by K. J. Parker
So; they knew about better armour, could have made it, but chose to ignore it. Why would men for whom fighting was a way of life do such a thing? I think the answer must lie in what they believed armour, and war itself, was for.
We’ve seen that the Greeks fought to decide issues, while the Romans fought to conquer, contain and retain an empire. The Germanic tribes of Western Europe fought for other reasons—
Men die, cattle die;
Only the deeds of heroes live for ever.
That’s how the Vikings saw it; and the only heroic deeds worth remembering were war and fighting. They fought for honour—or call it prestige, or acquiring or maintaining a dominant place in society through actions held to be prestigious by their peers; they fought in the same way that movie stars negotiate their pay, not because they need the money but because it’s the only real way of keeping score. They in this context means the nobility, the ruling elite. It may be hard for us to get our heads around ideas of aristocracy and nobility among fur-clad savages, but barbarian societies were ferociously aristocratic and hierarchical, pyramids of king, great nobles, lesser nobles, rich farmers, poor farmers, nobodies. In materially poor cultures, lacking the palaces, fine tableware and refined manners of the urban Imperials, a member of the elite could really only justify his exalted status by actions, rather than possessions or expenditure. Insofar as they had fine possessions, they had armour and weapons; they also had a deep-rooted tradition of reverence for the past, for tradition itself. The best sword you could own was one that had belonged to a dead hero two hundred years ago; by using his sword, you partook of his deeds, his honour. Accordingly, sword designs don’t change much, even when better designs became available7. Any sword—or helmet, or body armour—that looked different, looked new, couldn’t be a family heirloom and therefore couldn’t be imbued with the honour of one’s glorious ancestors. New armour, like new money, simply isn’t the same. Accordingly, in the graves of these dead heroes we find arms and armour; beautiful arms, made the hard way and decorated and embellished with exceptional skill and lavish expenditure of precious materials, but not better arms. For at least 300 years, until Charlemagne rebooted Rome as the Holy Roman Empire, and Carolingian warriors start wearing a new design of helmet, there is essentially no change in arms, armour or military tactics. When changes do come, it takes a new empire to bring them about; which empire fell apart almost immediately after Charlemagne’s death, because nobody else really seemed to want it. The new two-piece helmet died out too, and people went back to the old four-piece design.
It’s a case—sorry, but the pun’s irresistible—of self-denying ordnance. Greek hoplites created and persevered with military equipment that was (by our standards) inefficient, inconvenient and needlessly overengineered, because it was suitable for what they wanted out of war. They could make highly advanced composite bows when they wanted to, bows every bit as good as the Persians’, but they didn’t want to, because archery warfare would have changed the rules, spoilt the status quo, ruined everything. The Romans had no such compunction, their agenda being so very different; as well as innovating and inventing, they cherry-picked arms and tactics from every nation under the sun, but their successors, the Germanic barbarians, also drew back from progress in military technology, and for the same reason as the Greeks. Mass participation in war by common people in mass-produced armour was the last thing they wanted. It was the exact opposite of what they were fighting for.
We have to fast-forward a long time, from the Fall of Rome to the thirteenth century, before we come to a real change in armour, or attitudes. During that time, the Western European warrior’s outfit, consisting of a mailshirt and a simple conical helmet with a nose-guard, usually made of four plates riveted to a frame, hardly changed at all; hemlines rose and fell, as hemlines do, and we start to see a few helmets made from a single sheet of metal, but that was about all, and there’s no evidence of technical advance or any desire for it. Then, at the end of the eleventh century, westerners came into violent contact with a richer and vastly more sophisticated culture: Islam.
The First Crusade succeeded mostly through sheer ferocity. European knights, predominantly French and Norman, smashed their way into the Holy Land and took Jerusalem. In every aspect of military technology, from equipment to tactics to logistics, they were hopelessly inferior to their enemies; they succeeded largely through the element of surprise. For four hundred years, with only a few reversals, Islam had had no trouble defeating Christians; it was largely to internal divisions in the Muslim world that Byzantium owed its continued existence. The crusaders were, however, a different sort of Christian entirely. Unlike the Byzantines—it’s a sad irony that the most spiritual culture the world has ever known had to spend most of its energy and resources on war—the Crusaders wanted to fight; they were warriors, not soldiers.
A hundred years later, the Christian defenders of the Crusader states weren’t warriors any more; they were demoralised, underresourced soldiers defending their homes against a superior enemy whose victory was inevitable. They had a real and urgent incentive to try and improve their arms and armour; and we begin to see innovations; new helmet designs, defences for legs and arms to supplement the basic mailshirt. Once these changes had become acceptable, it’s no surprise that they start appearing back in the old country, where the prestige of the crusaders would have made emulation of their fashions desirable. Whether the improved equipment prompted increased interest in the chivalric games of the tournament—better armour made jousting safer, so it became more popular—or whether a demand for better jousting gear led to improvements, we can only guess; in any event, supplementary defences for the body, to protect against the horseman’s lance, begin to show up by the end of the thirteenth century.
The mailshirt, even worn over padding, was quite inadequate against the lance. Consider the physics of a galloping knight; three quarters of a ton of horse at thirty miles an hour propelling a needle-sharp point against a target of similar weight moving towards it at similar speed. It’s the doubling effect of the joust that introduces a level of danger never previously experienced; nothing had ever hit that hard before, and something had to be done.
Something took the form of iron plates, sewn inside a cloth or leather jerkin and worn over the mailshirt. Known as the coat or pair of plates (really fancy versions made of hundreds or thousands of small scales sewn into velvet were called brigandines), this essentially makeshift reinvention of 3,000-year-old scale armour was considered entirely adequate until the next disaster happened; the ascendency of the bow.
Read most modern histories of medieval warfare, and you’d be left with the impression that the English yew longbow was a dramatic, game-changing innovation. Not so. It’s not even a particularly good bow, compared with other contemporary designs—its D-shaped section is inefficient, meaning that less of the energy expended in drawing it is converted into arrow velocity than with, say, a rectangular-section flatbow; it’s made of solid wood, and therefore can’t compete with the exquisite, difficult-and-expensive-to-make composite bows (horn, wood and sinew) used since antiquity by the Greeks, the Romans and the medieval world east of the Balkans. It wasn’t even particularly new; the same design and material was used by the Vikings, and very similar bows made by prehistoric cavemen have been fished out of peat bogs. In any event, no longbow capable of being drawn by a human being can shoot an arrow as fast or as hard as the high-powered crossbows used throughout Europe since the twelfth century.
The English longbow wasn’t an outstanding weapon, but it was relatively cheap and easy to make, and it was used by special men. The archers who fought at Crecy, Sluys and Poitiers were extremely strong and very highly trained. It’s unlikely that they were marksmen, like the Genoese crossbowmen8 they’d been trained to shoot volleys, to get as many fast-moving heavy arrows in the air as possible in the shortest possible time. In modern terms, they were machine-guns.
And they could shoot through armour. Th
ere’s a lively debate about whether the coats of plates worn by the French nobility could turn the heavy ash-shafted, bodkin-headed English arrows shot from 100-pound draw-weight yew longbows; on the balance of probabilities, it seems like they could, but that still left a lot of the body protected by nothing but mail and padding. Therefore, as a matter of urgency, fourteenth-century armourers turned their attention to finding a way of covering all the other bits with iron plate, in a way that meant the wearer could still move and breathe. A great deal was at stake here; nothing less than the survival of the nobility, the warrior class.
There were an awful lot of noblemen in France in the fourteenth century; a whole army of them, literally. The fact that the French army at Agincourt in 1415 was still based around a substantial core of aristocratic horsemen, in spite of the horrendous losses sustained by that class at Crecy and Poitiers (not to mention the Black Death and other unpleasantnesses) shows just how many of them there were. The Hundred Years War was, quite literally, a class war; French nobility against the English middle class. By the time of Agincourt, coats of plates were widely supplemented with articulated arm and leg armour that covered a man literally from head to toe (the bits for the feet were called sabatons). The particular circumstances of that battle (lost by the French, not won by the English) make it hard to pontificate about whether the armourers had done the job they’d been asked to do; in the later stages of the war, however, particularly once the Milanese armourers had started heat-treating high-carbon steel to make it harder and tougher, it was clear that armour was capable of seeing off the longbow. It was a short and hollow victory. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, knights in shining armour found themselves facing massed matchlock muskets, and the age of armour was drawing to a close.
For a while, though, the European knight was confronted with a wonderful, tantalising possibility; armour so good, so comprehensive9, that it would be proof against anything. Wearing it, provided you were enormously strong and wonderfully fit, you couldn’t be killed. It was the apotheosis of the noble warrior; invulnerability, hitherto the exclusive preserve of Achilles and Siegfried, was now readily available at an armourer’s near you, always provided you had the money to pay for it. For a decade or so, it looked as though the warriors would be vindicated, after three thousand years of murderous debate, going right back to the Lelantine War treaty outlawing the use of missile weapons. That approach had never worked and never will; but the armourers had succeeded in rendering the arrow, and therefore by implication the lower-class soldier, obsolete. Nobody, not even a fellow noble, could kill a knight, unless he did something stupid (like getting off his horse and charging the enemy across a quagmire, as at Agincourt), or unless God willed it. It’s heartbreaking to think that this dream, in pursuit of which so much blood had been spilt and so much money spent, should have been rudely shattered by the perversion of Chinese firework powder.
Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur is a glorious evocation of what might have been. About three-quarters of the book is blow-by-blow accounts of imaginary tournaments, really fine sports journalism. Wonderful knights knock each other off their horses, beat each other insensible with swords, are set upon by twenty enemies simultaneously and still prevail; and (provided they’ve got their armour on) nobody gets killed or maimed or seriously inconvenienced; the most debilitating injury Lancelot suffers is when he’s accidentally shot in the arse by a lady archer.
Malory lived during the last, brightest blaze of glory of the noble warrior. In his day, armour was better than it ever had been, or would be again, and noble warriors were fighting the Wars of the Roses, the last self-destructive gasp of the independent barons before the Tudor monarchy sorted out the over-mighty aristocracy once and for all and established a modern state protected by gunpowder and low-class professional sailors. You can tell from the way he writes that he knows it’s all a fantasy, even though he desperately yearns for the values and certainties of the imaginary world he claims as history. Malory gave us the image of the knight in shining armour, of Lancelot, able to prevail over any earthly danger provided his cause is just, whose function is to protect the weak against the strong and pursue the Holy Grail of spiritual perfection. There never was such a creature10 but modern palaeontologists can nevertheless examine his fossilised remains, his steel shell which remains after his imperfect flesh has long since rotted away. The evolution of that shell doesn’t obey the usual Darwinian rules; in a sense, the evolution of armour is the survival of the unfittest, because the Gothic and Vandalic chieftains didn’t want to evolve into the most efficient killers they could possibly be. Instead—according to their own values, which aren’t ours—they wanted to be the best men they could be; brave fighters, superior to those who depended on them, men of honour. Laugh all you like; call them Klingons, and charge them with an impressive catalogue of crimes against humanity, including all the customary offences of the rich against the poor, the proud against the humble. But then you might care to consider the things that have been done since, by standing and conscripted armies serving duly elected governments, by soldiers, at the taxpayers’ expense; at which point you might start to wonder if the rich men who wanted to lock antlers and not get killed were quite so misguided after all.
NOTES
1 The hoplite’s rigid bronze body armour (known to military historians as the ‘bell corselet’) stayed in use for centuries, but was gradually replaced by the linothorax, a form of body armour whose name means ‘linen breastplate’. We have pictures of these things, but very little hard data. A recent academic study at the University of Wisconsin concludes that the linothorax was a three-piece breastplate (front-and-back; two shoulder straps) made out of 18+ layers of linen, glued or quilted together, ending up about half an inch thick. The Wisconsin tests suggest that this model would have turned arrows and sword-cuts.
The advantages over the bell corselet are obvious. It’s cheaper, which means more people can afford one. It can be made by semi- or unskilled labour; even modern university students can make one. The shoulders move, which means the fighter has a better chance of using his weapons. What it doesn’t do is provide a rigid shell to protect you from having your insides squeezed out through your ears in a 10,000 body pileup. It also goes against all the principles I’ve claimed or will claim for Greek hoplite warfare in this essay.
Consider the context. As far as we can tell, the linothorax comes into general use around the time of the Persian wars. Instead of fighting other Greeks in hoplite formation to settle specific points in a sort of armed referendum, the Greek cities are fighting for their existence against the Persian empire; a different war, against different enemies, with a totally different agenda. Suddenly, there’s a strong, unprecedented incentive to innovate, and the stakes had never been higher.
The linothorax appears to have been the dominant form of armour in the Peloponnesian War, the longest and nastiest war in ancient Greek history. During that war, a great deal changed. Basically, the alarming growth and unacceptable behaviour of the Athenian empire so terrified the Spartans that they decided that Athens had to be brought down, and the majority of Greek states outside the Empire agreed with them. This was a very unGreek war—its length, its objectives, its bitterness, the damage and disruption it caused—and during its course the rules changed forever, so that in the final stages, during the Sicilian campaign, light infantry with bows and javelins—the poor, the scum of the earth—were used to pick off, exhaust and harry to death an Athenian hoplite army.
The tactics used against the Athenians in Sicily could have been used at any time in the preceding three centuries. They’re not exactly rocket science. To my mind, they were used in Sicily in the same way that nuclear weapons were used against Japan in WW2; because of desperation, moral exhaustion, an overwhelming desire to get the war over with and the unspeakable enemy beaten, even if it meant changing the rules and unleashing a force that could destroy the world, or at least the world as they knew it.
The linothorax, like the Sicilian light infantry, should, in my view, be seen as part of the breakdown and collapse of the unspoken conventions of gentlemanly hoplite warfare, forced on the Greek cities by circumstances—a foreign enemy, followed by an unprecedented domestic ‘total war’ that proved unwinnable for both sides by conventional means. [back]
2 Raising is the most useful, and the most difficult, of the armourer’s skills. It’s used to form a deeply concave shape – a helmet, a breastplate – out of a single sheet of metal. In order to do this, you need to work from the outside of the piece rather than the inside; squashing the metal onto a form rather than stretching it into one. Basically, you hold the sheet against an upright steel stake and make a dent in it with your hammer; then you deepen and widen this dent, making the metal flow like an extremely thick, sluggish liquid, continually turning it, until the sheet sort of flows downwards from the place where you started into the shape you’re trying to make.