How Medieval Armorers Made Flexible Armor

Hey everybody, Adam Savage in the Armor Conservation Lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with its curator, Pierre. How are you, sir? Good. Good to see you, Adam. It's good to see you again. Pleasure. You have brought out some things to show me, and I know nothing about what you're planning to talk about. Fortunately, I've been given some thought about what I wanted to prepare, and I'm thinking all the time about what the armorer had to solve, problems in making armor. We often think that armors are sculptors, what they make in the end is very beautiful, it's shapely, maybe to an extent the tail has to fit, but really they also have mechanical problems to solve. How things fit together, how they fit the body when the body's in motion, and they came up with some ideas, and I thought there are some ideas that are pretty nifty. You're singing my favorite song, I love that. The beginning of armor in medieval times, they have mail, which is very flexible, and then they need to reinforce it, and they put hard pieces attached to it, leather, textile, of course it's flexible. Yeah. Then they start having plates, and they need to combine them, and I brought in this German breastplate from the early 16th century that demonstrates two kinds of solutions that they adopted to create mobility. Torso defense, wear it right over here, it's got a flexible waist, so that's pivoted with just two rivets, one here, and one there, and that's enough to create this kind of flex. Then when you use your arms in combat, you need to be able sometimes to reach over your torso, so here they use what we call sliding rivets, so these pieces have a little slit, and then they can move in and out, so it can contract and expand. On the best armors, there are springs that push them back automatically, so as soon as you're done, it comes back into place. So those are pretty basic techniques that create a pretty basic type of flexibility. So we're here in the 16th century. Go back in time, we're at the beginning of the 15th century, and we have this incomplete vambrace, or defense for the arm. It's hinged, so you can get in and out, we know about hinges, but what they did, which is perhaps one of the earliest examples, is they used a system of slits, very similar, to allow the lower arm to rotate. So you have the slits in the actual arm, and then you have rivets on the plate above it, and that's just enough to create a rotation. Wow. Okay? So we now have things that flex, and we have things that rotate. A bit later, at the same time this armor is made, they have a new way of doing rotation. You want to try it? So it sticks a little bit, you have to, because you could oil it a little more. Yeah, but that is actually impressively smooth. It's pretty smooth, it's flush, you don't see how it's done. And on the inside, you have a system of a plate that acts like a catch, and then the other one is caught by it, and then they just grab each other a bit like this, and one rotates into the other. So they used the same system we have here, to cover the inside of the arms, right? This is almost always a gap in armor. Right, and here they decided to completely close it, and it's still very much like a lobster tail in terms of functions, right? It's pretty straightforward. So now I'm introducing a mystery piece, a piece that has puzzled us for a very, very long time. So it's kind of unwieldy. It's light, you're welcome to hold it. Now, I mean, the only place I can think of is right here. You're onto something, you're onto something, right? It's a piece of armor that came in 1927 as a gift of Prince Albrecht Radsville, and when it came, we said, this is not articulated the way we used to. You have a scissor type of articulation. So instead of the basic thing we have here, now we have smaller lames that are placed strategically with sliding rivets, some inside, so it can really be compact. This is so fun. But it also has a familiar now rotating movement, so things can happen in all kinds of direction. And we had never seen anything like this. No. So we were wondering, well, what is it? Now, I'm producing here drawings that were done in the 60s of what this looks like. So this is a view like you have it here, trying to understand it. And we came up with a theory, which were very, very few horses had articulated legs. And this might be a piece for one of them. So these are drawings or sketches based on late 15th century examples of armors made for Maximilian I of Austria. And the thought was, maybe it's designed to fit one of the horse's legs, because it's so strange. Yeah. And we went as far as publishing these pieces with the idea that it definitely fits the right leg of the horse, the rear right leg. And we came up with these designs to explain it. So you actually took these over to a horse or took them simulacrally? In the file, we have anatomical drawings of the horse bones and muscles. And then it was suggested, well, it could fit exactly that part of the leg. And obviously, this is a fragment. It was part of something much bigger. And maybe the horse leg does need all of this business. Wow. That would be a huge horse. It would be a huge horse. And we know that there were legs made for horses. And the armors who made those horse armors, they asked their clients to never show the armor to anyone. So that you can have one, but you must not show it, please. Because if you show it, somebody will copy it. And so these were like state secrets. They were state secrets. We know, for example, that the Marquis of Mantua was presented with an opportunity to buy one of those horses from Germany. And the armorer said, I leave it with you. And if you don't want it, I just take it back. And you must let no professional walk into your arsenal and see what it looks like. And maybe three or four of those articulated leg armors for horses were made. I mean, three or four horses. And we never saw, there's not one that survives. Really? We don't know. Maybe we're onto something here. So this may be a unicorn of a piece. It would be a unicorn piece, as humble as it is. It's from a point of view of technology, probably one of the biggest design challenges that an armorer had to solve, which is, this is not your human anatomy, so how do you make this work? Right. And the other thing is, is it still moves well enough that it feels like it was a mature process? Like they had solved this problem before. It's not a prototype. Right, right. It's not a prototype. One of armorers here actually made a replica. Because this one, it's a historical piece, it's got its share of issues. So this is giving you a better sense of how it would have functioned, if you want to have it in here. So this was hammered in our department as a way of replicating. So if it can do all these things, then what is it? Wow. And it looks to me like this is the centerpiece of a piece, and more of this continues on the outside. And perhaps it was completely symmetrical. Right, right. So it's the 1970s, we came up with a new answer, and you were right, it goes onto the crotch. It does! It's a piece of crotch armor. So in terms of contextualizing this, we have a very strange type of armor that is done for the foot combat. Foot combat is a duel originally to death. One of the participants has to die, and it's part of the legal process. When you appeal a decision, at some point God will decide, and you let these two gentlemen fight it out, and one of them is killed, and then obviously God designated the one who is telling the truth. So they created these armors originally for this type of judicial duels, but in the 16th century, this is the one that was in the last night. It's more of a violent sport, you do not need to kill the adversary, but it is one of the most dangerous kinds of tournaments you can be in. And therefore, every part of the body has to be protected. So here's the lobster tailing. The lobster tailing, the arms, the gauntlets inside the arms, so you cannot lose your gauntlet. The trunks, they're like closed in the front, and then the legs are completely encased. There's not one area of the body except the inside, the palms of the hands are visible. That raises some questions of how you would actually design these things. And we did an exhibition here in 1991, where we borrowed armors from Madrid, from the Royal Armory of Madrid, including this foot combat armor made for Charles V. This is the catalog of the exhibition. It comes with this big skirt that is called a tunnelette, and it's designed to prevent attacks on this area of the body. But it's a pretty short one. The early medieval ones are going all the way to the knees. And it came, we have a 16th century inventory showing in watercolors, all the pieces that go with it. It came with a piece like this that goes somewhere, that goes with it, goes somewhere. These are shoulder reinforcers. What are these for? And there are other views of this armor. It doesn't answer this. So when the armor came here, our colleagues immediately just asked if they could take it apart. Yeah. And they did. And this is one photograph of the back of what we have here, of the full piece. Look at that. So you have this line, you have these lames here, they would have continued all the way to cover the inside of the legs. And then on the front, it's obviously open. And this is where you have the beginning of this embossing for the cod piece. And it has the same types of articulation as you can see here. So these armors were made in very limited series, these very special tournaments. And even though there are a few left, those are not the pieces that call attention. So we believe that what we actually have here is one of the earliest examples of this type of design and an interesting piece of engineering for any armor in terms of achieving all that the inner side of the leg had to do. Well, especially with the replication here showing that you can actually, that these can be made to tolerance, oh, sorry, that won't do what I just did, that allow it to stay. It just popped out because we don't have the internal leathers. Right, right. But that like, yeah, this makes it really clear how viable this is. So it took from 1927 to 1974 to figure it out. 50 years. To figure it out. And it shows a different type of activity for armors. We think of them also sometimes as like metallurgists, like how to heat up and temper the armor. But this is more maybe the work of a locksmith. Right, right. You know, moving parts and how they fit with one another, how they're made practical. You had some of those things like the bills from Maximilian's clockmaker for designing the shield mounts. For designing the shields, ejecting the shields, exactly. And it's possible that this was also outsourced to a degree. That's amazing. So it's, you go for something rather straightforward and then you have with the same toolkit an armor trying to make something that rotates, flex in a sort of natural way. But, you know, I love talking about spacesuits and I, spacesuits and armor are very closely linked in my head because they're hard things we fit on our soft bodies. And the hardest part about designing a spacesuit is that every human is different. And this is also true of armors. Doing this kind of work, like every single one of these would have to be bespoke to its owner. Especially this one. This is made for a boy. It's too small. This is too small to fit an adult. So this must have been intended for the practice, you know, the training of a young prince. No question it was custom made. And it had to be delivered on schedule, otherwise he was... Oh, right. Because he's going to grow too big. He's going to have to grow it. Talk about growing pains. So a true mechanical luxury of sorts. Yeah. Amazing. What a, that is a thrilling story. I love that. I just, I, this blows my mind. Thank you so much for breaking this out and telling me this story. It's amazing.