Martijn A. Wijnhoven
European Mail Armour: Ringed Battle Shirts from the Iron Age, Roman Period and Early Middle Ages
(Amsterdam, 2021), 507pp. €181
Any military system that attempts to provide protection to mobile elements in the battlefield needs to reach a balance between protection and maneuverability. This is not only true for modern fighting vehicles, but for every shield and body armour in history. One of the most successful and long-lasting types of armour is chain mail, or more accurately and plainly, mail armour. It was invented in the Iron Age and was actively used in combat from that period up until the late 1800’s. However, this armour type is usually associated with the Medieval period due to extensive cinematic representation. Similarly, the silver screen consistently portrays Roman soldiers with the lorica segmentata (a modern Latin term for this type of armour), a type of plate armour (although it is often depicted as made from leather on screen, without any historical basis). Yet, this is a misconception, as even in the height of its usage in the first to third centuries CE, only less than half of the Roman soldiers received one, and in the period of the Republic none wore it. In the Late Empire (4th-7th centuries CE) only a select few had similar armour in terms of technology (but not design). Throughout Roman history, the main body armour was the lorica hamata, a type of mail armour, and the same is true for many other cultures that are usually depicted on screen with no armour, or only leather armour (Celts, Germans etc.). Henceforth, it is unsurprising that mail armour received less attention in the academic sphere as well, while a lot of attention was focused on magnificent Late Medieval and Renaissance plate armour as many such examples survived and were passed on as family heirlooms. The book at the centre of this review has set for itself to change this situation and offers a complete survey of available finds and knowledge on mail armour, from its creation in the Late Iron Age to the Early Medieval period.
The book, which is an adaptation and extension of the author’s PhD dissertation, gives mail armour the attention and understanding it deserves. This book is an enormous feat and encompasses numerous topics and debates regarding mail armour. As this review cannot incorporate them all, it will try to present the general content and highlight important ideas and discussions. The book starts with an introduction to the literature on the subject, from the end of the 18th century up to the middle of the 20th century. This chapter also presents the main themes that the book discusses. The second chapter deals with the origins of mail armour, by first showing that all pre 4th century BCE examples, which were considered as the forefathers of this type of armour, are not armour but ornaments, and should not be part of the debate. He also showed that some of the earliest armour that were found are not as ancient as suspected. According to the database that the book is based on, which also consists of over a third of the book, the author arrived at the conclusion that mail was most probably invented in the Celtic world around the turn of the 4th to the 3rd centuries BCE. The chapter is filled, like all the others, with countless pictures and maps. The pictures provide a visual catalogue for a substantial percentage of mail armour finds that exist. The maps and graphs are based on the database, and show what are the benefits and the quality of research that can be achieved using such databases.
The third chapter deals with the distribution of finds from the 3rd century BCE to the 9th century CE, and it beautifully analyses and presents the archaeological finds on maps and graphs. For me, the last part of the chapter was the most fascinating and unique, and it is an amazing accomplishment made possible only because of the database the author has built. This last part analyses mail armour finds in graves. It shows that pieces of mail were often left with buried individuals, sometimes without any other weapon, including in graves of infants and females. As the author claims, this tradition was possibly meant to protect them in the afterlife, and it was symbolic as in most cases only a small piece of mail was left, and not a complete armour. Furthermore, the author shows where this tradition was common. In the 1st to the 5th centuries CE, infant and female graves with pieces of mail are mainly found in Northern Germany, Poland and Slovakia. From the 6th-7th centuries, there are also examples from modern-day France and the Netherlands, as well as more eastern countries such as Hungary. However, in the 7th-9th centuries such burials were mainly attested in Hungary, and more interestingly, almost all burials with pieces of mail belonged to females.
However, in this chapter there is one thing that I disagree with: the dating of the introduction of mail armour in the Roman Army. On page 49, Wijnhoven concludes that the date was in the 2nd century BCE. This is based on three things: the Delphi victory frieze from 168 BCE that depicts Roman soldiers wearing mail, an extract from Polybius describing a parade in 165 BCE in Daphne where 5000 Seleucid soldiers were dressed in mail armour (described as the “Roman fashion”), and the lack of mail armour finds from Republican Rome in an archaeological context. Yet the frieze shows that in 160’s BCE, it was already the tradition to depict Roman soldiers in such armour and Polybius suggests that around this time, this type of equipment was a synonym with Roman warfare. It is improbable that these traditions were entrenched merely in two decades. It is equally improbable that a large percentage of Roman troops received it in such a short time span. This means that this type of armour was introduced to the Roman army in the 3rd century BCE, and possibly even the early 3rd century BCE, most probably after they encountered this armour in the service of the Gauls. It also implies that the assumption of its origins in the 4th century BCE should be preferred.
The fourth chapter beautifully deals with the representation of mail in ancient art, and using art to better understand the changes in design of this type of armour. The fifth chapter, on the other hand, deals with its terminology, and explores whether the term lorica hamata was a Roman term for mail armour. Wijnhoven clearly shows that such a conclusion is problematic. He also shows that the term lorica catena was also not necessarily used only for mail armour. Subsequently, he concludes that the term the Romans used for such armour is currently not known to us. The sixth chapter deals, once more, with the equipment and its design, in this case the decoration. It examines the evidence for embedded copper or brass rings in armour mainly made of iron rings, in order to make decorative patterns. It also presents decoration in hybrid armour (consisting of an outer layer of scales attached to a mail backing), that was done by adding iron elements to armour made from copper. As the earliest examples from the archaeological record are dated to the 1st century BCE, Wijnhoven concludes that the tradition to decorate mail armour in such a way was introduced only in the second half of the 1st century BCE. However, I believe that this situation might well be a mere coincidence, and the origin of this kind of decoration could be earlier.
The seventh chapter cleverly uses ancient texts, ancient iconography, and archaeological finds to show that the use of undergarments beneath mail was already widely common in antiquity. These undergarments were similar to the padded garments used in the Medieval period (such as gambeson, aketon, jupon etc.), which made wearing mail armour more comfortable and also added extra protection. The rest of the book deals with the manufacturing and construction of such armour. This well-written and thorough section covers everything from the production of rings (eighth chapter) and their characteristics (eleventh chapter) to the different ways that were used to connect the rings (ninth chapter), as well as the overall construction of mail garments (tenth chapter). The book ends with the twelfth chapter, which provides a brief summary and conclusions.
All in all, this book covers everything that is expected and much more. It is an incredible intellectual feat and provides an example of how databases should be gathered and analysed, although an edition of this book with a disc containing the database in excel format for everybody to use could be a welcome addition. This book is exemplary, containing the most extensive and complete research on this topic, and should be available in every university library. Additionally, due to its clear and accessible writing, it would be also appealing for anyone interested in ancient military history and weaponry, and so is relevant to the wider public. This book is so good that not only every scholar of the field would want access to it, but they would be sad that such a book is not accredited to their name. In general, we all need to hope that in the future decades Wijnhoven will update his database regularly with new finds and will publish updated versions of the current book accordingly.
Haggai Olshanetsky
University of Basel
Switzerland
[email protected]
