The funny thing is, in practice the potential future issues inherent in trading away advanced military gear to a potential foe didn't actually bother people. Or rather, they might bother rulers and suchlike, but their enterprising underlings tended to be only too happy to sell them off anyway.Originally Posted by Lowenklee
The way Frankish kings repeatedly banned the sale of high-quality swords to Vikings (to little effect) is a poignant illustration of this phenomenom. People are greedy little buggers.
Moreover, if I've understood correctly it wasn't too unusual for Germanic mercenaries to fight for Celtic paymasters (among others), which would be another source of armour - both as loot, and as tokens of gratitude and friendship from the employer. Given the prestige associated with such gear, odds are they'd occasionally be given away as diplomatic gifts to foster goodwill in allied chieftains etc. Didn't the Celtic big shots pretty much have a practice of demonstrating their wealth and power with lavish gifts to followers, clients and so on ?
If the smith knows how to draw wire, then he can make mail. It's not so much difficult as rather tedious and very time-consuming. And as for the iron, I'm under the impression you want it to be pretty soft (ie. the opposite of what goes into cutting edges) since the whole point of the stuff is that it deforms under the blow and absorbs its energy while simultaneously preventing the sharp stuff from getting as far as the meat under the armour where it could do major harm.There must certainly have been a high cost associated with the import of large amounts of the required higher grade iron ore than the domestically available bog iron and the time/labour required for it's manufacture (which would not have been something within the means of just any iron smith) which might have made mail prohibitivly expensive for even many of the germanic chieftains?
I've no idea of the quality of raw iron available to the Germans at the time, but if it was good enough for spear-and axe-heads it ought to make the cut for mail too.
It'd have to be damn near uselessly low-grade if it didn't, anyway, AFAIK.
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