Polish Hussar Half Armour
Seventeenth century
A steel breastplate with a raised central ridge, a rounded helmet with a nasal bar and a neck guard of overlapping plates, shoulder and arm defences, and a gorget engraved with a cross and a Virgin Mary: this is the armour of a Polish winged hussar, the heavy cavalry that dominated the battlefields of eastern Europe for two centuries. Behind the shoulders of the figure on display rise the famous wings, tall wooden frames set with eagle feathers, and over the armour hangs a leopard skin. The whole effect was meant to terrify, and it did.
The armour is a half armour, protecting the torso, arms and head but leaving the legs free for riding. Look at the breastplate, made of horizontal strips riveted together so that the rider could bend, and at the brass rivet heads and edging that gave the steel a rich, decorated look. The helmet, called a szyszak, has a peak, cheek pieces and a hinged nasal bar, and the gorget with its religious images was worn over everything as protection of both kinds. Hussars carried a lance up to five metres long, a sabre, a long straight sword for use on horseback and pistols, and rode into battle in a wedge that broke infantry squares.
The National Museum in Kraków has one of the largest collections of hussar armour in Poland, and it is displayed in the Arms and Uniforms gallery of the Main Building, alongside sabres, muskets, banners and the uniforms of every Polish army from Napoleon's legions to the Second World War. The wings, it is now thought, were worn mainly for parades, but the sight of a hussar charge at Vienna in sixteen eighty three, with King Jan Sobieski at its head, was enough to end the Ottoman siege.
Did You Know? The purpose of the wings is still debated; the most popular theory, that their whistling frightened enemy horses, has never been proved.
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