The most famous cavalry units in history include Alexander the Great's Companion cavalry, the armoured cataphracts of Parthia and Byzantium, the Mongol horse archers, the Mamluks of Egypt, the Polish winged hussars, the Cossacks, Napoleon's cuirassiers, the Royal Scots Greys, the Polish light horse of Napoleon's Guard and the US 7th Cavalry. Each became famous for a different reason: shock, firepower, mobility or a single legendary day.
Some horsemen are remembered as a type, others as one regiment with a name, a uniform and a battle honour. This list mixes both on purpose, because elite cavalry came in two forms: whole warrior systems, like the Mongols or the Mamluks, and individual units whose reputation outlived their era, like the Scots Greys.
We chose units for evidence, not for glamour. Each entry says what the unit was, how it fought, its defining moment and what is legend rather than record. For the single great charges themselves, see our guide to the greatest cavalry charges.
1. The Companion cavalry of Macedon
The Hetairoi, or Companions, were the noble horsemen of the Macedonian kings and the striking arm of Alexander the Great. They fought with a long cavalry spear, often in a wedge formation, and Arrian's account of Gaugamela lists them in eight squadrons, with the royal squadron1 at their head.
Their method was to wait for a gap. At Gaugamela in 331 BC, as the Persian line stretched to outflank him, Alexander led the Companions into the opening and straight towards Darius1, who fled. No other unit on this list was so closely tied to one commander's genius.
2. Cataphracts: armoured horse and rider
Cataphracts covered both man and horse in armour, scale or mail, and charged with a heavy lance. The Parthians made them famous: at Carrhae in 53 BC, Plutarch describes the Romans2 of Crassus dazzled by gleaming armoured horsemen while Parthian horse archers shot them down, and Crassus died in the aftermath.
Rome copied the idea with its own armoured clibanarii, and the Byzantines kept the tradition alive for centuries. In the tenth century the emperor Nikephoros II Phokas is associated with a revived heavy cavalry of kataphraktoi trained to charge in a blunt wedge.
3. The Mongol horse archers
The Mongol army was not one regiment but a whole mounted nation organised in tens: units of 10, 100 and 1,000, grouped into a tumen of nominally 10,000 men3. Each warrior rode with several remounts3, which gave Mongol armies a speed of movement no settled state could match.
Most Mongol troopers were horse archers, backed by more heavily armed lancers for the decisive blow. Feigned retreats, encirclement and relentless arrow fire broke army after army from China to Poland and Hungary. Our comparison Mongol vs Knight looks at how they fared against European armies.
4. The Mamluks of Egypt
The Mamluks were slave soldiers, many of them Kipchak Turks bought as boys4 from the steppe, converted to Islam and trained for years in horsemanship, archery and lance work. Freed on completing their training, they formed an elite that eventually ruled Egypt and Syria itself.
Their fame rests on one achievement above all: they were the army that beat the Mongols4. At Ain Jalut in 1260 and in a long war afterwards, the Mamluk horse archers proved a match for the Ilkhanate's cavalry. They survived as a cavalry caste until the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517 and remained powerful under the Ottomans long after.
5. The Polish winged hussars
The heavy lancers of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth are the most celebrated cavalry of early modern Europe, famous for very long lances and the feathered wings worn on their backs. They broke far larger armies at Kircholm in 1605 and Klushino in 1610 and led the relief charge at Vienna in 1683.
We tell their full story, including the debate over the wings, in our guide to the winged hussars.
6. The Cossacks
The Cossacks grew out of free frontier communities on the Dnieper and the Don, and over three centuries they became the light horsemen of the steppe: raiders, scouts and pursuers rather than battlefield shock troops. The Zaporozhian Cossacks fought for and against the Commonwealth, while the Don Cossacks became a mainstay of the Russian army.
Their most famous campaign came in 1812, when Cossack bands harried the Grande Armée without rest during its retreat from Moscow, picking off stragglers and foragers. Cossack cavalry still served in large numbers in the First World War and the Russian Civil War.
7. Napoleon's cuirassiers
The cuirassiers were the heavy cavalry of Napoleon's army: big men on big horses, protected by a steel breastplate and backplate and armed with a long straight sword. They were the reserve that Napoleon threw in to break a wavering enemy line.
Their most famous afternoon was also their bloodiest. At Waterloo in 1815 Marshal Ney led wave after wave of French cavalry5, cuirassiers prominent among them, against the Allied infantry squares. Without enough infantry and artillery support the charges failed, and the cavalry wore itself out, a classic lesson in the limits of shock.
8. The Royal Scots Greys
Formed in 1681 as the Royal Regiment of Scots Dragoons6, the regiment was mounted on grey horses by 1693, which gave it its famous name. At Waterloo it charged as part of the Union Brigade into d'Erlon's attacking corps, and Sergeant Charles Ewart captured the eagle of the French 45th Line, later worn in the regiment's badge.
The price was high: the regiment lost 201 men killed or wounded and 228 horses6 at Waterloo, after the charge carried on too far into the French guns. In 1854 it charged again with the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava. It was amalgamated in 1971 into the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards.
9. The Polish light horse of Napoleon's Guard
Raised in 1807 as a regiment of the Imperial Guard, the Polish chevau-légers became famous in a single morning. On 30 November 1808 at the Somosierra pass in Spain, a single squadron under Jan Kozietulski charged up a narrow road at Spanish batteries totalling sixteen guns7. The regiment's own records and Polish memoirs give about 125 men; some English-language accounts give 87 or 887.
The charge took the guns and opened the road to Madrid, but close to half the riders, about 56 or 57 men, were killed or wounded. The regiment was later armed with lances and fought on to 1814. Our battle page tells the story of that charge minute by minute.
10. The US 7th Cavalry
The 7th Cavalry Regiment, raised in 1866 for the wars on the Great Plains, is famous for a defeat. On 25 and 26 June 1876 its commander, George Armstrong Custer, split the regiment and attacked a large Lakota and Cheyenne village on the Little Bighorn River, whose warriors are estimated at 1,500 to 1,8008.
The five companies under Custer's direct command, about 210 men, were wiped out to the last man8, while the rest of the regiment held out on the hills. The regiment's name is also tied to the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. Our account of the battle follows it hour by hour.
