Is there a reason why the Middle Easterners and Indians never developed full plate armor?

>mughals literally memed by light maratha cavalry so hard that they collapsed.
>Mughals struggle for hours against rajput infantry and have problems decisively defeating them.
>bad.

>lances were not common in india
ok.

>ok.

Not used in massed cavalry.

Perhaps the couched lance wasn't common?

((((You)))) are all fucking cucks. It's clear that they didn' t develop it beause they are genetically inferior.

Then how do you explain cataphracts?

They're not as heavy as plate-armored cavalry and can into horse archery?

Plate armour is lighter than chainmail and lamellar mang.

Your horse is fucking armored with plate mang.
In addition, archers dont seem to wear plate very often. One wonders why.

Look at fucking Russia. Has access to Western European tech in the 1500s but you dont find them using plate armor.

Jesus Christ all the stupid answers in this thread.

The answer is because they didn't develop plate armour. It takes centuries of build upon blacksmithing knowledge and metallurgy, universities and experience to make something like fully articulated plate armour in a blacksmiths. No regular blacksmith can do it. How long did it take Europe to develop it? At least 400 years, we see it slowly increase until it becomes full and then extreme.

There's also differences in European and Asian combat, Asian combat being over bigger areas requiring more mobility, more heat (a metal plate in the sun gets hot very quick, this is why Arabs always had clothes over their armour), and less high powered projectile weapons like crossbows and longbows which need to be stopped.

>m-muh plate cartwheels
It's not only about the weight.

When will plate fanboys get this.

Climate isn't an issue, even when the Ottomans moved into Europe they never bothered with plate.

From what I can tell being able to shoot a bow in armor was necessary for them and making entire suits of plate armor was not something they had learned.

Because plates are useless against strong bows.

>implying India didn't have the best metal smiths on Earth

They didn't develop it because they didn't need to. End of story.

Why don't flying squirrels grow wings? Why don't whales grow gills? They do/did perfectly well without them. That's it.

Also plate armor seems less viable for large centrally-supplied armies. Shit's expensive, hard to repair, and impossible to mass produce before modern industry.

Remember that European men-at-arms tended to mix plate pieces with jack-of-plates and maille through the renaissance.

Actually mass production of several pieces such as helmets and breastplates is faster than producing those same pieces in mail. Something I heard an armor smith say regarding breastplates was that you could easily make ten in the time you could make a single mail shirt.

Not sure where you get the jack of plates thing from though.

But then it would be a crappy munitions plate.

Producing a good tailor-made plate armor takes its time.

Jack of plates is a term for brigandine. It was in extensive use by everyone who wasn't a knight in the west during the Renaissance (though knights often used it as well). It was debateably more comfortable and flexible and less heavy (though less well distributed than plate) as well as much cheaper and easier to produce.

Maille is indeed painstaking and labor intensive, but the knowledge of how to make it was much more widespread. I included 'establishing a community of smiths to make the plates' in the logistical cost of mass production. Sorry if that was unclear. Total agreement about individual pieces (such as helmets, non artisan cuirasses,etc). Which is why places like Wallachia (Ottoman Vassal) did often mix in some plate with their panoplies.

What I was trying to get across was that in the premodern era establishing a big enough production base for widespread plate wasn't really feasible, which is why even in Europe full plate was limited to independently wealthy people like knights & condottieri or units funded directly by the King/State (i.e. Horse & Foot Gendarmes, certain Swiss like/halberd units, various Swiss Guards, etc.)

As for places like India, Persia, Eastern Europe, & the Ottoman Empire it seems that the benefits of establishing a manufacturing base for full plate was didn't (in their eyes) outweigh the massive cost in the context of the kind of wars they fought.

Yes so?

Still makes it more useful if you want to armor a big bunch of infantry than trying to arm them in mail.

What's so bad about mail?

Shit's expensive, user. I'd bet my left nut that making plate in the Middle Ages/Renaissance was considered more skilled labor than maille production. It took longer and wasn't as good, but it was good enough and every armor smith from Wales to Timbuktu was familiar with it. It got the job done, except in the case of problem weapons like crossbows (which as another user noted were largely a non issue in places that didn't end up adopting plate).

So;
> if you're equipping yourself for the levy it's probably too expensive for you.
>if you're being equipped on the Crown's dime as part of a large army it's going to have to be absolutely necessary before you're going to be issued expensive plate armor (until the logistics eased up in early modern era).
>if you're infantry in a large medieval/Renaissance force commissioned by the state you sure as shit won't get the priority in regards to plate, given that your job is to pin enemy formations and not die to arrows (doubly so for shielded units or pike/archer troops).

Consider that the Iphicratian hoplites and Macedonian/successor phalangites moved away from bronze plates in favor of linen or mail thoraxes except in the case of shock infantry. Benefits don't outweigh the cost.

By the time plate armor was around and regularly produced it was as expensive or even more expensive than plate armor itself. Since most soldiers had to buy their own equipment buying something like pic related was preferable.

Its shit to make in a mass-production setting.

I'd rather have my boys in shitty, front-piece only plate than wait around for everyone to have mail.

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Heavy, hard to repair, and labor intensive to make. Otherwise it's based.
Doesn't stand up well to halberd/longbows/crossbows/guns (can opener weapons) and the like either but then again very little does. Breathable too.

Also it reportedly is good at keeping you cool in sunlight as long as you have clothes underneath so you don't get burned by the rings when they hear up.

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Completely agree. If we're talking 16th century on there's no argument. I'm only defending mail/brigandine if there's no production base - once there is Demi plate is fucking King.

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Drifting from OP's question but fuck halberdiers are cool

That production base was around during the 15th century. Brigandine and plate were around and the poorer soldiers wore quilted armor. But once metal armor was affordable most opted for something else than mail.

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Okay, I can agree with that.

I just get annoyed when people grossly underestimate the capabilities of mail, but damn I'll agree that production time was probably its biggest weakness.

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no. just no.

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Agree it was around, but I'm speaking to places and times it wasn't around (IE Middle East/most of Eastern Europe). No question that places that had that base earlier (Bohemia, parts of Germany, Italy, etc.) could and did spread that shit around as much as they could. I'd reaffirm to OP's question that full, fitted, plate wasn't feasible to supply on a large scale even then. That remained restricted to Knights and some shock infantry until the very end. Not to say full-plate infantry weren't a thing (Black Army of Hungary, for example - pic related), just not something that made up the bulk of a military force.

As you've mentioned the time saving factor alone makes mixed plate superior to maille, plus the better weight distribution makes it layer more effectively with quilt/padded/brigandine armor. Plus this lets you be less reliant on shields which opens up the halberd/guisarme/poleaxe as a viable mass infantry weapon which is a huge deal.

So, yeah. I think the main point I'm bringing is that for the places that base didn't exist in (regardless of time - 15th c. Byzantium, 15th - 17th c. Russia/Persians/Ottos, etc.) it was probably seen as too much of a pain in the ass to move to establish such a base for what they likely saw as a type of armor not useful enough to justify the effort it would take to produce and distribute.

Same. I get overly rustled whenever people get too fetishistic about plate. Some people have the same issue with plate that weebs have with the katana

myarmoury.com/feature_mail.php

A good read for those wanting to know more about mail, particularly dispelling myths and such.

That guy has some neat bronze age stuff too.

Mail was still the king of all-covering flexible armor, which is why even during these later times you'd still see things like mail sleeves and skirts. It persisted for quite a while.

thank you

Climate may have been an issue. Metallurgy another. Plate armour only came up when blast furnaces and oxidisation ovens were around. Maintaining a blast furnace requires quite the logistic effort. You need a forest nearby for large quantities of charcoal, you need a source of iron nearby, you need a river to operate the bellows via water power, etc.

Definitely. I couldn't fathom drudging around in full plate through the Indian jungles or the mountains of Afghanistan. That would be nightmarish.

It is much harder and more expensive to produce steel suitable for plate. you need a big enough piece of steel, homogeneous, only few slag inclusion and so on. Steel like that was really expensive. Now iron wire is much easier to produce, and even if a guy spent a month riveting it was simply cheaper. Metallurgy in Europe was not advanced enough to produce steel for plate until the 13th century, and it took them another 150 years to bring it to full plate level.

Now Indo-Persia had tons of money and with watered steel (Wootz) they had quality steel available much earlier than Europe did. No idea why they did not develop full plate. You often see plates strapped to coats like this.
>looks like your riding with the Lannister lads.

It was expensive. I don't just mean expensive for the European nobility to purchase, but expensive in the manpower, resources, and technology needed to produce it. And that's for Europe, with its abundant rivers, forests, minerals, markets, and labor. Attempting to reproduce all of that in the Middle East, which around this time had a shortage all of the above, would raise the cost exponentially.

And yes there was a question of practicality when it came to armor in the Middle East, but that didn't stop everyone who could afford it from wearing and fighting in armor whenever feasible. The issue was that list of feasible situations where full body armor was preferable to a mail coat or even nothing at all was a lot smaller than it was for someplace like the Rhinelands or Northern Italy.

Even when you get into more peripheral regions of Europe like southern Spain and Sicily or Eastern Europe, full sets of armor isn't as useful. The problems you face are only exacerbated the further south and east you go from there.

Well as said, India had crucible steel long before Europe developed powered furnaces and finerys to produce quality steel at a reasonable price. However, only the Europeans developed full plate when enough metal came available.

Just for your info, Persia and India where far more advanced, especially in the ferrous metal metallurgy department than Europe for millenia, they had quality steel ready when Europeans still where proud of their bendy iron swords.

Crucible steel is made by re-heating bloomery iron in air-tight crucibles. The end result is a pure, high carbon steel, but only in very small quantities. Blast furnaces in Europe produced large quantities of pig iron, which if re-heated in oxidisation ovens resulted in a large amount of pure, high carbon steel.

>expensive
>metmuseum.org/toah/hd/isaa/hd_isaa.htm

There are several findings which indicate that Europe had quite advanced metallurgy: isis.stfc.ac.uk/instruments/engin-x/documents/a-germanic-ultrahigh-carbon-steel-punch-of-the-late-roman-iron-age10392.pdf

Also, it should be considered that for making swords you don't need a whole lot of high quality steel. Refer to .

I know, I was speaking mostly of North Africa and the Levant. Persia and India are regions which had the potential to develop plate armor (and they did), but the devastation of Persia's industry after the Mongols and Timurids set it back.

The culture of the military aristocracy, which was increasingly Turkic in character, also didn't help as they prized a more mobile form of warfare and didn't invest the way Western European nobility did in incredibly expensive suits of full plate armor. What they did pay for, of course, were swords and maces and guns of high quality.

Yea, I am aware of that, still it was common practice to fire-weld several pieces of crucible steel together if needed. They produced several weapons and even shields with that technique, but apparently they never made much plate from it.
For your pig iron, either you melt it and poodle it (which came much later), or you are in for a really long hammer/reheat session. It took quite some time to develop the process until it yielded a reasonable quality at a reasonable price. Even then, good steel was an expensive commodity.

>It took quite some time to develop the process until it yielded a reasonable quality at a reasonable price. Even then, good steel was an expensive commodity.
Indeed, this only happened during the 14th century as far as I know. Blast furnaces were around much earlier, but they didn't know what to do with all the pig iron. From that point on, when they learned how to turn pig iron into steel we see the rise of plate armour, which I doubt is coincidence.

>There are several findings which indicate that Europe had quite advanced metallurgy
wrong conclusion. There are samples from Roman, Celtic and Germanic swords, most where of iron, bad quality iron steel composites and so on. around 5% of the blades sampled showed a) quality steel and b) signs of proper quench hardening. Good quality swords where rare and so was the knowledge to make them.

I recommend The Sword and the Crucible ,A History of the Metallurgy of European Swords up to the 16th Century By Alan Williams on the subject.

I never said it was an issue of wealth. There was no shortage of incredibly wealthy aristocrats in the Middle East and certainly no shortage of skilled craftsmen. It was a question of production overhead for the armorsmiths themselves. Before they could ever think about selling to nobles with lots of cash to burn they needed to already have a large furnace by a source of water power, cheap fuel, a market with enough soldiers with high enough wages to fund the endeavor through smaller tasks, and enough skilled but affordable manpower to help run all of the above.

If it was simply a matter of getting fabulously wealthy people to throw money at something they didn't even know or care to want, the Middle East would have reached space by the 10th century. It certainly got them far, just not enough to go beyond perfecting individual artistic talent for a small but rich clientele.

>From that point on, when they learned how to turn pig iron into steel we see the rise of plate armour, which I doubt is coincidence.
Nope, but It cannot be the only precondition for plate, as Indo-Persia had steel available for much longer, and they simply never cared to go full plate.

They were unable to make it because they lacked steel in large quantities. Producing crucible steel takes a whole lot of effort. Putting all these tiny pieces together which need to be carefully treated in order to not ruin the material into a large suit of armour was probably not practical.

The Mogul empire was fantastically rich, had the best craftsmen in the world and a warrior caste that really loved their weapons, yet, they did not build plate, and it was surely not for resources. Weapons of that era are some of the most magnificent ever made. Same goes for the Ottomans, technologically and recourses wise plate would have been easy for them, but they never adopted it.

We have plenty of such samples of low quality and plenty of weapons of very high quality. The point is that Europe could create high carbon steel during the late antique already, which contradicts the idea that they were technologically behind.

As said, they made shields and oversized peices on a daily basis, they simply forge welded them together et voila, big enough piece. They even exported their crucible cakes around the world, the famous second generation ULFBERTH swords partially where persian crucible steel.
A suite of plate would need around 20kg of steel, 30 if you are generous and calculate the waste. now thats 40-60 crucible cakes. Historic examples of crucible hearths show that they packed several dozen to several hundred cakes per setting,
I just does not sound right, Europeans payed a fortune (entire farms and more) for full plate, why would an even more rich Indian warlord not do the same?
Same with guns, many cultures new about blackpowder, but the ones truly weaponizing it where the Euros, maybe it is a cultural thing?

>As said, they made shields and oversized peices on a daily basis
Making a shield is very different from a full suit of plate armour. Europe pieced together their larger armour parts too before the 14th century. This was done for helmets for example. They didn't make any breastplates however, but relied on coats of plate, mail, etc. - so there clearly was a reason why they didn't attempt to do the same before blast furnace steel was around and they could forge them from a single piece.

Armor isnt very practical to poo

I was gonna go to the Met today but got lazy, I'm going tomorrow. Tell me some stuff worth seeing if you know?

You didn't understand my point. The Mughals were rich, perhaps some of the richest men in history, and India certainly had some of the best craftsmen in the world. As you say, Indo-Persian warrior classes loved their weapons, and that resulted in some very beautiful and well made arms. But plate armor wasn't a question of the Middle East and India lacking the wealth or the technical skills to make them. The issue was their smiths, the ones who had to shoulder the actual costs of setting up and maintaining manufactories, couldn't afford to attempt articulated full plate armor in the first place, as the cost would be higher for them than it was for European armorers without the same guarantee of profit and investment that a flamboyant Flemish knight wanting his own set and demanding the codpiece curved this many inches could secure. When a Mughal knight came to a smith, he came looking for the most bombasss sword since Zulfiqar, not an experimental armor suit that his friends would make fun of for making him look fat.

>plenty of weapons of very high quality.
Thats simply not true, just look at the romans for example, a good sword for a hundred bad one, mostly they only could produce iron, not even steel. Just because every now and then a smith could make a decent sword doesn't mean they had constantly good quality or just even the technological knowledge. It is pretty darn hard to work bog iron into steel, even more so without the use of water power.
Feel free to post historic examples of all steel constructed swords with fine enough granular structure and sings of quenching.

Now Indo-Persia on the other hand had almost 2000 years of quality crucible steel, and they supplied half the world with it.

Ooooo Veeky Forums snap

>was not something they had learned
I really doubt that was the reason.

How hard would it be to hire people who know their shit enough to start producing plate armor?

I think it may have had more to do with differing climate and terrain.

There were plenty of low quality weapons found in the middle east and most Damascus steel blades I've seen were from the 17 - 18th century. I haven't seen a lot of analysis on Eastern weapons from earlier time periods that surpasses what Europe had at the same time.

Still, this has nothing to do with the original argument: they've found ultra high carbon steel made in Europe from the late antique which clearly indicates that Europe could make it. When it comes to particular examples of historic weapons of great quality I've already named the Sword of Saint Cosmas and Damien which was thoroughly analysed in the 1980s and they published a paper on it.

>The issue was their smiths, the ones who had to shoulder the actual costs of setting up and maintaining manufactories, couldn't afford to attempt articulated full plate armor in the first place
The good smiths where mostly servants or slaves of the court, they worked in the royal workshops. at least thats where the best stuff was made. Costs was not an issue for them. Both the Mogul empire and the Ottoman empire had such workshops,

Technologically I see no reason why they should not have developed full plate if they cared to. So either there was no need, or they preferred the mail / coat of plate combo for some reason.

>Sword of Saint Cosmas and Damien
>third quarter of the 10th century

You don't just need people who know how to make it - which isn't that hard. You need the infrastructure to operate a blast furnace, which simply isn't economic just anywhere. After all, it's not like plate armour was made all over Europe. It was mostly made in South Germany and Northern Italy, rather likely because it was logistically ideal there. A lot of forest nearby for charcoal, rivers with a strong current to operate the bellows due to the Alps and of course a source of iron from early mining efforts. Even if you had good enough workers to make plate armour, it wouldn't be worth it just anywhere.

It's hard to poo in loo when wearing full armour

It's an example of a medieval sword made after the Ulfberht weapons weren't around any more which rivals crucible steel weapons in quality (it is often claimed that Ulfberht's quality was unmatched).

When it comes to the late antique, I've already posted the paper on the ultra high carbon steel that was found.

>It's hard to shit on the designated shitting street when wearing full armour
FTFY

>When it comes to particular examples of historic weapons of great quality I've already named the Sword of Saint Cosmas and Damien which was thoroughly analysed in the 1980s and they published a paper on it.
Thats one of the few known surviving proper swords of the time, it must have been the same to a normal as what would formula 1 car would be to a honda civic. No wonder an emperor himself gave it to the church. Most swords that where found from that time are iron/steel construction at best. Good swords where not common until the 13th century in Europe.

>had my dirty fingers on a Ottoman 16th century saber with royal markings
> was ready to go up to 5k for the little bugger
> sold for 26k and I know the guy who bought sold it for double that
> i will never have the collection I dream off :-/

>The good smiths where mostly servants or slaves of the court, they worked in the royal workshops. at least thats where the best stuff was made. Costs was not an issue for them. Both the Mogul empire and the Ottoman empire had such workshops,

These were more artisans than anything else, highly skilled and prized for what they did but not entrepreneurs free to cater to just anybody's needs so long as they could pay. Plate armor developed out of a lot of competition and experimentation, both of which are not high priorities for a royal armory whose owners tended to be peerless in rank and prestige already.

>Good swords where not common until the 13th century in Europe.
I'm rather doubtful whether swords in the Islamic world were on average a lot better. We have lots of findings in Europe and many of them are of low quality but you can also find quite a few great weapons. When it comes to Eastern weapons, most I've seen are rather new-ish, i.e. Early Modern and later. From that time period onwards, the quality of European weapons became also a lot more consistent. There's very little thorough analysis on medieval or even earlier weapons of the Eastern world - and if there is, it's usually comparably exceptional as the Sword of Saint Cosmas and Damien (e.g. Masamune weapons).

Sad that this has had to be said so many times. Right on the money.
This is also a really solid point. This Turkic martial tradition was well entrenched in Egypt, Persia, and Mughal India as well as in the Ottoman Empire. Added to the lack of a suitable production base it just didn't make sense in their context. Plate was harder to produce in most of the Islamic world, was exotic and largely untested, and doubtless offered little advantage relative to its cost for the type of war fought there.

Given that they developed about every goofy thing with weapons that is possible in India it is hard to believe that they did not play with plate for fun. maybe there was just no need for it.

With the Ottomans, battling guys in plate for centuries and for at least two centuries have equal or superior metallurgy and smiths it makes even less sense. I suspect it had more to do with their fighting style than anything else.

>Islamic world
I think pre-caliphate India, Turkey, and Centeal Asia also offered some pretty nifty metalwork, especially India.

Of course. They supplied the Islamic world after all.

There are however documents from ancient China, where they describe the weapons made of crucible wootz and praised them as superior. There is even a historic Chinese manual how to tell fakes from the real stuff (9th century) and Zosimos describes the crucible steel process in detail and mentions that the Indians invented it and that the Persians master it. (4th century)

That might as well be the case but 'better' is a relative term. I was more talking about a thorough analysis of findings from the middle ages for example.

Some of the more popular items Rus merchants came to Northern Iranian markets to sell in the 9th and 10th centuries, besides furs, were swords.

I think the Islamic world could have better swords, but as a consequence of having enough wealth to import quality weapons or materials to make them from wherever they could find them.

>I was more talking about a thorough analysis of findings from the middle ages for example.

You ant this book
>The Sword and the Crucible ,A History of the Metallurgy of European Swords up to the 16th Century By Alan Williams
It is really surprising how long it took the Europeans to make consistently good swords.

>found some Indian 17th century plate
>likely inspired by europeans

Interesting enough, Persia had plate armor, but they did use Rhinoceros hide for the cuirass. So maybe they where right, and full steel plate is no good for hot sunny climates.

I wasn't talking about European swords - there's a lot of data on them. I was talking about Eastern swords. When it comes to consistency it shouldn't be surprising that there was a lot of variety: they relied on bloomery iron mostly. And bloomery iron leaves a lot of effort to the craftsman due to requiring elaborate homogenisation efforts as well as more intricate methods of construction. A lot of things can go wrong there. As time passed on, metallurgy became more advanced and thus also the quality of weaponry more consistent.