Why did non-European people never develop plate armour...

Eastern cultures generally valued mobility more ad plate is very heavy compared to mail etc.

Not it isn't. Mail is quite heavy, heavier for it's protective value than plate.

A 12th century Crusader would've worn roughly the same in terms of weight as a 15th century knight.

That's just not true though

Plate is quite sophisticated and took a long time to develop. You could say other areas were beginning to develop it, many examples like you point out mimic the early use of plate in Europe, but the firearm spread faster, making it obsolete.

Mail is heavier than plate actually as well as being less evenly distributed

I'll go one further and say that that is probably an actual imported Portuguese cuirass. The helmet looks like a repurposed pikeman's pot, too.

Non-Euros like the Ottos, Safavids, the Chinks, and the Nips fielded bigger armies than the Europeans, ergo necessitating more metal for weapons than armor.

Though Asians did have loads of partial plate. As your picture shows, at even used imported European armor, as shows.

In fact by the time Euronigs were throwing up armies as big as the ones in China, the same trend happened: you see soldiers and musketeers only wear the breastplate anymore and a helmet in the late 1600s, and by 1700s, both East and West wore little to no armor in the battlefield anymore, opting for uniforms.

Pic related: in 1700s-1800s Japanese soldiers wore only uniform kimonos. Only weirdo samurai wore armor. And this armor isn"t even serviceable anymore since the guys who made armor at this time made metal art pieces as opposed to the actual thing, which could stop a musket ball

Centralization could also play a role, with governments favoring efficiency of production over autistic level quality.

Forgot ma pic

>the same trend happened: you see soldiers and musketeers only wear the breastplate anymore and a helmet in the late 1600s, and by 1700s, both East and West wore little to no armor in the battlefield anymore, opting for uniforms.
This is entirely because of firearms and not because of army size. Munitions grade plate wasn't difficult or expensive to make by 1600

that design is actual european import armor, not copied from one.

>This is entirely because of firearms and not because of army size
1700s Cuirassiers wore breastplates that can stop a musketball.

Flintlocks did nothing to the lethality of Muskets, just improved the firing mechanism. Its only when the Minie Balls came around and better propellants did Firearms became a threat to metal armor.

Its really the fucking size of armies. Artisans cant just give a massive number of cunts better equipment no longer.

>1700s Cuirassiers wore breastplates that can stop a musketball.
At long range.
It was firearms which resulted in the reduction in armour, not army size, or else why wouldn't generals and other rich folk still wear full plate?

Besides you're wrong anyway, in the late medieval period, we see armies of troops all in full plate, men at arms.
>In the 15th and 16th centuries, large bodies of men-at-arms numbering thousands or even more than ten thousand men (as many as 60% of an army) were fighting on foot wearing full plate next to archers and crossbowmen.
It's really nothing to do with the size of the armies and everything to do with a bullet going straight through your fancy armour.

Also while the flintlock mechanism didn't change the lethality, developments in better mixtures of powder, and remeasured amounts of powder along with properly bored barrels and standardised bullet sizes, certainly did.

>Late Medieval Period
>Armies as large as Azn ones or in the civilized world of the 1600/1700s
Pick one.
>At long range
Ergo the usual fighting range of fucking muskets.
>It was firearms which resulted in the reduction in armour
The production of which, for large numbers of cunts, not the lethality it had to plate armor.

Not him but...

Towton was estimated to have involved 60.000 combatants.

Both sides.
Which is bleedingly rare. The battle that ended the war had, what, 20,000 Combatants?

Meanwhile in China at around the same period there were battles involving 100,000, particularly when the Ming Invaded Inner Mongolia to end the Northern Yuan Dynasty.

Armies in 17th century werent much larger than in the 15th century.
Muskets weren't usually used at long range, being inaccurate, they sought to get fairly close.

Your argument is totally baseless. Plate and mail other forms of entire body armour did not decline because of an increase in army sizes. This makes no sense for a few reasons.

1. Army sizes didn't get much bigger
2. By the 15th and 16th centuries it had become quite easy and cheap to manufacture large quantities of full plate, and we see large armies of men wearing it
3. Firearms are the obvious cause for the reduction in army, they render armour near useless, as firearm technology improves, armour gradually reduces, by the 19th century, only soldiers fully expected to go into melee are wearing armour and just a cuirass at that

>Muskets weren't usually used at long range, being inaccurate, they sought to get fairly close.
Yeah, they totally did not mass musket armed cunts together.

>Yeah, they totally did not mass musket armed cunts together.
Now where on earth did i say or imply that? Of course they massed men together to fire in volleys, in order to make up for the inaccuracy. But they also stood at ranges which the muskets were effective, not the longer ranges required for a musket to bounce of armour.

Yeah but Towton was an English civil war. England which at the time had like 4 million people living in it instead of a hundred million. I reckon that England + Scotland could raise 100.000 soldier between the two of them. Not all men-at-arms of course but still a sizable force.

If we're talking purely men-at-arms in full armor then Western Europe could possible draw from a group as big as 200.000. Though admittedly such a huge force was never actually brought together due to lack of usefulness and logistical constraints.

medievalists.net/2016/01/23/the-power-of-medieval-states-a-report-from-the-year-1423/

Making plate armour requires certain metallurgical developments, e.g. blast furnaces and oxidization ovens. Maintaining these is only economic under certain conditions since they require a certain logistic effort.
It's not a coincidence that plate armour was mostly made in Italy and Germany.

It likely has to do with the weather. The polish used plate in armor a lighter configeration then what the Germans, french, or Italians did in the 15th century. In the 16th century when the Germans came up with 3 quarters plate and the Almain rivet the Poles witch over to those new armor types faster then the Germans who invented did.

Russians used even lighter armor then what the Poles did. Heck in they used 4 in 1 mail till the late 13th century when the west had changed over to 6 in 1 mail in the 10th century.

It could be a lack of infrastructure needed to make heavier armor, or it could be breathability was more needed in that part of the world.

Spanish and Italians live in warmer med climates and still loved their full plate

>It was firearms which resulted in the reduction in armour

Time line does not fit that theory at all. The first army to make heavy use of firearms and gunpowder field artillery was the Hussites in 1420. Craftsmen in their employ invented the arquebus sometime in between the years 1420 and 1423. Hungarin followed suits after a few years of getting their asses kick by the Hussites. Next in the late 1420's the french start using gunpowder field artillery a lot more then they were before and making very heavy use of the arquebus in sieges. The Ottomans get on board next after some encounters with the Hungarians in the mid 1430s.

During this time the use of plate armor keeps growing till around 1470. The amount of plate armor worn declines starting in 1500, with new styles of plate removing armor (and weight) from less threaten areas.

The timeline matches perfectly actually.

Those early firearms you mention were not effective as firearms, having barrels too big for the bullet, using varying levels of powder, having no accuracy at all, they were probably about as powerful as later flintlock pistols, which couldn't penetrate armour. Beyond the technical side, they weren't used effectively either, not being used in mass timed volleys.

Plate armour keeps going because firearms aren't a big danger to it at this point. As firearms improve though, we something interesting happen.

Plate armour keeps going, but it gets much thicker, and much heavier. This is in order to make it bullet proof, and is partially where the myth about plate armour being super heavy comes from, it was damn heavy during its twilight years. But eventually the gun still overtook it, they couldn't make it any thicker, and it began to get discarded.

>Meanwhile in China at around the same period there were battles involving 100,000

The records claim that number sure. There are also some period claim that are very high in Europe as well. A number of sources put the forces in each of the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396 in the 80 to 100 thousand range. However after careful examination it appears that those source are propaganda, with the real numbers being about 16 to 25 thousand on the Hungarian side and about 12 to 16 thousand on the Ottoman side.

Scholars still repeat period claims of troop number in Chinese history at face value because there has not being critical examination of the events in question yet. Give it 20 to 30.

This typical Polish Hussar armour is 17th century gear though. I'm fairly certain that during the middle ages, up to the mid to late 16th century Polish armour didn't look that different from what the rest of Europe used.

Pic shows armour of the Polish King Sigismund II Augustus (16th century).

Google the battle of Osha painting, it shows Polish nobles fighting in pretty much the same armor as the rest of Europe.

The whole Hussar sarmatian thing came later.

>typical
>worn by kings

Stop.

see

By 'typical' I was referring to the armour shown in , which is indeed typical or rather 'archaetypical' in the sense of people associating it immediately with Polish Hussars.

The armour in my pic () belonged to a King, but it still gives a good impression of the armour of the time, which wasn't that different from the rest of Europe.

During the 17th century, Polish armour started to deviate from what most people associate with medieval knightly armour, but on the other hand - so did armour in the rest of Europe, due to the experiences from the Turk Wars, e.g. adopting Zischagge type helmets.

So you are more of less saying that the caliver ( improvement on the arquebus in the early 16th century) improved more then a supple issue? Maybe, but I have not read anything that said that. Have you?

>they were probably about as powerful as later flintlock pistols

A 52 caliber flintlock pistol pushes a 219 grain bullet at around 800 fps for a muzzle energy of 414 J. The tests that I have seen for hand gonnes ranges from 1140 J to 1490 J muzzle energy. The figures that I have seen for the arquebus are all over the place, ranging from 894 J to about 2300 J.

While wrong about the weight, the user is right when saying mobility was far more important to many other cultures who didn't fight wars the way it was fought in Italy or the Low Countries.

Mail was easier to make, maintain, equip and remove, and transport. Eastern armies generally had a long way to march through less developed countryside, further away from fortifications than a Western European army, and were more readily ambushed and fighting long-ranging skirmishes with light infantry and cavalry.

Yes, there was more to the caliver (the most aesthetic musket imo) than a more ergonomic design or the firing mechanism. Longer barrel, better fitting bullet, and better powder. Early powder as used on early handguns was terrible and slow burning.

>Early powder as used on early handguns was terrible and slow burning.

There appears that there was design evolution that worked around that issue.

musketeer.ch/blackpowder/handgonne.html

Hand gonnes do far better with a period type of gunpowder then with modern types of black powder because of it. The page I linked is not the only source that I have found that has the same outlook. Thus hand gonnes had around the same muzzle energy as a modern assault rifle in Russian 5.45×39mm. Not that I am saying it is as lethal as it, the shape of the 5.45×39mm transfers energy far batter and is more aerodynamic.

Anyways older literature paints a very low performance for early firearms because of that.

>China you see plenty of brigandines but nothing approaching the articulated plate harness.
Ming China had the 全鐵甲 ("Full Steel Armor") but it resembles the ottoman armor, just with larger plates.