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

m 87 n David Nicolle Leather Armour in the Islamic World: a Classic Problem T his paper looks at armour, helmets and to some extent horse-armour made of leather, but not at other pieces of leather equipment such as shields. Where Islamic leather armour is concerned, the most important piece of docu- mentary evidence remains Mur ḍ ī Ibn c Alī Ibn Mur ḍ ī al-Tar ṣ ū ṣ ī’s account of how such armours, helmets and indeed shields could be made. This text ap- pears in his Tab ṣ irat arbāb al-lubāb which was written for Saladin when the latter was the last vizier of the final Fā ṭ imid Caliph in Egypt, probably in the late 1160 s 1 . Since the publication of Claude Cahen's translation of this part of the Tab ṣ irat, a large number of fragments of leather or rawhide armour and leather helmet of medieval Islamic origin have been discovered. These were found in association with wood-lined helmet or hard-hats, composite bows, composite crossbow staves, crossbow bolts, fragments of horse harness, bro- ken saddles and other interesting items 2 . 1 Al-Tar ṣūṣī , Mur ḍ ī Ibn c Alī Ibn Mur ḍ ī. The Arabic title of his book is usually abreviated to Tab ṣ irat arbāb al-lubāb which is normally translated as “The explanation of the masters of the quintessence of tactics...” The best known and perhaps original manuscript is that in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (Ms. Bod. Hunt 264). It was edited and substantially translated, though with er- rors, by C. Cahen: “Un traité d’armurerie composé pour Saladin”, Bulletin d’Etudes Orientales , 12 (1947–1948) 103–160. Dr. Shihab al-Sarraf has comleted a more accurate and complete rendition but this has not yet been published. 2 One of these remarkable hoards seems to have been known since at least the mid- 1970s, after which it remained in the hands of various specialist antique dealers until the entire collection was sold the Qatar Museums Authority in Doha. Various stories purport to explain its origins. The first that I heard was from the late Dr. Ada Bruhn de Hoffmeyer, of the Instituto de Estudios Sobre Armas Antiguas in Spain. She had heard from a French archaeologist that “some leather helmets had been found during the excavation of a castle in Israel”. Next I briefly saw some lacquered crossbow staves in the possession of an antiques dealer which were said to form part of a collection of weapons and leather armour “probably from eastern Turkey.” The crossbow staves were virtually identical to, and probably