Also the various Portuguese chronists and travellers from the discoveries period, Castanheda, Barbosa, Manrique, Costa, cited the war elephants in their works. The famous jewish phisician Garcia de Horta wrote that war elephants carried hooks and bisarms, and even lately half cradles ( small breechloading cannons ) and gunpowder pans, and were armoured, specially in their head fronts and chest; had bells pending on their flanks and were blanketed like horses. Also they were equiped with encased arms in their tusks, with the shape of plough irons. None of them mentions weapons on their trunks. Within my uncultured limitations, i can easily assimilate that war elephants were equiped for battle with thrusting devices in their tusks, but i can't see them going to special training to be able to do actual swording with their trunks. A sword is a specific weapon, requiring fencing notions. But what do you know?
The watercolour i post here belongs to a codice that was painted by a Portuguese anonimous in the XVI century ... one of or maybe the earliest in loco work ever available from the period. The elephant is not "personnaly" armed, but the picture is worth to see ... the hanging bells are there, though
Fernando
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