The trouble is, if the shoemaker starts to bake the pies, And the boots are for the cake-maker:
And things won't go well
Fable I. A. Krylova "Pike and Cat"
For starters, one funny illustrative example is a little off topic. When I teach PR students, I always tell them that their profession is a little akin to that of a detective or a spy. You need to develop observation in yourself, which helps to learn a lot about others, those people with whom you are dealing, and not tell them anything about yourself. So, one of the ways to find out the degree of a person's education is to give him a book. A person with a high level of education always looks at it from the end to look at the publishing house and circulation, for both can say a lot. A “simple” person, even if he wants to find out the name of the publishing house, looks for it on the title page. That is, without asking, you can immediately determine who is in front of you: a candidate of sciences or just a literate amateur.
Angus McBride. A Mordovian warrior attacks the Russian knight.
It’s even funnier when a person says: “I've read such a book in a black cover …” and after that you can not take him seriously at all. But these are purely professional skills, another reader will say, and there are scientific journals, monographs that anyone can study … Yes, there is all this, but only non-specialists usually do not read all this. They prefer to watch TV or, in relation to historical topics, they limit themselves to L. Gumilev (according to the results of content analysis, this is the most mentioned author on the VO website). There is nothing wrong with that. It is bad when people judge absolutely categorically about what they have only a very superficial idea. That is why there are so many links to Internet resources in the comments - this is the most accessible one. Only not so long ago I came across two links to materials from the magazine "Rodina" for 1992 (that's even how!), But still for some reason people do not refer to such magazines as "Questions of History", "History of the State and rights”, or, say,“History Illustrated”. There are also more specialized publications containing very narrowly focused information, but they (and about them) are also on the Internet today, you can find them and get acquainted with their content. No time? Oh yeah! This is a problem today. But then one should restrain one's peremptoryness in judgments.
Sam and Garry Embleton. Warriors of Volga Bulgaria in the 9th - 10th centuries: 1 - Bulgarian military leader, 2 - Bulgarian horseman, 3 - archer of the Siberian taiga tribes.
However, for some reason, the worst of all is those who, having read a couple of books and familiarized themselves with one of some sites, turn into persistent adherents of obscure theories and "subverters of the foundations" of traditional history, like one of our firefighters from the Penza region, who wrote about the fact that the pyramids of Giza are breakwaters from the flood, which will occur when the waters of the world's oceans fill the voids of the mine workings and the globe topples on its side. I am citing this example of the wildest ignorance only because it was published in one of our Penza newspaper. It would be better, as they say, that he trained to put out fires.
Once I came to visit V. P. Gorelik to Moscow, and he told me that he was invited to a Moscow club of reenactors, and when he came to them, he saw an ad on the wall: "Tomorrow is a test in scramasax" make sure that there is very little information about him and there is clearly not enough of it for "offset"). But they explained to him that this is only a theory, and there will also be practice - how they used it! “And how? Nobody seems to know? So you know? " - Gorelik was surprised and left this “interesting place”.
The book of V. P. Gorelika in the publishing house "Montvert"
This does not mean that amateurs cannot discover anything interesting. They can. But you need to know where and what to look for, that is, to know in advance half of the answer. And one of the most interesting sources of information for both the professional and the amateur are candidate and doctoral dissertations posted on the Internet today. The abstract, that is, the introduction or preface to the study, is freely available and can be read free of charge. For the text of the dissertation itself, you have to pay from 450 to 500 rubles, but it's worth it, and this price is not much different from the cost of modern printed books. And in my opinion, it is better to buy these works than something else. In them, at least, there are links to everything, archived data, which you yourself can use in the future. In general, this is a very "fishy place" for anyone who is "interested in history."
For example, I recently went into a VO dispute about the armament of Mordovian soldiers. And the question immediately arises, where can you find information on this apparently little-studied topic? Note that it turns out that a Ph. D. thesis was written and defended on it: “Armament and military affairs of Mordva in the first half of the 2nd millennium AD. NS. (Year: 1998. Author of scientific work: S. V. Svyatkin)
The work has a solid archaeological foundation and an equally extensive historiography, that is, it also relies on the work of its predecessors. Well, the actual source base of the work is data on 139 arrowheads, then there are 57 spearheads, axes - 99, 6 sabers, 5 shields, 20 copper bowlers, 12 bits, 14 stirrups, several parts of the headband and harness, 12 girth buckles, 4 tricky buckles, although only six pages (84 to 90) are devoted to armor and camping gear.
The author points out that various elements of weapons from medieval Mordovian burials at the end of the 1st beginning of the 2nd millennium A. D. have been described many times in the works of such historians as A. N. Kirpichnikov, G. F. Korzukhin, and A. F. Medvedev. But, in his opinion, archaeological sources only by themselves, no matter how numerous they are, are not able to give a complete picture of the events of such a remote time from us. It is impossible to interpret them without the additional involvement of written evidence of "contemporaries", be it the works of foreign authors and the epic legends of the Mordovian people themselves.
V. Svyatkin in his research notes that the quantitative and qualitative indicators of the armament of the Mordovian army were such that it can be argued that it was not inferior to the military forces of its neighbors. At the same time, the main weapon of the Mordovian warriors at that time was a spear (a heavy spear with a diamond-shaped tip in cross-section), battle axes, daggers, large three-layer bows with arrows of almost a meter length. In battle, spears for throwing were actively used - darts and sulitsy (the same darts, but heavier, with which they pierced armor and chain mail). To protect against enemy weapons, shells made of thick bovine skin with rows of metal plates sewn on them were used, as well as helmets made of leather. The richer warriors already wore metal helmets, and also had swords and … yes, they had chain mail! That is, their weapons practically did not differ from the warriors from the famous "Bayesian canvas". Moreover, it is characteristic that the quality of the metal used in the manufacture of weapons was higher among the Mordovians than, for example, among the neighboring Slavs. And as was customary everywhere, except for the militia, there were also permanent squads of Mordovian princes, which consisted of professional soldiers. With good weapons, good physical data and centuries-old tactics of fighting in the forest, the warriors of the Mordovian army were dangerous opponents for any enemy invading them.
V. P. Gorelik. Warriors from the borders of Russia: 1 - Polovtsian, 2 - Mordovian warrior, 3 - Latgall.
Only continuous internal strife weakened the Mordovian region. The processes associated with political fragmentation, characteristic of both Kievan Rus and the neighboring Volga-Kama Bulgaria, obviously could not but affect ancient Mordovia. In any case, the author points out that the documents of that era already speak of the presence of a number of Mordovian principalities, as stronger - there were two of them that went down in history by the names of their princes (foreigners) Purgas and Puresh, and weaker ones and dependent on them.
As for the Mordovian protective equipment, the author of the dissertation research indicates that "it is worth recognizing that on this issue, archaeological sources are very scarce." Although whole helmets and chain mail were already found in the graves of the Andreevsky kurgan, in the Mordovian burials of the period under study, no whole items of such protective equipment were found. Iron armor was represented in them only by finds of several chain mail - that is, fragments of chain mail. They were found in burials No. 186 and 198 of the Armiyevsky I ground burial ground, and in burial No. 50 in the Seliksa-Trofimovsky burial ground.
An analysis of these chain mails allows us to conclude that all those features that are noted as characteristic of the ringed armor of Europe in the middle of the 1st millennium AD. found their reflection also in the Mordovian chain mail armor. The technique of weaving chain mail from riveted rings was typical of this period. And it is the riveted rings that show us the army burial grounds. But chain mail from simply rolled rings was also known. And in the Mordovian burials in the Seliksa-Trofimov burial ground, we also find just such chain mail. It is significant that the last type of chain mail weaving in Western Europe was used exclusively in the middle and second half of the 1st millennium AD. That is, in terms of the time of existence, the above-mentioned burials of the Seliks-Trofimovsky burial ground very clearly correlate with the existence of these armor in other regions. At the same time, just like in Europe, in the Mordovian land there are rings made of both round wire and flattened, that is, flat.
The fact that the Mordovian chain mail is presented in the form of scraps is not surprising. Here it is necessary to take into account the important ritual side of such a phenomenon as burial, when symbolic meaning was attached to individual chain mail elements of armor. That is, it was a pity to sacrifice all the chain mail to the deceased. But a piece of weaving was easily sacrificed, and thus signified the reception of a position in the grave, widespread in pagan afterlife ceremonies, instead of the whole object of its part. This convention is easily confirmed by examples with throwing weapons, when instead of a full quiver of arrows, only 2-3 arrows were placed in the grave. A whole chain mail could be put into the grave together with the deceased only extremely rarely in exceptional, very special cases, because such a valuable armor for a clan or tribe in this case was lost forever. The exception, of course, could be the leaders (and such a tradition is known to us from the burials of many peoples), and especially noble, distinguished warriors. In ordinary cases, the chain mail was inherited, and if it fell into the ground, it was only in the form of very small scraps of chain mail.
In the Mordovian burial grounds of the XI-XIII centuries. (Zarechnoye II, Krasnoe I, Vypolzovo IV), remains of shields are also found - mainly these are iron umbonous plaques. Judging by them, the Mordovian shields of that time could be round or even oval. It can be assumed that in the period under study such shields were used everywhere in the Mordovian lands (Grishakov V. V.., 2008. - S. 82-137.).
Miniature from the Japanese "Legend of the Mongol Invasion". Pay attention to the number of soldiers in metal protective equipment. 21 warriors in soft armor, 3 in metal.
And now the conclusion. Obviously, an appeal to a scientific dissertation based on extensive archaeological material, as well as the works of other authors who worked on the same topic, helps to make a well-grounded conclusion that the Mordovian warriors, like the warriors of that time among other peoples, they had both leather protective equipment and metal, which did not differ in any way from the equipment of the "knights of the East and West" of the early Middle Ages. Another thing is that the percentage of such warriors was small. However, they were. As for other sources, for example, what was the equipment of the Mongol warriors who invaded Japan, we are shown by miniatures from the famous "Legend of the Mongol invasion of Japan" of the 13th century. There we see warriors both in metal armor and in protective clothings. Counting the first and the last for all the miniatures gives us the following indicator: 1: 7! It is quite possible that there were even fewer than 1:10. But where the count goes to the thousands, then this is a fairly large indicator of "hurry".
P. S. Until recently, our university had a separate department of philosophy. And from time to time (one might even say regularly) people of a very strange appearance came to it, bringing whole handwritten treatises on philosophy, which contained recipes for universal happiness, a complete world order, and even an explanation of why God is God! And the manager in such cases usually said: "Well, you can't forbid people to be interested in philosophy …". With history, things seem to be better. In any case, in my city, I know of only two cases when such amateurs tried to at least somehow declare themselves. But at the service of such people now the Internet, where you can write everything that God puts on your soul. And in fact, you can't forbid a person to be interested in interesting things! You can advise how best to take it up, but for some reason few people follow these advice.
