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

m 152 n John Masson Smith, Jr. arms industries. The Ilkhans’ armor procurement is described by Rashid al- Din 1 and illustrated in the Rashid 1309. [The Mongols] make a number of thin plates of [iron], a finger’s breadth wide and a hand’s breadth in length, piercing eight little holes in each plate; as a foundation they put three strong narrow straps; they then place the plates one on top of the other so that they overlap, and they tie them to the straps by narrow thongs which they thread through the afore-mentioned holes; at the top they attach a thong, so that the metal plates hold together firmly and well. They make a strap out of these plates and then join them together to make sections of armour… for horses as well as men… 2 Such armor provided fairly full coverage, below the knees and on the up- per arms, as depicted in Rashid 1309; it has been claimed to be more proof than mail against arrows 3 . But it required access to metal and the services of miners, foresters, smelters and blacksmiths 4 . Although no examples of such Mongol armor survive, some Tibetan suits made of platelets (lamellae) do. They are fairly similar in construction to Plano Carpini’s design, except not attached to underlying leather straps 5 . One of these, in the Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds — “a particularly fine and heavy example” — is estimated to weigh about 50 lbs. 6 As for the utility of such armor, consider the experience of the eighth cen- tury Turkic prince, Kül Tegin, as reported on his funerary stele: When [Kül Tegin] was twenty-one years old, We fought against (the army of) General Çaça. 1 RaD, III, 748–50. 2 Plano Carpini 1966: 34. 3 David Nicolle, Medieval Warfare Source Book: Warfare in Western Christendom (Lon- don: Arms and Armour, 1995), 136, cited by May, 53. 4 Mongol weapons-procurement in Iran and its reform by Ghazan Khan is described in RaD, III, 748–50, and discussed in Smith/Lev, 260–61 and 263, n. 50. 5 LaRocca, 51: “the lamellae are supported by being laced only to one another rather than to a lining or support material of any kind, and ... the rows of lamellae overlap upward”. Mongol lamellar armor in Rashid 1309 overlap downward, but upward in the “Demotte” Shahnāma ; see Smith/Lev, 263, n. 50. 6 Personal communication from Thom Richardson, the curator who handled it in prepara- tion for its display in New York in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Warriors of the Hima- layas: Rediscovering the Arms and Armor of Tibet” exhibition in 2006. See LaRocca, 98 and 99, plate no. 26.