Hypothetical: Get your time travel assignment here.

[patteeu]

My assignment is 496 AD.

I initially considered going to North Africa to observe the transition from Gunthamund to his brother Thrasamund in the Vandal Kingdom, but who wants to spend a year in North Africa.

Instead, I'll go to Italy and see how things are going for Theodoric the Great a few years after he unified the place and took charge over the Romans and the Goths who lived there.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by patteeu

My assignment is 496 AD.

I initially considered going to North Africa to observe the transition from Gunthamund to his brother Thrasamund in the Vandal Kingdom, but who wants to spend a year in North Africa.

Instead, I'll go to Italy and see how things are going for Theodoric the Great a few years after he unified the place and took charge over the Romans and the Goths who lived there.

Good choice. That would have been an interesting time period as the post-Roman era shook out.

You should mind your manners at dinner, apparently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoderic_the_Great

In 488, Emperor Zeno ordered Theoderic to overthrow the German Foederatus Odoacer, who had likewise been made patrician and even King of Italy, but who had since betrayed Zeno, supporting the rebellious Leontius. After a victorious three-year war, Theoderic killed Odoacer with his own hands while they shared a meal, settled his 200,000 to 250,000 people in Italy, and founded an Ostrogothic Kingdom based in Ravenna.[4]

[FlintHillsChiefs]

I did some google-fu on why the gap between the invention of the saddle and the stirrup was so long.

Here is the answer I found from r/askhistorians -

You need a certain saddle design to make a stirrup work. It needs to have a tree (a firm wooden frame like this) for the stirrups to anchor to, otherwise every time you put weight in one stirrup, the saddle will slip like this. The lack of a tree also creates abnormal pressure points on the horse's back, which will be greatly worsened by the stirrups. That will cause the horse back pain, which leads to an ornery horse that's apt to buck you off (or worse, become crippled).
Most early saddles served only to make riding more comfortable for the rider, so they were treeless. The first saddles to have trees were the Roman saddles that Agrippa911 linked to (those saddles could easily have stirrups attached; it wasn't too long after the invention of those saddles that stirrups came into use).
I should note that nowadays we have treeless saddles that do not cause pressure points on the horse's back and and can have stirrups attached, but they were developed very carefully by vets to avoid putting too much pressure on any one point in the horse's back. They also use elastic to create a tighter girth, preventing saddle slippage.

Picture of a saddle tree: