Where did dressage come from?

Dressage traces its origins to the cavalry horsemanship of ancient Greece, where Xenophon's treatise On Horsemanship — written around 350 BCE — articulated principles of horse training that remain recognizable in contemporary dressage philosophy: working with the horse's nature rather than against it, developing the horse's natural movements rather than forcing artificial ones, and producing a horse that performs with willingness and beauty rather than through compulsion. The discipline's more direct historical lineage runs through the Renaissance courts of Europe, where the academic riding of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries developed as a refined art form among aristocratic horsemen. The riding masters of this period — including Federico Grisone in Italy, Antoine de Pluvinel in France, and François Robichon de la Guérinière in eighteenth-century France — codified the principles and movements that remain foundational to classical dressage. De la Guérinière in particular is credited with developing the shoulder-in and other lateral movements that form the gymnastic core of dressage training, and his 1733 work École de Cavalerie remains a foundational text of the tradition. The Spanish Riding School in Vienna, established in the sixteenth century and still operating today, preserved and transmitted the classical tradition through changing fashions and historical upheavals and remains the most visible institutional expression of the classical heritage. Modern competitive dressage developed through the twentieth century as the sport transitioned from military to civilian competition, culminating in its Olympic inclusion and the development of the international competition structure governed by the FEI that defines contemporary sport dressage.