Knight

Its around the year 600 CE in Western Europe, a period that aint called the Dark Age for nuthin'. Rome has fallen, society has fallen apart and a bunch of germanic barbarians have run over fighting over the scraps. Small tribes warred with each other. Then something comes in and changes the game. A while back some clever bastards in China figured out that it is much easier to ride a horse if you have small loops on strings hanging off the sides your saddle to put your feet in. This idea became popular and slowly moved its way across Eurasia and then arrived in Europe by means of the Avars.

What this did meant that when fighting on horseback it was a lot harder to get knocked off by your enemy or swing your dumb ass off and that you could crash into enemies with a lance, smashing shield walls, unlike earlier cavalry which could just scout, attack the rear and chase down people who were running away. A few armored guys guys on horseback with stirrups armed with spears and swords could break an army of hundreds and the guys who figured this out first took over, with the blessing of the church so they could conquer troublesome pagans. When they took over, each cavalryman was given an area of farmland and farmers on it. They had to cough up a section of their harvests every year as protection money so they could afford their horses, armor, swords and a few goons on foot for backup. Europe was taken over by these Motorcycle Gangs with horses instead of motorcycles known as Knights.

These guys were the greatest thing in Europe's arsenal for nearly a thousand hundred years, then came italian pike formations, another chinese import and the idea of a professional and standardized standing army which gradually put an end to the age of Knights. Then in the 19th century and after the french revolution, Romanacists who wanted to defend the old order of things against upstart ideas about "democracy" and suchlike began looking to the past with rose coloured glasses and forgot about the shitty quality of that period and instead saw dashing knights in shining armor (a phrase that originally meant "The New guy who has never been through battle" FWI).

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