Download PDF | David Nicolle - Arms & Armour of the Crusading Era, 1050-1350_ Islam, Eastern Europe and Asia (Vol 1-2)-Greenhill Books (1999).

Download PDF | David Nicolle - Arms & Armour of the Crusading Era, 1050-1350_ Islam, Eastern Europe and Asia (Vol 1-2)-Greenhill Books (1999).

Preface

The publication of a revised edition of Arms & Armour of the Crusading Era has enabled me to restructure the original work and make a number of what I hope will be seen as improvements. The most obvious change has been to divide the book into two volumes by culture or civilisation rather than having all the text in one volume and all the illustrations in another, as in the first edition. Hopefully this will enable readers interested in only one of the civilisations to purchase just the volume they require.

Where the illustrations themselves are concerned, some have been redrawn because better sources have become available. A number of additional pictures, largely of surviving military artefacts, have also been added. Most obviously, however, several oversized pictures which characterised the first edition have now been reduced to average dimensions. Similarly, a number of tiny pictures have been enlarged. In both cases this has been possible because I now have access to more sophisticated equipment than was available in Yarmouk University, Jordan, where I worked during the writing of the first edition.

Finally, a chapter on China and the Far East has been introduced. This is for the simple reason that, since writing the first edition, I have become increasingly convinced that many aspects of military technology seen in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and even Western Europe either had their origins in China or were strongly influenced by developments in Chinese arms and armour.

Introduction

Whereas Western European arms, armour and military technology have been studied for many years, the serious study of Byzantine, Islamic, Central Asian, Indian and Far Eastern arms has been a more recent phenomenon. Sadly, however, it is already suffering from the same nationalism, parochialism and oversimplification which have plagued the study of Western European military technology. Nevertheless, while there was considerable regional variation within each of the great religiously based civilisations of what Europeans call the Middle Ages, there were also varying degrees of stylistic, technological or fashionable influence spreading from one civilisation to another. This was particularly apparent within Asia and, by extension, the rest of the Islamic world. Some scholars might find this surprising, given the fact that the medieval world has sometimes been described as one of distinct and separate regions.

Such varied influences were even more obvious in the early medieval period (5th to 10th centuries). However, continuing migrations and conquests by Turkish and Mongol peoples stemming from Central Asia meant that military as well as cultural and other influences spread with remarkable speed across a great deal of the Eurasian land mass. In this respect Asia, and to a lesser degree Islamic Africa, differed from medieval Europe, since regional variation may actually have declined rather than increased.

Although no single culture or people had a monopoly of technological innovation or leadership in fashion, some obviously had more influence than others. Some, indeed, were almost entirely recipients rather than exporters of influence, while others remained wedded to archaic forms suited to their own military situations. Yet the very fact that the great cultural blocs of European Christendom, Islam, India, Turco-Mongol Central Asia and China came into such violent and widespread contact during the ‘Crusading’ centuries makes the history of arms and armour during this period particularly interesting.

 The study of military technology can, in turn, throw useful light on other aspects of a warlike period. I believe it to be especially illuminating where the spread of Chinese-rooted technology is concerned.

Then there is the question of mere ‘fashion’, and the use of costume and military equipment as a means of displaying cultural identity, religious affiliation or political loyalty. During the Middle Ages, as today, personal appearance reflected many sociological, political and religious factors. Where military fashion was concerned these pressures were even more obvious. They

could reflect a rise or fall in the prestige and power of empires or individual rulers, perceived but not necessarily real military superiorities, actual or desired associations and alliances, plus a whole series of lesser factors. All this affected not only an individual warrior’s sense of identity but that of his entire culture. 

Thus the study of arms and armour can shed light on much more than one facet of the history of technology. It is, as Professor R.P. Lindner described it, ‘a wide sea whose currents are largely uncharted; the history of taste, emotional fancy and cultural preference.’

Unfortunately these same currents also swayed the arts. This has been widely recognised where pictorial representations are concerned. Some scholars have, for example, dismissed medieval European art as too unreliable to be taken seriously as a source of information for the history of material culture.

 Others have limited their criticism to Byzantine and certain periods of Islamic art. Although these are very difficult to interpret, and thus to use as source material, I believe that with adequate knowledge, and determination to ‘sift the wheat from the chaff’, even such highly stylised art forms can provide a rich source of information. What has, meanwhile, been less widely appreciated is the fact that most medieval literary sources, other than technical manuals and inventory lists, also suffer from similar distortions. 

In fact virtually all civilisations were subject to comparable cultural pressures, including fashions in costume, arms, armour, military organisation and tactics. At the same time such pressures varied because they stemmed from different sets of cultural preferences and emotional fancies

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