Put it into practice

It is a hard and/or expensive task to assembly a historically accurate gear of good quality. An other difficult job is to wear and use it in intensive action, like changing your weapons quickly on a charging horse. While the items themselves are evident considering the sources and the remaining specimens, the way they were used is not so clear. How precise or quick was a mamluk archer in the army? How high was the training level for the horses working in a unit? And so on. The biggest question is the power of the old warriors. How could we know thier actual skills or can we ever reach these skills? Were they much above us, or were they the same men?

One cannot answer theese questions from period illustrations. We have to focus on written sources, especially the military treatises. After it we have to get used to every item and the back of the horse, to see what physics and logic says. This way we can get near to the old warriors, but we can never reach them. The main option is missing, and we cannot - I hope we would not - regenerate it. This option is the destruction of an other warrior, the only aim of all theese weapons and techniques.