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Not sure about that though. For a large portion of the (european) middle ages it was common and even expected from rulers to fight in battle. It's not like that was an exceptionally peaceful time (nor was it exceptionally warlike though). Yet it should be mentioned that high ranking combatants like kings, knights and other nobles could expect to be captured and ransomed instead of being killed. But still, it was a risk and many a ruler were killed in battle.
The critical issue is that they weren't expected to fight "in the trenches" as it were, on foot in the front lines. They fought from horseback in the heavy cavalry that had the power of terror on their side because a thundering tide of heavy horse hoofbeats rolling towards you is kinda very fucking scary to the primitive part of the human brain.
They also typically wore heavier armour, funded from the surplus they forced the peasants to create, which was far more effective for survivability. The difference between a thick piece of laminated cloth, a shirt of interlinking metal rings that stops blades and slows spears and a metal sheet that movies never do justice to is staggering (as in: getting stabbed with a spear might leave you staggering instead of bleeding out, if the mail shirt held an converted the momentum into blunt trauma, or not wounded at all if it glanced off the curved metal sheet).
So between their battlefield role being half psychological and designed to shatter cohesion (rather than direct combat only) and their far more expensive, but far superior protective equipment, battle wasn't nearly as scary for them. The "ransomed instead of killed" is just a cherry on top.
The fact that many did get killed in battle speaks to the volume of battles that took place. They weren't as devastating in the pre-modern era, partially because guns massively increase lethality, partially because mass mobilisation wasn't as easy. But given that fortune in battle is a great and clearly visible way to demonstrate divine favour, kings wanting to show that god was on their side had a good motivation to find reasons to wage war.
Besides, once battle begins, there isn't a whole lot a commander of patchwork armies without modern communication can do. They don't have aerial reconnaissance to give them a bird's eye view of the battle, troop positions are harder to assess with the naked eye and getting messages out to the people doing the fighting is much slower if you need to first send a messenger to tell your duke what to to, who then has to despatch messengers to his own vassals and by the time the order trickles down and people get moving, whatever situation you might not have seen right in the first place, or maybe only spotted late in its development, might have shifted anyway and your order would be useless.
So might as well join battle, test that whole "God protects me" deal and trust the armour to make god's work easier.
In a modern context, sending the people starting wars to fight with the infantry might have a different effect, but it also would be quite different in nature. Imagine feeding Trump MREs! The pampered cunt would choke and starve... Actually, that sounds like a better idea the longer I think about it. You wouldn't even need war for it.
Well, yeah, but those were different times altogether