The Armour Archive

Here we will deal only briefly with the breeding as such.48 While the mares were primarily kept on the Order’s estates and breeding farms, the stud-horses were mostly stabled in the castles. The main reasons for this were better supervision and care as well as the increased safety this location offered. For every stud-horse there were ten to seventeen mares. Stud-horses were used for breeding from the age of five years, and the mares, one year earlier. Normally the mares were not used for ordinary work or military service, as they were kept exclusively for the purposes of breeding.49 However, there were exceptions to this. As far as the colts were concerned, most of these were gelded when they were three years old in order to perform military service as so-called ‘monk horses’ (Mönchpferde, Mönchhengste). This designation was used in order to make clear that they were not horses capable of breeding. There were, of course, ungelded war-horses in the army of the Teutonic Order but it would be a mistake to believe that they were in the majority. As far as can be determined from the account books relating to horse breeding, the ‘monk horses’ predominated.50

Because colts were almost always rendered infertile by ‘strangulation’ of the spermatic cords (Auswürgen),51 they were not castrated in the present sense of the word – as asserted in the older literature on the subject – but sterilized. As a result of this, an animal’s male characteristics remained largely intact. This also guaranteed that in the case of a defeat there was no danger that the enemy could use captured horses to develop the breeding of their own large horses. In his notes on the regulation of the Order, Grand Master Paul of Rusdorf (1422-41), declared in 1427: ‘Furthermore, nobody, except those who own mares, should possess stallions [horses capable of reproduction], only monk horses. Also the lords shall not give stallions [ungelded steeds] to the brethren’.52 When the same Grand Master two years later gave the Lithuanian Grand Duke Vytautas (Witold) a valuable horse as a gift, it was a temperamental, yet infertile warhorse (ein fröhlicher Mönchhengst).53

A further method of sterilization was performed by crushing the spermatic cords with two sharp-edged pieces of wood (Kluppen),54 but this seems to have been applied less often. Occasionally genuine castration took place by the removal of the testicles. It can be assumed that these geldings were primarily used as draught or saddle-horses. Apparently, in Prussia there were skilled people who were able to apply this technique to human beings, because in 1437 Paul of Rusdorf issued a testimony for the ‘testicle-doctor’ (Hodenarzt) Master Nicholas, who was well practised in ‘the cutting of children and other people’.55

deflagratio wrote:The technique sounds like what mike Rowe described when he was having to castrate sheep. Basically a rubber band around the scrotum.