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Nat Lamb
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 Posted: Tue 13 Mar, 2012 7:12 pm Post subject: |
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This "Bronze Age Warfare" sounds like a lovely book. I think the image of bronzr age conflict being a dress up contest is rather charming.
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Kurt Scholz
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| Posted: Wed 14 Mar, 2012 1:42 am Post subject: |
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| Gary Teuscher wrote: | I forget the specifics, but there was an islamic document from around the time of Saladin that mentioned the use of an armour made from a paste that hardened from various materials, I think leather was mention and glass as well.
Apparently these were made into plates of some source, and I have no idea if there was widespread use of this. |
It's about this stuff. The bronze age armour and linothorax were inserted for some unknown reason and I made the mistake to discuss them.
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Dan Howard
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| Posted: Wed 14 Mar, 2012 2:38 am Post subject: |
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I tried to Google the Islamic document and had no luck. I'd love to see a primary source for this or a least a secondary source that cites the original work, but it sounds like a superstitious folk recipe. The Chinese have lots of them too. My favourite is the The Lion-Armour of the T'ang. You paint your armour with it and it is supposed to become impenetrable.
I've started a new thread about this subject.
http://www.myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=25504
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Kurt Scholz
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| Posted: Wed 14 Mar, 2012 5:14 am Post subject: |
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I'm unconvinced this is all about some superstition. Glass, glue and leather can form armour parts that resist force effectively (similar to modern ceramic armour or armoured glass). I'm not sure what glass means in that context and for this reason I'd like to point out the availability of slag and other smelting products have similar properties like glass. They are hard and brittle and lie around in abundance without much useful applications.
I agree that there were likely magical rituals for protecting against the dangers of warfare. "Gefrorene" in the 30 Years War or the "Germanic" WW 1 swastika are more recent examples.
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Len Parker
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Dan Howard
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| Posted: Wed 14 Mar, 2012 6:10 am Post subject: |
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Very cool. That is worth repeating here.
| Quote: | | RECEIPTS OF MANUFACTURE OF the JAWSHAN AND LEATHER HELMET According to "a DRAFT Of ARMURIE A the USE OF SALADIN" (Fine of XIIème century) Here an extract of the folio 116r° of manuscript ms Bib Bodeleienne Hunt 264 dated from the end from XIIème century, its title is "Explanation of the Masters of the spirit on the matters to put itself during the engagements at the shelter of the damage, and development of the instruction relating to the equipment and the machines being used to face the enemy" (title translated from Arabic). Its author is Ali Mûrda At-Tarsûsi, indicated generally often under name "Al Tarsûsi". This manuscript describes the methods to manufacture and use the weapons, armours and machines of war present in the Islamic armies of the end of XIIème century. A complete passage is dedicated to the armours and in particular to Jawshan (lamellate). I deliver below the translation of Mr. Claude Cahen (1) of the extract dedicated to the receipts permattant the manufacture of Jawshan. "Description in the way of the armours and the helmets that the arrows do not cross and against which them spearheads and the edges of the sabre do not do anything: Take leather clippings of camel, makes soak them in water until they are well softened, pile finely and pulverizes them with the crusher; throw above approximately its half of and adhesive shavings of cobbler and his spleen moity also of blood crushed well. Then take wood or clay moulds to the proportions which you wish to give to the plates armours; extend them on a table and cover each one of a piece of rag or of skin, take a little hard metal filings (?) (2), of the leather clippings of camel, bowel and powder of horn; put the whole in a pot; throw its moity approximately fish glue and of black adhesive (?). Make leather until softening. Then throw above one the third of the first mixture, crushes finely in a stone mortar and pulverizes it with the crusher until it is agitated (?) and mixed perfectly well well. Coated in then the moulds which you covered with skins and of rags, put in of sufficiency, lets dry, coat with spleen, spread above filings of "Shâburquan" (?), then file the whole, polished it, equalizes it, varnished to it. Borers there of the holes, while it is still flexible, places pegs has there through and once dryness bores it with the drill and arranges. It is an armour with the which weapons and the arrows do not do absolutely anything. In the same way you make the helmet by adapting the skin to the mould and by supplementing the manufacture in the way indicated above, after which you embellished, varnished, enriched, gild, varnish with varnish of "farâgh" (?), in three hand according to the use "It should be noted that there is also a technique or one coats the beforehand cut blades of a made up mixture: "of glass beads of (...?), of the filings" of isfâdariya ", red copper and crushed emery, each one a share, been dependent on the adhesive "I invite any person which will have carried out one or the other of these receipts to return in contact with collective 1186-583 (3) in order to deliver his assumptions and conclusions. (1) French Institute of Damas, BULLETIN Of STUDY EASTERN, volume II, years 1947-1948, Beirut 1948, pages 138-139. (2) the mentions (?) indicate an incomprehension or impossibility of translating the text. |
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Randall Moffett
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| Posted: Wed 14 Mar, 2012 6:23 am Post subject: |
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Hey that is worth repeating Dan. Looks a bit like making fiberglass.
RPM
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Dan Howard
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| Posted: Wed 14 Mar, 2012 6:26 am Post subject: |
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Len gets Dan's "sloppy kiss on the forehead" award.
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Kurt Scholz
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| Posted: Wed 14 Mar, 2012 7:47 am Post subject: |
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Thanks a lot Len. It's a complicated recipe and I'll have to ask some Arabian friends for help, but it's possibly what I guess it is, the use of some kind of ceramic (in a loose sense) and glue as an armour component.
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Matthew Amt
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| Posted: Wed 14 Mar, 2012 8:43 am Post subject: |
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| Kurt Scholz wrote: | | I'm unconvinced this is all about some superstition. |
I agree that "superstition" may be too harsh a word. But even when these composites were functional to any degree (and some were obviously quackery), there doesn't seem to be any indication of widespread use. In short, however good they were, they were NOT better than the common alternatives in enough ways or to enough of a degree to replace what was already in use. For modern comparisons, carbon fiber composites and high-strength ceramics are now in common use in some applications, and along with nano-tube materials may be the way of the future. Yet we still build most houses out of wood, solder water pipes together with molten tin (and lead!), and coat the interior walls with a compound commonly referred to as "mud" (which basically it is!). Why? Because it works fine, and it's affordable! Sure, houses burn down or decay or get eaten by termites, that's just how things are, right? The advantages of the new materials do not offset their disadvantages (mainly cost, in this case). Same reason we don't all drive carbon-fiber cars, which would be lighter and indestructible--they'd cost too much to build. As a result, we burn more gas to drive heavier vehicles, and we die in car crashes. Hardly negligible factors! But not enough to offset the cost and difficulty of manufacture.
| Quote: | | Glass, glue and leather can form armour parts that resist force effectively (similar to modern ceramic armour or armoured glass). I'm not sure what glass means in that context and for this reason I'd like to point out the availability of slag and other smelting products have similar properties like glass. |
Be careful. Glass *fiber* can be very tough, but powdered glass in glue will not be the same. Glue can be strong, but since they were not using modern epoxy resins and such, it was mostly just to stick things together. I have heard of glue-hardened leather, but I don't know how well-documented that is or how common it might have been. Leather can be hardened in several ways, of course, and no one is trying to say that leather and hardened leather were never used for protection.
[quote]They are hard and brittle...[quote]
But iron and steel and simple water-hardened leather were hard and NOT brittle! So they are already superior materials, as well as being readily available, completely familiar and easily worked, and (not a negligible factor) not something "new-fangled". It seems to me that a few simple iron plates would be no more expensive than your glue composite, and more effective against weaponry. And in fact what we see starting in the 13th century is simple plates of iron riveted to fabric or leather linings--coats of plates and brigandines. Simple, cheap, effective. We do NOT see any significant numbers of glass-and-glue composite armors.
| Quote: | | ...and lie around in abundance without much useful applications. |
And there's your answer: "without much useful applications." If all that slag had been useful, it would have been used. By and large, it wasn't. Layered and quilted gambesons were good enough for what they needed to be, cheap protection. More protection meant metal, and a higher cost (as well as weight). No one saw any point in spending all kinds of time and money to make cheap protection almost as protective as metal while still being bulkier.
| Quote: | | but it's possibly what I guess it is, the use of some kind of ceramic (in a loose sense) and glue as an armour component. |
No, ceramics are created by high temperatures. No baking or roasting is indicated in this recipe, so there is no way you can even "loosely" call this a "ceramic". I still think you are trying to stretch some very unusual and shaky fragments of evidence to support a pre-conceived notion. That's where history become fantasy. Be careful!
Matthew
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Kurt Scholz
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| Posted: Wed 14 Mar, 2012 9:32 am Post subject: |
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You're overdoing it. I'm making a difference between evidence and my ideas for construction. Ceramic is an inorganic nonmetallic solid material created by heat and cooling. Slag or glass is ceramic as well (and glass fibres are an own chapter because they are traditionally made from slag and one of the reason why I will look whether some slags could have been included among the word glass). Especially glass is a term you have to rethink because silicate-lead chemical binding can create for example many variants of glass in silver mines during extraction that are glass but otherwise utterly useless and impossible to disintegrate with methods then available.
The problem is quite self-evident from the text if glass was the only ceramic used in armour the availability and price of glass were limiting factors until the invention of the Leblanc and Solvay process in the 18th and 19th century. But what does an Arabic source define as glass during that time and does this text perhaps contain some of the usual alchemical expressions with hard to understand meanings? And of course there are elements of fashionable enhancements that are more magic than effect due to theories that had little to do with observation.
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Gary Teuscher
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| Posted: Wed 14 Mar, 2012 10:11 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | And there's your answer: "without much useful applications." If all that slag had been useful, it would have been used. By and large, it wasn't. Layered and quilted gambesons were good enough for what they needed to be, cheap protection. More protection meant metal, and a higher cost (as well as weight). No one saw any point in spending all kinds of time and money to make cheap protection almost as protective as metal while still being bulkier. |
Matthew - we really do not know how much or how little the above mentioned method of making a jawshan was used. It could have been relativey common - we should not assume it was never or rarely used because we have the preconceived notion that lammelar was primarily made of metal.
I don't know how well or long the above mixture holds up to get an idea how often we should see it in the archaeological record - or even if found if anyone really would have known what it was (barring a find of a semi intact jawshan made of such material).
I'm not stating it was commonly used, but really, we do not have much of an idea how much it was used to my knowledge.
But apparently it never caught on real well in Europe, that I think would be something we could say with conviction.
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Dan Howard
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| Posted: Wed 14 Mar, 2012 2:06 pm Post subject: |
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| Matthew Amt wrote: | | I have heard of glue-hardened leather, but I don't know how well-documented that is or how common it might have been. |
The only documented example I can think of is some North American shields.
As for slag, the only thing the ancients used it for was landfill. At Rio Tinto alone it is estimated that the Romans produced 6.6 million tons and it is all still there.
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William P
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| Posted: Thu 15 Mar, 2012 12:10 am Post subject: |
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isnt it also maybe a decent idea to layer leather, just one piece, between layers of quilted cloth, its slightly heavier, but it can be made faily rigid, and also might interfere with a projectile cutting impacting the armour
esopecially if it was hardned slightly.
this thin layer of hardened leather could also help the quilted garment resist the impact. and give the armour some shape.
you could also substitute the leather with rawhide.
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Gary Teuscher
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| Posted: Thu 15 Mar, 2012 9:00 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | isnt it also maybe a decent idea to layer leather, just one piece, between layers of quilted cloth, its slightly heavier, but it can be made faily rigid, and also might interfere with a projectile cutting impacting the armour
esopecially if it was hardned slightly.
this thin layer of hardened leather could also help the quilted garment resist the impact. and give the armour some shape |
First of all, hardened leather of sufficient thickness is similar in effiency of stopping arrows or other weapons to a gambeson.
How thick of a piece of leather are you thinking about? Go to thin and you have added little to the defense. Go thick enough and you have added a good deal of weight. And I would not put it in between layer - for purposes of maintenance it would be better to be over or under, but not in between.
Secondly, if you make it hardened leather, you have turned flexible armour like a gambeson into rigid armour - good for spot protection, but not a suit.
There is an Irish Document from the I believe late 10th or early 11th century - where the hero Cu Chulain wears a garment of many layers of linen (I think 27-30), and over this wears a belt of leather and a hardened leather chest piece as well.
I'm not sure if the belt is or is not intended as armour - but the many tunics are similar to descriptions of Gambesons, so you have hardened leather over a gambeson, with a belt that may be a thick wide belt to protect the midsection, or it may just be a belt.
I might point out that these items were neither cheap nor light though. Clothing was pricey in the middle ages - even a simple tunic. Tweny seven tunics would show wealth even if not used as armour. Same for the Hardened leather breastplate (for lack of a better term). It is stated in the document that the hide of the "better parts" of yearling cattle (I forget how many cattle were needed but more than 2 IIRC) were used - which one could intepret as using the thickest parts, the hide on the back.
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Matthew Amt
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| Posted: Thu 15 Mar, 2012 9:37 am Post subject: |
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| Gary Teuscher wrote: | | [Matthew - we really do not know how much or how little the above mentioned method of making a jawshan was used. It could have been relativey common - we should not assume it was never or rarely used because we have the preconceived notion that lammelar was primarily made of metal. |
Very good point! I certainly don't know the middle-eastern stuff, I just had never heard of a western reference to such armor. Just seems to be something the Crusaders would have mentioned if they noticed it being used, being so different from anything else in their experience. (Not that I know all the Crusader sources all that well, it's just one of those details that modern writers tend to pick out!) If it turns out to be a known material, rare or common, I'm good! Learning new stuff is cool.
| Quote: | | I don't know how well or long the above mixture holds up to get an idea how often we should see it in the archaeological record - or even if found if anyone really would have known what it was (barring a find of a semi intact jawshan made of such material). |
Also good points. Is there even that much surviving metal armor from that region? With such a scarcity of archeological evidence of any sort, written sources are all we really have, and I'm happy to go with them.
| Quote: | | But apparently it never caught on real well in Europe, that I think would be something we could say with conviction. |
Bingo.
Thanks!
Matthew
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Gary Teuscher
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| Posted: Thu 15 Mar, 2012 10:57 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | we should not assume it was never or rarely used because we have the preconceived notion that lammelar was primarily made of metal. |
I must admit, Matthew, My preconeived notion looks at most lammelar being metal as well, other than the hardened leather stuff and a few other materials.
The idea of a composite type with leather, glue and glass among other materials never struck me as an option 
But I think I vaguely recall one method of making glue was to use mashed water softened leather, kind of like the camel clippings. Am I correct here?
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Kurt Scholz
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| Posted: Thu 15 Mar, 2012 1:45 pm Post subject: |
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The Islamic world in High and Late Middle Age generally had less iron available for armament than Europe while as a country with many nomads and semi-nomads animals and skins are plenty. Granada, according to D. Nicolle's Medieval Sourcebook II, is a well documented case of Islamic armies using leather where European armies used iron. Glass could be one solution to increase the penetration resistance of that armour. I doubt it outperformed iron/steel armour. The translation of glass and iron still leaves me unsure whether this is a corruption of slag with iron that has properties of glass and by containing some iron ingots a much improved resilence. At least we have some ideas to test now.
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William P
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| Posted: Thu 15 Mar, 2012 11:31 pm Post subject: |
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| Gary Teuscher wrote: | | Quote: | isnt it also maybe a decent idea to layer leather, just one piece, between layers of quilted cloth, its slightly heavier, but it can be made faily rigid, and also might interfere with a projectile cutting impacting the armour
esopecially if it was hardned slightly.
this thin layer of hardened leather could also help the quilted garment resist the impact. and give the armour some shape |
First of all, hardened leather of sufficient thickness is similar in effiency of stopping arrows or other weapons to a gambeson.
How thick of a piece of leather are you thinking about? Go to thin and you have added little to the defense. Go thick enough and you have added a good deal of weight. And I would not put it in between layer - for purposes of maintenance it would be better to be over or under, but not in between.
Secondly, if you make it hardened leather, you have turned flexible armour like a gambeson into rigid armour - good for spot protection, but not a suit.
There is an Irish Document from the I believe late 10th or early 11th century - where the hero Cu Chulain wears a garment of many layers of linen (I think 27-30), and over this wears a belt of leather and a hardened leather chest piece as well.
I'm not sure if the belt is or is not intended as armour - but the many tunics are similar to descriptions of Gambesons, so you have hardened leather over a gambeson, with a belt that may be a thick wide belt to protect the midsection, or it may just be a belt.
I might point out that these items were neither cheap nor light though. Clothing was pricey in the middle ages - even a simple tunic. Tweny seven tunics would show wealth even if not used as armour. Same for the Hardened leather breastplate (for lack of a better term). It is stated in the document that the hide of the "better parts" of yearling cattle (I forget how many cattle were needed but more than 2 IIRC) were used - which one could intepret as using the thickest parts, the hide on the back. |
the question is whether non hardened leather , over or under a gambeson would behave in a way when struck, that is significantly different to quilted cloth
the idea, like with all composite combinations, is the idea that one portion behaves differently, so that anything that would triumph over the gambeson, would not do so well against leather, and anything that would do well against leather, would maybe be foiled by the gambeson.
for example, not to ressurect an old topic but metal lamellar over maile like what was supposedly worn by byzantine cataphracts, if lamellar is made so its fairly rigid, for say just key areas, its good at stopping some forrces that maile on its own would just pass on to the person, say, a strike from a mace. or a needle bodkin, it would spend a lot of energy against the lamellar. before trying to breach the maile
also in terms of cloth armour and how effective heavily quilted cloth can be as armour.
i suggest people handle a decent quality kendo kote, the wrist portion is made purely of cloth, i have confirmation of this from the guy who owned it., but it is so heavily stitched together it formed a piece of armour that sounded, when knocking on it, like i was knocking on hardened leather/ plastic, or thin wood... at its current thickness it might not stop heavier blows from cutting through it on its own, (or it might, you never know) but it would , i think, certainly stop lighter blows from cutting your wrist.
and i think it would sure as hell stop your wrist being crushed by a sword blow. add even a few small plates and a little bit of maile and you have very effective arm protection.
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Gary Teuscher
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| Posted: Fri 16 Mar, 2012 8:44 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | the question is whether non hardened leather , over or under a gambeson would behave in a way when struck, that is significantly different to quilted cloth
the idea, like with all composite combinations, is the idea that one portion behaves differently, so that anything that would triumph over the gambeson, would not do so well against leather, and anything that would do well against leather, would maybe be foiled by the gambeson. |
From what I have seen, even moderately thick non-softened leather, like 8oz for instance (about mocassin bottom thickness) does virtually nothing against any type of attack.
If you are looking at 6oz (per square yard as opposed to sqaure foot as leather is measured) as a standard weight for a 27 layer tunic, you could get 12 layers of cloth tunic for one layer of 8oz leather. This is close to half the thickness in layers needed for a true gambeson.
So you add greatly to the weight, for little or no protection.
If I were to make a gambeson and would incorporate leather, I'd use maybe a 4oz layer of leather on the outside, merely for water resistance. Or I would forgoe any leather at all.
| Quote: | | also in terms of cloth armour and how effective heavily quilted cloth can be as armour |
In the tests I have seen, it (27 layers or so of linen) perform remarkably well. It seems they can ward off any but the most determined cuts and thrusts. The few layers of linen with a cotton batting do not perform nearly as well.
Actually, the layered linen performs as well or better than hardened leather of say 8oz weight, though the hardened leather might give better protection from blunt trauma over "hard" areas such as shins, knees, and the skull.
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