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Fig. 1000. Equestrian armour made for Rupert, Count Palatine of the Rhine
Augsburg work, about 1502. Imperial Armoury, Vienna
can be assigned we cannot do better than give an illustration of the fine harness in the Imperial Armoury, Vienna, made, as we now know, about 1502 for Rupert, that Count Palatine of the Rhine famous for his feud with Maximilian for the possession of Bavaria, a feud which ended in the conquest of Kufstein and in his own death in 1504 (Fig. 1000). The horse armour is presumably of Augsburg make, fashioned in bright steel and embellished with brilliant fire gilding. The chanfron is embossed with a salamander. The glancing knobs represent lions' heads. The saddle still retains the original pads for the thighs. The croupière is formed by scaled armoured bands, placed crosswise and terminating below in bosses. This horse armour, which bears no armourer's mark, is ascribed in the old inventories quite erroneously to a Palatinate Rupert of 1352-1410, some-*times called King of the Romans, an error which was repeated in Schrenck von Nozing's volume of engravings entitled Armamentarium heroicum, a volume commenced in 1582 and published in 1601, to which we have already had occasion to refer. Apart from the historical horse armaments in the Tower of London, of which we are about to speak, there are three parts of others that may be assigned to the closing years of the XVth century
