The single most fearsome thing a Western knight could do was couch his lance and charge. Tucked tight under the arm and braced by a deep war-saddle and stirrups, the lance no longer struck with a man's arm behind it but with the full weight and speed of a galloping horse. The Byzantine princess Anna Komnene, who watched the crusaders pass through Constantinople, put it best: "a Frank on horseback is invincible, and would even make a hole in the walls of Babylon." A line of such riders, knee to knee, was a battering ram of iron and horseflesh — the shock that Muslim and Byzantine armies alike learned to fear, and to sidestep rather than meet head-on.

King & Country catch that instant of the charge: the Red Swabian Knight low over his horse's neck, lance level and pennon streaming, in mail beneath a red-crested helm, his red surcoat and barding strewn with yellow crosses and a kite shield tight to his side. "Swabian" places him in south-western Germany — the duchy the Hohenstaufen ruled before Emperor Barbarossa carried its ambitions onto the Third Crusade. Pair him with his companion piece, the White Swabian Knight, and the Flemish Green Knight for a line of heraldic cavalry. In a diorama he is the tip of a charge — the instant before lance meets shield.

Model: MK212 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set