Pleated Skirt Armour in the Imperial Armoury, a Wedding Costume Made of Steel
At first glance it looks like a joke. A knight in full armour, wearing a flared, pleated skirt down to his knees, every pleat beaten out of steel, and on his head a helmet with a grimacing face and a crest of steel flames.
It isn't a joke, or not only one. It's a costume armour, and in the 1520s the courts of Germany took costume very seriously.
Photo: Virtual Travel Guide
Clothes copied in steel
In the early 16th century pleated clothes were the height of fashion, and a knight would sometimes wear a cloth skirt over his armour. Armourers took the idea and made it in metal. The skirt is called a bases in English, a Faltenrock in German, and the whole suit a Faltenrockharnisch, a pleated-skirt armour.
The steel skirt is linked above all with the imperial workshop in Innsbruck under Emperor Maximilian I and his armourer Konrad Seusenhofer. The Armoury has one Seusenhofer made around 1512 to 1514 for Maximilian's grandson, the future Charles V, as a boy.
The museum describes these as costume armour, a steel copy of a fabric costume, made for an age that loved festivals and pageants. They were worn in grand processions, often with fantastic masked helmets like the one here.
A wedding in 1526
The museum's pleated-skirt armour from around 1526 was made in northern Germany after an Innsbruck model. Its owner is given, with a cautious "allegedly", as Albrecht of Brandenburg-Ansbach, the last Grand Master of the Teutonic Order in Prussia, who turned the order's lands into a Protestant duchy in 1525 and became the first Duke of Prussia.
In 1526 he married Dorothea, a Danish princess. An etched bridal couple on the back of the armour alludes to the wedding, and the museum thinks the armour was probably made for it. The masked helmet is engraved, pierced and painted, and the armour alone weighs about 34 kilos.
Look at the skirt closely: the steel is beaten into deep folds that flare out like fabric. It's a piece of tailoring done with a hammer.
Seeing it
The pleated-skirt armours are in the Imperial Armoury in the Neue Burg, entered through the Weltmuseum. See our Armoury guide for the layout, and our post on Maximilian's Gothic armour for the armour that came just before.