Some units still wear them, but only for parades and other ceremonial purposes.
I must say that is rather funny. “We were riding full tilt on horses while aiming spears at each other when something went horribly wrong!”
Plus if your archery strategy consists of an assembled collection sending a hail of arrows up and then down on the approaching knights, hoping to hit a joint, limb, or helmet hole - I have trouble imagining a great deal of training other than strength training for repeated bow use. The guys who could hit a specific knight at X paces with a bow would be akin to modern snipers. Would they only be a fraction of the total bow-carrying forces?
Definitely - but the development was more in parallel with the development of plate, whereas the gun comes in later in the arms race, and proves more of a paradigm shift.
Yes, the strength training is exactly the training we’re talking about. Archery in warfare wasn’t about being able to hit the enemy general through the eyehole a 400 meters, it was about being able to bend an incredibly powerful bow over and over and over again.
For some reason we tend to think bows are the weapon of girls and elves, but a real warbow requires tremendous strength and endurance to use properly. And a weak hunting bow that a teenage girl could use doesn’t have the power to penetrate armor or the range.
So English longbows were very effective against armored knights. But weak Persian bows were nearly useless against armored and shielded Greek hoplites.
So it’s a mistake to conflate the famous elite longbowmen with your typical guy with a bow. Sure, you can give any peasant a hunting bow and a couple dozen arrows and he can fire it. But that hunting bow won’t have any range or penetrating power. If you want archers who can massacre a bunch of knights on the far side of the battlefield you need something else. And pulling a warbow is like weight lifting, after you’ve fired a dozen arrows you’re going to be exhausted unless you’re in top condition.
I suspect the use of full suits of armor in actual battle is greatly romanticized. Most of the troops were infantry. An individual in armor depended on his horse and being surrounded by infantry for protection. The armor would limit his motion and be oppressively hot. A shower of arrows would reduce his protective infantry and subject his horse to injury. If the battlefield had obstacles or the weather was bad his freedom of motion would be limited. If his forward motion were slowed, he was vulnerable to being unhorsed by infantry with long poles. He was unprotected from the rear. Falling from a horse would immobilize a fully armored individual and allow unskilled infantry with hammers to quickly dispatch him. Attempting to penetrate the armor was an unnecessary strategy.
I wonder if any of these guys were ever struck by lightning. Seems like a guy in a metal suit on a high horse would be a great target for lightning.
Crane
I don’t think archers will do the job, at least not against well armored knights in fully articulated plate. A powerful longbow might pierce mail, but not plate, excluding a lucky shot through an articulation, the palms, a visor slot, etc. It’s why they wore the armor if they could afford it. You probably didn’t want to be under that kind of fire if you could avoid it though.
With heavy cavalry it was probably about staying mobile always projecting a threat on the battlefield, forcing the enemy to move, hopefully where you’d want them to move, and then flanking after the peasantry engaged.
Well, suits meant for battle were not the same kind you’d see in the jousting arena in the high middle ages and renaissance.
It did limit movement and it was hot, but they trained in fighting in it. So long as they had support they would probably worth several less protected men on the battlefield.
Isn’t the correct answer the Atomic Knights, operating in full plate armour (irradiated, of course) in the 1990s, and riding giant dalmatians?
The notion that an armored knight was nearly helpless is just silly. The people who wore this armor were professional fighters whose lives were at stake. If armor didn’t help them do their job, they wouldn’t have worn it. It’s just not true that if you fell off your horse you’d be helpless. Knights routinely dismounted and fought as heavy infantry, and they didn’t have to take off their armor to do so. Of course it was heavy, of course it was hot, of course it was uncomfortable, of course it was expensive. That’s why it was worn by the aristocrats who could afford it, and who had training to fight as heavy cavalry since literal childhood, and who were part of a social class that exalted skill in battle above everything.
And yes, it isn’t like heavy cavalry can win a battle all by itself. But heavy cavalry can charge and destroy missile troops unless those missile troops are protected. That takes disciplined spearmen who won’t run away in terror when charged by heavy cavalry. Do you have any of those guys in your medieval army?
You can’t just imagine that armor was supposed to protect you against a full power attack directly into the armor. That could easily penetrate, but also note that the attack has lost a lot of energy penetrating the armor and so the wound is going to be less severe. It’s mainly protecting against the kind of glancing blows that are more common in a chaotic fight. A glancing or low power hit by a sword or spear or arrow could leave a horrible wound on an unarmored person, but be deflected harmlessly by a properly angled thin sheet of metal.
But it also certainly is true that a full “knights in shining armor” full suit wasn’t very common, most people could not afford such a thing, and it was only developed in the very late medieval period. Take a look at the Bayeux tapestry (Europe’s first comic book) for more typical gear.
I think the key here is falling (or being pulled) off your horse. The kind of horse bred to support an armored knight had a spine six feet off the ground. Falling from that height to hard ground with the added weight of armor could be jarring to say the least.
BTW: the stiletto was originally designed to finish off disabled knights, being usable through eye slits or gaps in plate armor.
The Bayeux tapestry depicts the 1066 battle of Hastings (among other things). I don’t believe they had anything like fully articulated plate back then. It was mostly mail, maybe a coat of plates and hide/ leather armor as well as jackets padded with fabric or straw.
Byt the time they did have it, I would imagine half plate or other wise piecemeal arrangements were probably common among well paid soldiers, but the full suits we associate with the knights in shining armor, were indeed probably pretty rare.
Maybe someone can chime in with some estimations? Probably only nobility and commanders/leaders of military orders could afford them I would imagine.
I believe the Rondel Dagger was initially designed for that purpose (also known as the misericord) and the stiletto was a later, italian design.
Why would falling off the horse wearing armor be worse than falling off the horse without armor?
Yeah, getting knocked of a horse is going to hurt. But if I knew I was going to be knocked off a horse, and you gave me a choice to either wear steel plate armor or normal clothing, I’d choose to wear the armor.
The trope that plate armor was so heavy that if you fell down you’d never be able to get back up is false. A suit of armor was something like 30-50 pounds. Heavy, yes, but not so heavy that you can barely move in it.
I believe the full plate style was just an evolution from the coats of mail from the early medieval period. You have a coat of mail, add a metal plate to one vulnerable area, then another, then another, then another, and eventually you’ve got the whole thing. Except only a few people can afford such a panoply, and lots of the really fancy suits you see were literally made for kings.
On the other hand, that’s the stuff that’s more likely to survive, metal was expensive and relentlessly recycled. And a very large proportion of the armor you see in museums or Victorian manor houses are replicas.
The point is that full suits of armor were a romantic fantasy. They could weigh up to 100 pounds. An unhorsed knight was free game on the battlefield. Two guys with poles could immobilize him in an instant. They quickly proved impractical for actual combat.
A knight in full armor required a massive amount of support compared to his effectiveness in combat.
European wars of the period were set pieces for the nobility. If the Mongols had reached western Europe the knights would have quickly been eliminated.
The folks who commissioned tapestries did not pay for images of their ancestors immobilized in mud and horse shit while being stabbed and beaten to death by filthy peasants. White horses, shining armor and heraldry are more noble (and commercially viable).
Crane
Whether a bow could penetrate a plate depended on the thickness of the plate, obviously but I agree the general conclusion is that plate armor eventually at least could typically defeat longbow arrows. The wiki article on longbow’s cites modern tests implying >1mm plate armor could usually defeat longbow arrows practically speaking.
Although here a paper is discussed finding that 3mm could stop all arrows but 2mm not necessarily, though the behind armor residual energy might not cause a grave wound especially if the wearer was wearing padding.
http://www.swordforum.com/forums/showthread.php?79261-New-Warbow-testing-publication
And this was assuming perpendicular impact most favorable to the arrow. It goes into the controversy about various attempts to replicate period plate, concluding that the results quoted are biased against armor, period plates were better than the tests assumed.
This survey of several 16th century breastplates shows them mostly greater than 3mm over most of their surface (3mm=0.12 inch)
http://www.allenantiques.com/Breastplate%20Thickness%20Study.html
This pretty well known modern test of artifacts at Graz Arsenal in Austria gave penetration for a variety of early modern firearms. See Table 2. They give the capability of three modern firearms for comparison. The ‘muzzle’ energy of period longbows has been given as anything from 80-160 J max v 1752 for the lowest performing matchlock musket of early 17th century and 3-4000 for 18th century flintlocks. The penetrations of the early modern firearms were typically 2-4mm v ‘steel’ target at 30m.
https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/view/17669/22312
Altogether it isn’t a crystal clear picture, but the simplest assumption is generally that things were done for a reason, not for no reason. And pre-industrial societies fitted out many soldiers into the 17th century (pikemen and musketeers), not just a small social elite of ‘knights’, with at least helmets and breastplates. Then they fell into disuse with the exception of some and eventually few heavy cavalry. The simple explanation would be the basic truth of contemporary accounts which said armor wasn’t useful enough anymore at decisive ranges against the growing power of muskets, with again muskets by 18th century not the same animals as early 17th century muskets, or arquebus or pistols in the 16th when (actually) fully armored heavy cavalry and firearms seemed compatible.
Nonsense. It’s totally false that a suit of armor weight 100 pounds. More like 50 pounds at the maximum. Yes, there were some incredibly heavy suits made for the sport of jousting, but that was after full plate suits were on their way out anyway.
An unhorsed knight was absolutely not helpless, as I said above knights regularly dismounted and fought as heavy infantry.
Agreed, which is why the classic “knight in shining armor” type of armor only appeared in the very late Medieval period, and only lasted into the early Renaissance. But for hundreds of years the aristocrats of the day fancied themselves as heavy cavalry. If other combat arms were more effective, why would they do that? Because heavy cavalry excels at running over lightly armed and undisciplined infantry.
Again agreed, but not because armored heavy cavalrymen were useless. Horse archers have much better mobility than heavy cavalry, heavy cavalry can’t engage horse archers unless the horse archers agree to stand still and let them. So mongols shoot arrows at the knights, and gallop away when the knights charge, then shoot more arrows at them, gallop away again. This mismatch goes all the way back to the ancient Scythians. And of course the famous Mongol political and logistic organization. Medieval Europe was famously dis-unified. They destroyed China and the Middle East, and could have done the same to Europe.
A section of the Bayuex tapestry: https://media1.britannica.com/eb-media/96/100096-004-301BD9B6.jpg
Note the people lying dead in the mud, and the lack of plate armor, and the brown horses trampling soldiers to death.
Also note this section, showing peasants looting the bodies of the dead knights: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/10/12/1413105027210_wps_1_C1A3JF_Bayeux_Tapestry_de.jpg
Of course the guys at the Battle of Hastings were equipped more like this: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/d6/ce/0a/d6ce0a4832db16a22e4fdfb5f09458ef.jpg
Than like this: Plate armour - Wikipedia
That’s a suit built for a king in 1540.
Suits meant to be used in combat did not weigh 100 pounds. Again, you appear to be confusing jousting armor with armor worn on the field of battle. Actually, I doubt even jousting armor would weigh that much. Articulated suits meant to be worn in combat weighed form 30 to 55 pounds (with higher weights likely meant for jousting or relegated to heavy cavalry only), with their weight more or less evenly distributed through out the body.
WW2 troops landing on normandy carried more weight with them when they landed on the beach!
In fact, later articulated plate was probably easier to wear for a soldier than the heavy, full body coats of mail worn by warriors earlier in the middle ages.
I read an interesting post about this once, positing that Western Europe would have thrown some unique challenges their way that had little to do with knights.
Fortifications in the Holy Roman Empire and France at the time were significant in number and essentially insurmountable. If the Mongols could not secure enough of them (and they were unable to do just that with many un Hungary) they would have been vulnerable to counter attacks from European forces. Not sure if that would have halted the advanced or merely slowed them down.