Gothic Plate Armor

Origins

Full plate armor, enclosing the whole body in articulated steel, emerged around 1400, and by the middle of the fifteenth century two great schools dominated Europe. The Milanese armorers of northern Italy, above all the Missaglia family, made rounded, smooth harnesses with large, simple plates. North of the Alps, the German armorers of the Holy Roman Empire Arms & Weapons developed a different style from about 1460: long, slender and angular, with pointed sabatons, fluted plates and cusped, pierced edges. Nineteenth-century collectors called it 'Gothic' for its likeness to the architecture of the period, and the name has stuck. Its finest makers included Lorenz Helmschmid of Augsburg, armorer to the Emperor Frederick III and to Maximilian I, and the workshops of Nuremberg and Landshut.

Design & Construction

A Gothic field harness typically comprised a sallet, a helmet swept back into a long tail at the neck, worn with a bevor protecting the chin and throat; a breastplate built of two overlapping plates, with a long fauld of lames below; a backplate; full arm defenses with large couters at the elbows and gauntlets with articulated fingers or mitten plates; and full leg harness ending in long, pointed sabatons. The fluting was not decoration alone: ridges stiffen a plate the way corrugation stiffens sheet iron, letting the armorer use thinner metal for the same strength. The best harnesses were of hardened and tempered steel. A complete field harness weighed around 20 to 25 kilograms, spread over the whole body, and a fit man could run, mount a horse unaided and get up from the ground in one; the idea that knights were winched into the saddle is a nineteenth-century myth.

Combat Use

Gothic armor made its wearer almost invulnerable to cuts, and turned the knight's fight into a contest of thrusting to gaps and battering. Opponents armed with the Halberd, the War Hammer and the pollaxe struck at joints and tried to concuss or topple him, and the Longsword was used half-sworded, gripped by the blade, to thrust into the armpit, groin and visor. On horseback it was the harness of the lance charge of the Burgundian Wars of the 1470s and the wars of the Empire; on foot it was worn by knights fighting in the front ranks. Gunpowder weapons were still too slow and inaccurate to make it obsolete, and armorers began to proof their breastplates by firing at them.

Legacy

Around 1500 the pointed Gothic style gave way to the rounded, fluted 'Maximilian' armor, which married German fluting to Italian shapes, and by the mid sixteenth century full harness was retreating before the pike and shot of the Landsknechts. Very few complete Gothic armors survive, and most in museum displays are assembled from parts; the harness of Archduke Sigismund of Tyrol in Vienna and the Gothic equestrian armor in the Wallace Collection in London are among the best known. Their shapes still define the image of the late medieval knight.