sigh - I had hoped to have a little more time to prepare a thorough description of our project, but this new thread has forced me to speed things up.<br>
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A short description (in English) is in progress and should be added to our homepage in a couple of days. I am also working on an equipment section, so close ups of armour, boots, weapons etc. will be provided soon.<br>
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For now I can only give you a short-short description:<br>
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A group of 12 students (+ a few helpers) marched from Regensburg (Bavaria) to Trent (Upper Italy). The group started on August 15th and arrived on September 11th.<br>
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The historical background was the civil war of the year 193 AD (scenario: "a detachment of LEG III ITAL leaves its garrison at Regensburg, moves southwards and then crosses the Alps in order to give support to Septimius Severus and his Pannonian legions")<br>
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The equipment was chosen to represent a group of Roman legionaries with auxiliary forces in the late 2nd/first half of the 3rd century AD.<br>
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armour:<br>
chain mail for the archers, loricae segmentatae for the legionaries.<br>
Type of cuirass: 'old new Newstead'. Already with the large lobate hinges, but still with a leather thong for the girth hoops<br>
(as Florentius has rightly observed ) - based on a plan made by Michael Bishop in 2001.<br>
The cuirasses were made by a group of Czech craftsmen<br>
(I would have loved to make one myself but had neither the time nor the skill).<br>
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Helmets:<br>
Niedermoermter (steel) for the legionaries + "Archer helmets" (Deepeeka) for the sagittarii (these helmets looked great but were very cumbersome and were only rarely used)<br>
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Shields:<br>
Dura-Europos rectangular (+ one oval)<br>
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Swords and Daggers:<br>
Spathae and a few Künzing pugiones<br>
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Footwear:<br>
a type of closed eyelet boot (based on findings from Vindolanda/Saalburg/Weiblingen/Walheim). They were made by Marquita Volken (shoe museum Lausanne - we received her address from Carol van Driel-Murray).<br>
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Baldrics:<br>
1 Zugmantel, the rest Vimose style<br>
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Errors:<br>
1.) The centurion has a Corbridge with a Weisenau helmet instead of a Newstead with a Niedermoermter or Niederbieber/Heddernheim helmet. The reason was that the Czechs had somehow forgotten his set of armour and this problem was reveiled only a few weeks before the start ! Luckily, he still had a really nice Corbridge with an appropriate helmet in reserve. I was responsible for choosing most of the equipment but he was the initiator of the project. We both had worked our a** off and had invested too much time and a lot of money (for a student) into our great dream, so I could impossibly say "sorry mate, your armour doesn't really fit into this period, so either walk without it or stay at home".<br>
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In the end we were glad to have this Corbridge with us, because we were able to show interested people the differences between this older type of cuirass and the Newstead (and do a few comparative tests).<br>
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2.) one of the arches wears an Intercisa ridge helmet.<br>
Similar story: we tried desperately to equip each of our archers with a Syrian spangenhelm, but we received only three (and we were still lucky since they are not on sale in Germany). Now Martin, one of our archers, who was no expert on Roman military equipment, just took one of the late Roman helmets from our warship project. The centurion and me had a discussion on this, but in the end we decided to let Martin do so, since he was such a nice and selfless person. He did not wear this helmet later, so it was not that much of a problem.<br>
(and, as with the Corbridge, we could show visitors what Roman helmets looked like in a later period).<br>
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3.) we also took flak because some of our men used long-sleeved coats of mail. Again the same reason: we managed to get several short-sleeved ones, and one 'nightgown' with a zig-zag terminal, but still had to take a few long-sleeved shirts as a stopgap. One of the skeletons from Dura-Europos probably wore a slong-sleeved one, but it is unclear whether this skelly was once a Roman or a Persian.<br>
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I apologize for the equipment errors, but if you have to put through a project of that magnitude with a limited budget and under heavy pressure of time, you have to improvise a lot.<br>
One more year of preparations would have been fine, but because of state examinations and other 'peanuts', the summer of 2004 was the only possible time slot.<br>
The two men in charge (the centurion and me) were handicapped by fiendish tests in Latin and Greek, and most of the guys in our group simultaneously had to race against time to complete our Roman warship. The ship was presented to the public only two weeks before the march started, so we had to split up our time and energy.<br>
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Now to a couple of difficulties experienced by Marcus Junkelmann in 1985 [my rough translation]:<br>
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-"Of course it would have been best to take a car and take a close look at the entire distance and to decide on a fixed route, but, as usual, there was not enough time."<br>
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-"It was a disadvantage that many pieces of equipment had been made available only immediately before the march, so that an intensive training together was not possible."<br>
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-"Despite a huge amount of paper-warfare, which included the Bavarian State Chancellery, the Italian consulate general and the district of Suebia, we have not received a licence to carry arms from the Italian authorities right to the present day."<br>
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We had EXACTLY the same problems during the preparations for our project. The lack of a licence to carry arms almost led to a minor catastrophy when an Italian policeman thought of arresting the whole group at Franzensfeste near Brixen. We called the vice-chancellor of our university with a cell-phone and he managed to talk us out of this situation.<br>
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