[Aqtai]

Originally Posted by Ahriman

Thanks, both vambraces are very nice... and the upper one has that more solid metacarpal plate I missed. Is that mail riveted? It seems very thin...

I'm afraid the book doesn't tell me if the links are rivetted or not. But from what I've read almost all Indian mail made before 1750 AD used rivetted links.

Originally Posted by Ahriman

Thanks for the swords as well... They are indeed better for horseback usage, especially as they mostly lack a real thrusting point... They were VERY lucky with avoiding open combat against vollharnischers... A good harness is quite hard to defeat with cuts, even with a good wide twohander, and most, especially milanese, harnesses were able to repel arrows, even from average crossbows in the 500-550 pounds area.

I'm not so sure about that. Ottoman cavalry used almost identical equipment to the mamluks, indeed some actually was Mamluk equipment captured after the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517. Unlike the mamluks, the Ottomans fought many battles against western Europeans in the 15th and 16th centuries, many of which the Ottomans won, like the battle of Mohacs in 1526.

Islamic cavalry had a different style of fighting, they would stay away from the enemy shooting arrows from horseback, they would only engage in hand-to-hand combat after the enemy was weakened and exhausted.

BTW I found this picture of the back of an Ottoman krug at oriental-arms.com.



The shoulder piece would be connected to the back-plates with mail links or leather straps, then the whole assembly would be attached to the front of the armor with leather straps and buckles and worn over a mail shirt.

I don't think these shoulder plates and back plates are a matching set though, the shoulder plates look much bigger.