A History of Dressage: From Military Riding to Modern Sport

Dressage descends from military horsemanship. Its documented history runs from Xenophon’s cavalry treatise On Horsemanship in the fourth century BC, through the Renaissance riding academies of Naples and the courtly high school of the French écuyers, into the cavalry schools whose manuals codified the modern training doctrine — and only then, at Stockholm in 1912, into the Olympic arena. The competitive sport is younger than its vocabulary suggests: Olympic dressage was restricted to commissioned military officers until 1952, and the professional, civilian, commercially organised discipline described across this section is essentially a creation of the decades after the Second World War, when Europe’s cavalry culture was converted into sport. The word itself preserves the lineage: dressage is simply the French for “training”.

Antiquity: Xenophon and the cavalry horse

The earliest systematic writing on riding that survives complete is On Horsemanship (Peri Hippikēs), written in the fourth century BC by Xenophon — Athenian soldier, historian and student of Socrates. It is a cavalry officer’s manual: how to buy a sound horse, how to stable and groom it, how to sit it, and how to train it for war and parade. What has kept it in print for over two millennia is its temperament rather than its technique. Xenophon argues that nothing forced can be beautiful, that the horse must be taught calmly and rewarded rather than punished into compliance, and that the brilliance a trained horse shows under a rider should be the same brilliance it shows at liberty. Modern readers recognise in his descriptions of the proud, collected parade horse something close to what the sport now calls collection, and his insistence on the horse’s willingness anticipates by twenty-three centuries the “happy athlete” language of the modern rulebooks.

Xenophon was heir to an older tradition — he cites a lost treatise by Simon of Athens — and antiquity’s cavalry cultures from Persia to Numidia all trained horses systematically. But no continuous line runs from the ancient world to the modern sport. With the fall of Rome, the literature of horsemanship in Europe effectively stopped for a thousand years; the medieval knight’s horsemanship was practical and largely unwritten. When systematic riding re-emerged as a written, teachable discipline, it did so in a specific place and moment.

The Renaissance: Naples and the first riding academies

That place was sixteenth-century Italy, and above all Naples. The Renaissance rediscovery of classical texts included Xenophon, and the humanist enthusiasm for turning practice into teachable art extended to the horse. The Neapolitan nobleman Federico Grisone founded a riding academy in Naples in 1532 and in 1550 published Gli ordini di cavalcare (“The Rules of Riding”) — the first Renaissance treatise on horsemanship and a European bestseller, running through dozens of editions and translations within decades. Grisone took from Xenophon the idea of the systematically educated horse; he conspicuously did not take the gentleness, and his corrective methods read harshly today even by the standards of later classical authors.

The academy model mattered more than the methods. Grisone’s contemporary and follower Giovanni Battista Pignatelli taught a generation of foreign pupils at Naples, and through them the Italian school travelled: his students Salomon de la Broue and Antoine de Pluvinel carried it to France, where it was refined and — significantly — softened. Pluvinel, riding master to the young Louis XIII, taught with a patience closer to Xenophon’s, working horses between pillars and insisting that understanding, not fear, produced expression. By the early seventeenth century, riding “in the manner of the academy” was an expected accomplishment of a European gentleman, and the manège — the enclosed school with its prescribed figures — had become a fixture of court life.

The courtly high school: the age of the écuyers

Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the military art became simultaneously a courtly one. The airs of the haute école — levade, courbette, capriole, and the collected school paces that survive in the modern piaffe and passage — were displayed in carousels and royal spectacles as much as practised for the battlefield. William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, published his influential method in exile during the English Interregnum, working horses bent and displaced on circles; and in France the royal manège of Versailles produced the figure the modern sport regards as its greatest single authority.

François Robichon de la Guérinière published École de Cavalerie in the 1730s. Its lasting contribution is a movement and a mentality. The movement is the shoulder-in — épaule en dedans — which La Guérinière developed from Newcastle’s circle work onto a straight line along the wall and presented as the first and most essential of all lessons for suppling the shoulders and engaging the haunches; three centuries later it is still trained on essentially his terms, as the shoulder-in article sets out. The mentality is gymnastic: the horse made light, balanced and agreeable to ride through progressive exercises addressed to its body, rather than compelled movement by movement. La Guérinière’s text became the doctrinal foundation of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna — founded in 1572 and the oldest institution of classical horsemanship still operating — and remains the reference point for everyone who argues about what “classical” means, a debate treated separately in classical versus competitive dressage.

The cavalry century: schools, manuals and doctrine

The French Revolution ended the courtly manège as a way of life, and the nineteenth century relocated serious horsemanship to a new institution: the national cavalry school. France re-established its military equitation at Saumur, where the instructor corps — the Cadre Noir, formed in the earlier nineteenth century — carried the French tradition forward inside an army institution; Vienna’s school preserved the Baroque inheritance; and the German states built the remount-and-academy apparatus whose breeding half is described in the European market essay: state studs such as Celle (1735) and Trakehnen supplying cavalry horses, and military riding institutes training the officers who rode them.

The century also had its quarrels. The Frenchman François Baucher, working in circuses rather than academies, developed a method of extreme suppling and lightness that split European horsemanship into partisans and opponents for two generations — a reminder that disputes over method, force and lightness are not a modern invention. But the cavalry era’s decisive legacy is codification. Armies need doctrine that survives the individual genius, and the German army’s riding regulation H.Dv.12, issued in 1912 and revised in 1937, distilled the accumulated tradition into a systematic progression for training remounts and troopers. Its sequence — rhythm and looseness first, contact, then impulsion, straightness and collection — is the direct source of the six-step training scale that governs dressage training and judging worldwide today; the term Skala der Ausbildung itself only came into use in the 1950s, applied retrospectively to the cavalry doctrine. It is the sport’s central historical irony: the framework by which every modern test is judged was written for the military seat of an army that no longer exists.

Into the Olympic arena: 1912 to 1952

Competitive dressage in a recognisably modern form emerged around the turn of the twentieth century as international officer sport, and entered the Olympic Games at Stockholm in 1912, when the equestrian disciplines joined the programme. The early competitions were, in effect, examinations of the trained officer’s charger — closer to an obedience-and-riding test than to the modern Grand Prix, and progressively formalised between the wars. Team medals were added at Amsterdam in 1928, and the test slowly acquired the full high-school vocabulary over the interwar Games.

Eligibility told the sport’s social history plainly. When the Fédération Équestre Internationale was founded in 1921 to govern the international sport, it confirmed that Olympic equestrian competition was open only to commissioned military officers — the amateur gentleman-officer being considered the appropriate competitor. The rule was enforced to the letter: Sweden won the team dressage gold at London 1948 and lost it the following spring, when one of its riders, Gehnäll Persson, was found to have been temporarily promoted from sergeant to lieutenant for the Games; the FEI disqualified him and the gold passed to France. The episode helped precipitate the reform. The FEI relaxed its eligibility rules, and from the Helsinki Games of 1952 dressage was open to civilians, non-commissioned ranks and women.

The change was immediate and symbolically complete. At Helsinki, the Danish rider Lis Hartel — riding partially paralysed below the knees after polio — won the individual silver medal, the first Olympic medal won by a woman in direct competition with men; she repeated the silver in 1956. Persson, restored to his sergeant’s rank, won team gold at the same two Games. In the space of a single Olympic cycle, dressage ceased to be an officers’ preserve, and the demographic transformation that followed has been total: women now form the majority of competitors at every level of the sport, up to and including its championship podiums. The full competition history is treated in dressage at the Olympics.

The post-war transformation: from cavalry to civilian sport

The deeper revolution of the mid-twentieth century happened outside the arena. Mechanisation removed the horse from agriculture and from the armies within a generation after 1945, dissolving the cavalry culture that had produced the sport’s riders, teachers and horses. What survived did so by conversion. The cavalry instructors became civilian trainers and federation educators; the military doctrine became the civilian federations’ official teaching; and the state-stud and studbook apparatus that had bred remounts and farm horses rewrote its selection goals for the riding-horse market — Thoroughbred refinement into the heavier stock, inspections re-aimed at gaits and rideability, the Dutch regional books merging in 1970 into what became the KWPN. That conversion, traced in detail in why Europe dominates dressage horse production, created the modern warmblood: the purpose-bred sport horse whose studbooks, licensing systems and foundation sires date, as sport institutions, essentially from this period.

The sport’s structures civilianised in parallel. National federations organised amateur competition down to club level, building the graded test ladders that still define national dressage; professional training became a regulated trade in the German-speaking and Dutch systems; and an international calendar grew beneath the Olympic summit — World Championships from the 1960s, continental championships, and eventually the year-round circuit of international shows. By the 1970s and 1980s, dressage had completed its migration: a discipline invented to prepare horses for war was now a civilian sport, practised overwhelmingly by amateurs and led professionally by trainers rather than officers.

The modern era: professionalisation, the freestyle and the record book

Two developments define the sport’s most recent half-century. The first is the freestyle to music. Conventionally dated to Reiner Klimke’s celebratory one-tempi changes at the 1984 Olympic Games and the idea they planted, the choreographed Kür was built into the first FEI Dressage World Cup Final in 1985 and grew into the sport’s public face: since 2002 only the Freestyle counts toward the World Cup rankings, and the Grand Prix Freestyle now decides the individual medals at the Olympic Games and World Championships, as the freestyle article describes. The Kür did for dressage what no fixed test could — it gave the sport a broadcastable, theatrical format — and it pulled judging, music production and choreography into professional specialisation along with it.

The second is full professionalisation and commercialisation. The modern discipline is produced by a specialised industry — breeding, young-horse production, young-horse championships, auctions, sponsorship and an international trade in trained horses — surveyed in the dressage industry. Its competitive summit has been marked by a small number of era-defining partnerships. Edward Gal and the stallion Totilas broke the sport’s 90% barrier in the Grand Prix Freestyle at Olympia in December 2009 and became, briefly, the most famous dressage horse in the world; Charlotte Dujardin and Valegro then set all three current world records between 2012 and 2014, culminating in the 94.30% freestyle at Olympia in December 2014 that still stands — the full record book is in the highest dressage scores. That these records have now outlasted a decade of challengers says something about both the standard they represent and the stability of the judging system that produced them.

Timeline: key dates

Dressage today

The sport’s present chapter is being written around equine welfare. High-profile training-method controversies, scientific attention to contact and hyperflexion, and a broader public questioning of animal sport have pushed the FEI and national federations toward tightened stewarding, revised judging guidance and formal welfare strategies, while the sport’s own institutions debate how competitive incentives interact with the classical principles the rulebooks still cite. None of this is historically new — the argument between force and lightness runs from Xenophon through Grisone’s critics and the Baucher controversy to the present — but the scrutiny is now external as well as internal, and how the discipline answers it will shape its social licence in the decades ahead. The substance of that debate, and the distinction between classical ideals and competitive practice it turns on, is examined in classical versus competitive dressage.

Sources

• Fédération Équestre Internationale — Olympic Games: equestrian sport at the Games, 2026. https://inside.fei.org/fei/games/olympic
• International Olympic Committee (Olympics.com) — Rising from the saddle: the story of Lis Hartel, 2024. https://www.olympics.com/en/news/lis-hartel-first-woman-to-win-olympic-equestrian-medal
• Olympedia — Gehnäll Persson (the 1948 team disqualification), 2026. http://www.olympedia.org/athletes/12557
• Wikipedia — Federico Grisone (Naples academy, Gli ordini di cavalcare, 1550), 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Grisone
• Dressage Today — The Origins of the Dressage Training Scale (H.Dv.12, 1912/1937), 2019. https://dressagetoday.com/theory/origins-dressage-training-scale-bruno-greber/
• British Dressage — World & British Grand Prix records, 2026. https://www.britishdressage.co.uk/get-involved/international-dressage/medal-history-results-records/world-british-records/