The end of the Thirty Years War, dubbed the ‘first world war’ by many historians, also marked the end of a long period where weapons’ manufacturers competed with makers of armour. Firearms now prevailed over armour in land warfare, and the rivalry was not to be renewed until the coming of the first tanks in 1917.
However, in the east, the development of protection for riders lagged a century behind Western Europe. In the second half of the seventeenth century, mail-clad horsemen whose equipment had not changed in a thousand years cruised the expanses of Russia, Poland, the Ukraine, Hungary and the Turkish territories. There were several reasons why this type of protective equipment was retained in the east but abandoned in the west.
In 1600, the workshops of Graz still produced mail short shirts, aprons, collars and sleeves as protection for the parts of the body left vulnerable by a suit of armour. However, a pair of sleeves cost 10 guilders and a shirt 25, while a complete suit of armour was only 6.5 guilders. Armour offered much better protection, and the technology of forging was more advanced and cheaper than the welding or riveting of small iron rings. Because of its high price and the insufficient protection it offered, mail was abandoned in the west at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
In the east things were quite different. Every village blacksmith knew how to cut iron rings and turn them into mail armour. The cost of this labour was much lower, as no special qualifications, complicated tools or furnaces were needed for working plates. Until almost the end of the nineteenth century, mail shirts were produced in Afghanistan and Iran, and worn practically as a national costume.
In western armies, the ratio of infantry to cavalry was about three to one. In the east, it was the other way around: the horseman was still the backbone of the army, and his main weapons were the spear, sabre, long thrusting sword for piercing mail, and the composite bow. Against these weapons mail and a round shield offered adequate protection.
In Poland, the mail-clad riders were called pancerni (from the German panzer – armour). At the reviews held before the Battle of Vienna (1683), 8,874 pancerni rode past under 84 flags; this was more than half Poland’s total cavalrymen at that time. They were heavy cavalry, organized in units of about 100, and the men serving in them belonged mainly to the middle and lower nobility. They were armed with a 3 m/10 ft spear (rohatyna), a sabre (szabla), a long straight sword (konzerz) up to 170 cm/70 in long usually worn on the left side of the saddle, a sabre (karabela), a composite bow and a round shield (kalkan). Part of the pancerni who fought at Vienna also had a pair of pistols in ornamented saddle holsters.
