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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Abstruse" data-source="post: 5941123" data-attributes="member: 6669048">Holy crap, you posted a picture that proves my point! For one thing, tournament lances and the sort of lances they used in actual warfare are two different things. The lances were made to shatter on a clean hit so it would be easier to tell (no instant replay or electronic sensors back then).But let's look at that armor for a moment. If an attack was going to get through that armor, were would it go? I see 1) Eye slits 2) Neck/under the helm 3) Under the arm (which leads to the heart and lungs) and 4) between the thigh and knee (which takes out the leg and can bleed a lot...don't ask how I know, just trust me). So if you get through those defenses other than just hitting with a strong blow, you're going to do some serious damage.Now look at someone in leather armor (I tried for 10 minutes to find an image of historical leather armor and gave up because we pretty much moved to metal armor for most armies as soon as we had the ability to make it and it sort of decomposed so we don't have very many artifacts left...also, turn safe search on, trust me). It's not nearly as effective at protecting all areas of the body as the plate armor above. The softer material doesn't turn away as many blows, so any blows that do get through are less likely (per blow) to hit a vital area.Therefore, the man in the plate armor is going to be hit with a damaging blow less often than the man in the leather armor, but any blow he does get hit with is going to be far more likely to hit a vital area.Edit: Oh, and there were fatalities in tournaments, though they were far more rare than shown in movies and TV. But a shattered lance has been known to go exactly into the places I just mentioned far more frequently than I'm sure the jousters would've liked.</blockquote>

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