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Martin Kallander
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 Posted: Sat 29 Mar, 2025 12:16 pm Post subject: short sleeves after antiquity |
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In ancient times, it was quite common for soldiers to wear short-sleeved tunics that left their forearms completely exposed to the elements. However, around the end of antiquity, this seems to have changed. suddenly, everyone appears to be wearing full-length sleeves. Do we know why this shift occurred? As far as I am aware, this change happened universally, so my only current idea, that the climate got colder, does not really explain it to me.
Also, if any of you have examples of medieval short sleeved warriors, please share them here, as I would be very interested in them. Thanks in advance!
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Sean Manning
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| Posted: Sat 29 Mar, 2025 3:29 pm Post subject: Re: short sleeves after antiquity |
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| Martin Kallander wrote: | In ancient times, it was quite common for soldiers to wear short-sleeved tunics that left their forearms completely exposed to the elements. However, around the end of antiquity, this seems to have changed. suddenly, everyone appears to be wearing full-length sleeves. Do we know why this shift occurred? As far as I am aware, this change happened universally, so my only current idea, that the climate got colder, does not really explain it to me.
Also, if any of you have examples of medieval short sleeved warriors, please share them here, as I would be very interested in them. Thanks in advance! |
Roman tunics from the Middle Republic up to the third century CE were usually woven as rectangles with a slit in the middle for your head. So the only thing that covered the arm was the very wide body of the tunic (occasionally there were little tabs woven on to add a bit of width there). Tacitus seems to think that most Germani still wear just a cloak and nothing else (no trousers, no tunics).
By late antiquity most Romans started to wear the Iranian and steppe fashion of tunics with sleeves, either sewed on or woven as one cross-shaped textile, and sometimes even cut their garments out of the cloth and sewed it to shape. You can find tunics with sewed-on sleeves as far back as New Kingdom Egypt but the basic Mediterranean and Northern European approach was to weave garments to shape. For more see Roman Military Dress by Graham Sumner.
weekly writing ~ material culture
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Martin Kallander
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| Posted: Sat 29 Mar, 2025 5:14 pm Post subject: Re: short sleeves after antiquity |
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| Sean Manning wrote: | | Roman tunics from the Middle Republic up to the third century CE were usually woven as rectangles with a slit in the middle for your head. So the only thing that covered the arm was the very wide body of the tunic (occasionally there were little tabs woven on to add a bit of width there) |
That's really interesting, a lot of modern drawings and reproductions have them just wearing normal tunics with short sleeves so I assumed that was what the old art depicted without ever looking closer.
| Quote: | | By late antiquity most Romans started to wear the Iranian and steppe fashion of tunics with sleeves, either sewed on or woven as one cross-shaped textile, and sometimes even cut their garments out of the cloth and sewed it to shape |
I still don't really get why this change happened though
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Sean Manning
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| Posted: Sat 29 Mar, 2025 5:53 pm Post subject: Re: short sleeves after antiquity |
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| Martin Kallander wrote: | | Sean Manning wrote: | | Roman tunics from the Middle Republic up to the third century CE were usually woven as rectangles with a slit in the middle for your head. So the only thing that covered the arm was the very wide body of the tunic (occasionally there were little tabs woven on to add a bit of width there) |
That's really interesting, a lot of modern drawings and reproductions have them just wearing normal tunics with short sleeves so I assumed that was what the old art depicted without ever looking closer. |
Ancient art often gives rectangular tunics short sleeves. In New Kingdom Egypt I don't think we have any cross-shaped tunics, just rectangles sometimes with separate wrist-length sleeves sewed on. So the painters are probably 'improving' reality.
| Martin Kallander wrote: | | Quote: | | By late antiquity most Romans started to wear the Iranian and steppe fashion of tunics with sleeves, either sewed on or woven as one cross-shaped textile, and sometimes even cut their garments out of the cloth and sewed it to shape |
I still don't really get why this change happened though |
There are whole books on this, but mostly in the third century AD Romans and especially Roman soldiers decided that Persian and steppes fashions were cool! And northern barbarians started to dress more like Roman soldiers with bows and arrows and shiny helmets and trousers, whereas before many northern societies didn't let men show off like this because they would start to boss their neighbours around.
weekly writing ~ material culture
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Sean Manning
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| Posted: Yesterday at 6:00 pm Post subject: |
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If you want to learn more than the Graham Sumner book, the world centre of research on early European textiles is in Copenhagen https://ctr.hum.ku.dk/ and an excellent article with diagrams of one-piece tunics and tunics with gores is Veronika Gervers, “Medieval Garments in the Mediterranean World.” In N.B. Harte and K.G. Ponting (eds.), Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe. Pasold Studies in Textile History 2 (London: Heinemann, 1983) pp. 298-315.
But the key concept is that the type of cut-and-sewed tunics you see on the Bocksten Man or in nineteenth-century Japan are a Central Asian tradition, and tunics in western and southern Europe until well into the Roman empire were woven to shape. So it was hard to make them cover the arms (you can weave a one-piece tunic with long sleeves but its annoying).
weekly writing ~ material culture
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