The Knight And The Legionnaire: Heavy Armor In Use A Millennium apart

The Roman Legions and the Feudal Armies of the Middle Ages were both reliant on their heavy armor to protect their men as well as their ability to deliver devastating charges to their enemies in order to achieve victory in the field. This is despite the many centuries which separate them in time, the vastly different social structures which support those armies and the scale of the wars which were being fought. This paper studies the similarities and differences between these two fighting forces and the men that made them up, as well as how such similar tactics had persisted for so long despite the changes which Europe had undergone in the time between their existence with the purpose of considering the consistency in martial thinking over time. It achieves this by the description of both types of fighting men, the theory behind their wars, followed by examples and discussions of the tactics used by those groups in reality.