Rüstung eines Generals, mit Schild

This armour combines a mail shirt with metal plates, a type of armour first recorded in the Islamic world in the late fourteenth century. One of the earliest extant depictions of this kind of armour is in the 1396 edition of the works of the Persian poet Khwaju Kermani (London, British Library, cod. Add Ms 18113, fol. 23r). A large number of such harnesses have survived, among them Timurid, Mameluke, and Ottoman examples.

The armour, decorated with arabesques, is the work of an Ottoman armourer active in the early sixteenth century. Particularly interesting are the circular discs on the front and back. Known since the late Middle Ages, they were first recorded in Iran (originally, they probably functioned as a solar symbol) whence they made their way to Central Asia and Europe. The helmet also features several inscriptions: ‘The Sultan, the king, the nobleman’, and ‘Completed by the armourer Ali’, as well as verses from the Quran.

The armour was first recorded in the Armoury of Heroes assembled by Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria, at Ambras Castle near Innsbruck, where it was attributed to the ‘King of Cuba in India’ (künig zu Cuba in India), perhaps a reference to the city of Cambay in Gujarat. In the sixteenth century, Cambay was an important transregional trading centre. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese sources it is called Caobay or Cābay. It was established as an independent princely state under Mahmud Shah III, Sultan of Gujarat. A rey de cābay is depicted in the sixteenth-century Codex Casanatense (1889, Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense), and Marco Polo too mentions that ‘Cambay had its own king’. The armour may have found its way to Europe via the Portuguese trade routes, ending up in the Habsburg collections.