Rus' rectangular shields

[Swampster]

Modern illustrations of Rus' show at least some of them with a large rectangular shield, often with arrow shaped decoration.

Does anyone know the source?

Heath mentions Leo the Deacon. The shields are described as reaching the ground. Talbot and Sullivan's translation gives a reference to Terras,"Leo Diaconus and the Ethnology of Kievan Rus'." who says the shield was likely the spordr. He which in turn references Shetelig and Falk who describe this shield as being a kite shield.

I would have thought the late 10th century too early for kite shields, though there some possible appearances including one on a supposed 10th century Byzantine Iliad.

I'm part way through doing some Rus' and I don't think I would be changing the shields now, but it would be nice to know.

[Duncan Head]

There's an interesting discussion - if you can bear with the sometimes clumsy transliterations - of early Slav shields at https://en.topwar.ru/174487-slavjane-vi-viii-vv-so-schitom.html which may have some bearing on the ancestry of the long Rus shield.

[Swampster]

That's one of the sites I had come across, but nothing very concrete about shape.
I don't have much by way of Byzantine material to hand, but Maurice says 'nice-looking but unwieldly shields' which doesn't help much either.

[Duncan Head]

In Poland "Many examples of iron-reinforced shields of rectangular shape (see pic 8 above) were also documented". Ian Heath in AFE says something similar. I haven't found any more precise references, but it might be worth your looking in a Polish direction?

[Swampster]

I am wondering if that image on Tumblr may go back to Heath, though there are a few modern È European pics of Slavs with rectangular shields - one with a straw binding.

The earliest Polish shields shown in Nicolle's Crusade era book are from the Gneizno doors -  they are kite shields and have been interpreted as planks with quite rough metal reinforcing strips. This book only goes back to 1050 but Nicolle's Polish Osprey says earlier evidence isn't around.
I will see if Heath's bibliographies have any leads

[Andreas Johansson]

Having finished Duczko's Viking Rus yesterday, I thought it might be some utility in mentioning that, while Duczko isn't much interested in shields, he did leave me with the impression that the only archaeologically attested shape for Rus' shields is round.

There might be a bit of a methodological catch here, though, in that Duczko's operational definition of Rus' is people buried in Eastern Europe with identifiably Scandinavian grave-goods; the armies the Byzantines saw may have included Slavic or Finnic auxiliaries, or Norsemen gone native, whose graves he wouldn't count as Rus'.

That Leo mentions the size but not the shape might suggest the shields were of a familiar shape to the Byzantines, which would rather suggest oval or perhaps kite than rectangular?

It's a bit of a shame if there's little evidence for Rus' rectangular shields, because it'd be a handy way of telling them apart from "proper" Norsemen.

[Andreas Johansson]

I got hold of another of Talbot and Sullivan's references via interlibrary loan, namely Peter Schreiner's "Zur Ausrüstung des Kriegers in Byzanz, im Kiewer Rußland und in Nordeuropa nach bildlischen und literarischen Quellen" (1981).

Unfortunately, it turns out to be something of a disappointment, partly because it's got less to say about Rus' than you'd think from the title, partly because Schreiner has some odd ideas*, but for what it's worth he thinks the long shields Leo mentions were kite shields, and that Leo's the first evidence for such anywhere. He does mention rectangular shields as occuring in Byzantine depictions, but he doesn't give any reference, nor any indication in whose hands they're shown.

* The most noteworthy perhaps being that he says that mail armour was of Oriental origin and is first found in Romano-Byzantine armies among imperial-era auxiliaries.

[Andreas Johansson]

Continuing down the Byzantine rabbit hole a bit, I learn from Kolias' Byzantinische Waffen that Leo the Wise (Taktika 20§183) mentions rectangular shields, but actually looking the passage up is another disappointment - we're told these shields are known as thureoi, which word Leo otherwise uses for oval shields, so one has to suspect some sort of confusion here.

Perhaps more helpfully, Kolias also mentions that the Sylloge Tacticorum speaks of large rectangular infantry shields, alongside triangular and round ones. But unfortunately I don't have access to the Sylloge.

Unlike Schreiner, he says there aren't depictions of rectangular shields, from which he concludes they were rare. But if they existed even marginally among Byzantine troops, I guess that makes it somewhat more likely that the Rus' used them too.

[Swampster]

It'd be interesting to know how precise the word translated as 'rectangular' is. Could it simply mean longer in one axis than the other, so covering oval?
A bit like how oblong is generally taken as being synonymous with rectangle, but can be used for oval.

[Andreas Johansson]

Leo the Wise uses tetragonos, literally "four-cornered", which you'd think would exclude oval, but might include quadratic or rhomboidal, but I don't know how precise Byzantine usage was.

The Sylloge uses the same word, at least in the passage Kolias quotes, but adds that the shield should extend narrowly downwards, which when I read it again sounds like a kite with a triangular rather than rounded top. It can at any rate not very well describe an actual rectangle, which would be narrow or not along its entire height.

[Andreas Johansson]

And in fairness to Kolias, I should mention that "rectangular" was my imprecise rendering of his viereckig, also literally "four-cornered". Blame a combination of that I was looking for rectangular shields and that "quadrangular" and "tetragonal" aren't really everyday words in English (but viereckig is in German).

And to be equally fair to Schreiner, he says viereckig-länglich, or "quadrangular-oblong".

[aligern]

Just to make a point that you chaps will all be familiar with. In the wings of this discussion lies an old academic debate about tge origin if kite shields and whether the kite design is invented in the east and travels west or vice versa and within that argument is  the debate about the effectiveness of Western military systems , the mounted knight, the crossbow. he pije and the eventual emergence of Western technological superiority. ( Military Revolution anyone?)
Isn't thureos in origin something to do with a door?
Roy

[Andreas Johansson]

Isn't thureos in origin something to do with a door?

Originally a stone used as a doorstopper, acc'd Liddell & Scott. They don't list a meaning "door", but it's tempting to assume as the stepping stone between doorstopper and oblong shield.

[Erpingham]

Isn't thureos in origin something to do with a door?

Originally a stone used as a doorstopper, acc'd Liddell & Scott. They don't list a meaning "door", but it's tempting to assume as the stepping stone between doorstopper and oblong shield.

I know little about Greek, but online Bible lexicons give Thureos as deriving from the Greek Thura, a door.

[CarlL]

In lateral or pictorial thinking style, it would be 'easy' to see link between a wooden door (thura) to block the passage of unwanted guests from entry to your family / clan home and a wooden shield to block the enemy's blows or arrows on the battlefield.

My pictorial memory tells me that the early wargaming community always thought of the Persian sparabara as such carriers of rectangular shields rather than any Greek soldier.
So it would be interesting to read about the etymylogy of the thureos / thyreos in becoming associated with Greek oval shields.

I am not sure if likes of https://journal.ivinas.gov.ua/pwh/article/view/216
would help; (is this one you have already considered? apologies if so) as the summary notes:

"The author came to the conclusion that the shields used in Rus' and Europe in the X–XII centuries generally belonged to the same types. In particular, it is round, almond-shaped and triangular shields. The issue of shields of the XIII–XV centuries remains more complicated. During this period can be observed as the influence of Western Europe on Rus', for example, the spread of the knight's "tarch". And trends that began in Eastern Europe, namely the spread of pavises in the XIV–XV centuries."

While this link takes you to a description of research into Viking shields and their decoration.
see https://sagy.vikingove.cz/en/lesser-known-aspects-of-the-viking-shield/
This points to circular shields as the norm across a wide geographical area of viking settlement / raiding.
CarlL