A cataphract was a form of armoured heavy cavalry that originated in Central Asia and was fielded in ancient warfare throughout Eurasia and Northern Africa.
Historically, the cataphract was a very heavily armoured horseman, with both the rider and mount almost completely covered in scale or lamellar armour over chain mail, and typically wielding a kontos (lance) as his primary weapon.
Cataphracts served as the elite cavalry force for most empires and nations that fielded them, primarily used for charges to break through opposing heavy cavalry and infantry formations. Chronicled by many historians from the earliest days of antiquity up until the High Middle Ages, they may have influenced the later European knights, through contact with the Eastern Roman Empire.Nell, Grant S. (1995) The Savaran: The Original Knights. University of Oklahoma Press.
Peoples and states deploying cataphracts at some point in their history included: the Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Medes, Parthians, Achaemenids, Sakas, Indians, Armenians, Seleucids, Attalid, Pontus, Greco-Bactrian, Sassanids, Romans, Goths, Byzantines, Georgians, Chinese, Koreans, Jurchens, Mongols, Tanguts and Songhai.
In Europe, the fashion for heavily armoured Roman cavalry seems to have been a response to the Eastern campaigns of the Parthians and Sasanians in Anatolia, as well as numerous defeats at the hands of Iranian cataphracts across the steppes of Eurasia, most notably in the Battle of Carrhae (53 BC) in upper Mesopotamia. Traditionally, Roman cavalry was neither heavily-armoured nor decisive in effect; the Roman equites corps comprised mainly lightly-armoured horsemen bearing spears and swords and using light cavalry tactics to skirmish before and during battles, and then to pursue retreating enemies after a victory. The adoption of cataphract-like cavalry formations took hold among the late Roman army during the late 3rd and 4th centuries. The Emperor Gallienus () and his general and putative usurper Aureolus (died 268) arguably contributed much to the institution of Roman cataphract contingents in the Late Roman army.
Etymology
The origin of the word is Greek. (, , , or ). is composed of the Greek root words, , a preposition, and ("covered, protected"), which is interpreted along the lines of "fully armoured" or "closed from all sides". The term first appears substantively in Latin, in the writings of Lucius Cornelius Sisenna: "", meaning "the armoured, whom they call cataphract".
There appears to be some confusion about the term in the late Roman period, as armoured cavalrymen of any sort that were traditionally referred to as in the Republican period later became exclusively designated as "cataphracts". Vegetius, writing in the fourth century, described armour of any sort as "cataphracts" – which at the time of writing would have been either or . Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman soldier and historian of the fourth century, mentions the "" – the "cataphract cavalry which they regularly call clibanarii" (implying that clibanarii is a foreign term, not used in Classical Latin).
Clibanarii is a Latin word for "mail-clad riders", itself a derivative of the Greek (), meaning "camp oven bearers" from the Greek word ,Klibanos or kribanos; . meaning "camp oven" or "metallic furnace"; the word has also been tentatively linked to the Persian word for a warrior, . However, it appears with more frequency in Latin sources than in Greek throughout antiquity. A twofold origin of the Greek term has been proposed: either that it was a humorous reference to the heavily armoured cataphracts as men encased in armour who would heat up very quickly much like in an oven; or that it was further derived from the Old Persian word *griwbanar (or *grivpanvar), itself composed of the Iranian roots griva-pana-bara, which translates into "neck-guard wearer".Nicolle, David (1992) Romano-Byzantine Armies, 4th–9th Centuries. Osprey Publishing.
Roman chroniclers and historians Arrian, Aelian and Asclepiodotus use the term "cataphract" in their military treatises to describe any type of cavalry with either partial or full horse and rider armour. The Byzantine historian Leo Diaconis calls them (), which would translate as "fully iron-clad knights".Leo Diaconis, Historiae 4.3, 5.2, 8.9
There is, therefore, some doubt as to what exactly cataphracts were in late antiquity, and whether or not they were distinct from . Some historians theorise that cataphracts and were one and the same type of cavalry, designated differently simply as a result of their divided geographical locations and local linguistic preferences. Cataphract-like cavalry under the command of the Western Roman Empire, where Latin was the official tongue, always bore the Latinized variant of the original Greek name, . The cataphract-like cavalry stationed in the Eastern Roman Empire had no exclusive term ascribed to them, with both the Latin variant and the Greek innovation being used in historical sources, largely because of the Byzantines' heavy Greek influence (especially after the 7th century, when Latin ceased to be the official language). Contemporary sources, however, sometimes imply that were in fact a heavier type of cavalryman, or formed special-purpose units (such as the late , a Roman equivalent of horse archers, first mentioned in the ). Given that "cataphract" was used for more than a millennium by various cultures, it appears that different types of fully armoured cavalry in the armies of different nations were assigned this name by Greek and Roman scholars not familiar with the native terms for such cavalry.
Iranian origins
The reliance on cavalry as a means of warfare in general lies with the ancient Indo-European inhabitants of the Central Asian steppes in early antiquity, who were one of the first peoples to domesticate the horse and pioneered the development of the chariot.Mielczarek, Mariusz (1993) Cataphracti and Clibanarii. Studies on the Heavy Armoured Cavalry of the Ancient World, p. 14 Some of these nomadic tribes and wandering pastoralists (Bronze-Age), the Iranians, migrated from the steppes of Central Asia into the Iranian Plateau and Greater Iran from around 1000 BC to 800 BC. Two of these tribes are attested based upon archaeological evidence: the Mitanni and the Kassites. Although evidence is scant, they are believed to have raised and bred horses for specific purposes, as is evidenced by the large archaeological record of their use of the chariot and several treatises on the training of chariot horses.Robert Drews, "The Coming of the Greeks: Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East.", Princeton University Press, Chariot Warfare. p. 61. The one founding prerequisite towards the development of cataphract cavalry in the Ancient Near East, apart from advanced metalworking techniques and the necessary grazing pastures for raising horses, was the development of selective breeding and animal husbandry. Cataphract cavalry needed immensely strong and endurant horses, and without selectively breeding horses for muscular strength and hardiness, they would have surely not been able to bear the immense loads of armor and a rider during the strain of battle.Perevalov, S. M. (translated by M. E. Sharpe) (Spring 2002). "The Sarmatian Lance and the Sarmatian Horse-Riding Posture". Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia 41 (4): 7–21. The Near East is generally believed to have been the focal point for where this first occurred.
The previously mentioned early Indo-Iranian kingdoms and statehoods were to a large degree the ancestors of the north-eastern Iranian tribes and the Medians, who would found the first Iranian Empire in 625 BC. It was the Median Empire that left the first written proof of horse breeding around the 7th century BC, being the first to propagate a specific horse breed, known as the Nisean, which originated in the Zagros Mountains for use as heavy cavalry.Farrokh, Kaveh (2005). Sassanian Elite Cavalry, AD 224–642. Osprey Publishing. The Nisean would become renowned in the Ancient World and particularly in Ancient Persia as the mount of nobility. These warhorses, sometimes referred to as "Nisean chargers", were highly sought after by the Greeks, and are believed to have influenced many modern horse breeds. With the growing aggressiveness of cavalry in warfare, protection of the rider and the horse became paramount. This was especially true of peoples who treated cavalry as the basic arm of their military, such as the Ancient Persians, including the Medes and the successive Persian dynasties. To a larger extent, the same can be said of all the Ancient Iranian peoples: second only to perhaps the bow, horses were held in reverence and importance in these societies as their preferred and mastered medium of warfare, due to an intrinsic link throughout history with the domestication and evolution of the horse.
These early riding traditions, which were strongly tied to the ruling caste of nobility (as only those of noble birth or caste could become cavalry warriors), now spread throughout the Eurasian steppes and Iranian plateau from around 600 BC and onwards due to contact with the Median Empire's vast expanse across Central Asia, which was the native homeland of the early, north-eastern Iranian ethnic groups such as the Massagetae, Scythians, Sakas, and Dahae. The successive Persian Empires that followed the Medes after their downfall in 550 BC took these already long-standing military tactics and horse-breeding traditions and infused their centuries of experience and veterancy from conflicts against the Greek city-states, Babylonians, Assyrians, Scythians, and North Arabian tribes with the significant role cavalry played not only in warfare but everyday life to form a military reliant almost entirely upon armored horses for battle.
Spread to Central Asia and the Near East
The evolution of the heavily armored horseman was not isolated to one focal point during a specific era (such as the Iranian plateau), but rather developed simultaneously in different parts of Central Asia (especially among the peoples inhabiting the Silk Road) as well as within Greater Iran. Assyria and the Khwarezm region were also significant to the development of cataphract-like cavalry during the 1st millennium BC. Reliefs discovered in the ancient ruins of Nimrud (the ancient Assyrian city founded by king Shalmaneser I during the 13th century BC) are the earliest known depictions of riders wearing plated-mail shirts composed of metal scales, presumably deployed to provide the Assyrians with a tactical advantage over the unprotected mounted archers of their nomadic enemies, primarily the Aramaeans, Mushki, North Arabian tribes and the Babylonians. The Tiglath-Pileser III (745–727 BC) period, under which the Neo-Assyrian Empire was formed and reached its military peak, is believed to have been the first context within which the Assyrian kingdom formed crude regiments of cataphract-like cavalry. Even when armed only with pikes, these early horsemen were effective mounted cavalrymen, but when provided with bows under Sennacherib (705–681 BC), they eventually became capable both of long-range and hand-to-hand combat, mirroring the development of dual-purpose cataphract archers by the Parthian Empire during the 1st century BC.