Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 1).djvu/189

 hemispherical helmet not unlike that illustrated (page 108, Fig. 129), but without the nasal-guard.

We have already made use of, for the first time in dealing with the history of armour and arms, certain illuminations which have yielded to us much interesting detail. The next to which we shall refer is a leaf from a series of Old Testament pictures executed by a French miniaturist in the third quarter of the XIIIth century, and given in the XVIIth century to Shah Abbas, King of Persia, by Cardinal Bernard Maciejowski, Bishop of Cracow. The subjects represented on its two sides illustrate the life of David. Two leaves from the same book are in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, whilst others are in the Phillipps Collection, Cheltenham. When the book was in its entirety in Persia a Persian translation of the Latin text was added in the margins. The leaf we illustrate was brought recently from Teheran by an Armenian priest and is now in the collection of Mr. S. C. Cockerell. This most delicately drawn and carefully executed page affords us a minute record of military apparel in the third quarter of the XIIIth century. As the illumination appears to be of French origin, we may judge the fashions to be a little in advance of those prevailing in England at the time. The vellum is painted on either side. One side, in which merely civil costume is recorded, shows episodes in the life of Saul, but the side which we reproduce depicts the history of Absalom, and is a veritable mine of information regarding the armament of the period with which we are dealing. The three subjects are in two rows beneath arched canopies. Under the two canopies in the top row we see the battle of Ephraim and the discovery of Absalom by Joab (Fig. 141), while the third subject, the return from the battle, occupies the two canopies of the lower row (Fig. 142). Certain soldiers in the battle of Ephraim wear new types of head-piece not yet mentioned by us, the complete helm and the war hat or chapel-de-fer. All the soldiers are in full chain mail with the coif, which appears from its well defined hemispherical form to be worn over the steel cap; each warrior wears the surcoat uncharged with any heraldic device, but in every case of a distinctive colour, occasionally carried out in the caparisons of the horse which, as yet, appears still unarmoured. All the hauberks terminate a little above the knees, while the mail chausses, sollerets, and hauberk sleeves fit closely to the limbs, the long arms of the hauberk in every case terminating in mittened gloves with a separate thumb. Kite-*shaped shields, of no great size, are used by a few of the warriors only. This could be explained if we accept the theory that most of the shields, like