An Ottoman Lamellar and Mail Shirt, Turkey, Late 15th Century
Auction Closed
April 29, 12:32 PM GMT
Estimate
50,000 - 80,000 GBP
Lot Details
Description
the front of the riveted mail shirt fitted with twenty steel lamellae of varying sizes on the front, carved with an elegant floral vine motif surrounding Arabic inscriptions in monumental thuluth, reading in the rows from left to right ‘Religion, Religion, Religion’, and ‘The Sultan….the greatest and the possessor….’ And a Prophetic tradition ‘The world is a house for the homeless and the property [of those who have none]; three lamellae plain replacements, the back fitted with sixty-five steel lamellae of generally smaller size and comparable decoration, of which four plain lamellae, of which three replacements and one an apparent addition
97cm.
Philippe Missillier Collection no.142C
H. Ricketts and P. Missillier, Splendeur des Armes Orientales, Paris: Acte-Expo, 1988, p.24, no.14
During the late fifteenth century, lamellar and mail shirts of the present form were the dominant form of body armour across the three main polities of the Near East: the Aqqoyunlu tribal confederation of Eastern Anatolia and Iran, the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and the Levant, and the Ottoman Empire. The earliest surviving example of such armour is a shirt inscribed with the name of Ibrahim Sultan, governor of Shiraz between 1414 and 1434 (Bashir Mohamed, L’Art des chevaliers en pays d’Islam: Collection de la Furusiyya Art Foundation, Milan: Skira, 2007, pp.300-1), which is only a few decades after its earliest known appearance in miniature painting, in a Diwan of Khwaju Kirmani dated 798 AH/1396-97 AD, now in the British Museum, London (inv. no.Add 18113, fol. 56v., David G. Alexander, Islamic Arms and Armor in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015, p.29).
Other examples include three shirts now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. nos.04.3.456, 36.25.54, and 36.25.362), each similarly inscribed with monumental Arabic inscriptions, two of which are overlaid with silver, one with gold (Alexander 2015, pp.28-34). Another notable example was made for an officer of the Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Sayf al-Din Qaitbay (d.1496), previously in the Saint Irene arsenal and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. no.2016.99).
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