As to stirrups, of which there certainly is no trace among the Greeks or the Romans, it may be said they were coeval with the invention of saddles. They made their appearance in the earliest days of the Merovingian dynasty; and if we accept the German etymology which the learned have offered (_streben_, to support one’s self), the name and the object was introduced by the Franks into Gaul. However that may be, they were no longer dispensed with, especially in war, and when the weight of armour rendered their use necessary. They were of course very large, very massive, and very clumsy in the days of chivalry. When they diminished in size and weight they were wrought with more care, and became objects of art, charged with ingenious ornaments, and embellished with engraving, chasing, and gilding. [Illustration: Figs. 78 and 79.--Tournament Saddles, ornamented with Paintings, taken from the Armoury Real, Madrid. Sixteenth Century. (Communicated by M. Ach. Jubinal.)] In accordance with the opinion held by M. de la Varenne, we have already ascribed the disuse of private carriages to the contempt with which the Franks regarded a mode of conveyance deemed by them to be effeminate. But, following the same author, we must observe that a reason might also be discovered in the wretched condition into which, after the decline of the Romans, those magnificent roads formed by them in all their conquered provinces had fallen. In towns, moreover, the streets, narrow, crooked, and with no regular direction, were very frequently so many holes and quagmires. Philip Augustus I. had some of the streets of Paris paved in that _lutèce_[13] which already, at the time of the Roman conquest, had deserved the significant epithet of _miry_. The princes and the nobles who, as Molière humorously makes Mascarilla say, feared “to leave the impression of their shoes in mud,” and could not without difficulty drive about the towns in carriages, consequently had recourse to the horse or the mule. The ladies made use of them also; but very frequently, if not carried in litters, they rode on a pillion behind the horseman. [Illustration: Fig. 80.--The Caparison of the Horse of Isabel the Catholic. (Communicated by M. Ach. Jubinal.)] In the thirteenth century chariots reappeared; but the fashion did not long prevail, for Philip the Fair discouraged them, in one of the clauses of his sumptuary ordinance of 1294, by declaring that “no citizen may have a chariot.”