The information is to help with an essay comparring the Christian Knightly Orders (eg Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights) with the Ottoman Janissaries.

All being religious fighting institutions with a Military basis.

Any help you could give me wou;d be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Phil

--------------------

--------------------

The David Nicole I havn't seen. In what sense is he biased?

--------------------

Nicolle has a habit of attributing every piece of armour technology, and any transmission of any technology from East to West, while dismissing the notion of the possibility of native invention.

This is perhaps due tom his intensive study of Outremare and the Fatamid sultans, and that general area and era. The idea that all technolgy, especially simple technological advances can have only a single point of origin, and then a linear path of transmission of knowledge is generally very dated.

To give you a simple example of such a discredited theory is the ealy idea that some explorers in centeral America had that because Mayans and Aztecs had developed pyramids, they somehow must have had contact with ancient Egypt - apparently to their minds, native Indians didn't have the wearwhithal of a small child with a set of building blocks to put them together in a pyramidal form. It is an idea long scoffed at by pre-Columbian scholars, given the evidence of the Mound peoples in the Ohio region, and other similar evidnence that shows native peoples developing the concept of an artificial elevated sacred place.

At any rate, I digress. Niccole tends to dismiss the notion of Western Armourers having a tradition of their own, and a path of evolution of armours of their own, regardless of evidence to the contrary.

--------------------