China, Japan – rejected what the stirrup made possible: fighting on horseback. And the reason the civilizations rejected it, despite its tremendous military superiority, was that the armored knight on horseback had to be an autonomous power center beyond the control of Central Government. To support a single one of these fighting machines, the knight and his three to five horses and their attendants; the five or more squires (knights in training necessitated by the professions high casualty rate; the unspeakable expensive armour – required the economic output of one hundred peasant families, that is of some 500 people, about 50 times as many as were needed to support the best equipped professional foot soldier, such as a Roman Legionnaire or a Japanese samurai.<\/p>\n\n\n\n