Hello guys!

Do you know if lamellar armour was adopted by western knights during XIII or XIV century?
And waht about Byzantine knights or men-at-arms?
Do you know if anyone (Byzantine or western) used lamellar over the full mail armour?

Thanks

P.D.
I´m not refering to the coat of plates.
There are some sites showing recreated Byzantine men-at-arms carrying lamellar over mail.
Do you know if there is any art piece showing this accuratelly? (And not Icons)

Hi Rodolfo! How are you doing? (Weird to talk to you in English :P)

Do you mean strictly lamellar armour? Because I may have something about scale armour.

Rodolfo,
In the Osprey Publishing book Knight of Outremer Warrior #18 is a plate of what you are looking for I think. It is plate I and it is supposed to be from a tournament on Isthmus of Corinth, AD 1302. It seems that the participants were knights from all over Latin Greece. Unfortunately it does not list any provenance.

Scott

Hi Guys,

Antal:
About scale armour, there's a very nice picture in page 41 of "Arms and armour of the Medieval Knight (Edge & Paddock)" that shows a warrior's statue from early thirteenth century at Rheims Cathedral wearing scale armour.
The book states that it is "Probably" modelled on a contemporary (Early XIII c.) Byzantine warrior.

There's also Osprey's "Men at arms - Byzantine armies 1118 - 1461 AD" showing some interesting stuff.

Of course I don't indulge piracy, but I've heard there are copies of that in the web (In .pdf format) on p2p networks.
If someone is really interested I encourage them to buy the original copy and not download them.

Scott:

Ok, I've got it. The problem is... where do I upload it? :P
Have a little patience... sooner or later I'll learn :)

Here is the picture that D. Nogueira was speaking of.

Scott

It is scale armour, not lamellar. And the illustration is depicting a charactiture of an "oriental" soldier. It is not representing an actual person and is definitely not representing western Eueropean armour at the time.

Here is a link that might be of interest to you Rodolfo. This one is to a subject from earlier that has links to other sources as well.

http://www.myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=13070

Thanks guys!
Scott, i opened this topic because i have seen such drawings :)
They are really weird, Do you think if byzantine soldiers looked like them? I don´t trust in icons very much...

I'm not really sure Rodolfo. There has been talk that a shirt of either lamellar or scale was found at Wisby that looks to be older and modified. It is in one of the threads that my earlier link leads to. I really do not know that much about Byzantine soldiers though that may change as I am doing research for the time around the fall of Acre to the Hospitallers invasion of Rhodes.

I would also imagine that more than one piece of lamellar armor would have made it to western Europe from mercenaries working for Byzantium when they went home. Just a thought there from me though.

Scott

a book i have on the normans states that norman knights in italy adopted byzantine armor