Why would you ever bother making chainmail when plate armor is just better and way easier to make? Even scalemail makes way more sense when one thinks of the insane amount of labor that goes into chainmail.
Why would you ever bother making chainmail when plate armor is just better and way easier to make?
Does that man have breasts? That picture is weirding me out.
Kek, it's his tunic you can see through the links.
It's not though munition plate armor is pure dogshit and well made white harness is literally 20 times more expensive in some cases.
Plate armour is hard to make and made to fit a specific individual. Chainmail can be cheaply mass produced and thrown on any levy.
Mail was neither cheap nor issued to levies.
It's not armor production that was the issue for most of history, but the metal itself. Until the blast furnace was invented, most furnaces could produce enough raw metal that was roughly the size of a golf ball. You could hammer this flat and maybe get enough to make a single solid sheet big enough to turn into a helmet, but nowhere near enough for a single piece breastplate. But you can cut it up and make it into segmented armor, or draw it out into massive quantities of wire and turn that in mail and use that instead.
I thought that using river soil iron was relatively easy to amass in large quantities. I suppose all of that was spent, but even then wasn't iron ore fairly plentiful?
I know there is the titanium chainmail that is worn against sharks.
>make wire
>make rolls
>put rolls into a proper shape
>river the rolls
vs
>make plate
The latter sounds way easier. Of course, making a single solid plate is harder than it sounds, but scalemail should offer best of both worlds.
Plate armour is not just a piece of sheet metal. Very, very few armourers ever existed with the skills to make it. Basically just Augsburg, Milan, Florence, Vienna and one or two other West European states had native production. The knowledge was actually lost in the early modern and we only recently started being able to replicate it again.
Chainmail by contrast was basically just rings chained by women in between chores since Ancient times. It doesn't require much skill to make and could fit over any individual.
This is unfettered horseshit, just in case anyone is wondering.
What about scale mail? I know a type of 'riveted armor' with small steel plates inside leather jacket was fairly popular. Why did it not manage to supercede chainmail?
>What about scale mail?
It's worse at stopping arrows than plate and offers less mobility than both pure mail or plate armour with mail covering joints. Really there was no reason to ever use this which is why it was never really used in Europe. As with most lammellar the problem is that you actually cannot get complete coverage of the body without sacrificing mobility. This is probably unintutive, but true, Ronan lammellar armour had the same mobility issues.
> I know a type of 'riveted armor' with small steel plates inside leather jacket was fairly popular. Why did it not manage to supercede chainmail?
I think you mean Brigandine armours. It was in between chain armour and plate in terms of both cost and performance, depending on the manufacturer.
Why was brigandine more expensive than chainmail? One would think that small plates of metal are pretty easy to make.
But you can convert man hours to more metal.
A brigandine was tailored to an individual. Chain mail was not necessarily tailored, but also could be in which case it was more expensive than unfitted mail
And get more metal that is still golf ball sized no matter how many man hours go into it.
>in one instance
one instance more then your completely unsourced opinion.
>golf ball sized
You can make larger bloom though; just look on youtube
Frickoff you don't know anything about the history behind plate armour.
Lol. LmFRICKINGao. Please, share your source for mail being put together by random women as a side chore.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355941129_European_Mail_Armour_Ringed_Battle_Shirts_from_the_Iron_Age_Roman_Period_and_Early_Middle_Ages
That doesn't say anything about about women making mail in between chores anon.
So you admit it's litterally just one instance? Cool.
>So you admit it's litterally just one instance? Cool.
No? That's some shit you made up? The weight of materials in maille is heavier then then maille for a full harness on average yet the price of plate only starts plummeting. Why do you think that is?
Because the invention of the blast furnace finally made large scale iron/steel production possible and reduced the prices of the raw materials.
Well that and drop forges. But then you admit that labour cost is cheaper then the material cost?
After the invention of the blast furnace, yes, which has been by position the entire fricking thread.
when do you think blast furnaces were invented anon? Let's start with the very basics here
In Europe, as a consistent way of producing metal? Around the 13th century onward.
Incorrect, Ancient Celts had Cupola furnaces:
http://metalurgija.org.rs/mjom/vol12/No%202-3/9Mihok.pdf
Stop reading moronic Chink nationalist propoganda c**tpasted on wikipedia.
And the celts used these cupola furnaces to produce large enough iron ingots to make make into large sheets for the production of plate armor?
Just to be clear, I am not the Anon you were arguing with and don't care too much about materials vs. labour cost*, but rather I care about the technical details you are raising, my first response to you in that comment chain is
.
>used these cupola furnaces to produce large enough iron ingots to make make into large sheets for the production of plate armor?
No, because you cannot make sheet metal with such a furnace, only intermediate pig iron or with certain process modifications directly you can make cast iron, which is too brittle and heavy to be used for plate armor (but can be used for example, as plates for lamellar armour of inferior quality). Honestly can someone just finally correct those fricking wikipedia articles? I'm tired of history enthusiasts having this misconception about the development of metallurgy.
As I said the term "blast furnace" does not really mean anything specific, you mean "continuous blast furnace" and I agree with you on this point it drastically lowered the material cost of pig iron production. This was a new way to mass produce pig iron which did not exist before, but for a continuous process to be profitable you need a very large supply of ores continuously fed to the operation. Both the mines and subsequent manufacturing/mass production was only possible in highly developed regions. The real technical point you are missing, however, is that you still need to reheat the pig iron in finery furnaces (basically bloomeries) if you want to shape it into sheet metal or plate armour. Alternatively you can make cast iron directly from blast furnaces which is useful for things like gun barrels, pots etc., but actually quite worthless as an engineering steel (more brittle, lower tensile strength etc.). You are only skipping one step of the process with continuous blast furnaces and it's not a very important step.
*(though I do side with the other Anon on that, but it is a difficult thing to prove)
All those words and you don't actually say if the ancient Celts used these cupola furnaces to produce large sheets of metal...
This paper doesn't really say what they produced with those furnaces though, could they be used to make just normal bloomeries?
Ok now lets go to pre 13th century. Why is that a price of a hauberk at 12 solidi for a frank which would amount to 6 oxen completely overset for the actual material of iron for plough found in after the 13th century, when the cost of labour was actually increased? Even with a shoddy rate in which a pound of iron is equivalent in steel, why is that with 10kgs of both materials would be completely undercut by the price of 6 oxen in that period?
The term "blast furnace" does not really mean anything specific. Cupola furnaces were used by Ancient Celts already. This is a vast oversimplification of the process of pig iron production which in itself is dependent on the type of ore you start with. It's not that the blast furnace itself was new, the process of continuous production was and such continuous production was only useful due to very large quantities of ore being mined. That is to say, it was more to do with overall development, wealth and large scale labour automation, it was not a new invention.
Before so much ore was available a bloomery was just fine, as when you actually wanted to smith specific metals into shape, you needed more exact control over the temperature which was best accomplished in batch processes.
The late medieval blast furnace is mostly useful for production of cast iron, which is more brittle and weak than normal steel, but useful for things like pots, gun- and cannon barrels etc.
Cast iron was converted back into wrought iron; so you could have a larger iron production
>Cast iron was converted back into wrought iron
...in a finery...correct.
Yes and that process can produce a lot though as you said it needs a lot of people and infrastructure behind it
Yes, but just to be clear a finery is quite literally an upscaled bloomery.*
The innovation part was to turn the first step of pig iron production into a continuous process. Later early modern steel mills would then also be able to continuously produce sheet metals for the first time, but this is long after plate ever was being produced.
*(And btw no finery has ever been found in Ancient China which mostly used bronze weapons by contrast such fineries were found in Celtic cultures together with Cupola furnaces).
They didn't; no one did until early modern times. The Bessemer process was the first time in human history that we were able to mass produce sheets of steel, in 1856. So that is not relevant to the timeline of the other Anons' discussions.
>not being able to produce large sheets of metal with a ancient Celt furnace is not relevant to the ancient Celts not making armor that requires large sheets of steel
This is all my mistake I had misread "large sheets of metal" in
and
as "large scale production of sheet metal". Sorry, this is because the original topic was on material cost and production scales, I did not properly read your posts.
To address
succintly; yes, Hallstatt Celts made steel armor such as picrel as early as the 7th century BC.
"Plate armor" depends on your definition, see
for example, there are also some technical differences between mild and annealed high-tensile steel etc., I don't know if you are interested in those details.
>such as picrel
You mean the style? I'm pretty sure all of those are bronze
>I'm pretty sure all of those are bronze
made of mithril
You right, sorry I googled Iron age Hallstatt armour and just posted the first thing I saw. I did find picrel which is an iron armour in the same style, but dates to 400 BC, found in Epirus just south of the Slovenia region where those furnaces where found, so Grecian, not Hallstatt.
However, Noricum steel was produced using the same methods and used to make Roman military steel according to historical records, Romans made "large" armour plates including Lorica Segmentata armour, so we know that "Celtic steel" could be produced in sufficient quantities to make armour plates. Again I have to emphasis that this is all the same technology using bloomeries and cupola furnaces were maybe used for smaller cast iron things like brooches, pots and arrowheads of which there are many artifacts. You don't really want cast iron from cupola furnaces for military steel, you want mild steel that you shape into iron/swords (which also have better stress-strain curves). Either way the earliest technology for non-meteoritic sword production is from that culture as are the earliest smelted iron swords (https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/kap_a/articles/singen_sword.pdf).
To be clear however, there are extremely few iron artifacts found between 800-400BC, but a large explosion of Celtic iron swords found between 400-0 BC. The frequency is most often related to burial practices as precious iron was usually remelted. Additionally, as I mentioned before the quality of iron is important. Mild steel rusts and decays much faster than other types of steel, so the quality of steel matters for iron artifact survival.
Medieval plate armour is a far more advanced technology than stitched iron plates of mild steel.
>same style
It looks more anatomic than those other examples
, but dates to 400 BC, found in Epirus just south of the Slovenia region where those furnaces where found
That paper I'm assuming you posted says the furnaces where found in slovakia nlt slovenia; that is not that close to epirus also those furnaces where dated to the 1st century AD and the author says the mode of production is unusual for the area
I think you are missing the larger point. The technology for Cupola furnaces did exist in Europe, it just wasn't useful so they probably just discarded those batches and tried to make mild steel again. So the innovations surrounding the blast furnace in the high medieval ages was related to its development as a continuous process, not some missing technology.
Why are you reddit spacing? Also he never claimed that celts made armours that had large sheets of steel you moron, and wouldn't even matter in the context of this thread.
>reddit spacing
Lol. It's time for you to leave touristsfriend.
Quite peculiar hearing that from the one troony that constantly shit up the board.
>trannies trannies trannies trannies trannies
Yeah, it really is time for you to go back.
No it's just specifically you. You haven't posted a single source for any of your arguments and constantly come into question for things that have been mainstream in academia. And there are plenty of anons including myself that are willing to provide you with the materials but It's hard to talk to somebody who is so stuck up their arse and set in their ways.
If that's not enough you bring other dogshit board culture here as well troony.
>complaining about reddit spacing and incapable of going 5 minutes without blurting out something about trannies
>bring other dogshit board culture here
Lol. Lmao. Its been almost 4 years touristfriend. Time to get over it
Protip: plate armor became more widespread due to advancement in metal production techniques in the high/late middle ages IS mainstream academia.
>plate armor became more widespread due to advancement in metal production techniques in the high/late middle ages IS mainstream academia.
Literally nobody has suggested otherwise. Is it a wonder why i say you are far up your arse? It's like talking to a brick wall
The entire thread is about why mail was used instead of plate, dumb tourist c**t.
frick off
seething so much you are same gayging, ok bud.
go back
>is quite literally an upscaled bloomery.*
It's more like an indirect method of getting bloomeries without the size constraints of making a big one or many different furnaces
>*(And btw no finery has ever been found in Ancient China which mostly used bronze weapons by contrast such fineries were found in Celtic cultures together with Cupola furnaces).
I don't think anyone denies china used bronze for much longer than other places (until the three kingdoms I think) so it isn't surprising not finding fineries that old since they just didn't use that mich iron
>contrast such fineries were found in Celtic cultures together with Cupola furnaces)
You mean the paper that was posted before? It doesn't mention fineries nor that those furnaces were used to make cast iron
Missed this post.
>It's more like an indirect method of getting bloomeries without the size constraints of making a big one or many different furnaces
Sure.
>... they just didn't use that mich iron
You'd be surprised what kind of shit people write.
>You mean the paper that was posted before? It doesn't mention fineries nor that those furnaces were used to make cast iron
I guess that paper is a bit technical, they call it a Cupola furnace because their slag analysis proved that it was: that is they were able to melt iron ore (which wasn't difficult to do btw, this is a myth by historians who don't understand the process).
Here is another random paper I found with a which has high carbon content in some of the iron qualifying as "cast iron", dating to Hallstatt period:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440317301486
I see the paper is paywalled, but I can upload it somewhere if you want.
Europeans used to call it “corrupted metal” because it was so shit and brittle. The fact that they had a term for means they could obviously produce it by accident when the furnaces got too hot. This is what historians fail to understand about the subject. Historians fail to understand that "high carbon steel" and "cast iron" is not the same thing at all and I've seen this problem in many history papers before. The former is either annealed mild steel or alloyed wrought iron with a completely different microstructure and physical properties. What we really mean by steel is alloyed 41xx family steel, this is the high quality shit we use as engineering materials. Too much carbon results in near-worthless cast iron which you cannot shape as engineering steel.
To get back to OP's original question, plate armor (depending on your definition) was not "easier to make", it was one of the most difficult things in human history to produce requiring a very developed infrastructure, deep knowledge of metallurgy including annealing, decarburization etc.
>I guess that paper is a bit technical, they call it a Cupola furnace because their slag analysis proved that it was: that is they were able to melt iron ore (which wasn't difficult to do btw, this is a myth by historians who don't understand the process).
Yeas but it doesn't mention fineries or that those furnaces were intended to make cast iron; it being made accidentaly is beside the point because they don't seem to have used it in any meaningfull capacity
>This is what historians fail to understand about the subject. Historians fail to understand that "high carbon steel" and "cast iron" is not the same thing at all and I've seen this problem in many history papers before.
Honestly I can't say the same; usually they make pretty clear that they are different; at least the ones I read.
>To get back to OP's original question, plate armor (depending on your definition) was not "easier to make"
Yes I agree; shaping a breastplate requires more skill even starting from the same materials
They had enough labourers to mass produce them for other countries. Only at the 15th century it was Milanese and South German Centric. They got swamped by armourers from France and Spain later
I see the problem: we have very different definitions for what constitutes "plate armour". In my definition of the term it did not exist until very late in the high medieval ages. I'm sure you have a different idea in mind including mail stiched to chest cuirasses.
What do you consider as a plate armor? Not saying i want to argue about this just curious.
Ok fair enough.
>What do you consider as a plate armor? Not saying i want to argue about this just curious.
I also don't care to argue it's not an important distinction. For me plate armour is a specific style where the outer protection is entirely covered by steel plates with mail under only covering armpits and inner legs at worst. The key difference being that there is no non-plate exposure point to arrows and the armour is shaped specifically to deflect arrows and melee blows from all directions.
Steel breastplate connected to other armour pieces with mail is significantly older than full suits.
Yes but even then it's still roughly golf ball sized. Hence why cultures that used a lot of bog iron used the same style of armor and weapons as those that mined its iron.
But a smelt takes only about a day's work with another day to process the lump of slag you get (I forget its name). Surely that's less man hours than all the work you need to do for chainmail?
Man hours are cheap in comparison to the metal itself. And again, the lump of raw metal is the size of a golf ball no matter what anyway. You do do additional smelting but you'll just end up with additonal golf balls of metal.
An example of using that golfball sized piece of raw metal to its best advantage.
Man hours are not cheap compared to the metal itself. 9/10th of the cost of armor for plate armor was the wages for the smiths and the guild in one instance.
>>make plate
>hurr durr why not just MAKE it?
Plate involves the smith following each step checking the measures and thickness are right while with mail you can have a bunch if unskilled workers draw wire through a die an coil it so you can just rivet sheets of mail and do the final tailoring; it's even easier to use half riveted and half punched rings
Banging a piece of metal with a hammer can't be that hard compared to pulling wire or riveting. Sure managing the thickess is not trivial, but neither is making sure that the wire doesn't snap mid pull!
Making a piece of plate isn't "just banging a piece of metal" you need skill to actually give it shape; sure you could frick up wire pulling but then you just have a shorter wire you can still coil it into rings, coiling itself is even more idiot proof, it's easily scalable also show by the fact that the romans never stopped using it despite being capable of makimg segmentata
>sounds way easier
It isn't.
They still use chain mail today, workplaces that use knives often require some version of this cut resistant glove, usually nylon not metal. I can say very resistant to a slice, and only really vulnerable to like a needle.
Because plate isn't actually easier to make
So much ignorance in this post starting with the fact that a full set of plate armour actually includes chainmail too.
because plate armor is very very expensive to make and maintain in terms of materials, knowledge, and money, in other words the average levie who often had to get their own gear would never be able to afford such a thing
Plate armor plummeted in price so it would depend on time and quality on how costly one would be. The average levy, if you mean by yeomen could afford white harnesses and did wear it although rarely. Sometimes they straight up bought them by the thousands from milan and rented them to the footmen during campaign.
>The average levy
Anyone that owned plate armour was not an average levy by definition, but a man at arms, probably a petty noble, entitled to much higher pay etc.
The average levy was some peasant you had to pay to equip with shitty chainmail and spears who didn't get paid anything near what sergeants and men at arms got. Of course on the scale of war if you would use hordes of spear infantry or not. But the average individual was certainly of this tier.
>shitty chainmail and spears
Chainmail was still just as expensive for the same coverage. A full maille set costed 120 days worth of wages in 1304 and a decorated plate armor costed 100-160 days of wage in the 15th century.
A levy is an obligation and it has nothing to do with the wealth of a being. We have reports from bridport of yeomen wearing full plate armors.
Alan Williams page 904
You are right, I didn't mean necessarily chainmail, I meant armour of lower quality than plate, including non-metallic armours.
IQfy is literally the only place on the internet to continue arguing about the cost of armor because 90% of you guys haven't even read or simply dont have access to the introductory paper to plate armours which basically has answered everything in relation to cost, effectiveness weight, material quality yadayada.
It's called Alan williams, knights and the blast furnace. the details for cost of armour starts at page 903, the effectiveness of plate armor starts at page 945.
Rest of the paper is the history and developement behind the armor and cataloguing some specific pieces.
It's an absolutely crucial read and it's available on annas archives.
>46 Citations
This book isn't as authoritative as you think it is Anon. No offence if your name is Alan Williams.
It probably makes more sense to cite what the book is based on than the book itself
On the contrary, its literally the most completely book to date that goes through the motions and labours and costs of armors. Can you name something better?
Can everyone in this thread please just watch this video. How chainmail is actually made is not some high arcane art, they made it from mass produced steel rivets. In case you are wondering process of making steel wire for these rivets was not labour intensive at all as you could make it in wind/water powered steel mills using draw plates powered by the mill.
Then you can weave together rivets like this to resize and retailor chain mail as needed. Anyone could do this later part, you did not need a skilled master blacksmith to do the weaving, just a pair of pliers.
I know you want to believe that it was hard to make because non-Europeans couldn't figure it out, but most of those morons couldn't even figure out the wheel and the rest were still using shitty scale- and lameller armour from the Bronze ages so this should hardly be surprising. Making chain mail efficiently was already figure out in the EIA by Hallstatt Celts.
>shitty scale
Scale armour offers better and more solid protection from piercing and blunt attacks than chain mail.[17]
Post the full thing
>Scale armour offers better and more solid protection from piercing and blunt attacks than chain mail.[17] It is also cheaper to produce, but it is not as flexible and does not offer the same amount of coverage.
This is exactly what I said. Europeans had scale armour in the early bronze age already and quickly outgrew it. It's shit as a light armour and absolute dogshit as a heavy armour. It serves no real purpose.
So, hauberks were worn from 5th to 12th century, and were replaced when plate armor was invented in 12th century.
So, you would wear coat of plates before it, because it didn't exist
Plate armor was only useful in the late 14th century later when they figured out how to make hardened steel plates. Before then they were inclined to use smaller pieces such as scales or the rings in chainmail.
There was no shortage of labor in the middle ages, blacksmiths were sought after positions at a time when 90% of the population were peasants, it basically freed you from hunger, and there would be many apprentices willing to spend hours every day riveting the rings together.
I think mail vs plate is the wrong question.
The real question is mail vs linothorax, vs scale and vs lamellar.
How come mail spread so much over three continents?
Why do the Sassanids prefer mail over lamellar?
Why does Saladins own officer according to Baha Din boast about his mail shirt?
Why do so many Turkics switch from lamellar to mail when they migrate westwards and mail becomes available?
It must have been some advantages to it, otherwise it makes no sense.
mail is more flexible, great for horse archers
From the very accounts of Japanese and Arabic soldiers, lamellar was considered insanely difficult to rid of rot and humidity from lacings. Maille is better in every way except for the thickness the plates can be made in for lamellar.
Mobility - mail is by far the most mobile of all armor types
Air ventilation - oftenoverlookedy mail does not enclose your body, and allows bodyheat to escape, unlike plate and lamellar(which is even worse than plate at it actually)
-armpit armor - lamellar was never(except like that one elite type of Chinese lamellar) able to cover insides of arms and especially armpits, leaving them exposed especially on horseback and as archer when drawing bow
Etc etc.
Mail was simply the shit, and morons gave it a bad name.
Otherwise it would not have been used by everyone from Celts to the Sipahi til like 1890s in Middle East and Asia
Please elaborate how lamellar is worse for heat distribution. This doesn't compute in my drunk head.
You have bunch of smaller plates woven with rope to make a single large surface, with all the drawbacks and none of the advantages(lamellar gives to impact anx is utter shit for blunt immpact) all supported by a garment supporting the ntire lamellar section
Meaning same surface enclosing with twice the amount of layers(one metal, one fabric, on top of your own fabric) necessary
Chainmail has better protection against arrows, due elasticity and multilayered chains. It's easier to wear and obviously easier to produce. It's not hard to see the benefits, especially if you have to equip 1000 guys with armor.
>obviously easier to produce
It takes 60 to 100 days for a single man to make a hauberk linking several thousand maille by hand. drop forging a fat sheet with a water wheel seems much easier.
What exactly do you know about the processes involved in making these different products?
Chainmail worked against slashing weapons, forced you to come at the wearer or spam powerful types of projectiles at them that only non-morons could build. If it was worthless or impractical, Romans would have never found use for such technology. Same way they used some more advanced metallurgy and design patterns from norf Europe for other things like swords but used monosteel instead of pattern welding, because you don't need druidic autism to make the same sword types with monosteel or repair them on campaigns.