Use of Leather as armor

[Sean Manning]

Thick leather "armour" may stand up to some punishment and is certainly better then just cloth or nothing at all between you and a weapon. The reference to other cultures in other times should also be looked at in combination with the kind of weapon to be repelled. However, any sharp iron object (spearhead, arrowhead, bladetip) delivered with force will penetrate leather with ease. Rawhide is a bit more resilliant, but the person wearing it is still betting his life on it's effectiveness. By the way, I am not aware of ANY evidence of leather being used by the Roman as armour.

I am sure that they just slipped your mind, but you must have overlooked the famous scale cuisses from Dura Europus (items 441 and 442 in Simon James' book). James is reluctant to say whether it is leather or rawhide, but notes that it does not look like rawhide to him. Because there are so many ways to treat skins, I often say "hide" unless I am sure of which was used.

Hide armour was very common in some places and times, such as Late Bronze Age Southwest Asia, 13th century Mongolia, 13th-14th century Latin Christendom, 16th-18th century Japan. In most of these places and times, the main threat to an armoured warrior was arrows and spears tipped with iron. Men who could clearly afford metal sometimes wore hide: for example, the only armour in Tutankhamun's tomb was a corselet of rawhide scales even though we know that the Egyptians used all-bronze and half bronze, half hide armours. Hide armour can be effective, but it is usually heavier than equally strong metal armour, and it does not seem to have been common in the Roman world.