lance

lance, spear used by cavalry for mounted combat. It usually consisted of a long wooden shaft with a sharp metal point. Its employment can be traced to the ancient Assyrians and Egyptians, and it was widely used by the Greeks and Romans, despite their lack of the stirrup, which did not appear until the 6th century ad.

The combination of lance and stirrup gave the armoured knights of the European Middle Ages tremendous shock potential in battle and led to the development of the tournament joust, in which single knights sought to unhorse each other by holding their lances level and charging headlong at each other. The butt end of the shaft was couched in a leather rest attached to the saddle. Medieval battles usually disintegrated into hundreds of such single combats.

The introduction of firearms at once outmoded the lance, yet various factors prevented its being discarded and even brought it a surprising vogue lasting well into modern times. For one thing, the lance was a cheap weapon; for another, it did not require a constant renewal of ammunition. Russia and eastern Europe led a revival of the lance in the late 18th century, and a regiment of Polish lancers formed by Napoleon in 1807 was so successful that it was followed by the conversion of several other French cavalry regiments. The Prussians, British, and others organized lancer regiments.

The lance was carried by the cavalry of all the principal European armies through the 19th century, largely because there was no rigorous test of its effectiveness in the face of long-range musket or rifle fire. Part of its appeal lay in its contribution to peacetime military pageantry. In 1889, despite the indifferent success of lancers in the Franco-German War, Germany converted all of its remaining cavalry regiments into lancers known as Uhlans. In 1914 they briefly carried their antique weapons into a machine-gun war, as did the British and French—men were run through with lances at the first Battle of the Marne. Through hard experience, the general staffs of Europe eventually (and reluctantly) conceded that a charge of lancers or any other cavalry contingent could easily be mowed down by machine-gun fire before reaching the defenders’ lines. And so by the 1920s the lance had quietly faded out of the Western armory. The lance made an anachronistic battlefield appearance in the hands of Polish cavalrymen who charged German columns in September 1939, at the beginning of World War II, with some success.