ABSTRACT
The role of cavalry has attracted much comment from historians of early modern western European armies. It is a pattern which confounds those notions of 'progress', often driven by technology, that appear so central to many works of military history. Ann Hyland and R.H.C. Davis have examined the significant developments in horse breeding and horsemanship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, military historians-more interested in weapon technology than horses-have largely failed to consider the implications of their work. Instead, horse breeding and equestrianism transformed him into a mounted soldier 'of nimble service'. Nevertheless, as James Wood has observed, both Royalist and Huguenot forces did seek to expand their heavy cavalry arms in the immediate aftermath of the battle, suggesting confidence in the arm. Cavalry's tactical doctrine in the decades following the onset of the Great Italian Wars in 1494 has been linked primarily to technological change, and to the allegedly reactionary impulses of the socially elite man-at-arms.
