Small question: What armour is this?

[Dwin]

Hello.

I'll start off my first post with a quick question. As in the title, what type of armour is this? Apparently, I can't post URLs on my first post, so it will be in my next post.

While I'm waiting for the ability to post agian, for those of you who are intimately familiar with the game, I'm talking about the armour that Cretan Archers wear. It's a type of quilted armour, brownish in colour, worn over a white tunic.

[Dwin]

Here we go:



I've seen it around, but I haven't been able to get a name for it. I'm thinking it might be a spolas, but I don't know for sure.

[Watchman]

This ? Looks mostly like quilted armour to me. Could have an outer layer of leather too, going by the colour.

[Sarcasm]

Not necessarily, linen can assume that colour naturally. The white cuirasses you see on the greeks were often bleached to get that effect.

[Watchman]

...or covered with a bleached layer, I know. I was just hypothesizing based on the somewhat uniform shade of brown that reminds me a lot of many shoes I've seen.

Speaking of which, is there any reason you couldn't use leather for the outermost layer anyway ?

[Sarcasm]

I guess it is possible. But I've only heard of armour made like that during the middle ages in Iberia where they'd essentially have a leather bag in the form of a long shirt with padded linen inside. Good for low intensity warfare and arrows.

Then again I'm no expert in Hellenic matters, though curious on all forms of warfare.

[geala]

I would be very interested to get a source for that form of armour!

It is a hot discussion wether the Greeks used leather armour. For me the result of the discussion ist clearly "yes" but some may disagree. At least some examples of the spolas were made from leather. Another question would be wether the leather spolas were the normal tube-and-yoke armours so often depicted in the pictural sources or wether this form of armour was exclusively/mostly made from layered linen.

And now we come to the armour of the EB Cretan archers. I never saw something like this in the sources but I think it would be a good and simple form for a padded leather or layered linen armour (btw: how would it be donned and closed? just get into it like a pullover?). To be honest when I first heard about the spolas I imagined something like that stuff. So a pictural evidence would be very valuable.

The colour of the armour is a bit to dark for natural linen which is mostly light grey, seldom light brown-grey. But the same for leather; normally leather would be brighter, but that depends on the animal and the process of leather-making.