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Short description

Chorasmian Heavy Cavalry: Very heavy cavalry armed with a bow and a lance.

Description

The Chorasmian Heavy Cavalry is a heavily armoured mercenary cavalry unit. Although it doesn't bear the title of cataphract, it is very similar to this famous cavalry unit in the way the Chorasmian Heavy Cavalry fights and in the equipment it uses. Indeed, their whole body is covered with scale armour except for their arms as it is easier to use a bow when you do not have kilogrammes of metal over the arms. Their horses are also fully armoured, as any cataphract horse would be. They fight in the Parthian cataphract style, with a bow to soften the enemy before charging with a lance. They use the composite bow, a small yet powerful bow that is perfect for horse archery, and was invented in this region by an older nomadic people who fought the same way. Their lance, the kontos, is four-meter-long and they hold it with both hands. In addition to the sheer weight of both rider and horse, the charge of the Chorasmian Heavy Cavalry with their kontos couched is one of the deadliest things to be seen on a battlefield.

Chorasmian or Khwarazmian was the name of several kingdoms in the Far East, and of a language that was spoken near modern Iran. Most of the time, these states were parts of the Persian Empire, except during the Hellenistic period and the Parthian reign. The Arab geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi in his Mu'jem al-baladan wrote that the name "Khwarezm" is a compound name (in Persian) of "Khwar", and "-razm", referring to the abundance of cooked fish as a main diet of the peoples of this area. Others believe the Persian words meaning "the sun" and "Earth", designating "the land from which the sun rises". More correctly, however, the Iranic compound stands for "lowland" from khwar/khar, "low" and zam/zem, "earth, land.". Khwarezm is indeed the lowest region in Central Asia (except for the Caspian Sea to the far west), located on the delta of the Amu Darya on the southern shores of the Aral Sea. The name also appears in Achaemenid inscriptions as "Huvarazmish", and was declared to be part of the Persian Empire.

During the Achaemenid period, Khwarezm was governed by Smerdis-Bardiya along with Bactriana, Carmania, and the other eastern provinces of the empire. And the Persian poet Ferdowsi mentions Persian cities like Afrasiab and Chach in abundance in his epic Shahnama. When the king of Khwarezm offered friendship to Alexander the Great in 328 BC. Alexander's Greek and Roman biographers imagined him the nomad king of a desert waste, but 20th century Russian archeologists revealed the region as a stable and centralised kingdom, a land of agriculture to the east of the Aral Sea, surrounded by the nomads of Central Asia, protected by its army of mailed horsemen, in the most powerful kingdom northwest of the Amu Darya (the Oxus River of antiquity). The king's emissary offered to lead Alexander's armies against his own enemies, west over the Caspian towards the Black Sea. Alexander politely refused.

Although largely independent during the Arsacid and Seleucid dynasties, it is known that Khwarezm and neighbouring Bactriana were part of the Sassanid empire during the time of Bahram II. Yaqut al-Hamawi verifies that Khwarezm was a regional capital of the Sassanid empire. When speaking of the pre-Islamic "Khosrau of Khwarezm", or post-Islamic "Amir of Khwarezm", or even the Khwarezmid Empire, sources such as Biruni and Ibn Khordadbeh and others clearly refer to Khwarezm as being part of the Iranian (Persian) empire. The fact that Pahlavi script which was used by the Persian bureaucracy alongside Old Persian, passed into use in Khwarezmia where it served as the first local alphabet about the 2nd century AD corroborates Biruni's claims.