I myself have seen the late Lord of Eguillie, and the knight of Puigreffier, honorable old men both, remain fully armed for a whole day, marching in the face of their companies - whereas now a young captain can hardly bear to remain fully armed and armored for two hours.” Those armors that are worn now are so weighty, that they will deaden a 35-year old Gentleman’s shoulders.

Soldier and chronicler Pierre de Brantôme, a contemporary of Montaigne, likewise declared that men who wear heavy armor are “ spent at thirty years.”įrançois de la Noue, a Huguenot captain known as “Iron Arm,” wrote much the same thing in Discours Politiques et Militaires, also published 1587: “ Our men of arms in the time of King Henry made a far fairer show … their armor wasn’t very heavy, so that they were well capable of wearing it for 24 hours. For, in plain truth, to observe the weight and thickness of the armour we have now in use, it seems as if we only sought to defend ourselves, and are rather loaded than secured by it.” In 1587, French military theorist and famed essayist Michel de Montaigne noted that “ today the officer is so heavily armed that by the time he becomes thirty-five his shoulders are completely humpbacked.” In a separate account of roughly the same period, Montaigne noted that “ Alexander, the most adventurous captain that ever was, very seldom wore armour, and such amongst us as slight it, do not by that much harm to the main concern for if we see some killed for want of it, there are few less whom the lumber of arms helps to destroy, either by being overburdened, crushed, and cramped with their weight, by a rude shock, or otherwise. Not surprisingly, steel body armor was also growing very thick and very heavy. Some of the helmets of that era weighed more than twenty pounds - and, although that’s an admittedly extreme example, and helmets that heavy were very rare, helmets of more than five pounds were downright common. We can begin by simply noting that the plate armor and helmets of the 14th-16th centuries were increasingly designed to withstand ballistic impacts, and, on that account, grew thick and heavy over time. The history of the ballistic steel helmet is a much shorter story. Roman helmets, which were used alongside bronze helmets of similar design, were of sophisticated metallurgical composition - their helmets were generally either carburized or made of a reasonably high-quality medium-carbon steel alloy, though not necessarily quenched.īut to write the history of the steel helmet itself from the Roman era would fill an entire book. A Short History of the Ballistic Steel HelmetĪlthough the first steel helmet is lost to history, it was the Romans who were first to make wide use of steel helmets in battle, and they were certainly the first to make those steel helmets iconic.

Wwii ballistics armor and gunnery