Almost as early in India, they began to tame and use elephants in combat practice. It was from here that they first spread throughout the ancient world, and in India itself they were used in battles until the middle of the 19th century! The elephant is a very intelligent and extremely strong animal, capable of lifting large weights and carrying them for a long time. And it is not surprising that they were used for such a long time in the war.
Indian war elephant in armor. Royal Arsenal in Leeds, England.
During the ancient Punic Wars, the Ptolemies and Seleucids already had entire units of specially trained war elephants. Their "carriage" usually consisted of a driver who guided the elephant and knew how to handle it, and several archers or spearmen with long spears and javelins, who sat on his back in a kind of fortress tower made of planks. Initially, the enemies were frightened even by the very fact of their appearance on the battlefield, and the horses from one of their species were enraged and threw the riders off themselves. However, very soon, in the armies of the ancient world, they learned how to fight war elephants and began to use them with great caution, for it happened more than once that huge animals fled from the battlefield and at the same time trampled their own troops.
To protect the elephants from enemy weapons, they began to cover them in the same way as the horses with protective shells. The earliest mention of the use of elephants in protective weapons dates back to 190 BC. BC when they were used by the army of Antiochus III the Great of the Seleucid dynasty in the battle of Magnesia against the Romans. Despite the bronze armor plates, the elephants, which had become uncontrollable during the battle, fled and crushed their own troops …
In the 11th century in India, Sultan Mukhmud Ghaznevi had 740 war elephants, which had armored headgear. In one of the battles against the Seljuks, the Indian Arslan Shah used 50 elephants, on whose backs sat four spear-bearers and archers dressed in chain mail. Enemy horses began to rage at the sight of elephants, but the Seljuks still managed to repel the attack, hitting the leader of the elephants in the stomach - the only place that he was not covered by armor.
In his trip to Delhi in 1398, Tamerlane also met with elephants, dressed in chain mail armor and trained to snatch riders from their saddles and throw them to the ground. Elephants were usually placed in front of the troops and, invulnerable to swords and arrows, went to the enemy in a dense line, which plunged him into fear and horror, forcing even the most worthy to flee.
Leeds Elephant. View from the side where there is more armor.
It was hard for Tamerlane's army, since not only archers were sitting on the Hindus' elephants, but also bann grenade throwers, which made a terrible roar, as well as rocket launchers with bamboo pipe rockets. Nevertheless, the victory remained with the warriors of Tamerlane, who managed to hit the elephant drivers with arrows. No longer feeling the firm hand of a man, in the roar and under the furious blows that rained down on them from everywhere, the elephants, as happened very often, began to panic and fled. The frightened and furious elephant was so dangerous for its own troops that even in ancient times, each elephant driver had not only a special hook for controlling an elephant, called an ancus, but also a hammer and a chisel, which, if the animal went out of obedience, had to be hammered into it. to the head. They preferred to kill the elephant, enraged with pain, but not to let him into the ranks of their troops.
After that, Tamerlane himself used war elephants in the Battle of Angora and won it, despite the fierce resistance of the Ottoman army. The Russian traveler Afanasy Nikitin, finding himself in India in 1469, was amazed by the magnificence and power of the Indian rulers, who even went for a walk accompanied by war elephants, Nikitin wrote: in damask armor with towers, and the towers are chained. In the towers there are 6 people in armor with cannons and squeaks, and on the great elephant there are 12 people. Other contemporaries reported that poisoned points (!) Were worn on the tusks of elephants, crossbowmen and chakra throwers were placed on their backs, and warriors with rocket weapons and grenades covered the elephants on the sides. In the battle of Panipat, only the continuous fire of artillery and musketeers made it possible to repel the attack of the elephants, which, even with all their weapons, turned out to be a good target for artillerymen and riflemen from Babur's army.
Images of Indian war elephants from old miniatures.
A number of images of war elephants of the era of the Great Mughals have survived to our time, for example, in illustrations of the famous manuscript "Babur-name". However, the drawings are drawings, but only one of the real elephant armor survived and is now in the British Royal Arsenal Museum in Leeds. Apparently, it was made in the late 16th - early 18th centuries. The armor was taken to England in 1801 by the wife of Sir Robert Clive, then governor of Madras. Thanks to Lady Clive, we know exactly what this unique armor looked like, which was the result of the gradual (prolonged) development of horse armor.
"The elephant horse". What is it and why? Alas, it was not possible to photograph and translate the plate under this strange figure.
Thanks to this armor, we know what the unique protection of war elephants looked like, which became, in fact, the result of the development of horse armor. The armor is a set of small and large steel plates connected by chain mail. Without the missing plates, the armor stored in Leeds weighs 118 kilograms. The complete set would have to consist of 8349 plates with a total weight of 159 kilograms! Large square gilded plates of armor are covered with chased images of walking elephants, lotus flowers, birds and fish.
Fragment of the Leeds elephant armor.
Perhaps only these plates were visible from the side, and the rest of the armor was covered with a cloth blanket with square cutouts. All square plates were padded with cotton pads. The details of the shell, which consisted of several parts, were worn on the elephant over a linen lining. The lateral parts had leather straps that tied at the elephant's sides and back.
The head guard of the Leeds elephant consists of 2195 plates measuring 2.5 x 2 centimeters, connected vertically; around the eyes, the plates are arranged in a circle. Its weight is 27 kilograms, it is attached behind the ears of an elephant. The armor has two tusk holes. The trunk is two-thirds unprotected. Throat and chest protection weighing twelve kilograms has a cutout for the lower jaw in the middle and consists of 1046 plates measuring 2.5 by 7.5 centimeters. The fastening of these plates is such that they overlap one another like a tile.
The side armor pieces consist of three vertical panels each. Embossed with embossed steel plates with drawings; there are eleven in the front, twelve in the middle, and ten in the back. In addition to large plates, each panel contains smaller ones connected by chain mail weaving: the front one - 948 plates with a total weight of eighteen kilograms; average - 780 plates with a total weight of twenty three kilograms; back - 871 plates with a total weight of twenty-three kilograms.
Indian swords. Some have a pistol at the base of the blade.
The front panel is decorated with embossed plates; war elephants are depicted on five plates, on one - a lotus, on one - a peacock, and on four lower plates - fish. On the plates of the central panel there are seven elephants, a lotus, a peacock and three pairs of fish. At the back are seven elephants and four pairs of fish. All elephants on the plates are oriented in the direction of movement with their heads forward. That is, taking into account the total number of plates and the chain mail weaving connecting them, we can say with confidence that we are faced with a typical bakhterets, only he was made not for a horse or a rider, but for an elephant!
Perhaps such armor was worn by some warrior, also sitting on an elephant. Who knows?
It is interesting that on the figure of an elephant, recreated in Leeds, his back is covered with an ordinary carpet over the shell, and it is on it, and not in some "chained tower", that a single warrior-spearman sits behind the driver. True, there is a photograph of the Royal Archives dating from 1903, which also shows an elephant in armor made of metal plates and armor scales sewn onto a fabric base. So, on his back, a small platform with sides is visible, in which soldiers could well have been accommodated. In addition to protective armor, the elephant was also put on "weapons" - special metal tips on the tusks; it was a truly terrible weapon. Only one pair of such arrowheads has survived, taken to England from the Garbage, where it was in the arsenal of the Maharaja Krishnaraja Vadiyar III (1794-1868). In 1991 one tip from this pair was offered for sale at Sotheby's [1].
The last armor for a war elephant is also kept in England, in the hometown of William Shakespeare, Stratford on Avon, in the Stratford Arsenal Museum. However, this armor differs significantly from the armor from Leeds in that, on the contrary, it was made of very large plates covering the head, trunk and sides of the elephant, and on its back there is a turret with four supports and a roof. On the front legs there are large plates with spikes, and only the ears are covered with armor made of plates, similar to those on the Leeds elephant.
Thus, elephant armor was developed (or at least kept in the arsenals of India) for a very long time, even when they proved their complete futility, as well as the war elephants themselves. The fact is that with all his skill in training an elephant, a person purely physically cannot cope with it. Any oversight of the driver on the battlefield, the nervousness of the elephants themselves, who are quite easily panicked, the skillful actions of the enemy - all this could very easily lead the war elephants to break out of obedience. In this case, they turned into "Doomsday weapons", using which the commander in the most decisive way put everything at stake.
So, the knightly "elephant cavalry" in the East did not appear for several reasons. Firstly, being on an elephant, the warrior was subjected to heavy fire from the enemy, and secondly, it was extremely dangerous to be on the back of a running, distraught elephant, just as, incidentally, to fall from it.
Indian chain mail armor of the 17th century. (Metropolitan Museum, New York)
That is why the Indian rajas and sultans, if they were sitting on elephants during the battle, used them exclusively as mobile observation posts, and preferred to fight and retreat on horseback - not so strong, but faster and more easily controlled. On the backs of the fighting elephants were commoners - archers and musketeers, throwers of chakras, darts, warriors with missiles (the latter were so widely and successfully used by the Indians in battles against the British that they, in turn, borrowed this weapon from them).
The quality of the Indian damask steel was so great that another warrior was already cut in half, and was still reaching out to raise his saber!
But, in the language of modernity, having war elephants was prestigious. It was not for nothing that when Shah Aurangezeb forbade the Hindus, even the most noble ones, to ride elephants, they considered it the greatest insult. They were used during hunting, on trips, with their help, they demonstrated the strength of the ruler. But the glory of the war elephants faded as well as that of the heavily armed knights in the West, as soon as well-trained warriors with muskets and sufficiently mobile and rapid-fire artillery began to act against them, which they began to use in field combat. Alas, neither rockets nor light cannons on the backs of elephants changed the situation, since they could not suppress the enemy's artillery and … overtake his light cavalry, which now more and more often began to be armed with the same firearms.
