Thomas T. Hoopes

“ Steel, you will remember, is not a separate metal; it is just iron which contains from about .5% to about 2.5%, of carbon. This gives it the peculiar property that if it is heated to redness and quickly cooled, it becomes much harder than before. It also becomes more brittle. If hardened steel be heated a second time, not red hot but to a much lower temperature, and again chilled, the hardness is reduced somewhat, while the brittleness is reduced a great deal; the metal becomes tough and suitable for making into tools. ”

“ What was the physical character of the men who wore armor? Why do the suits seem so small? Were people smaller in those days? Yes and no. It is true that the nature of their life tended to develop men of the cowboy type, wiry rather than massive. Men who spend their lives on horseback are likely to have a broad shoulder and narrow waist, strong thigh and slender calf. It is true too that with primitive medicine and sanitation man died young; the average age of adult males was less than it is now. ”

“ As a matter of fact armor is not as heavy as one might think. A good military suit weighs no more than the pack carried by a modern soldier, sixty pounds or less, and is a great deal more comfortable to carry. The pack hangs from the shoulders, but a good suit of armor, carefully made (as all good armor had to be made) to fit the individual body of the wearer, has its weight distributed over the entire body. The helmet rests partly on the head and partly on the shoulders. ”

“ The Museum has a small collection of paper impressions of these “brasses” which are well worthy of study by anyone interested in early armor. Some are exhibited on the walls of the armor gallery.
Chain mail is more interesting than it appears at first glance, and the Museum’s specimens deserve to be looked at carefully. In the first place, it was made of wire. Nowadays wire is so common that we think nothing of it; it is produced by the mile with automatic machinery. But in medieval times wire was scarce and valuable, for every bit of it had to be made by hand. ”

“ However the principal reason for the small average size of preserved suits of armor lies in its inextensibility. A suit of armor cannot be “let out”. 20 As has been pointed out, it had to be made exactly to fit the wearer. Men had to learn their military duties very young, they had to have and to wear armor while they were still growing. Consequently they usually outgrew their first suit of armor, and it was this suit, unmarked by the scars of serious fighting, which was most likely to be preserved. By the time a man reached his full growth his armor showed wear and tear ”

“ But the accepted symbol of man as a fighting creature has always been the sword, and the sword, perhaps more than any other item of man’s warlike panoply, has experienced the full range of his artistic and technical initiative. Space does not here permit a discussion of the innumerable types of swords; only a brief resumé of the general development can be given. This is supplemented by a display of some typical forms along one side wall of the armor gallery.
Fig. 27. A mace or one-handed club, made of steel carved and gilded. A beautiful implement for smashing heads! ”

“ If the iron has too much or too little carbon it cannot be hardened at all; if there is too little it is very soft and malleable and is called “wrought iron”. If there is too much carbon it is harder than mild steel, but is very brittle indeed ”

“ The study of antique firearms is a fascinating one. Contrary to usual belief, firearms are not a late invention. They were in use before complete suits of plate armor were made, and continued in use throughout the entire period that plate armor was worn. ”

“ Fig. 4. A crossbow lock two thousand years old, with a model to show how the parts interlock. An ingenious bit of early mechanical engineering.
At first glance, the helmet proclaims itself a great work of sculpture, and proves that arms and armor can properly belong in a museum of art. How very well this piece deserves its place here is still more apparent on close examination. It seems incredible that so long ago a craftsman could, without any of our modern tools, have formed from a single plate of bronze such a deep and difficult forging as this helmet bowl. ”

“ But the gradual improvement in the efficiency of firearms undoubtedly caused armor to be made heavier and heavier, and thereby contributed greatly to its decline. For just when armor was thus increasing in weight there developed a new school of cavalry tactics based upon the use of lightly armed troopers on fast horses who, instead of directly attacking the enemy, could dash around his flank and cut off his supplies from the rear. ”

“ The first projectile-throwing arm appropriate to an art museum is the crossbow, which is simply a bow mounted on a wooden stock provided with a catch and trigger, so that the bow could be carried ready to shoot. ”

“ He no longer bothered to harden the surface of his breastplate and helmets to the glassy hardness 11 which was the pride of the Gothic armorers, but he made good, reasonably homogeneous mild steel which was hard enough for sword or dagger blades, yet tough enough to avoid brittleness. He could hammer his metal into even the most fantastic shapes, could color or gild it, or could inlay it with precious metals. Armorers began to vie with one another to produce magnificent and elaborate armor ”

“ A man wearing a properly fitting suit of armor over the correct undergarment could do anything that a modern man can do wearing a winter overcoat, and probably, due to his special training, a number of things that the modern man could not. ”

“ The coat of arms is presumably that of the noble patron who had supported him in the past and to whom the pieces would eventually come, but as they were made for glory and not for pay, the gunsmith felt quite entitled to place his own initials in a prominent position. It should be noted that though the pistols are both smooth-bored the gun is carefully rifled. It is interesting to speculate about the fate of Claude Thomas. It seems improbable that so skilled a craftsman should not have been successful in his career. ”

“ Damascus steel, on the other hand, is a type of metal especially suitable for armor and sword blades, made by the intimate combination, in innumerable layers, of two kinds of metal, one extremely hard, the other soft and tough. As billets of this composite steel were twisted, bent, and reformed, the superimposed layers made intricate patterns like those in watered silk. Such Damascus steel patterns can be best observed in sword and dagger blades like those illustrated in Fig. ”

“ The locks and the large and numerous mounts on the stock are elaborately chiseled steel in strong relief with designs of animals, monsters, and semi-human figures against a background of floral arabesques.
Not all flintlocks were on firearms. The same mechanism was used on tinder boxes, alarm clocks, and gunpowder testers. The powder tester (Fig. 49) was like a pistol with a friction cover closing the mouth of the barrel. It was loaded (of course without a bullet) and fired. The force of the explosion blew the cover away from the barrel against the friction of a heavy spring ”

“ An arrow or dagger point could easily spread open a link, and penetrate to the wearer’s body. So all good chain mail was strengthened by having the ends of every link overlapped, slightly flattened, and then riveted. In that part of the world we now call “Middle East”—where the 6 Mohammedan and Hindu cultures flourished—the rivet was a separate piece of fine wire. European chain mail is more of a mystery—principally because there is so very little old European chain mail still in existence. ”

“ The arm and leg guards are laced to the special undergarment which had always to be worn with armor, and each limb supports its own protection. The joints come at exactly the right places to correspond with the natural motions of the body, and every one of these motions is provided for. ”

“ Fig. 23. The wrist plates of a gauntlet with sliding (Almain) rivets.
Who wore armor? Every man who could afford it. Armor was always very much of a luxury. Its making required the services of consummate craftsmen, men who were not only expert metal workers, but also skilled draughtsmen, expert tailors, and keen students of human anatomy. Armorers were the aristocrats of all mediaeval craftsmen, the most highly respected and by far the best paid. ”

“ Typical swords of the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries, as displayed in the armor gallery.
Stone Age man could not make any true swords, for the flint and obsidian which he had to use were too brittle to be available in large pieces. But bronze could be cast into swords both effective and beautiful. A number of Chinese bronze sword blades from the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.) (Fig. 28) are available in the study collection. They are rather short, double edged blades, adapted primarily for thrusting, but not without cutting ability too. ”

“ They are exceedingly rare. The City Art Museum possesses only a gauntlet of about 1450 and a helmet (Fig. 9) from about 1475, yet we feel lucky to have these two pieces, for “Gothic” armor is not only rare: 9 it is very beautiful. It was at this period that armorers did their best work, from every standpoint. It was best metallurgically, with inner surfaces of pure soft iron, but with outer surfaces skillfully converted into almost glass-hard steel. ”

“ This type of helmet was often worn in combination with an upstanding guard for the lower part of the face which was attached to the top of the neck-defense. The lower edge of the helmet overlapped the upper edge of this face-guard; thus the entire face was protected, yet the wearer had reasonable ventilation and could obtain more when circumstances permitted by taking off his helmet.
“MAXIMILIAN” ARMOR
At the beginning of the sixteenth century the most important single personality in Europe was probably King (later Emperor) Maximilian I of Germany and Austria. ”

“ A heavy helmet especially designed for the tournament. The man who wore this was about as safe as armor could make him.
Tournament armor, used in the toughest, most exciting sport that man has ever invented, was worn for comparatively short periods of time, and could, therefore, be considerably heavier than the military armor which a man might have to wear continuously. Decoration on the armor itself was reduced to a minimum, although elaborate trappings of cloth and feathers were often added to it. Fig. ”

“ Many thousands of different specimens have been classified, but all firearms before the nineteenth century belong 33 to one of four types. These include (1) the cannon or hand cannon in which the charge of gunpowder was set off by direct application of a burning slow match or hot iron held by the shooter; (2) the matchlock in which burning slow match or tinder was held in a clamp attached to the gun and was brought into contact with the gunpowder by a mechanism attached to the gun and operated by the shooter ”

“ The outfit is definitely that of a dandy, for every piece is beautifully made and exquisitely decorated. The steel parts of the pistols are brilliantly polished or deeply blued. The stocks are delicately inlaid with rococo scrolls of silver wire. The oil can is a dainty hexagonal urn. Even the hammer and screw driver deserve in their own right places in a museum display.
Fig. 49. Not a weapon, but a device to test the strength of gunpowder. ”

“ A large and heavy gun (Fig. 46 [1] ) with a peculiar type of early flintlock having an exposed mainspring and known as a miguelet was probably made in Brescia for a purchaser from the Balearic Islands. The barrel is plain; the lock (Fig. 47 [1] ) and steel mountings of the walnut stock, however, are elaborately carved in openwork and in strong relief. Some of the details of this carving, especially that on the trigger guard, evidence the exquisite skill characteristic of the Brescian gunsmiths (compare the wheellock pistol mentioned above) . ”

“ Action grew faster and faster, and swords lighter and more manageable, until by the seventeenth century the customary weapon was the court sword, with a short, single-handed hilt, a small flat guard often magnificently decorated in chiselled steel, and a relatively short, light blade having a needle-like point, and often without any sharp cutting edge at all (Fig. 30) .
Fig. 31. A rondel dagger with a silver handle.
Fig. 32. An outfit for a hunter: dagger, knife, awl, and larding needle, all fitting into one scabbard. ”

“ A company of such men, formed into a square or circle, the front rank kneeling, the second standing, and both holding their pikes with the butts against the ground and the points projecting outward, was almost invulnerable to cavalry, whose horses would not charge against the forest of pike-points. ”

“ Another, rifled, specimen, from about 1635, formerly in the Liechtenstein collection (Fig. 46 [2] ) has a plain barrel, but the lock is finely engraved with a hunting scene, while the stock (Fig. 47 [2] ) is most elaborately inlaid 36 with fine filigrees and engraved plates of stag horn representing mythological characters, animals, and monsters against an architectural and arabesque background. The stock bears the mark of Martin Süssebecker, who was born at Liegnitz in 1593, and died in 1668 at Dresden where he was gunmaker to the court of the Electors of Saxony. ”

“ This was a great convenience in hunting or war, because otherwise the time lost in drawing the bow might give the victim opportunity to escape. Moreover, it was soon found that the application of mechanical devices permitted the use of a bow much stronger than any man could draw unaided. ”