Elephant Armor

Origin

The leading of the elephant into battle goes back as far as the kingdom of Magadha, forerunner of the Maurya, in 6th-century BC India, and the meeting of Alexander the Great with the more than 200 elephants of King Porus at the Battle of the Hydaspes in 326 BC is set down in detail in Greek sources. The Seleucids of the Hellenistic world and the Carthage of Hannibal took up the same beast, but the elephants of that age stayed in a relatively light dress of thick hide and only a small guard on the head. The place where the great suit of mail and plate elephant armor as we picture it grew up in earnest is the age of the Rajput and the Mughal Empire of 16th- to 18th-century India, when the Persian term bargustavan-i-pil, the armor of the elephant, took root. On top of that the royal houses of the Khmer, Siam, and Burma in Southeast Asia added their own hand at the same place, and a single great suit came to appear on every great field around the Indian Ocean.

Features

• Mask-like chanfron on the head and a covering of mail and plates on the back
• A single great layer of mail set close with small plates over chest and flanks
• A small turret called the howdah on the back that held two or three men
• A short blade tied at the end of the trunk as an auxiliary weapon to break the foot soldier's line
• Fitted by separate hand to the body of each elephant
• A great symbol that carried the field weapon and the prestige of the royal house together

Stories

Elephant armor was used to keep one great beast alive in the field as long as possible, so as to break the formations of the enemy's foot and horse at the same time. The armored elephant, with head and chest turning aside the frontal arrows and the great layer over the flanks holding off the spears and swords of the foot, pushed straight into the enemy line, while the archers seated in the howdah on its back shot down at the same moment from above. When the same beast met enemy cavalry, horses, unable to bear the smell of the elephant, often broke their ranks, and so in the 16th- to 18th-century fields of India the Mughal emperors Akbar (r. 1556-1605) and Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707) set their elephant corps as one axis of every great battle. In the Khmer, Siamese, and Burmese fields of Southeast Asia, the same elephant was itself a seat of the royal house, and at the Siamese-Burmese encounter of 1593 the two heirs, Naresuan of Siam and Mingyi Swa of Burma, were said to have fought a single combat each mounted on his armored elephant, an episode set down in the records of both kingdoms.

Weakness

The weakness of elephant armor grew above all from the living mind of the beast that bore it. When a heavy suit of mail and plate was set on the back and a mask on the head, as the cover against frontal arrows grew firm, the same elephant's tolerance of heat and its endurance were greatly cut, and the load on one beast reached hundreds of kilograms. Furthermore, the elephant was deeply weak before the noise and the fire of firearms, and as gunpowder and the matchlock musket spread from the 16th century, an armored elephant, startled by a great noise, often turned and charged back into its own lines. The case of the First Battle of Panipat of 1526, in which Babur scattered the elephant corps of the Lodi Sultan with a small number of matchlocks and cannons, stands as the representative place. From the start a single suit of elephant armor cost a sum equal to a city ruler's whole yearly war budget, and as the age of firepower came in and new weapons filled the same place for the same cost, the elephant armor withdrew slowly from the field and moved into the seat of ceremony.

Cultural Significance

Elephant armor is the largest single suit of armor the hand of man ever set on the body of a beast, and was in itself a great symbol that gathered in one place the prestige of the old royal houses around the Indian Ocean. The Akbarnama, the great chronicle of the Mughal emperor Akbar, holds the record that a single elephant in armor equaled the whole yearly war budget of a city, and in the illuminated manuscripts of the same age in India and Persia, an armored great elephant carrying the emperor and the prince upon its back and trampling the enemy line appears in many places. Above all, the suit of 17th-century North Indian elephant armor preserved at the Royal Armouries in Leeds, England, woven of about 5,840 small mail rings and plates, is one of the largest beast armors in the world, taking up a whole room of the museum and showing the viewer its bulk at a glance. The Jaipur City Palace Museum and the Junagarh Fort in Bikaner of India, and the National Museum in New Delhi, also hold many elephant armors of the same age and pass on their craft to this day.

In Popular Culture

Elephant armor appears as a great visual symbol in the period dramas, films, and games of India and Southeast Asia. The Indian films Jodhaa Akbar (2008) and Bajirao Mastani (2015) show in close detail how the armored elephant cut into the line in the great fields of the Mughal and the Maratha, and the BBC period drama Empire (2012), in its Mughal chapter, faithfully rendered a suit of elephant armor modeled on the actual piece at the Royal Armouries. The strategy games Total War: Rome II and Civilization VI set armored elephant units as the troops of India and Carthage, and the same figure appears in the Indian campaign of Age of Empires II. Films, however, often draw elephant armor as if it were already used in the age of Alexander, and so often blur the truth that the great suit of mail and plate elephant armor took root only in 16th- to 18th-century India.

Trivia

• The Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, England, preserves a single suit of elephant armor made in 17th-century India, woven of about 5,840 small mail rings and plates, one of the largest beast armors in the world, which takes up a whole room and overwhelms the viewer.
• At the First Battle of Panipat of 1526, in which Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, scattered the armored elephant corps of the Lodi Sultan with a small number of matchlock muskets and cannons, the case is often cited to show in a single blow how weak elephant armor was before the noise and the fire of firearms.
• At the encounter of Siam (Ayutthaya) and Burma (Toungoo) of 1593, the two heirs of the two kingdoms, Naresuan of Siam and Mingyi Swa of Burma, were said to have fought a single combat each mounted on his armored elephant, an episode set down in the records of both kingdoms, and shows that in Southeast Asia the armored elephant was the seat of the royal house itself.