Quote Originally Posted by Peterski View Post
Cossack cavalry wasn't even good in the 1600s. They were mostly infantry at that time. Cossacks from the 1800s and 1900s are very different from those in the 1500s and 1600s. But for example Dragoons also evolved from being mobile infantry (fought as infantry but moved to battle on horseback), to being regular cavalry. So it is not an isolated case.
Apparently, Cossacks went from being runaway peasants fighting with farming tools and sheltered behind wagons deployed as a fort to irregular cavalry fighting mainly with a lance. Charles François Philibert Masson (1762-1807), a Frenchman who served as a dragoon officer in the Russian court of Catherine the Great and Paul I, dismissed them as being little more useful than raiders and plunderers while Antoine Fortuné de Brack (1789-1850), another Frenchman who served as an officer in the Red Lancers unit during the Napoleonic Wars, described them as the 'best light cavalry in Europe'. Even better than Poles.