Use of Leather as armor

[Dan Howard]

Unfortunately nobody knows what was meant by "cordovan leather" at the time - today it refers to a fancy horse leather used for making shoes. All we know is that it was good quality leather and considered to be particularly suitable for making armour. It might be referring to the heavier pieces of leather taken from a horse's hide; it might be a special tanning process.

[Diocle]

Dreaming about 150.000 Roman legionaries + 150.000 Roman Auxiliaries = 300.000 men all clad in iron shining Hamata or Segmenteata armors is not only pure madness but also one of the most strange Fantasy tales ever invented!

Now try to follow some easy calculation:


1- '180 hours to make up a complete mail hauberk of the simplest type worn by auxiliaries from stamped and butted wire rings of 1/4 inch diameter some 22.000 rings...' from the old Osprey books by Michael Simkins.

2- As to say 180 hours X 5000 legionaries = 900.000 hours of work to make !!!!! and 110.000.000 (110 milions of rings!)

3- 900.000 hours of work X 30 Legions = 27.000.000 (27 milions) of hours of work......to make 330.000.000 rings (330 milions!)

4- 27.000.000 hours of work X 2 = 54'000'000 hours of handwork to make 660.000.000 rings (660 milions!!!!) (because the auxiliaries were 'at least' the same number than legionaries) to equip the whole army with mail hauberks of the wrost type (not riveted!), then they had to make swords, helmets, spears, shields, and other kind of protections and equipment.....so I can safely say......

WELCOME IN THE WONDERFUL CHILDISH WORLD OF OZ! :woot: ...... COMPLIMENTS! :grin:

(Anyway I can understand for a reenactor a shining Hamata is almost a status symbol, it's like a new Rolex! Sadly the Romans had no polished iron, to create the effect of shining metal they used Tin or Silver, but the shining rings....are so beautiful..... :grin: )

[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.

[Robert]

Hmm, yes, the Duro cuisses. Thing is, I do not really rate those as "armour" but as something to prevent chafing of the upper legs by shield and metal armour.

A leather musculata, if there was such a thing, may have been purely ornamental, having no intended function to offer protection. It would then certainly not be something worn by the common soldiers, centurio included. Burnished to a shine, decorated with silver appliques or even gilded (leather can be gilded with leafgold, as can be seen on ancient bookcovers), it could be very spectacular "power clothing".

On the comment of the Romans having no polished iron, that is pretty silly..... They could and did polish iron mirrors with ochre. Not many re-enactors wear shiny hamata, as it makes more sense to keep them a bit oiled to ward off rust. Now helmets, those can be and probaly were polished to a shine no problem.

Do not believe all you read in old Osprey books. As in Iron for the Eagles, some mayor mistakes have been identified. Also, do not underestimate the production capacity of Roman society. They had slave labour, a very good understanding of logistics and were very addapt at churning out vast quantities of goods.

[Vitruvius]

Ave, Dan,
And thanks. In Your opinion, do You think that "Cordovan" Leather might be or could have been a form of laminated leather? This is the first Antonia and I have heard of such a thing, (other than the late Ricardo Montalban's car commercial) for armor of ANY period. She and I are interested in what research you might have come up with.
Salve,
Vitruvius and Antonia...............Larry and Jaqui Mager

[Sean Manning]

Robert, hide scale armour similar to those cuises has been meant to stop weapons at other times and places. If they were just "chaps" I don't understand why they would have used a scale construction instead of just stitching some leather scraps together into a pad.

Unfortunately nobody knows what was meant by "cordovan leather" at the time - today it refers to a fancy horse leather used for making shoes. All we know is that it was good quality leather and considered to be particularly suitable for making armour. It might be referring to the heavier pieces of leather taken from a horse's hide; it might be a special tanning process.

FYI, Russ Mitchell's current interpretation of that armour is a sort of buff coat made in four quarters. He says that another possible design, which could have been four layers thick, is visible in Hungarian art. He has grand ideas of the ability of arrows to penetrate mail, and sword-cuts to penetrate helmets, but a high idea of the power of leather armour. He could give a long list of examples of Hungarians who owned mail and plate but chose to ride to war in an iron cap and leather body armour.

[Sean Manning]

Dreaming about 150.000 Roman legionaries + 150.000 Roman Auxiliaries = 300.000 men all clad in iron shining Hamata or Segmenteata armors is not only pure madness but also one of the most strange Fantasy tales ever invented!

Diocle, multiplying numbers as high as possible is a tradition which goes back to Herodotus, but it makes for better rhetoric than scholarship. Here is another calculation which you might want to consider.

For every hundred thousand soldiers in mail (nobody says that every Roman soldier wore mail) let us assume that their armor took six men a month to make (this is vaguely reasonable based on costs in the 14th and 15th centuries where industry was starting to approach Roman sophistication; your Osprey book assumes that a man could weave the armour in a month, but the real work was probably in making the wire). But each armour lasts a hundred years (plenty of medieval and early modern examples) so each year six thousand months of work are needed to replace the armour which is lost or worn out (100,000 loricae x 6 months of work/lorica % 100 years/lorica = 6,000 months of work/year). Five hundred men working full time could supply those hundred thousand soldiers (6000 months of work/year % 12 months/year).

Somewhere between 100,000 and a million loricae hamatae were needed by the Roman army, depending on whether you think only a few soldiers wore mail, or most soldiers plus some of their horses and servants (one horse armour would be as much work as several armours for men). So out of an empire of tens of millions of people, 500-5,000 people might have been required to make mail for the army. If you assume that each shirt of mail only lasted ten years, you could get a number as high as 50,000 workers but only by always choosing the highest possible number.

[M. Demetrius]

Cordovan leather info here: http://www.bensilver.com/gbb-cordovanleather.dlp

Some further say it got its name from the city of Cordoba in southern Spain. The color "cordovan" is sort of a maroon color, which can be approximated by mostly red, with some black pigment.

There.

[Diocle]

I state that, even today, NATO would not be able to equip 300.000 men with kevlar armors!

Nobody on Earth (and when I write nobody I mean nobody) was even able to equip 300.000 men with iron armors! Because this It's simply not possible!

Few tens thousands men during the middle age means nothing compared to 300.000 men during the Antiquity.

The numbers are an impassable obstacle for the Fantasy tale about the Roman Army clad in iron!

Even when the public fabricae started their activity, they had to produce weapons, as swords and spears, arrows and shields, from what we know even the numbers of the 'Loricaria' are not so large (look at the Notitia....).

Anyway I don't pretend to say that the Romans didn't use iron mails or segmented armors, but I find almost insulting my intellect stating that the organic body protections of many different materials like padded felt, linen and leather, weren't also widely used.

In the end I think that the guys of Ars Dimicandi are doing a wonderful and serious work with the help of historians and archologists, and their point of view has to be respected (even if not condivided.) and I find it more realistic than the dreamworld of the Roman Ironclad Army!

So again use Google and read their work it's intersting and serious.

Here the link to the page of Ars Dimicandi:

http://www.arsdimicandi.net/ad_1_0000c6.htm


I end up with this famous quote (from the site of A.D.), from the 'De Bello Civilis' I hope you'll be able to translate two lines of Latin dear hamata experts!

"'omnes fere milites aut ex coactis aut ex centonibus aut ex coriis tunicas aut tegimenta fecerant quibus tela vitarent'

Anyway the words for you, dear friends, are: Cento, Coactilia, and Coriis tegimenta......meditate good people, meditate! ;-)

[Sean Manning]

I state that, even today, NATO would not be able to equip 300.000 men with kevlar armors!

Nobody on Earth (and when I write nobody I mean nobody) was even able to equip 300.000 men with iron armors! Because this It's simply not possible!

Few tens thousands men during the middle age means nothing compared to 300.000 men during the Antiquity.

The numbers are an impassable obstacle for the Fantasy tale about the Roman Army clad in iron!

According to Statistics Canada, there were 70,000 police officers in Canada in 2012. Each of those has a body armour of synthetic fibres which will stop handgun bullets. ( http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux...5a-eng.htm ) When you add the Canadian Forces, and police reserves, private security companies, and so on, the total would be over 200,000 armoured men just in Canada. If we add in Italy, I am sure that the total would reach 300,000 armoured soldiers and police without asking the Americans to lend some armour

I end up with this famous quote (from the site of A.D.), from the 'De Bello Civilis' I hope you'll be able to translate two lines of Latin dear hamata experts!

"'omnes fere milites aut ex coactis aut ex centonibus aut ex coriis tunicas aut tegimenta fecerant quibus tela vitarent'

Anyway the words for you, dear friends, are: Cento, Coactilia, and Coriis tegimenta......meditate good people, meditate! ;-)

The quote about Caesar's soldiers at Dyrrachium making armour for themselves out of available materials has been discussed many times on this site. It tells us two things: that on this occasion soldiers did make improvised body armour, and that this was not usual. If everyone already had armour of cloth or basketwork or quilting, they would not have to make them when they were besieged by Pompeius and his archers!

[Vitruvius]

Ave, Carlo,
You have some fascinating facts and figures, I, too, found the Italian website interesting. I just got off the phone 10 minutes ago with an SCA friend who fights in leather plate and I posed the question about leather armor and falling into the water withit on. He shared with me his experience and be darned if Dan wasn't right......it kept him afloat .....long enough to get out of it and swim to the dock. Too forever to find his chest andbackplate.!!
Salve,
Vitruvius............aka Larry Mager

[Flavivs Aetivs]

I still will argue against leather Armor, there were around 30 Fabricae in the late empire, probably with a thousand workers each. Around 5-10 of these were for making metal cuirasses, which could supply easily the late roman army (200-400 thousand men depending on your source). Furthermore, it is well known that equipment was "hand-me-down" as well, which is probably one of the reasons why segmentata (it had to be custom fitted usually, otherwise it was extremly uncomfortorable).

[Dan Howard]

Ave, Dan,
And thanks. In Your opinion, do You think that "Cordovan" Leather might be or could have been a form of laminated leather? This is the first Antonia and I have heard of such a thing, (other than the late Ricardo Montalban's car commercial) for armor of ANY period. She and I are interested in what research you might have come up with.
Salve,
Vitruvius and Antonia...............Larry and Jaqui Mager

No. It isn't a reference to laminated leather but multiple layers of cordovan leather were used to make armour. Some texts refer to it as "cordwaine". A cordwainer was a leather tanner but I don't know whether they did anything differently to regular tanners.

[Dan Howard]

FWIW after seeing a video on youtube I tried swimming in mail armour. It was heavier than Roman mail and covered my arms down to the elbow. It was tiring but I could swim and tread water while wearing it. It seemed no worse than wearing water-soaked winter clothing. IMO if a marine knew how to swim then he could stay afloat no matter what armour he was wearing.

[Dain II.]

It seems it is possible to swimm in segmented, scale and lamellae armour too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLcT5J7yg9k Altough he wears no suneate and kogate, I think it is very representative.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-yRzil3v0Y at 2:58

(The way this armour moves is generally correct for lamellaearmour like Niederstotzingen or Kerc, altough I don't know which sort of metal they used. And the armour connected to this specific lamellaeshape (Kunszentmarton or Hajdudorag) could have been reconstructed more properly related to the find, like this one: http://awaren.net/?page_id=463 . But we see it is possible to swimm in it.)