ABSTRACT
The history of society in the West during the last millennium can-without much oversimplification-be summed up in one phrase: the rise, fall, and rise of pluralism.
By the year 1000 the West-that is, Europe north of the Mediterranean and west of Greek Orthodoxy-had become a startlingly new and distinct civilization and society, much later 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.
