Armor Review: Gothic Armor for Man and Horse

Gothic Armor for Man and Horse

German, late fifteenth century

Image Copyright Edge and Paddock 1996

This is the very image of the knight in shining armor, encased in steel, seemingly immune to harm. High on his horse, which is also clad in metal, he looks down through his visor with the pride of the invulnerable, like a gunner out of the turret of a tank. This is more or less what the knight inside this armor is: a medieval tank, able to deliver powerful blows to the enemy from a mobile platform, while being threatened only by other knights. Pound for pound, no single person was as dangerous on the pre-modern battlefield as the fully-equipped knight on horseback.

This particular armor is one of the best in existence for clearly conveying the combination of utility and beauty of the knight’s equipment. The harness is truly a cap-à-pied armor – that is, one that covers from “head to foot”. Looking closely at the armpits and buttocks, you can see that even the gaps in the polished plate are filled with tightly-knit mail, so virtually the entire body would have been covered in metal. Even the eye-slit in the helmet is so narrow the armor’s face is practically robotic.

The metal itself is largely plain, polished brightly but not to a mirror shine, without any etching or brass attachment to alter the consistent gray color of the steel. (There is some very unobtrusive filework on the breastplate, gauntlets, and shoulder armor, but this blends with the natural shadows on the metal.) The only obvious decoration are the ridges called “flutes” hammered into many of the otherwise unadorned surfaces of the plate. Even this fluting is a structural element, however: it strengthens the piece against deforming when hit, so the metal can be thinner and lighter for the same effectiveness. The metal itself would, in Germany in the late 1400s, likely be heat-treated: the components placed in an oven before assembly to make the metal harder. Forget “Iron Man”; this is “High-Carbon Tempered German Steel Man”. This armor is a well-engineered tool designed to let the knight inside stay alive so he can cut down his enemies with the longsword that hangs from his left hip or smash their armor with the mace in his right hand.

The horse was the reason the knight was literally and figuratively above other soldiers in the Middle Ages; the mount was in that sense more important than the rider, and this horse’s armor is even grander than the man’s. The fluting is much more elaborate. A leering face, embossed in steel, gapes out from the horse’s chest armor (the peytral). The scalloped edges of the horse armor give a sense of serration, of a cutting edge.

The barding, as horse armor is called, is also every bit as tough as the knight’s harness. The plates are broader and generally thicker. The coverage is impressive, given the need to maintain the horse’s mobility. The spine behind the saddle has its own articulated protection, as does one set of the reins. Of course, it would be impossible to forget the six-inch long spike on the chamfron (the horse’s face armor). As a foot soldier in the Middle Ages, you might well see a knight charging at you: a couple hundred pounds of muscle and steel, lance or mace or sword in hand, sitting in the saddle on top of many more hundreds of pounds of muscle and steel, heading in your direction at about twenty miles an hour. And if you somehow get past the well-trained (and better-equipped) knight, you still have to fight an animal that can kill you with its face.

This armor is truly impressive, if not for its beauty then for the awe it inspires as a feat of human design. The goal of this design is not just to look tough but to be tough. Coming from the end of the fifteenth-century, this armor was made at the point before the proliferation of guns in medieval warfare began to make knightly armor less useful, so it is arguable it represents the apex of knightly protection. (This is probably why Edge and Paddock chose it for the cover of their classic book, Arms and Armor of the Medieval Knight.)

But this armor is not without its flaws. It is displayed (at the Royal Armouries, Leeds) equipped with a lance-rest on the breastplate (the curved bar under the right armpit) but without a lance to go with it. The barding is of one set, made all together for the same mount, but the man’s armor is actually a composite of several pieces of similar size and origin. More importantly, while seeing the horse and knight’s armors posed together helps our understanding of their symbiosis as a pre-modern weapons platform, it disguises the unique form of each.

Next time, then, we will look at an armor dismounted, brought down to eye level where we can appreciate it that much more.

Works Cited:

Edge, David and John Miles Paddock, Arms and Armor of the Medieval Knight, New York: Crescent Books, 1996

Unless otherwise indicated, photos are copyright Stephanie Johnson 2010, all rights reserved.