One of the most common misconceptions about cavalry equipment is that European knights were best equipped, heaviest armor, and everyone was canned in iron. This is a typical Western-centric view, in the history of war for thousands of years, there are not many times when Western knights are well equipped, and the Eastern heavy cavalry is the strongest in equipment compared with the Western knights, and the equipment of the Western knights has to learn from the Eastern counterparts for a long time.
The tin plate armor that everyone remembers is a product of the late Middle Ages, and the armor on the man's harness is actually a product of 1600 years, when Constantinople fell for a century and a half. In the era of the Tang army and the Mongol army, the main armor of European knights was still lock armor, and the lock armor of the Knights Hospitaller was even used in the Ottoman Empire. The most well-equipped armor in history is also the Eastern heavy cavalry, during the Wei and Jin Dynasties, China was equipped with a large number of fully armored cavalry, Byzantium and the Sassanid Empire also had similar armies, but European knights rarely put armor on warhorses in the plate armor era, and The heavy equipment europe was far behind by the East.
The equipment technology of European knights was also heavily borrowed from the East, and their lock armor technology came from the Scythians in Central Asia and the steppes of southern Russia. Lock armor was so expensive in the early Middle Ages that the Saxon royal family stipulated that whoever had lock armor defaulted to a low-ranking nobleman. The Arab and Byzantine empires also used chainmail, but their elite troops used heavy armor similar to those of China.
In the Middle Ages, giving a knight's Chinese-made armor can definitely earn a sense of gratitude. Medieval knighthood techniques were not all horseback sprints, and the lock armor of knights during the time of Charlemagne was mostly open on both sides, rather than in front and back openings, which was more conducive to dismounting and fighting. In the eleventh century, that is, during the Northern Song Dynasty, when the legions of the Holy Roman Empire invaded Italy, many German knights still "wore only an old-fashioned chain armor, and many of these chain armors were still open on both sides rather than front and back", which shows that until the eleventh century, there were many knights in Europe who did not know the norman knight's gun charging technique. Many of the German knights lacked leg armor, and their equipment was very shabby compared to the Song Dynasty cavalry of the same period. The knight spear competition we are familiar with did not rise until the middle of the Middle Ages, and the knights of the early Middle Ages still often dismounted to fight, and the technology of the horse long gun was really inferior to that of the Chinese knights in the Southern and Northern Dynasties.
The helmets of medieval knights were also widely used in eastern techniques, and the early medieval star helmets were helmets from Persia. The helmet consists of four spliced iron bars, no nose cover design on the helmet, no chain armor turban wrapped inside, and no defensive design for the throat. At the same time, the helmets of the Chinese Southern and Northern Dynasties appeared hemispherical gizzards, and some helmets could also wrap the whole face, showing only the eyes, nose and mouth.
The Tang army armor has a huge soft armor neck guard, which is called a ton neck guard, which can protect the throat in front of it and avoid being shot through the throat by the enemy. The helmet of the Tang Dynasty also had a hanging device, which could usually pull up the dunxiang to reduce the danger of heat stroke of the wearer, and when fighting, it could put down the dunxiang to protect the throat of the warrior, and the concept of ergonomics was very advanced.
The helmets of the elite Persian cavalry not only had hard armor on the neck, but also added iron masks to protect the face. These designs of the Persians were expensive and were only used on a small number of elite warriors, and the ordinary Heavy Cavalry of Persia was not equipped, and the European knights were naturally not introduced. In the early Middle Ages, the cavalry helmets of both the Wei and Jin dynasties, the Sui and Tang dynasties, or persia far exceeded those of their European counterparts.
The helmets used in the European Middle Ages also include two pieces of helmets and one piece of dome helmets, as well as the most well-known barrel helmet, one piece of dome type helmet and barrel helmet are also european imports from the Middle East technology. In the late Middle Ages, Eastern and Central European knights widely used the conical direct riveted split-piece helmet, which had a collar armor and neck shawl, and was also a product of the Nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppe. Medieval Europe lagged behind the East in technology, and it is not surprising that knights used a lot of oriental technology in their equipment, but after their descendants developed, they used Renaissance equipment to mix pearls, adding a lot of brilliance to the ancestors.