ABSTRACT
In 1926 the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art sent an expedition to Palestine with the aim of excavating suits of thirteenth-century armour to fill a gap in the museum’s collection.1 The Department of Antiquities of the British Mandatory government assigned them the Teutonic spur castle of Montfort. The archaeologists were, perhaps not surprisingly, to be disappointed in their hope of obtaining Crusader armour from an excavation. Their only finds of this nature were several lumps of rusted iron chain mail and some other fragments.2 None the less, even these finds are not without significance. Other archaeological finds of arms and armour come from Chateau Pelerin and Vadum Jacob. This limited corpus is augmented by information from a number of written and illustrated sources, giving us an idea of the weapons and armour used by the brothers of the Military Orders (Figure 75). Amongst the most useful written sources in this regard are the Rules and Statutes of the two Military Orders.
