Use of Leather as armor

[Dan Howard]

If that is an argument in favour of leather armour then I fail to see it. We have no idea how many members of the Roman army wore no armour at all. Where is the evidence that Romans wore leather armour instead of just relying on helmet and shield like the majority of other fighters at the time?

FWIW during the medieval period there are multiple examples of orders for two to ten thousand newly fashioned mail shirts to be delivered within periods as short as a week. Entire towns were devoted to mail making. There is no reason to think that the Romans were any less industrious.

We also know that mail can be reused again and again over many centuries. There is no reason to think that the weapons and armour for an entire legion all had to be made at the same time. It is easy to imagine millions of rings being produced over a period of a few years. Healy reckons that the Roman Empire consumed 82,500 tonnes of iron every year. It is estimated that the Romans left 6.6 million tonnes of slag just at one site alone (Rio Tinto). There is no way to know whether every soldier in the Roman legions wore metal armour but it is pretty safe to say that Romans wore more metal armour than any other army up to that point in time.