The Siege at Novo Brdo

The Medieval world was fraught with bloody conflict. Amidst a landscape defined by conquest, emerged many concurrent traditions and styles of arms and armor. These tools were at once functional and beautiful- for they were a blending of fashion and function. Evolving alongside one another, these tools, and the processes used in their creation, were ever improved, refined, and iterated upon. It is this range of armor forms that has for all my conscious life ensorceled me.
“The Siege at Novo Brdo,” set in the year 1412, follows a group of assorted mercenaries as they assist a Serbian mining city in weathering a months-long Ottoman assault. I chose this time and setting as there was indeed a siege recorded then. However, as it was less consequential than later sieges of the city, there was little specific information, allowing me more or less free reign as far as story beats are concerned.

Each member of this band is named and armored in keeping with the time period, and with the country or region from which they hail. Judith, the band’s leader, bears a German cuirass and faulds supplemented with splinted arm and leg harnesses. To show her age and stylistic preference, her great helm is outdated by a few decades. Jadviga too wears splinted rere and vambraces, cuisses, and greaves alongside a breastplate. Her helm is an open face bascinet supported by a maille coif. Zigmond wears a quilted gambeson, and a bascinet and coif similar to Jadviga’s kit. In an effort to maintain the lighter build of his personal arming choices, he wears jack chains along his arms rather than a more solid harness. Finally, Parun wears a visored bascinet and maille hauberk. As he is the band’s standard bearer, I also saw fit to add a crest of feathers to his helm.

The Ottoman armor is also quite researched, and was a driving reason behind choosing to set my narrative in the Balkans. As the study of Ottoman armor forms is newer to my practice, the comparison of their design aesthetics to those of the eastern Europeans pictured was fascinating. Ultimately proving my setting choice effective towards my aim of providing a wider scope of contemporary arms and armor styles.

I recognized, in this narrative’s creation, the inherent bias shown towards the defending Serbs at Novo Brdo, and the antagonization of the Ottoman forces. While this has the potential to paint the opposing forces as “good and evil,” the use of an independent mercenary company as the protagonists lets both major sides become more neutral within the greater conflict. The resolution is a condensed but realistic take on the agreements drawn up at the end of a successful or unsuccessful siege, with monetary and external political factors dictating whether or not it continued.

Bio

Franklin Summers is an illustrator, medievalist, researcher, and history communicator. Sovereign within these studies lie arms & armor. These forms of steel, leather, and textile are the marriage of fashion and function- both symbols of elegance and station, and tools of war. To avoid glamorizing these forms, Summers reminds his audience of the medieval’s humanity, in relation to the world as we experience it. All this is achieved through traditional ink work and painstaking hatching, enhancing the impact of each page and panel of Summers’ narrative work, and through constant research.