fallsfromtrees wrote:Actually the demise of the armored knight occurred earlier that 1500 - at the Battle of Agincourt, the English long bowmen turned the French knights into pin cushions - and that was in 1415.
Indeed. The thing is mounted Knights continued to be used and arms and armour continued to be developed (in fact, you could argue there were pockets of development after 1500), post 1415, but the emerging "Infantry Revolution" outpaced the improvements in mounted warfare, and spread throughout Europe, so that by roughly 1500 mounted knights were no longer the dominant player on the battlefield.
I would also make a tangental observation that Welsh longbowmen were not actually agents of the Infantry Revolution, since it also look a lifetime of training to create an effective bowman, much less train units to fight and deliver the stunning arrow storms. By the time of Henry VIII, longbow training had fallen out of fashion and it would have been very difficult for the English to field an effective force of bowmen in Tudor times. The crossbow, and later the gun (along with complimentary weapons like pikes deployed in dense formations) allowed people with
minimum training to at least put up an effective defense against mounted Cavalry (or even other Infantry formations), and the ability to raise large numbers of fighting men at relatively low cost is what really drove the Infantry Revolution.
