The Rise and Fall of Warhorses

The term “dehorsification” (obyezloshadenie) was coined by Isaac Babel to describe the replacement of horses by machines during industrialization, after Babel had witnessed and chronicled the parallel sufferings of horses and humans in the antisemitic pogroms and Bolshevik battles of 1920.¹ David Chaffetz’s richly detailed recent book, Raiders, Rulers, and Traders, is about what I would call the “horsification” of the world—that is, the history of the domestication and breeding of horses, and of how warhorses became essential to the building and sustaining of great empires.

Despite the erudition of the author, the book is delightfully readable. Chaffetz studied Persian, Turkish, and Arabic at Harvard, and he has traveled extensively in India, Central Asia, and China; he enlivens Raiders, Rulers, and Traders with brief memories of riding on the Eurasian steppe. His scholarship is wide-ranging, much of it making use of information—from Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Mongolia—that became available only after the fall of the Soviet Union, and his text is animated by charming literary anecdotes and historical tales testifying to the affection that people in many different cultures had for their horses.

The book rejoices in fascinating incidental information about the ancient world, such as: Herodotus said that the first thing every Persian child learns is to ride a horse; the Persians used the same word for equestrian practice and statecraft; Cyrus (according to Xenophon’s Peri Hippikes) invented the first point-to-point (a country race over fences, also called a steeplechase). The chess term “rook” comes from the Sanskrit ratha (“chariot”), via Persian. (Chaffetz might also have pointed out that the English “checkmate” is a corruption of the Persian “Shah mat!” or “The king is dead!”) The Sanskrit word for aphrodisiac means “something that turns a man into a racehorse.” (It’s in the Kamasutra.) And so much more.

You can tell the history of a large part of the world by who had what horses when. Beginning with the domestication of horses on the Eurasian steppe (40,000–2000 BCE), Chaffetz takes us through the early herders and riders (2000–500 BCE) to the great Asian empires that got their horses from those herders—Iran, India, and China (500 BCE–400 CE)—thence to the Silk Road (which Chaffetz would rename “the Horse Road”) (100 BCE–500 CE) and the empires of the Turks (500–1100 CE), Genghis Khan and Timur (1206–1747 CE), and China, Russia, and British India (1584–1881). He concludes with the end of World War I, when petroleum replaced grass as the essential food of war: “Only when they were displaced by cars and planes did horses cease to be a strategic asset. That spelled the end of the horse-breeding culture that had thrived for four millennia.”

Many people think that kingdoms were made and battles won by people who had big ideas and seized power in various ways, but Chaffetz’s materials suggest that all that mattered was having the right horses. What a sad judgment it is on the human race that the main thing we could think of to do with these glorious creatures was to use them to help us kill one another (and them).

Equine history is believed to have begun not on the steppe but in North America, where the oldest fossils have been found. And yet the New World was a dead end for horses. When Cortés landed his cavalry at Veracruz in 1519, there had been no horses in North America for about 12,000 years. The horses that the cowboys and Indians rode were all descended from Cortés’s Spanish horses; mustangs, often called wild, are actually feral.

The early equines apparently began to travel across the land bridge from Alaska to Asia millions of years ago and evolved there into the three modern species of Equus: horses, zebras, and donkeys. (The horse remained in Eurasia, and the zebra and the donkey went south.) Horses in Asia and Europe were hunted for their meat (high in protein and rich in fatty acids) until they were domesticated in the steppes around 3000 BCE and bred for their milk (more nutritious than cow’s milk) as well. The time between horse generations then shrank considerably, suggesting that breeders were trying to produce more animals, and a new bloodline matching that of modern domesticated horses arose around 2200 BCE.²

It is in the nature of horses to move around in search of new grazing land, which they need frequently. Unlike cows, horses, whose teeth are quite dull, pull up grass by the roots rather than biting off the blades, or they nibble it right down to the ground, thus quickly destroying the land, which may require some years to recover. Horse breeders leave such fields fallow from time to time to allow the grass to regenerate, but horses in the wild, left to their own devices, range constantly to find new territory, moving on to literally greener pastures. The steppe breeders mimicked this behavior, often riding roughshod over other people’s land and taking it for their own herds. It was not merely that the horse made conquest possible; the horse came to symbolize conquest through its own natural imperialism. The steppes bred nomadic horses and nomadic hordes.

Chaffetz notes that “cavalry and empire are like the chicken and the egg”: without cavalry you couldn’t have an empire, but you needed an empire to be able to support the great number of horses needed for a cavalry. Men waged war to get other people’s horses so that they could wage war. Horsepower, which remained the basic unit of power for centuries, was central to what we might call the military-equestrian complex. With cavalry, even small nations could attack and defeat powerful states, but the emergence of great settled empires was a function of the amount and quality of horses they could mobilize.

In Iran, India, and China, the arrival of steppe horse breeders coincided with the emergence of horse empires. But the horse-breeding people of the steppes never succeeded in conquering the part of the world west of the Carpathians and the Alps, nor civilizations like ancient Greece, where sea power rather than horsepower was decisive. “Europe’s great empires arose to control trade by sea,” writes Chaffetz: “Athens, Rome, Venice, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and Britain.” For most of later European history, the sea, rather than horses, drove the great empires. And many battles were fought on foot. Warhorses finally became superfluous when empires found other ways to gain and keep power. Other sorts of horses then began to be bred from the warhorses in Europe and became important in other ways, though still retaining the mythology and symbolism of the warhorses of the past.

Warhorses aren’t born; they’re made. Ancient herders “made no attempt to breed or improve horses, except by culling milk-poor mares,” but breeding eventually meant gelding some stallions and not others, selecting some mares to breed and not others, and stealing other people’s best horses. The fact that a horse has his eyes on the sides of his head identifies horses as animals of flight rather than fight, in contrast with animals like tigers, who have their eyes in the front. But Chaffetz notes that “for a prey animal, the horse packs quite a kick and delivers a dangerous bite,” and humans eventually “weaponized the fight-or-flight instincts of the horse for mass cavalry charges.”

Over several centuries of breeding on the steppes, horses not only gained more muscle and endurance but “developed more warlike instincts, losing some of the fearfulness of their hunted ancestors.” Bred and selected for courage, they could “jump over obstacles, pass through flames and explosions, or carry on when wounded…. [They overcame] fears of dragging an encumbrance, loud noises, and water obstacles.” The extreme movements in that most rarefied of all forms of horsemanship, dressage—the levade, in which the horse raises and draws in its forelegs, standing balanced on its bent hind legs; the courbette, a jump forward at the levade; and the capriole, in which the horse jumps straight upward, with its forelegs drawn in, kicking back—were originally developed as a series of exercises to train warhorses to kick and trample human and equine enemies in battle.

These great changes in the form and behavior of horses were achieved through single-minded breeding, the method by which various political groups made horses what they wanted them to be. Contrary to the folk belief—best enshrined, perhaps, in Enid Bagnold’s novel National Velvet (1935) and the film adaptation starring a twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor (1944)—that you could just find, in a field, a horse that could win major races over fences, a champion horse is usually the result of particular selective breeding practices. Over the last millennium, the manipulation of equine genetic stock has created a number of highly restricted lineages, dramatically reducing the genetic diversity of the world’s horses.

Horsey people say that a good big horse will always beat a good little horse. Breeders from the time of the steppe horsemen have bred their horses for size. Eohippus, the “dawn horse” (aka Hyracotherium)—a predecessor of Equus—was just twenty inches high, or five hands, the size of a dog. (A “hand,” the standard measure of a horse, is four inches, measured at the withers, the top of the shoulder.) By the time Eohippus had become Equus caballus (20,000 years ago), horses still measured only between eleven and thirteen hands, or 44–52 inches, the size of a pony.

Gelding practices between 1800 and 1200 BCE made horses bigger, stronger, and faster. Persian horses in the fifth century BCE were already fifteen hands high and weighed a thousand pounds. In contemporary Afghanistan, there are horses eighteen and even nineteen hands high. There are also some grotesque miniature horses, ten hands or less, kept as companion animals, and zoos preserve about two thousand examples of the so-called Przewalski’s horse, or takhi (Equus ferus przewalskii), thought to be a throwback to some 50,000 years ago; it stands twelve to fourteen hands high.

Horses continued to grow not only in size but in numbers. Steppe armies could have 50,000–100,000 horses. The Persians had 100,000 horses and replenished the king’s armies with 10,000 a year. (The Persians and Scythians competed for the best horses in what Chaffetz calls “the original arms race.”) Genghis Khan mustered more than a million horses, his Mongol heirs ten million, and Timur half a million.

Western Europe could not feed the number of horses the steppe peoples marshaled, but the horse population of England and Wales in the nineteenth century was estimated at three million. As late as the 1870s and 1880s, there were 280,000 horses in London and 150,000 in New York, the latter producing between three and four million pounds of manure and four thousand gallons of urine per day.³ The Russians mobilized over a million horses in 1914, more than half from Cossack breeders and former steppe lands. And on and on, until (it is widely and rather casually estimated, though not by Chaffetz) eight million horses were killed in World War I, and between two and five million in World War II.

There is another chicken-and-egg problem embedded in these figures. Horses eat an enormous amount; they eat like horses. Their food is mainly grass or hay, so you need a lot of land, but they also eat oats (as in “feeling his oats”)—and grain and bran and apples and sugar cubes and carrots and so forth. To feed millions of horses, you need millions of rubles or rupees or yen. And so the great equestrian kingdoms constantly needed to wage war to acquire new sources of wealth to keep their horses, and to wage war they needed more and more horses.

Chaffetz’s argument for the centrality of warhorses in human history is supported by the many literary references to horses as warriors, beginning in the Bible. He quotes the prophet Jeremiah: “They shall ride upon horses, everyone put in array, like a man to the battle.” He might have added Job: “Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?… [He] is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword. The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield.”

Many of the great horses in English literature are warhorses. We could begin with “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” and gallop on for miles. Mr. Jorrocks, in Robert Smith Surtees’s Handley Cross, or Mr. Jorrocks’s Hunt (1854), boasted that fox hunting provided “the image of war without its guilt and only five-and-twenty percent of its danger.” (This line was famously misquoted by Winston Churchill, who remarked in 1911 that “Mr. Jorrocks has described fox hunting as providing all the glory of war with only thirty-five percent of its danger.” Churchill changed “image” to “glory” and increased the danger but, significantly, omitted the guilt.) Indeed, the British have always regarded the hunting field as a prep school for war.

The great English Romantic tradition of cavalry horses ended with the mythologization of the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava on October 25, 1854, the occasion both for a notorious poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson and for the much-quoted remark by the French marshal Pierre Bosquet—“C’est magnifique mais ce n’est pas la guerre” (“It’s magnificent, but it’s not war”)—that sounded the death knell for cavalry horses.

On the steppes everyone, often including women, rode, but only 1 to 2 percent of the population in Western Europe were ever riders. The degree to which horses long ago became not merely a source of actual power but a symbol of aristocratic power is reflected in a law that the British passed in Ireland in 1695 to prevent any Irish Catholic from keeping a horse valued above five pounds or standing more than thirteen and a half hands high. Of course the Irish objected to this law, which was designed not only to disarm them but to rub their noses in the dirt; they argued that it would “be prejudicial to the breed[ing] of horses in Ireland” and would prevent “those of best quality” from possessing horses strong enough for riding and pulling carriages. According to the historian Charles Ivar McGrath, “A case was put for an allowance for the keeping of breeding mares of any value, and their colts till they were four.”⁴

The persistent use of horsemanship by the horseless majority as a negative class marker is suggested by the continuing use of the phrase “Get down off your high horse.” And the transition from a positive to a negative attitude toward people on horseback can be traced in the degeneration of the English word “cavalier.” Originally, in the mid-1500s, it was a noun simply designating a horseman or knight, often used in a positive sense to denote a gentleman or a skilled horseman; by 1594 it had also become a verb, “to act as cavalier or escort (to a lady).” But then, in the mid-1600s, “cavalier” came to be used as an adjective meaning “haughty, disdainful, supercilious, careless, dismissive, high-handed, arrogant, swaggering.” (The German noun Kavaliersdelikt retains both the negative and positive overtones; it means a peccadillo that one quickly forgives as an outburst of high spirits.)

Part of this change was doubtless due to the use of “Cavaliers” (capitalized) to designate the hated supporters of Charles I during the English Civil War, the Interregnum, and the Restoration (a period from 1642 to 1679, shortly before the law about Irish horses was made). But most of the negative force of the adjective “cavalier” is surely due to a more general growing dislike of aristocratic horsemen, while the positive aspect survives in cultural pockets such as operas (Rosenkavalier, Cavalleria Rusticana).

In the nineteenth century the growing hatred for aristocratic riders, coupled with a rising compassion for the agony of horses both in war and in urban and rural life, produced a strain of European and American fiction that depicted horses suffering from cruelty. Though, as Chaffetz demonstrates so clearly, horses were often instruments of power and attack, literature often depicts them as frail, fragile victims.

Some stories were told from the perspective of the horse. One such was Rudyard Kipling’s “The Maltese Cat” (1895), about a polo pony of that name whose tale is actually not at all tragic—indeed it’s quite triumphantly pro-Indian and anti-British. But others were heartrending: John Mills’s The Life of a Racehorse (1865), narrated by a fictitious Derby winner named Sheet Anchor; Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877); and Leo Tolstoy’s “Strider” (“Kholstomer,” 1886), told by a Cossack horse who even describes his own killing at the end, and the approach of a wolf who will eat his corpse.

Raskolnikov’s fever dream in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) turns on a horrendous depiction of a horse being flogged. In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1875–1877), we know that Vronsky, Anna’s lover, will destroy Anna when we see him break the back of his mare as he rides her, badly, over a jump and then, when she falls, kicks and shoots her. Nietzsche, Kafka, and so many others also wrote about the mistreatment of horses. And in the arts as well as literature, this tradition was carried forward with works such as Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which used an image of a tortured horse to protest the bombing of a Basque town by Nazis and Fascists.

Paradoxically, the Industrial Revolution at first increased the number of horses, as they were used to draw barges, deliver beer, pull hackney cabs, and so forth. But eventually the plough horses were replaced by tractors and the horse-drawn carriages by cars. The cavalry charge gave way to the tank and, eventually, the jet and the drone. After four thousand years, horses ceased to be a strategic asset in human life.

The Amish continue to use horse-drawn vehicles, but even they allow riding in buses, in cars, and on electric bicycles. Horse-drawn carriages have recently been banned (mostly on grounds of cruelty to animals) and replaced by electric carriages in a number of cities, including Montreal, Barcelona, Prague, Salt Lake City, Key West, Chicago, and Brussels, though not New York. Outside of limited realms of agriculture, tourism, sport (polo and racing), some herding of flocks, and the urban mounted police sent out to control large crowds of protesters or carousers, the only riders left are privileged equestrians, rural ranchers, or dude ranchers.

What some people still have—for recreation or pure pleasure—are smaller breeds like ponies that are smarter, hardier, and much cheaper to keep than full-size thoroughbreds (aka warhorses). As one modest Welsh farmer whom I knew remarked of the ponies that lived in his fields but were seldom if ever ridden, “One needs to have some beauty about the place.” And Connemara ponies still graze in Connemara, and Camargue horses still run wild on the Camargue, but the bands of free-running horses are dying out.

The highest economic value of horses eventually came to lie in racing, which was always vulnerable to corruption. (As was the entire economic side of horse breeding: a horse dealer has the same social status and reputation as a used-car salesman.) But in 2023, when twelve horses died at Churchill Downs in the days surrounding the Kentucky Derby, many people (though not horsey people) were shocked by the news that the owners and trainers of prize-winning racehorses had used drugs to mask injuries that should have barred those horses from running. During the 2024 Paris Olympics, a dressage rider was castigated for cruelty to their horse and banned from the games; in the 2020 Olympics, a similar episode of cruelty had resulted in the cancellation of the dressage element of the pentathlon in future Olympics.

Could horses make a comeback? Even into the twenty-first century, some aristocrats continue to keep horses and to be in some symbolic ways defined by their horses. I have borrowed the term “horsification” to describe how the world was changed by the original domestication and breeding of horses thousands of years ago. But the anthropologist Lee-Ann Sutherland coined the word to describe the way certain people in contemporary rural Scotland—generally middle class, sometimes nouveau riche—have used recreational horses to move up the social ladder, to become the “new squirarchy,”⁵ a process that I would call “rehorsification.” Apparently, to be upwardly mobile is, once again, to be on a high horse. And the fact that these Scottish horse owners regard their horses as companion animals (a term previously applied only to smaller animals like dogs or cats or piglets) does give one some hope.