C13th "chopper" ?

[leonardo daneluz]

Today , with all of our technology , there are people like Ed Fowler marketing heat treatments where 80% of all the process is just nonsense. On the other side of the spectrum several key pieces into our machinery regularly goes with less than optimal heat treatment (at a scary level).
I find no surprise that the same was the case 500 years ago.

Ancient steels have such a low hardenability (which is not the same that carbon content) that it´s almost impossible to make a proper full hardening without a full quench in water, risking severe warping or cracking. Slack quenching or interrupted quenching would work but would also leave the thicker parts untreated. Incidentally mild carbon (say 0,5% C ) would accept a full quench in water better making a still hard piece. So when you see a good piece with not so high carbon you may be see something really better, made with a superior care, even in the heat treatment deparment. It´s all a combination of material+heat treat + design what has to be evaluated.
But again: I have still to see a probe of deliberate hardening + tempering before the XVII cent. English really draws a confusion since "tempering " isn´t an specific term. But in spanish "revenir" (tempering just in the sense of stress relieving after hardening) as far as I know is firstly seen in documents in the XVIII cent.
If you see at all the Oakeshott typology there are really few designs which cannot be made into a fully functional blade without a proper full heat treatment in the modern sense. If any.

Bd:

the key role of impurities in the formation of wootz is for making good quality, historical wootz. You can make "a" wootz without them or with other elements which favours nucleation of the carbides. It just won´t turn out very similar to the beautiful good ancient wootz.
Be sure, bd, that we have far better steels today than anything they had. Even in a chunkyard. This is not an argument, is pretty evident once you get familiar with our steels and the care involved in their making, even the cheap steel we use for buildings and cars. Steel have several characteristics, all of them have been improved and are continuously improved. It is so important in our culture. When you see "the first eight", the first eight elements present in an ancient piece through an spectometer and you know what each one means, you see they were anywhere near to us. But again, that means little, you still have to throw into consideration heat treatment and design.

Ty:
I am not so brave as Bd at drawing theories but the japanese sword designs seem to be mainly driven by heat treatment. You still have sugata variations according to external factors but the pervasive characteristics, which are many, seem all to turn around the heat treat. Section, edge angle, curvature, point design, everything says "I carry a glass hard edge to you safely".
Surely japanese history would not be changed by full hardened swords but japanese sword history would be completely different by full hardened and tempered swords.

[Thearos]

What a great forum this is

[bigdummy]

He says that *some* was good quality steel, but a lot of armour - even a lot of high status stuff - was made of iron or very low carbon steel. What he told me was that they were surprised to find very little correlation between high status pieces and good quality steel - apparently there was an even spread of material across the board and across a wide period. Also, heat treated armour seems to have been in the minority (because of course not much armour was of high enough carbon content to be heat treated anyway).
Yes we know that a couple of the most famous makers were regularly producing heat-treated carbon steel armour by the mid-15thC, but that armour was very much in the tiny minority in the grand scheme of things. And by the 16thC the amount of heat-treated armour seems to have reduced, for whatever reason.

Ok, I went back and looked at Alan Williams as I said I would. What I found is that, more or less as I remembered, the late 15th C armor from the top centers, notably Augsburg, Landshut, Milan, and Brescia, were mostly heat treated medium carbon steel with a fairly high hardness (350 - 450 vpn) hade mostly of martensite and few slag inclusions. For example he tested 16 armors from Augsburg and 12 of the 16 were hardened martensite, 2 were partly heat treated but only slightly lower hardness, and only 1 was iron. This continued in Augsburg until the late 16th Century, as late as 1560 there was an Augsburg guild regulation requiring that ALL breastplates produced in Augsburg and recieving the town mark had to be tempered steel, which is amazing consdiering that they also made munitions armor and a lot of armor for landsknechts and so forth, and that a lot of the armor was gilded which made heat-treating difficult. But Williams said his testing revealed that they maintained the standard until close to the end of the 16th Century. A lot of the Augsburg armorers were recruited to work in Austria in the 16th Century and the quality of the armor from Innsbruck in the 16th Century was even better.

The Italians, who were the first to use steel armor in the 14th Century, evidently stopped tempering their armor after 1510 due to the difficulty of dealing with the gilding that most of their customers wanted. Which is quite interesting! He did find some high-end Italian armor from the (post 1510) 16th Century for example a harness for Cosimo De Medici which had slag in it and was mostly made of iron. A lot of these armors are clearly tournament or parade harness.

Before 1510, almost all the Italian armor with a makers mark was made of steel, 45 of 72 marked armors were tempered, compared to only 12 of the 45 unmarked armors.

Armor from the rest of Europe tended to be of generally lower quality, based on a quick scan of the book. I saw one test he described from the late 16th Century of a "wounderously light" Steel breast plate from Austria by a Royal official. The official was ordered to have an English copy made, and they tested both with a pistol "with very good powder" at close range. The Austrian armor barely had a dent, whereas the (presumably iron) English armor was punctured and "rent" horribly.

So my conclusion is, your statement about slag and crap "pig iron" armor is somewhat true for the second - tier armor produced in the Medieval period around Europe, and for a lot of Italian parade and tournament armor from the 16th Century, but the armor made in the most estemed centers during their heydey (Milan from 1400 - 1510, Augsburg from 1460 - 1560, Innsbruck through the 16th Century) remained of excellent quality tempered steel. These were the epicenters of the armor producing industry in Europe at this time. The best armor also apparently remained relatively thin and light, based on Alan Williams measurements, and provided pretty good protection against the firearms of the day, as Williams suggests and I also noted from reading a first-hand account of the Siege of Malta not long ago.

My best guess is that the Italian towns apparently changed their speciality under pressure from competition from Swabia and Austria after 1510, and began to specialize in parade and tournament armor. This kind of thing happened a lot in many industries. At any rate this seems to be the case with the items Williams tested.

BD

[bigdummy]

Modern steel (pure iron isn´t common, what we know as iron is usually iron +0,1% carbon or some more) has a lot of beautiful alloying elements which aren´t present before, say, 1880. .

Well we know for a fact this isn't true, since Wootz steel relies on the trace elements of vanadium, molybdenum et al as you already acknowledged in this thread. Just because they didn't know what these elements were does not mean they were not introducing them into the steel intentionally, following old processes which were only partly understood, like the Norse using the bones for phosphorous or the Indian smiths using the special mineral laden clay to make their forges.

For those who unlike Leonardo and Matt aren't aware of this, an article on the importance of these 'impurities' in wootz

http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/98 ... -9809.html

BD

[bigdummy]

Heat treating little pieces of modern steel is easy mostly because modern steels are designed to be easily heat treated... and because we can learn the "hardening´+ tempering" combination from a lot of sources. I still never found a reliable description of deliberate tempering until the XVII cent.

On pages 895 and 896 of Knight and the Blast Furnace Williams mentions 5 books from the 16th Century which cover tempering in detail, listing the authors Biringuccio, Agricola, Garzoni and della Porta, and an anonymous book called "Stahl und Eisen" from 1532. He specifically says that both slack-quenching and full-quenching-and-tempering were described (his words). He goes on to mention an English translation of della Porta in 1562, and quotes an extensive passage from della Porta from 1558 which covers tempering mail armor, which della Porta says "workmen call the return" where you re-heat the mail, then quench it again, and it will lose it's brittleness and "resist all blows".

So I'd say they clearly knew exactly what they were talking about. Williams goes on to point out that since tempered armor was rare from Italian sources after 1530, these may have been descriptions of techniques of the earlier generation of armorers.

BD

[bigdummy]

This is also interesting, regarding wootz

http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscienc ... _sword.php

[admin]

Interesting stuff BD. Also look in The Great Warbow - there are graphs in there showing armour hardness and carbon content I seem to remember.
The point is that the armours tested by Williams were in almost all cases the very best armours produced at that time. They belonged to the richest patrons and most of those tested were from the late15th-mid16thC - ie. they would very obviously show the highest proportion of carbon steel and heat treatment. Yet despite this, as you show from the Italian examples, a lot were still made of lower-carbon steel, iron and un-heat treated.
Now given that only say half of the Italian 15thC examples were heat treated carbon steel, and these were top-notch armours, imagine what the proportions would have been like for most other harnesses of the time. Then there is also the question of which *pieces* of the armour were made of what - I do not know, but I find it highly likely that the material of breastplates and helmets was given somewhat more attention than arm or leg harness. I suspect that if you took one complete harness you may well find quite a lot of variation just in that one example.

[bigdummy]

No if I'm reading him right I don't think that is exactly true. He goes into all that in a lot of detail. The main factor is where the armor is produced, armor from the main centers in South Germany, Milan or Brescia from the 15th Century was almost all steel of a fairly low slag content (below 1%), and this included both fancy armor and regular infantry armor, and a lot of it was tempered across the board. In fact looking at the individual examples in many cases it was the fancier parade or tournament armor which wasn't tempered (the mythological beast head-helmets and so forth). The only real difference between the infantry armor and the cavalry armor, including the fancy stuff, was thickness. The infantry armor tended to be thinner, but other than that it was of the same quality - in fact it was just as often gilded in Germany. The really super-expensive etched armor which could be up to 100 times the cost of regular armor, was not necessarily of any better quality. Williams tested a wide range of armours including landsknecht armour, and a wide range of different pieces: helmets, vambraces, pauldrons, and so forth. One of the Innsbrook pauldrons he did destructive testing on had a hardness of over 550 vph. Probably more than sufficient to stop any modern handgun!

"Munitions grade" armor which was very cheap, could have a high slag content, but that was not used by most mercenaries or accepted by town militias in Central Europe, though locally made munitions grade armor was used by some militias in England and France according to Williams. Slag content also went up in Italy after 1530, even in expensive gilded armor. But this appears to be related to the nature of their market niche at that time. One of the interesting things Williams points out is that slag content made more difference in "fracture toughness" (i.e. whether a bullet would pierce it) than carbon content did. But he also says that the carbon steel produced in the larger bloomery forges also had the lowest slag content, which he calls a "benevolent cycle" or something like that.

The bottom line is that the centers in Southern Germany and Lombardy which dominated the armor-making trade produced very good quality armor in the late Medieval period. But the craft-guilds (or in the case of Milan, the family businesses) were reluctant to export their technologies, and the other centers of production around Europe (with a few exceptions) did not seem to know this trick. Attempts to export the technology by powerful Princes did not always succeed: he says Cosimo de Medici tried but failed to buy or steal tempering technology from Brescian craftsmen, but clearly the Bavarian and Austrian Princes were able to successfully export the technology from Augsburg by hiring top Augsburg armorers. I'll have to go read in more detail to see if he covers what kind of deal they made with the Augsburg armorers guild and / or city government. In the second half of the 16th Century it seems like the best 'real' fighting armor was made in Innsbruck.

He also gets into some of the differences between modern and Medieval steels, modern steel has less slag and can be more easily tempered. But that does not mean (in my opinion) that it was better in every way and clearly using their own techniques they were able to achieve very good results with the Medieval steel, better than what Williams was able to do with his own experiments with modern steel if I'm reading his numbers right.

It's also interesting that even the untempered steel seems to have been much stronger than iron. roughly 110% the strength of modern mild steel if I'm reading his charts right, whereas the tempered medium carbon steel was 150% the strength of modern mild steel.

BD

[bigdummy]

I should add that from reading some recent books on craft Guilds, this kind of regional specialization was common in the Medieval period. In the 13th and 14th Centuries the best wool cloth was being made in Flanders (Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, Liege) and in some south-German towns like Augsburg, made largely from wool imported from England and Scotland, died using Alum imported by Venice, and with dyes from around the Levant and as far away as China. The Flemish cities became incredibly rich largely due to dominating the textile industry in the Middle Ages.

But by the 15th Century the English wool manufacturers were making their own wool of increasingly competitive quality, thus cutting out the middle-man, and the Flemish and German towns shifted to higher quality luxury niche, but British, Scottish, and Dutch towns began to edge them out of there as well.. So the German towns like Augsburg switched to Fustian and then Cotton weaving, and the Flemish and Rhineland towns switched to silk, leaving the English and the Dutch to dominate the wool industry which moved north and west.

The same thing happened to Venice with glass when they started to face competition from Bohemia in the 16th C, forcing the famous Venetian glass industry to focus on making glass beads and small mirrors for use in the Colonial export trade (like for buying Manhattan island ). The pattern of urban guilds competing with putting-out systems organized by Princes or Merchants was also common, this happened in the silk ribbon industry for example also to Venice when French Princes set up 'putting-out' businesses in the French countryside, and enacted tariffs against foreign imports. It also happened to Zurich clock-makers guild in the 17th Century.

Another interesting example is paintings. North of the Alps Flanders was well known as the source for the best quality paintings, not just top quality portraits and magnificent triptychs, but also for much cheaper simple landscape paintings, maritime paintings popular with merchants, simple religious paintings and so forth. But when the Burgundian Valois dynasty collapsed and, eventually, the Spanish Hapsburgs came to control the low countries, the Flemish towns lost a lot of their autonomy and with it, many of their industries including painting, which largely shifted north to the Dutch cities like Delft and The Hague. The same craft guild (Guild of St. Luke, which may have a HEMA connection interestingly) simply moved north. Guys like Memling and Van Eyk were members in Flanders in the 15th Century, as were guys like Pieter Bruegel in the 16th, and Vermeer and Rembrandt in the 17th when there was such an explosion of Dutch painters (until the French invasion in the 1670's).

This sort of dynamic, local regional specialization dominating a particular industry for a while, then moving or changing under various pressures was a characteristic of industry in the pre-modern economy.

BD

[leonardo daneluz]

Modern steel (pure iron isn´t common, what we know as iron is usually iron +0,1% carbon or some more) has a lot of beautiful alloying elements which aren´t present before, say, 1880. .

Well we know for a fact this isn't true, since Wootz steel relies on the trace elements of vanadium, molybdenum et al as you already acknowledged in this thread. Just because they didn't know what these elements were does not mean they were not introducing them into the steel intentionally, following old processes which were only partly understood, like the Norse using the bones for phosphorous or the Indian smiths using the special mineral laden clay to make their forges.

For those who unlike Leonardo and Matt aren't aware of this, an article on the importance of these 'impurities' in wootz

http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/98 ... -9809.html

BD

Alloying elements in wootz are related to nucleation of carbides. There is no probe AFAIK that impurities were deliberately added to wootz. Nucleation of carbides is enhanced by these elements but occurs without them too and there were many wootz varieties without them. There are lots of modern knifemakers making their own "wootz" which looks very similar to the ancient.
Can you provide any probe that wootz was intended to be hardened by quenching at all?

Alloying elements like phosphorus are related to cold work hardening. They have nothing to improve heat treatment or making it easier.

Modern alloying elements in the steels we use to make modern swords are related to hardenability and to avoid fragility induced by phosphorus and sulphur. They also which makes a big piece of steel hardenable.
Full temper of a big thick sword with ancient material is difficult, to say the least. You´ll chance cracks and you´ll get warping in no easily solved ways. Could be done? yes , but it wouldn´t be the safest choice, slack quenching, fine perlite structures were a much safer way and most blades tested show exactly that. Adn design can be combined to obtain something perfectly useful.

Design in many, if not most , of the oakeshott typology puts use envelope of the steel in the blade well into the elastic range for perlitic steel which behaves exactly as it was full tempered martensitic steel (Which is one of the weird and counter-instinctive things in steel)

My point is that an ancient sword in times when the cycle "hardening + tempering" wasn´t a widespread knowledge had a huge difference in performance with anything you can make in your backyard with an old car spring, a coal forge and burnt oil. Strictly speaking about mettalurgy and no design involved.
Once proper tempering was widespread (you have pointed a nice source in the XVI cent. I had only found some in the XVII) you can get different things and certainly that happened.

Can somebody be sure that an armour or sword of tempered martensite wasn´t tempered by heating it in a grinding wheel instead of deliberated tempering? Tempering for simple carbon steel starts at 200C or less.

more simply said:

wootz: alloyed to favour carbide nucleation
your source for Norse steel making: Alloyed to favour cold working.
Modern steel: alloyed to be easily hardenable and to cope fragility induced by sulphur and phosphorus.
Ergo : moder steels are more easily hardened than ancient steels

Also:
Ancient design was intended to complement low quality heat treatment and sometimes even low quality steel.

There is a whole world of possibilities combining analysis of swords and mettalurgy. For example at least three types of the swords of the Arsenal at Alexandria can be explained entirely using heat treatment/steel combination as a leading factor in their design. ( the very wide ones and OaKeshott XIX the most easy case)

[bigdummy]

Alloying elements in wootz are related to nucleation of carbides. There is no probe AFAIK that impurities were deliberately added to wootz. Nucleation of carbides is enhanced by these elements but occurs without them too and there were many wootz varieties without them. There are lots of modern knifemakers making their own "wootz" which looks very similar to the ancient.
Can you provide any probe that wootz was intended to be hardened by quenching at all?

What I'm saying is that they intentionally used clay from certain deposits to make their crucibles because they knew it allowed them to make the fine quality steel they were producing and selling all around the world in billets, to their considerable profit. This was figured out in recent years by modern researchers who are still trying to emulate real Wootz steel (which is still a bigtime trade secret if it has in fact been successfully emulated, as some Russians and a few others have claimed). Sure anyone can make a knife which looks like "Damascus" steel by forging it out of a cable, that doesn't mean anything though in terms of quality as you are aware. And would not have worked as an export product for the Hindu smiths of the Middle Ages and on back.

Alloying elements like phosphorus are related to cold work hardening. They have nothing to improve heat treatment or making it easier.

I'm not an expert on forging steel, having only barely tinkered with it. You appear to be more knowledgable in general than I am. But I raised this example to cite just one way in which something being done a LONG time ago (this treatment of bones in bloomery forge smelting appears to go back to the Halstadt era in Spain and Austria) which in modern steel would seem like a dangerous impurity but for the techniques they were using, helped them to make better weapons. Given the proliferation of "magical" formulae for hardening steel, including in my favorite KDF manual the (15th Century) 3227a, and the fact that they were working on this stuff in highly competitive industries, selling to customers who were themselves dangerous people counting on their products to save their lives, that they did figure out a few things which worked in terms of metalurgy that we don't necessarily understand today.

Just the fact that they clearly knew how to make tempered steel (which we know from the admittedly rare presence of full martensite blades from as far back as the 3rd Century BC that I know of) without knowing anything about the actual chemistry, tells me this is the case.

Full temper of a big thick sword with ancient material is difficult, to say the least. You´ll chance cracks and you´ll get warping in no easily solved ways. Could be done? yes , but it wouldn´t be the safest choice, slack quenching, fine perlite structures were a much safer way and most blades tested show exactly that. Adn design can be combined to obtain something perfectly useful.

I'll have to read up on this a bit more like I did for the armor, but if my memory serves fully tempered steel blades were not unusual by the 13th Century. I know they have found some mixed results in some testing but in the period we are discussing (Late Medieval) my understanding is that slack quenching was not the common technique even for things like messers. Good quality swords (which had become very cheap by this point) were fully tempered. But just like with armor, there were places where good swords (and other blades) were made consistently, albeit more than just the handful of centers you see for armor production.

Design in many, if not most , of the oakeshott typology puts use envelope of the steel in the blade well into the elastic range for perlitic steel which behaves exactly as it was full tempered martensitic steel (Which is one of the weird and counter-instinctive things in steel)

That is interesting.

My point is that an ancient sword in times when the cycle "hardening + tempering" wasn´t a widespread knowledge had a huge difference in performance with anything you can make in your backyard with an old car spring, a coal forge and burnt oil. Strictly speaking about mettalurgy and no design involved.
Once proper tempering was widespread (you have pointed a nice source in the XVI cent. I had only found some in the XVII) you can get different things and certainly that happened.

I'll grant you this, it wasn't common knowledge, but that was because of the nature of the economy back then. Hardening + tempering was a trade secret. It was not one of those technologies like the production of iron itself, which was disseminated everywhere by Cistercian monks. But it was pretty widespread in that, sword makers and cutlers (messerschmidt) guilds in towns all over Europe, even in the far flung parts of Western Europe, knew this technology. As did blacksmiths working for Abbeys and for Princes and landed gentry. So I would call it a trade secret, but a pretty widespread one. Knowing it could get you a well paying job! But it wasn't a State secret wars would start over. Tempering of armor, especially large pieces like a breast plate, was obviously much more difficult and rareified.

Can somebody be sure that an armour or sword of tempered martensite wasn´t tempered by heating it in a grinding wheel instead of deliberated tempering? Tempering for simple carbon steel starts at 200C or less.

Well it is described as a heating process in several of those books. Can someone translate the rest of 3227a for me ? Because it was a trade secret I don't think it's the kind of thing that anyone would want to publish for the entire world to see, at least not until the proliferation of the printing - press made it tempting (due to being more feasible) to get rich off of a book. There are parallels with fencing. In the 15th Century we see fewer books and more often made for internal consumption by the author, i.e. a book of secrets like the 3227a, or a special productions for wealthy Princes like some of Talhoffers or Fiore's books. There is a cost to benefit ratio of sharing such valuable secrets.

more simply said:

wootz: alloyed to favour carbide nucleation
your source for Norse steel making: Alloyed to favour cold working.
Modern steel: alloyed to be easily hardenable and to cope fragility induced by sulphur and phosphorus.

All agreed but I think there is more to the story

BD

[leonardo daneluz]

We need to focus in not to talk about "good" or "bad" things in general because that really doesn´t exist.
It remembers when you posted that thread "Were celtic swords crap?"
Just because you and Polibius know of celts straighten their swords doesn´t mean they were crap or that somebody lied.
It just means that celtic swords weren´t elastic, which is one charasteristic whose importance is relative. japanese swords aren´t elastic neither. May be elasticity wasn´t a necessity for common celtic warfare. May be just in that particular battle the romans put the celts to fight in an unconventional way for them.
Opposing widespread use of armour?
Lenghtening the duration of the battle?
Good shield use?
We don´t know.
Once I showed the chemical analysis of celtic swords (the pdf is somewhere) of many la tene swords of similar type (the long wide) to an old engineer who is a local aucthority on mettalurgy ( he designed several key pieces of our nuclear reactors). And I asked what he thought about it. "Cold work hardening, those swords were cold work hardened for sure, phosphorous is pervasive, carbon not. It Could´nt be another way." The pdf also showed consistent cold work hardening but I told him nothing about it, it was pretty obvious for him.
Hard edges, resilient core, long blade, should be a deliberate fine blade for something.

This pattern of things could well existed in medieval times, with things that look better or worst in our mind but weren´t that way in the proper context. We look for good steels with lack of slag and our good elements in there, or full hardened , deliberate temperings, fine grain, rockwell test over 50, etc. We want to find a Boeing 747 in prehistoric times (remember "Highlander"?) but that is exactly what we don´t have to aim for.
You can skip all of that and still make a superb weapon.
Look at the guards of medieval swords! we don´t need to put the shoulders into the guard anymore. We harden the tangs and can keep them strong enough. They didn´t, they needed to put the shoulders into the tang. No matter if it is a frank sword in IX cent or a spanish one in XV, the shoulders go into the guard. No weak point exposed.
We should check the numbers but I have a feeling that it´s better to have an unhardened tang into the hilt than a hardened joint blade/tang just over it.
That´s the "they knew more than us" kind of things we should focus.

[bigdummy]

Well I'm not approaching it from an ideological level, I want to know what the reality was. From the best sources I could find, (i.e. Williams) the reality apparently was that Late Medieval armor was in fact often tempered steel, low-slag martensite. That is useful for me to understand and was worth the effort of 3 days to figure out, according to the best and most thorough source we have. They didn't require any special tricks to make it effective, though that may very well have been the case with armor made in earlier eras.

The thing with Celtic swords simply arose from reading a crap article on Wikipedia, but it turns out I couldn't find many sources with any definitive answers to correct it. Or if there are some I'd have to pour through that Spanish website on Celtic stuff or read 100 articles pilfered from JSTOR to find it and I have too much on my plate now (and back then) to do that. But it's an interesting subject and I have read enough to have a vague opinion on their metallurgy (one which I understand you did not share) but I don't have the intimate familiarity with the primary sources and published test data to really even discuss it at this point. Really for me, a project for another day. Whatever we do here let's not get into the debate over whether the "Celts" were trash-Romans or proto-Gringos or whatever, that one gave me a headache.

What you apparently perceive as ideology in me on this subject, is simply this: I see a strong persistent myth, left over from Victorian era like so many are, that metalurgy was crap in the Medieval world, armor and swords were made of 'pig iron' and so on, and since it appears to be incorrect, I like to point that out. There is an opposite myth that everything from long ago was better, which I also shoot down from time to time (though not often around here*).

The reason I debunk these myths when I encounter them (and so many others) is for the selfish reason that I myself can learn more about these subjects i am interested in. It's just like when you hear that Medieval swords weigh 20 lbs or armor required you to be winched into the saddle as I still often do, it's just part of some "white noise" that makes it hard to find the real data online. Which in turn interferes with understanding more complex subjects like Medieval martial arts. This is the dilemma of the internet: so much valuable real information, hidden by so many billions of tons of utterly worthless bullshit.


BD

* I can however, point you to places where I do

[Thearos]

So is there any possibility that a chopper could shear through mail ?

(On Celtic swords: strange thread. I thought that it was assumed that seeing Celtic tombs with bent swords-- well attested in the funerary material for the La Tene period-- is what motivated Polybios).

[leonardo daneluz]

What you apparently perceive as ideology in me on this subject, is simply this: I see a strong persistent myth, left over from Victorian era like so many are, that metalurgy was crap in the Medieval world, armor and swords were made of 'pig iron' and so on, and since it appears to be incorrect, I like to point that out. There is an opposite myth that everything from long ago was better, which I also shoot down from time to time (though not often around here*).BD

* I can however, point you to places where I do

I think we all agreed on that and can resume moving forward. My point specifically in this matter (ancient metalurgy) is that we don´t ussually get in which direction the ancients worked. We tend to think in a linear progress, kind of "Age of Empires", where you develop one thing as a step into another and then into another. It doesn´t work that way. It could be "pig iron" and still that means nothing viewed as an isolated event. It takes a view of the whole picture to figure what that really means. It is always easier to see the big picture in regard to politics, philosophy or art, because those leave a lot of archaelogical records. But small trades don´t.


"Technology in the XXI century was so backwards that their computers and cars couldn´t work properly for more than a few years without serious malfunction. Can you imagine that? They could put a man on the Moon but not make a car last 5 years"

[leonardo daneluz]

So is there any possibility that a chopper could shear through mail ?

.

From a period metalurgical point of view: Yes, indeed, just as shown there. A posibility.

[bigdummy]

I think we all agreed on that and can resume moving forward. My point specifically in this matter (ancient metalurgy) is that we don´t ussually get in which direction the ancients worked. We tend to think in a linear progress, kind of "Age of Empires", where you develop one thing as a step into another and then into another. It doesn´t work that way. It could be "pig iron" and still that means nothing viewed as an isolated event. It takes a view of the whole picture to figure what that really means.

On this we are in agreement, context is critical for all this stuff, that is actually what I specialize in. I try to take the work of the experts and link it together into a "big picture". That is what I've been doing on my Baltic research.

It is always easier to see the big picture in regard to politics, philosophy or art, because those leave a lot of archaelogical records. But small trades don´t.

Fortuitously, this is changing. The study of the craft industries has become very fashionable all of the sudden in Academia, I have read 3 'new' books on it this month alone.

"Technology in the XXI century was so backwards that their computers and cars couldn´t work properly for more than a few years without serious malfunction. Can you imagine that? They could put a man on the Moon but not make a car last 5 years"

yeah I see what you are getting at, valid point for sure.

BD

[bigdummy]

So is there any possibility that a chopper could shear through mail ?

.

From a period metalurgical point of view: Yes, indeed, just as shown there. A posibility.

I disagree! From what Williams estimates in terms of Joules of energy required, I don't think a man on foot could do it. I'll quote his figures later when I have more time. A man riding by fast on horseback might be able to possibly as this will increase the speed by 30 mph or so but I still have my doubts. From what i gather they did a lot of testing on mail at the RA at Leeds and concluded it wasn't possible to cut through with hand weapons but I've never been able to get my hands on their reports.

BD

[leonardo daneluz]

That is why I said "from a metalurgical point of view" , we need to take into consideration many other factors. It can be cut, and energy required depends on both the agent and the subject. These other factor should be valued by people who knows better than me.

In favour of your belief there is the artist who obviously portrayed the event with a very special weapon. I think this is a hint that the artist wanted to keep some realism into the picture and that a man wearing mail nearly cut in two was something out of the norm.

I would think that mail could be cut, that specialized designs were developed to achieve that and there is more than one fact we have which point to that.
I have no more time now but I also believe there is a possibility that a helmet could be cut nearly as shown in that bible too. Just given a material, heat treatment and design combination.
In the kabutowari test a japanese helmet can be cut 5 to 12 cm , which I doubt should imply a lethal bound. But the same helmet can be made out of steel softer (or softer heat treat) in a way it couldn´t be cut (I have done that idiot thing, just after trying to cleave the M1 helmet). But would collapse easily, possibly with a lethal wound. Take it this way: If you were to be stabbed by a very thin rapier What would you prefer to protect you: a pillow or a piece of thick glass? Because anything but a direct blow won´t break the glass but every stab would catch on the pillow and may be pass through it.
May be a good helmet of that context was made to avoid being catch by a lance point, the usual threat, and be broken by a sword cut, the unusual. The same soft, poorly made helmet shouldn´t be easily cut but would catch and collapse in front of many other situations.

[bigdummy]

Speaking of which

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h0e0NSwYNg

BD