The Stratioti or Stradioti ( gr, στρατιώτες ''stratiotes''; sq, Stratiotë, Stratiotët;,
it, stradioti, stradiotti, stratioti, strathiotto, strathioti; french: estradiots; sh, stratioti, stradioti; es, estradiotes) were mercenary units from the
Balkans
The Balkans ( ), also known as the Balkan Peninsula, is a geographical area in southeastern Europe with various geographical and historical definitions. The region takes its name from the Balkan Mountains that stretch throughout the who ...
recruited mainly by states of southern and central
Europe
Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located enti ...
from the 15th century until the middle of the 18th century. They pioneered
light cavalry
Light cavalry comprised lightly armed and armored cavalry troops mounted on fast horses, as opposed to heavy cavalry, where the mounted riders (and sometimes the warhorses) were heavily armored. The purpose of light cavalry was primarily ...
tactics
Tactic(s) or Tactical may refer to:
* Tactic (method), a conceptual action implemented as one or more specific tasks
** Military tactics
Military tactics encompasses the art of organizing and employing fighting forces on or near the battlefiel ...
in European armies in the early modern era.
Name
One hypothesis proposes that the term is the Italian rendering of
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
στρατιώτες, ''stratiotes'' or στρατιώται, ''stratiotai'' (soldiers), which denoted cavalrymen who owned
pronoia
The ''pronoia'' (plural ''pronoiai''; Greek: πρόνοια, meaning "care" or "forethought," from πρό, "before," and νόος, "mind") was a system of granting dedicated streams of state income to individuals and institutions in the late Byz ...
fiefs in the late Byzantine period.
It was also used in
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...
as a general term for a soldier being part of an army. According to another hypothesis, it derives from the
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or relat