Obviously, not all warfare was heavy infantry centered at the same time or became cavalry centered at the same time, but it seemed like Roman heavy infantry took a back seat in the later years of the empire, and afterwards heavy cavalry was the deciding factor in a battle.
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What happened was that european medieval societies had way less means of mobilizing their population to war than ancient societies. When the western part of the roman empire began do decline the cities became way less safer than they were during previous centuries, so more and more people started to ran to the countryside and isolate themselves in small rural communities.
A consul or a roman emperor could directly interact with a great deal of their population by recruiting troops in the cities, while a medieval noble or king had the population of their territory way more dispersed and harder to contact and conscript for war. So with less poor people to go the infantry, rich people were always the cavalry, there were less ways of fighting off a cavalry charge and they became way more effective.
Like someone else said, Medieval Europe was not as efficient for collecting resources than big the empire of antiquity (or other places). The Roman Empire had a huge population and they levied this by having a large army of professional heavy infantry. They could be easily transported by ships and fight everywhere in their large empire in different geography. Horse might be faster on a short distance, but human have more endurance and can travel long distance faster than horses.
Medieval Kingdom were smaller, they fought in less diverse terrain and the most important kind of terrain was the Great European Plain that run from France to Russia where most of the population was living.
Medieval Kingdom simply didn’t have the bureaucracy and stability to extract as much resources and form a large professional army. It cost too much and Europe had to wait until the 15-16th century for that to happen again. The best military force Europe could made was a rich elite. They had the time to train and the money to equip themselves without the King having to pay for it. So the rich elite bought the best they could in equipment, which include an horse. Shorter distance to travel through a Kingdom and a smaller army mean that horse was the fastest way to bring your limited military to where it was needed.
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