«Тахиййат»: Сборник статей в честь Н. Н. Дьякова

Mongol Warfare and the Creation of the Mongol Empire m 125 n The Mongols made their own arrows, as they did bows, also each in his own style, as apparently reflected in the variety of arrowhead types in pictorial sources. Every [Mongol] soldier is ordered to carry into battle sixty arrows, thirty smaller ones for piercing and thirty larger with broad heads for discharging at close quarters 1 . Illustrations show arrows drawn to the cheek or ear 2 (I would need 32- inch arrows), but the editors of Saracen Archery point out that while an archer would make, or have made, a set of arrows to his own measure — the sixty arrows Plano Carpini reports — supplementary “government-issue” arrows (if any) would be sized long, to prevent injury to the archer from “overdrawing” 3 . Mongol-period art displays many kinds of Polo’s broadhead arrows 4 of various sizes and shapes — ovoid 5 , and rhomboid with acute- or obtuse-angled points 6 — perhaps because their most common combat targets were unarmored men and horses more vulnerable to sharp-edged broadheads than to sharp points on “piercing” arrows 7 . Both of Polo’s types are echoed by some Tibetan arrowheads of the seventeenth or eighteenth century 8 . Three 1 Polo 1980: 314. 2 Rice D. T., Gray B. The Illustrations to the “World History” of Rashid al-Din [hereinaf- ter “ Rashid 1309”] (Edinburgh UP, 1976), passim. Saracen Archery , 27, prescribes drawing an arrow to the ear. 3 Saracen Archery , 33. The Mongol arrows a little over two feet long claimed by May, 51, would be dangerously short. 4 See Rashid 1309, passim ; E.D. Phillips, The Mongols (New York: Praeger, 1969), plates 19 (= Legacy , p. 38, fig. 33, cat. no. 24), 20 (picture reversed), 21, 25; M.S. Ipş Ì roğlu, Paint- ing and Culture of the Mongols (New York: Abrams, 1966), pls. 8 (= Phillips’ plate 19), 9 (= 20, but not reversed), 43. No light is shed on Mongol arrowheads by Saracen Archery , 24–26, 28–29 or Anon., Arab Archery , N.A. Faris and R.P. Elmer ed. and trans. (Princeton, 1945), 107–110. 5 Rashid 1309, respectively, #3 (which looks very like the ambiguous arrowhead~feather in the important “shower-shooting” scene in Sheila R. Canby, Islamic Art in Detail (Cam- bridge MA: Harvard UP, 2005), 101), and #4. David C. Nicolle, Arms and Armour of the Crusading Era, 1050–1350, 2 vols. (White Plains, NY: Kraus International, 1988), has line drawings of the weapons (except the first) in both this and the following note: #386B, #386AG, #386E. 6 Ibid , #19 and #53, the latter showing both types. 7 Vulnerability: tests by Saxton T. Pope, in Bows and Arrows (Berkeley: UCal Press, 1962), 56, show that “bodkin points [low-profile arrowheads especially effective against armor] are not effective in penetrating soft animal tissue ... a cutting edge is necessary”. The only plausible example of a Mongol piercing point I have seen is in May, facing p. 115, second from right in the middle row. 8 LaRocca D. J. Warriors of the Himalayas: Rediscovering the Arms and Armor of Tibet. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006. P. 194–95, no. 96.