Lamellar armour is built from hundreds of small plates laced directly to one another; scale armour hangs similar plates from a fabric backing. The two look alike and are constantly confused.
Lamellar armour is made of hundreds of small plates laced directly to one another with leather or sinew. There is no garment behind them: the lacing is the structure, and the plates hold each other in place.
Scale armour looks similar and is built the opposite way round. Its plates are riveted or sewn onto a backing of fabric or leather and hang from it, overlapping downward like roof tiles, so the backing carries the weight and the plates only cover.
Together they are the dominant body armour of the eastern medieval world, where Western Europe used mail. The Byzantine Empire, the steppe peoples, and the Rus' lands all armoured their soldiers this way, and the Byzantine version — the klivanion — is the form this archive most needs.
A lamella is a small rectangular iron plate, typically four to eight centimetres tall and one and a half to three wide, pierced with pairs of holes along its edges. A cuirass takes several hundred of them and a full harness well over a thousand.
The plates are laced into horizontal rows, each plate overlapping its neighbour, and the rows are then laced to each other so that each row laps upward over the one below. That upward overlap is diagnostic, and it means a downward blow slides across closed joints rather than into open ones.
The result is a semi-rigid shell that flexes at the rows but not within them. A Byzantine klivanion is a torso cuirass fastened at the sides, usually with shoulder pieces of the same construction and a skirt of hanging leather strips — pteruges — below the waist.
Against cuts it is excellent: a blade meets overlapping iron backed by more iron, and the layered plates spread the force in a way a single thickness does not.
Against arrows it does better than mail. This matters enormously in the eastern Mediterranean and on the steppe, where horse archery was the dominant threat, and it is a substantial part of why lamellar rather than mail became standard in those places.
It was above all cavalry armour. The Byzantine kataphraktoi of the tenth century wore klivania, and the same construction equipped the horse archers of the steppe whose armies reached Europe during the Mongol invasions — the forces that destroyed the Hungarian and Polish armies at the Battle of Mohi and the Battle of Legnica in 1241.
Its great practical strength is manufacture. Cutting and piercing small plates is unskilled work compared with drawing wire and riveting twenty thousand rings, so lamellar can be produced in quantity by workshops that could not make mail at all.
It is also repairable in the field. A damaged plate is unlaced and replaced without touching the rest, where a torn mail shirt needs a specialist and a supply of rings.
Its weakness is the lacing. Leather and sinew rot, stretch when wet and can be cut through, and a cuirass whose lacing has failed comes apart into its components — which is both its battlefield vulnerability and the reason none survive.
Both constructions are ancient and reach medieval Europe from the east. Scale is well known in the Roman world as the lorica squamata, and lamellar arrives with the steppe peoples and through Byzantine contact with Persia and Central Asia.
The Byzantine klivanion is documented from the tenth century in military manuals and in art, and is the standard cuirass of the heavy cavalry through the middle Byzantine period.
In Western Europe it never took hold. Mail was established, the Western threat picture was different, and lamellar appears only sporadically — as at Birka in Sweden, where a tenth-century find of eastern type shows the trade route rather than local practice. In the east it persists into the fourteenth century and beyond.
Byzantine work is the most systematic, and the klivanion is described in the military treatises with enough precision that its construction can be reconstructed with some confidence.
Steppe and Mongol forms favour longer plates and lighter cuirasses suited to horse archery, often combined with hardened leather rather than iron, and it is this tradition that Europe met directly in 1241.
The Rus' lands sit between the two and have produced the richest archaeological record in Europe: plate finds from Novgorod, Kostroma and elsewhere run into the thousands and cover the twelfth to fifteenth centuries.