[Gregstrom]

Thinking of cloth armour... IIRC Mongol cavalry tended to wear loose shirts of raw silk. The cloth tended not to be cut by arrows, which a: protected the archer and b: made removing barbed arrowheads an awful lot easier, because the cloth around the arrowhead made pulling it out much safer.


On the swords/armour bit, I'm with Endo on maces/hammers etc. being used a lot. The Royal Armouries in Leeds (UK) have a few experts who do demonstrations of swordfighting, jousting etc., and I chatted a bit while visiting. I think they were talking about late medieval/early renaissance equipment (full harness and so on), and apparently swords would start a battle literally razor sharp but got blunted pretty quickly due to hitting hard objects with a great deal of force. Hitting plate armour with a newly sharpened blade could do pretty horrible things to it, but you weren't going to keep an edge on the blade very long. A can opener on a stick of some sort was much more reliable against armour, and still killed unarmoured men pretty well into the bargain.

Oh yes - since the later armours were quite highly engineered to allow mobility with high levels of protection, just denting armour could have a serious impact on the wearer's mobility.