Sometimes there is a story that’s just so simple and explanatory that it just must be true … even when it isn’t. Such is the so-called ‘Stirrup Thesis’ most tightly connected to a story that Lynn White, Jr. told in his 1962 book Medieval Technology and Social Change, which has been one of the few medieval history textbooks to remain continuously in print since its publication.
Put simply – and it is simplistic – the Stirrup Thesis argued that when the Franks discovered the stirrup in the eighth century, they used it to develop a new form of mounted shock combat with the couched lance, made cavalry the dominant military arm and knights the backbone of the military aristocracy (and that then led to a wholesale r/evolution in society to support the horse-owning aristocracy that gets shorthanded in another quasi-mythical concept, ‘feudalism’), and promptly turned back the Umayyad invasion of Gaul from the Iberian Peninsula, thus securing Europe for Christendom.
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