ARMS & ARMOR

>My guess is it was easier to maintain and supply
This. The vast majority of war is spent marching around, convincing people you can pay for shit, and not fighting.

Why not both?

>This handsome bastard

He's got those eyes all the men have in classical portraits.

It's too heavy

>replied to a picture of someone wearing both

Taking off maille is also achieved by shaking, trust me I've done it. Ditch your weapons, untie your belt, lean forward and wiggle until it all comes off.

As for putting on maille, it varies. Donning a simple shirt is as easy as lifting it over your head and jumping up and down a few times to make it sit right. Longsleeves present more of a problem since the padding/clothing underneath can get scrunched up by the act of pulling your arms into the sleeves, so it helps to have a friend grab the offending fabric and tug it free.

Coifs can be put on yourself, but if you want everything laced up tight to afford maximum comfort and protection help is needed.

Maille leg armour is the absolute worst though. The usual maille hosen style is pretty simple, but the earlier style that I have which are draped over the leg and laced up along the back of the leg is flat out impossible without a dilligent squire.

All of this takes a few minutes tops, with the exception of said stupid early chausses.

These are what I'm talking about for the legs. Note the saw-toothed pattern at the back of the leg which is where the it's closed by deer hide thonging.

There are two main reasons.

The first is metallurgy. Bronze is easy to work with but it is extremely expensive compared to iron. It does not take a very high level of metal-working skill to craft bronze plate, look at the Dendra Panoply for an example over 3 thousand years old. It's crude, and very expensive but it can be done.

Iron by contrast is relatively cheap but much harder to work with. In particular it very difficult to consistently produce large sheets of high-quality iron which is vital for plate armour construction. This is also the reason that during the Early Middle Ages swords were patterned-welded from multiple rods and helmets were constructed from panels rather than being made out of a single piece of metal. Incidentally helmets were the last piece of bronze armour to go, precisely because they could be moulded from a single piece of metal which is more important on the head for obvious reasons.

So the technologies needed to create bronze vs. iron/steel plate are very different. It's not a case of the ancients developing the secrets of plate armour and everyone forgetting about it for a millenia or so. The development of iron/steel plate armour was very closely linked to the advancement of metallurgy, which the excellent book "The Knight and the Blast Furnace" covers in detail (available in the /hwg/ mega). Medieval plate started with small items like knee and elbow cops, gradually increasing coverage on the limbs and it's only until the metallurgy is finally there at some point in the later 14thC that the solid breastplate arrives.

So in ,say, 500BC, bronze plate is the most protective armour available. Iron working of the time simply cannot produce anything remotely similar in style. However scale/lamellar armours only require lots of very small plates which is possible with the available technology. While less protective the fact that these armours are cheaper/use a more plentiful resource means they are very widespread. Bronze continues to be used for items such as greaves or helmets which are far harder to make in iron due to aforesaid limitations.

Then in the 4thC BC something magical happens. Maille.

The reason why maille is because it is amazingly effective. It's a high quality iron armour that completely sidesteps the metallurgy issue by being made of wire links. It offers excellent protection far above scale/lamellar, it's flexible allows for joint coverage, is easy to repair and modify to the user and is made from that lovely and plentiful iron. The chief downside of maille is the expense of all the skilled labour needed to draw out the wire, but it still cheaper than bronze.

tldr: Bronze is rare/expensive. Maille is really good/still cheaper than bronze. Iron/Bronze plate need different techs.

More like plate was invented, but then some Celt came up with mail and pretty much everybody who could afford it switched.

Not even the reenactors particularily like segmentata.

Maille is also really good. Retardedly good. We know that from historical accounts that maille with padded protection underneath can survive strikes from lances, being constantly shot by Turk shortbows in the Crusades, and renders the wearer immune to swords for the most part. The only thing you really have to worry about is axes. While maces will certainly concuss you, frankly I'd rather have a mace hit my arm so hard it breaks, than have an axe hit so hard it manages to bust maille links, chop through my akerton, and drive iron links into my flesh which will fester and cause death.

IIRC during the High Middle Ages, the glory age of chivalry and maille armor, Knight mortality rates were at an all time low too, compared to later periods. There's a lot less contemporary weapons in the 12th and 13th centuries able to fuck maille up than there is in the 15th century to fuck up plate armor.

>IIRC during the High Middle Ages, the glory age of chivalry and maille armor, Knight mortality rates were at an all time low too, compared to later periods

You recall correctly. Part of this is due to chivalric warfare being keen on treating opponents honourably with surrender (and ransom) almost always accepted but it helped that it was extremely difficult to actually kill a knight in armour with the available tools. These two factors go hand in hand, since there are plenty of opportunities to surrender once it's clear one side has the upper hand.

The Battle of the Standards (1138) is good example; with 10,000 dead or missing Scots for one English knight (plus a few ordinary soldiers).

There is another battle I cannot remember the name of where it actually called off after two knights are killed, which is evidence things were getting a bit heated.

It's quite easy to buy in the chivalric "War is Glorious" mentality when you probably sit at the point where defence was at it's peak in relative terms compared to the weapons of the time. Reading the literature of the period the most striking aspect of duels between knights is how it becomes a battle of enduarance as helmets are dented, swords are bent, the maille is ripped, the shields shattered with a growing collection bloody wounds and bruises but the conflict drags on without a knockout blow until one knight begs reprieve from exhaustion.

Not really, everyone knew squires were training to be knights so I doubt lords would approve of their boys not getting work experience they need.

Doesn't sound very chivalric for the other soldiers

Why should chivalry count towards people who are not chevaliers?

>So why mail?
Metallurgy was not sufficiently advanced up until the 14th century to produce large steel plates.

>We had plate armor in the bronze age.

Bronze (which is a copper-tin alloy) was much more abundant and work with than steel. Bronze is softer, heavier, and generally an inferior metal to steel. Also while we did have large plates of bronze, it was more common to use lamellar and composite types of armor.

>Romans started busting out mail in the late game.

They had been using mail since at least the 1st century BC if not before, and mail was the dominant armor of the legion for the entirety of its history. Lorica segmentata was only used in large numbers for a relatively short period.

>Reading the literature of the period the most striking aspect of duels between knights
Any examples I can buy?

To you user, it's on the house.

Four tales by Chretien de Troyes.

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>filename

>called off after two knights are killed
>treating opponents honourably with surrender (and ransom)
Battle of Lincoln 1217, also known as the Lincoln Fair, was ended when the Count du Perche has a splintered lance(or sword I've heard and read both) go through the eye-slit in his helmet killing him. That was the only noble death that day, other than the clumsy knight that wounded him, and a third(Not sure who isn't written in the book in my lap.). Prince Louis of France was captured by the flower of chivalry William Marshall who escorted him to the coast personally.

King Phillip's conversation with the messenger is thus.
Is King John dead? Is his son crowned(Henry III)? And is the earl still alive? Yes? "Then I fear nothing for my son."
I'm a chivalry nerd who spends too much of his paychecks on books.

You sir are a scholar and a gentleman.

There is also Chretien's incomplete Parzifal (which introduces the Holy Grail to the Arthur mythos), which I don't have pdf of but is worth reading just for the opening. One big long joke in which the punchline is always the welsh.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanson_de_geste

There are links to the text of most of the works on the page.

>Battle of Lincoln 1217

Thank you, it was nagging at the back of my mind.

Make the jump user, live the dream, become a reenactor and never have to worry about your paycheck again because you already spent it on kit.

I'm only an A&A thread away if you need to talk shop.

Dunno if it's been mentioned yet, but STANDARDIZATION.

Once you go from a village/castle smith making armor for men he has access to and can measure easily, over to State Smiths who must make protective clothing for literal legions of who-knows-whos from who-knows-where, mail becomes a massive time and money saver as, once the hard part of making wire rings is over, modifying is rather simple.

Soon user... soon...
Planning on making some changes in life.

Very good. The more the merrier, especially when they are well-read fellows like yourself.

Welcome to the madhouse, muster for battle is at 12.

A number of reasons.

Originally plate bronze armour was very expensive to make, it takes a lot of bronze and so only the elite can use it where mail can be mass produced and shaped into clothing of different sizes (bronze has to be recaste for this)

Another reason.

Tactics changed, everyone who used phalanx and tight formations usually struggled in small conflict (20-30 men), when you're a Viking raiding party and all you have is mail and wooden shields the formation of your shield wall can move around the battlefield very fast.

Also Calvary

Eventually it went back to slow moving tight formations as seen in the late 1500's and early 1600's when armour caught back up and became more durable and accessible to normal solders.

(different user) Make it happen brother. It is a small but very cool community and the rewards are huge for history nerds. I hope to see you on the field some day.

I'M SAVING THIS THREAD

WITH ALL SURVIVORS

But no, it is significantly heavier and once people realized that they didn't need to layer them, they stopped and only used chainmail for parts the plate could not cover.

>Wearing mail or plate
>Not wearing boiled leather
>Not using a rapier and buckler
I bet you didn't even level dex casul. Fast and light beats slow and heavy. Mail and plate is for pleb soldiers who smash into each other in huge battles and don't have room to parry and dodge.

Why wasn't scale and lamellar more common? Was it simply expense, or was it worse than mail?

Because it's absolutely sexy.

So after the glorious bastards got their hunk of iron out of a bloomery, what would be the next steps to turn that into mail? Presumably they'd take small pieces from the chunk and make straight, small not-nails out of it, to then be twisted into circles, right?

Nope. Much worse. They drew it through a plate by hand.

>Was it simply expense, or was it worse than mail?

Lamellar? According to the manuals? Yes. Probably not in terms of protection, but in terms of maintainance as you had to regularily check the lashing for wear, tear and rot and have them replaced.

Sounds hellish.

It completely baffles me how they got from this to suits of mail or plate harnesses. Sure, labor was cheap, but still.

Amongst other things, the rise of plate armour in Europe as more than the odd reinforcing bit seems to come around the same time that furnaces grew large enough that you could make a breastplate out of a single bloom.

Mail on the other hand can be made from small scraps without having to worry about welding things together. A piece of a nail too small to make even a single ring could still be turned into a rivet. Mail is also extremely easy to recycle, just chop up old pieces into sheets of "fabric" and tailor new armour from them, same with the most extensive repairs.

First is primary forging (save fuel, do it while it's still hot form the furnace). The bloom is extremely porous as it comes out of the furnace, and the metal weak form the heat, so it'd fall apart of you looked at it wrong. Start gentle beating it together, and then increase the punishment gradually. This also beats out considerable amounts of slag, which over the years made for huge slag pile to entertain modern day archometallurgists. At the end you have a seemingly solid billet of metal.

This material will do for everyday, non-edged objects, but probably won't cut it for edged tools, arms and armour, or wire drawing. For those, start folding.

Then you can start forging out your long, thin starting piece for the wire drawing.

Also worth keeping in mind is that once you have your rings, it's very important to flatten the ends of them properly and evenly, place the rivet hole dead centre, and get the riveting done just so. Mail fails by links opening up and letting go of each other, and the riveting is pretty much guaranteed to be the bottleneck for the performance of any one ring.

Scale and lamellar were pretty widespread, especially in Asia and Eastern Europe.

The main advantages of scale is that is cheap and very simple to produce compared to other metal armours.

Maille was simply better as armour. It's flexible but also provides at least equal if not greater protection compared to scale/lamellar on top of all it's other qualities. The drawbacks are that it is expensive and time consuming to make.

It's telling that in almost every civilisation with access to both maille and scale/lamellar those with the means opted for maille, or at most lamellar worn over maille. The Byzantines are a good example, the foot soldiers wore lamellar while the cataphracts used maille.

>9GAG

Keep in mind that most nobles would still die on the battlefield or due to health problems caused by previous battles.

My family line can be traced back to a guy (probably a mercenary) who married a noblewoman from a house that had hit some hard times (and actually went "extinct" after her father died without a male heir).

The entire history of that family can be summed up "And then he died on a battlefield somewhere between what we nowadays call Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark." Alternatively, somewhere near the Holy Land.

>Romans started busting out mail in the late game.
They used the Lorica Segmentata for about 80 years in the first century CE. The Roman Empire fell 1453, its last remnants even later.
Not even remotely "late game".

>rapier and buckler
>not rapier and dagger

Roman plate was less protective then medieval plate and was more expensive for the area it covered. Each one of those plates had to be made one at a time because of the limits of crucible size at the time. Because of the need to fit the plate together Roman lorica segmentata was very skill and labor intensive to make. The only reason why they felt it was a good investment was that it could stop a sword thrust and 1st century BC mail could not. However mail improved over time and by the 2nd century AD it could stop a thrust from the swords used in the area.

It is worth noting that the lorica segmentata and the Gladius started to be phased out around the same time.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but I'll give it a shot. In my setting, the non-descript evil horde has bypassed 3/5ths of an army defending a certain city, with only 2/5ths of that army actually stationed within the city, manning the walls, so the horde has a significant numerical advantage. The problem is that the other 3/5ths is aware that they've been bamboozled and are marching hard for the city that's being besieged.

The thing is that the city has defenses arranged in three "rings", like some poor man's Minas Tirith. What I want is for the orcish invaders to quickly take the first ring with as little damage caused to its structures as possible (so later on it can evolve into some Alesia-esque situation). How could this be achieved? The advantages the orcs right now have are:
>More men
>A huge-ass battering ram (so huge, six ogres are needed to operate it)
>A genius general
>Dire wolves that act like overgrown attack dogs
Other than "just batter down the gates, lol", what other factors/strategies might play a part in the orcish army being able to take the outer ring in a matter of hours?

tl;dr: How to blitz a siege?

Easiest option is always the one factor that can always fail: People.

They have an Insider. Maybe it was a guard who knew the patrol routes and secret entrances, or where the walls were a farce; badly damaged years before and never properly repaired. Maybe they have sympathisers who want them in there and have taken control of the main gate in a surprise attack for long enough to get a strong force through.

For most of history, people were the weak link where a city fell quickly. Or part of a city at least. If you can find better than the basically useless wikipedia article about it, the 1648 siege of Prague is a very good one to check out for exactly that: outer defences breached because of traitor, small band inside holding off a much stronger force.

>tl;dr: How to blitz a siege?
Offer terms.

Once they had the rings cut from wire, would they have to be annealed to have the rivet holes punched, and then hardened again after? Or would the forging make some of that unnecessary?

Thanks for the explanation.

Isn't bronze much softer than iron?

Copper is softer than iron. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin.

When you come with your war horse and shiny armor to pacify some unruly mountain niggers, and you get savagely recked.

have you considered a 5th column situation? Human traitors open outer ring gates

or perhaps infighting among the defending commanders. Glory hungry overconfident 2nd tier defense general screws over outer tier by letting in orcs thinking he will defeat them and be the hero.

or maybe orcs bash through a gigantic gate, flood in, then collapse the gate leaving an enormous pile of rubble that is near impossible to mount and or easily defensible by the orcs.

All good ideas, I especially like the infighting officers one (mostly because I doubt anyone would really be willing to cooperate with the orcs. Also they're a relatively new power in the world so it's unlikely they'd have a lot of informants/collaborators). Some dumb, gloryhound defying orders and breaking formation to 'save the day', effectively screwing over the entire first ring, sounds nice. But I'm afraid that it makes the orcish commander look lucky rather than brilliant. That isn't bad per se and if no other solution presents itself that's what I'll go with, but I'd like something that better exposes the orcish commander's ability to exploit the weakness of the not!Roman elves.

Perhaps the orc commander could do something to bait the elves into an attack that will utterly crush them? Perhaps even demonstrate his courage by using himself as bait? No idea how that would work out in the context of a siege though.

I don't know what kind of numbers your armies have, but the orcs will need a massive numerical advantage against any kind of legitimate fortifications. If they're facing an opponent of roughly equal numbers in total, with 40% of those numbers behind walls, the orcs are utterly befuckled. They would need an insider to open the gates in the middle of the night, or a grotesque advantage of artillery or equivalent magic. Otherwise they're about to get bent over their own breastworks and buttfucked by the other 60% that will be riding up on them before they can so much as draw dick graffiti on the barbican.

Inside cooperation is inevitable then, if I want the plot to progress as planned. I guess it could be justified by some elf (lower) officers getting antsy and simply wanting to be on the 'winning' side, right?

>The Roman Empire fell 1453, its last remnants even later.
>1453
I think you're confusing the romans with the Holy Roman Empire

Inside man works. Most realistically, a member of the defending ingroup that has been socially ostracized somehow, so that they would possess a gut level need to punish their former group, and this need can be supplemented by an offer of enough wealth to escape the inevitable slaughters and potential retribution of any survivors amongst the defenders.

Other possible options to show orc commander studliness would be to take pages from ghengis Khan's playbook, using plaguey corpses thrown over the wall in basic attempts as biological warfare, or request as the price for leaving 10000 housecats, which would have combustibles tied to them and released so they would drag fire back to their homes.

Also something to consider would be if the city has an interior water supply. If they're fed from outside, finding the source of their water and dumping corpses and poisons in would hurt the defenders. Remember, after 3 days without enough water people start to drop like flies, and this is exacerbated by things like dysentery and other forms of the drizzling shits.

He means the Eastern half, you silly goose.

4u

that's even more stupid then, as the Byzantine Empire wasn't really very roman at this point, nor was it much of an empire
the real Roman Empire ruling pretty much most of Europe died in the fifth century

Shut the fuck up Voltaire, it was funny when you were mocking the Germans but now you're going too far. This is almost as bad as the time you pretended the Prussian system of governance is good.

you stay the fuck away from the prussians, if not for the Potato Revolution you'd still be a malnourished peasant

what you could do if you wanna make orc general look smart is design into the defense some architectural defect that only the orc general sees.

something that was a necessity due to the land layout (there was a cliff face, or bluff, or unstable sand on a beach something like that). Everyone else thinks is strong and fortified, but just a little X here and a little Y here and boom it all comes crumbling down.

As an idea for this is pic related, can't remember the name of the movie but they're defending the castle and the attacking force puts a bunch of pigs in a mine shaft below the castle then sets them all on fire. Foundation of the wall collapses and boom you're in. If I could remember the name of the movie I'd link it. Ask around

Anyway after that the problem is creating a barrier to keep them all in. Idk maybe the orc brings in all the siege works and crams in into the hole and seals it all up. Or maybe there's a secondary collapse after the orcs have flooded the castle that leaves them cut off and unable to retreat

>can't remember the name of the movie but they're defending the castle and the attacking force puts a bunch of pigs in a mine shaft below the castle then sets them all on fire.
Ironclad.
I only remember it because Lindybeige had an autistic rant about it

Alexios Komnenos survived four norman lance strikes thanks to his armour.

>real roman empire
>literally only ruling stinking barbarians
>east was wealthy and full of civilized people
>west rome is somehow the true rome thanks to having the useless capital full of degenerates

Fuck off retard.

>Ironclad

That's the one, Veeky Forums is best board.

Ironclad is cool but assumes a lot more time than OP implied.

And as far as seeing something no one else sees, he's basically given the defenses as three rings of fortifications. That level of investment leaving something open does the opposite of make the orc commander look brilliant, it makes the elf defenders look stupid.

Remember, defensive fortifications are primarily intended to bog down an enemy, forcing them to invest time and resources to overcoming them, and this orc chief needs to move fast.

I've heard of examples of Norse mail where the rings alternated between drawn wire riveted together and solid links most likely punched out of a sheet of metal.

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>Was it just a matter of resources? Making loose mail to cover more square inches w/ less metal than solid plates?
I'd say a combination of this with an additional waste associated with plate, and mobility associates with weight.
Romans had a fuckton of people to put armor on, and these people had to walk a good distance to get where they were needed. Beyond this, the list of things that dgaf about mail, and the list of things that dgaf about plate are too similar in that era. The additional expense and wight were definitely not worth the difference.
Also, there was a bit of the 40K Guardsmen mindset. The value of a life was so small that paying top dollar to keep them alive was a waste of resources.

>Romans started busting out mail in the late game.
Bronze doesn't behave like iron, blacksmiths choosing to work iron had to practically relearn how to do everything. And the Roman Segmentata, while a fine bit of body armor, required a lot of maintenance to keep up not helped by the small oversight of having bronze fittings to hold plates of iron together and that regular maintenance needed a lot of infrastructure to make happen, something Rome had in spades during it's heyday, but was lost after the collapse. In truth, mail armor was the next best alternative.

I don't know.

If you could do it without annealing, then you'd get the work hardening there. Though also the embrittlement that brings with it, and it'd of course make it a lot harder to flatten and pierce the ends.

"Proper" hardening of armour through quenching is something most mail would never have experienced. It starts happening for armour in the 15th century, and fads out again in the 16th, and in that period it's by no means universal practice.

Still my favorite armor I've seen

You can't make steel plates like you can make bronze plates.

Noone cares about the Byzantines you Greek boylover.

From what I understand punching holes for rivets is a right pain in the ass without softening them up first. The hole-puncher-ers must have simply been stubborn or something. Otherwise that all makes sense.

Thanks for the info dump.

Seriously?

Some people just have no taste user.

I'm saving this bread.

You haven't seen enough armour

You wear a chainmail coif to protect your neck, where it's difficult to fit plate.

What was the reason for the Roman Empire being so much more advanced than its neighbours/enemies?

They weren't.

>frankly I'd rather have a mace hit my arm so hard it breaks, than have an axe hit so hard it manages to bust maille links, chop through my akerton, and drive iron links into my flesh which will fester and cause death.

That is never gonna happen man.

Then what was the reason for their success and not, say, the Greeks?

Squamata was so damn sexy.