Roman Full Plate Armor?

[SigniferOne]

Not guilty -- I can be accused of many things, but re-enacting isn't one of them! I leave that to the experts.

Indeed. It was Endre who said that. Careful whom you ascribe your quotes to!

Sorry there seems to be a confusion here. I did not attribute that quote to Duncan (where it indeed wa Endre's). The only thing I mistakenly attributed was the statement that Segmentata is comfortable to wear, which I thought was said by Duncan but was actually by Tarbicus.

What won that battle was not any new weapon, but position and tactics. At Bouvines a hundred years before, the Brabancon spearwall block, equally well equipped and proving entirely capable of dealing with heavy cavalry, were cut off as the rest of the Imperial army retreated. Then, not having the luxury of having the french attacking them across a brook and surrounded by cavalry in open ground, they were slowly ground down until they were disordered enough for the cavalry to ride them down. This would have been the fate of the flemish at Kortrijk as well, had they not been favoured by terrain, good tactical positioning and bad french dispositions, goedendag or no. We've come a good fifty years in medieval military history research since Verbruggen had to play up on the exceptionalness of Kortwijk to actually make his audience believe it was possible for such a thing to happen, to put it to a (perhaps too fine) point.

Yet Verbruggen was supported by a book by DeVries which she published in 2000, entirely vindicating his account in every sense. She additionally listed a dozen more battles right after Courtrai where cavalry were not only impeded but actually defeated by infantry, which is a highly unusual thing for the Middle Ages. I'm not saying the goedendag was a miracle weapon which fought humans' battles for them, but rather that if there were no armor-crushing weapons, if the paradigm you draw up where a heavily encumbered unit was practically invulnerable was indeed the case, then no tactics or manoeuvering could've saved them.

The key point that I want to take away from all this, so as not to derail our conversation towards middle ages, is that lightly armored Flemings, armed with little more than fierceness and well-designed weapons, defeated the most heavy-armored, most encumbered units on the planet. All this goes towards a central point: that more armor does not equal better; that at some point there clearly is reached a tipping point, and more heavily armed units begin to lose absolute effectiveness, only able to defeat enemies when they are fleeting and disorganized (which most of the infantry during the Middle Ages were, having won 1-2 battles in about 400 years).

Thus far for situations when ultra-heavily armored men win. But once infantry gets its act together and behaves properly, the heavily-encumbered clunky knight quickly loses, and his dominance is over. This was shown not just by Flemings but by Halberdiers which every army tried recruit, and by that rebirth of the ancient phalanx, the Swiss. So what does this mean for us in the end? It all begs the question: why couldn't have Romans foreseen this development a thousand years earlier? If Europe was discarding the knightly panoply as demonstrably weaker to the infantry, what motive would the Romans have had to adopt it in the first place?