Leather Armor

An age old hunter-gatherer throws his last spear at the sickly elk at the back of the herd and by some miracle brings it down. The warrior drags it back to his camp where he quickly finds what is edible on the animal. He discovers bones, skin, and teeth don't taste very good and decides to find other uses for them. Bones become weapons, teeth trinkets. Without much imagination the warrior uses the hide for the same purpose the animal used it for, protection from the elements and the environment. Over time the hide dries out naturally and the ancient man notices the hide is tougher and lighter. He'll think he won the prehistoric lottery until it rains or he falls into a river. Once the hide gets wet again it will start to rot and smell something awful.

No one is really sure when man first discovered to use tannin to tan hides and turn them into leather. Leather is hide that has been treated so it won't putrefy when it gets wet again. As you can guess, being able to make clothes and armor, out of something that is readily abundant was a great boon to civilizations. Leather afforded very good protection in its basic form but as time progressed people learned different ways to make the leather stronger and more suited for protection against weapons.

cuir bouilli is a type of leather that is made when you dip leather in a warm liquid be it water, oil or something else. This process makes the leather much harder and more brittle. The hotter the liquid the harder and more brittle it becomes. For a couple minutes after removing it from the liquid the leather is easily molded. Usually the leather would be pressed in between two pieces of wood formed into a certain shape for the armor or it would be shaped around a model.

The second type of better leather that was a regular suit of leather armor coated with lacquer. Lacquer of yore was generally red or black and was usually obtained from resinous or sappy trees. Lacquered armor was popular in China, and some lacquered scale leather armor was created elsewhere. Lacquered leather was extremely strong and could have given later plate armors a run for their money. Although it was a great invention and surely saved a lot of lives lacquered leather did have some downfalls. The armor was quite heavy and not very flexible. Also the people applying the lacquer to the armor would have probably had about the same chance getting a life insurance policy as a modern day asbestos remover.

The last leather that was possibly used but not very likely is waxed leather. Heating the wax and applying it the armor would have produced a similar affect akin to cuir bouilli armor. The added benefit of the wax creation process would have been less chance of over heating the leather and shrinking or destroying it. The other benefit of waxing leather would have been making the armor virtually waterproof. Now the downsides of why waxed leather was possibly not used. Although wax would have increased the armor durability against blunt weapons it would have acted as a lubricant for arrows and other piercing weapons. Also wax in olden days was used for candles, most historians have no idea how expensive wax could have been in ancient times. Finding or buying enough wax to outfit an army could have been a very costly affair.

Leather armor, being one of the oldest armor types, held up very well to the test of time and is used even to modern times. Leather is a biological material though and due to decomposition we have very little remnants or evidence of ancient leather armor. Most of the information we have is from texts or from picture interpretations. We do know all different types of leather have been used throughout time. Deer, buffalo, bison, rhinoceros, ostrich, zebra, antelope, cow, goat, sheep, and alligator are some examples of leather has been used. There's no doubt that leather will continue to be a useful material for armor far into the future.

Illustrated by Cyrus "killacaravagio" Hunter

Until the benefits of curing leather were discovered, soldiers were often smelled before they were seen.