Such investments needed to be protected, and it is unsurprising that
there should be a development in horse armour that parallels that of
armour for the knight. It was by no means a total innovation; the late
Roman army had used horses wholly covered in mail or lamellar armour for
the catapbracti (literally ‘completely enclosed’) or klibanophoroi (meaning
‘camp oven’; a humorous reference to how quickly these fully armoured
men and horses would heat up!), both of which were adopted from their
Sassanid Persian neighbours who spanned the Middle East between second
and seventh centuries. Whilst such armour continued to be used in small numbers in the Byzantine Empire, this practice had died out in Western Europe long before.
