The State Hermitage’s collection of Middle Eastern arms and armour numbers over 5,000 items making it one of the largest of its kind in the world. The permanent display contains 400 exhibits that include articles from Arabia, Ottoman Turkey, North Africa and Iran.
One of the advantages of Middle Eastern (Islamic) military equipment is its relative lightness and compactness. Islamic armies gave preference to chain armour, light round shields, close-fitting conical or sphero-conical helmets, sabres, small arm and leg guards. Another common feature, typical specifically of Middle Eastern arms, was the use of “pattern steels” – crucible steel and forged Damascus steel – for the making of edged weapons.
The dominant element in the decoration of arms and armour, especially edged weapons, was calligraphy, which in the Islamic world is a fully-fledged branch of visual art.
The display opens with a display of exhibits from Arabia, the region where Islam was born. Particularly noteworthy is a sabre blade dating from the 16th century. Both sides of it carry an inscription in gold inlay that is an extensive quotation from the 48th surah of the Quran (“Al-Fath”, “The Victory”).
In the 15th and 16th centuries, Ottoman Turkey became the centre of the Islamic world. Arms and armour from there form a considerable part of the display. The central feature of this section can be considered to be the figure of a mounted warrior demonstrating a full set of defensive equipment for man and horse from the late 1400s or early 1500s. Such armour was used by the Sipahi, the Ottoman heavy cavalry that, along with the corps of janissaries, formed the backbone of the Ottoman army in the 16th century.
The main type of edged weapon in the Middle East had a curved blade. Turkish sabres displayed two distinctive characteristics: the yelman – a massive enlargement of the top third of the blade and a back edge with a T-shaped cross-section, both of which increased the force of the blow. One example is the sabre on display in the first section of the Turkish arms.
Besides sabres, Ottoman warriors also used striking weapons – maces, pernaches (flanged maces) and axes. Such arms were highly effective against heavy armour that consisted of a behter (a shirt of mail-and-plate) and a helmet belonging to one of the three main types that existed in Ottoman Turkey in the 16th century – the misiurka (a cap with a veil of chainmail), the chichak (with a peak, nosepiece, cheekpieces and neck guard) or the turban helmet. Changing tactics and the gradual disappearance of armour led to striking weapons losing their primary battlefield function and evolving into elegant, richly decorated symbols of power.
