Судан и Большой Ближний Восток

273 Alexander S. Matveev. A Case of Survival of an Early Medieval Straight Sword... armour (mainly lamellar armour and a coat of plates, as chainmail was little used by the Mongols). If the West, which was not that much in a direct contact with the nomad invaders, solved the problem by further elaborating the European straight sword, the Muslim opponents of the Mongols, especially the Mamluks, adopted the weapon of their foes. In the 13th C. the onlyMiddle Eastern army equipped exclusively with curved blades were Il-Khanid Mongols; however, the Egyptian Mamluks eventually also adopted the sabre as a major edged weapon in their army, as it was among the most effective arms of the time. In Egypt, however, the straight swords continued to be used, though on a much lesser scale. It seems that the final transition to the curved blade did not take place there until the Ottoman period. 1 Thus, after all, the changes in the sword shape in the West and in the East, however different they seemingly were — heavy “hand-and- a-half” straight or highly tapering acutely pointed swords; and a slightly curved heavy sabre, — ultimately had the same starting point and the same purpose: to cope with improved body defences of the opponents, which had been previously developed to defend the cavalrymen from arrows. So, technical problems faced by knights and Mamluks were quite similar, though they were solved by absolutely different ways, thus leading to a further divergence of Western and Eastern warfare. The peculiarities of Western knightly warfare determined further development of plate armour, which — due to the highly developed technology of European armourers — in due course led to creation of the full armour. In the East, however, this line of armour development has not been completed, because of both inadequacy of a too heavy armour in the much warmer climate of the East, and inability of the Eastern armourers to produce large pieces of metal to create one-piece 1 A number of European 14th — early 15th trophy swords were stored in the arsenal of Alexandria (see Fig. 16), thus indicating use of European heavy swords inMamluk warfare. Another evidece of employing heavy straight swords can be find in the furusiyya manuals, which mentioned swords weighed from 2 to 5 pounds, the heaviest obviously being European-like broadswords (likely, “hand-and-a-half” type or evenheavier). [H.Rabie. TheTraining of theMamlūk Fāris // War, Technology and Society in the Middle East . London, 1975].