page_title: Lobster-tailed pot helmet
section_title: Use
hierarchical_section_title: Lobster-tailed pot helmet / Use
caption_attribution_description: Polski: szyszak skrzydlaty
context_page_description: The lobster-tailed pot helmet, also known as the zischägge, horseman's pot and harquebusier's pot, was a type of post-Renaissance combat helmet. It became popular in Europe, especially for cavalry and officers, from c. 1600; it was derived from an Ottoman Turkish helmet type. The helmet gradually fell out of use in most of Europe in the late 17th century; however, the Austrian heavy cavalry retained it for some campaigns as late as the 1780s.
  The French term capeline was also used for this helmet, however, usage of this word was not precise. "Capeline" was indiscriminately used to denote various types of hat, and helmets other than the lobster-tailed pot.
context_section_description: This form of helmet was widely used during the Thirty Years War and English Civil War; it was commonly known as a zischägge in Germany and a 'horseman's pot' or 'three-barred pot' in Britain; the term 'lobster-tailed pot' is widely used in modern scholarship. The typical cavalryman of the period, the harquebusier, would have worn the helmet with a buff coat, bridle-hand gauntlet and breastplate and backplate. It was also sometimes worn by a more heavily armoured type of cavalry, the cuirassier, combined with three-quarter armour. It was used by cavalry on both sides of the English Civil War including Oliver Cromwell's Ironside cavalry. The common misconception of Cavaliers wearing plumed wide-brimmed hats whilst the Roundheads wore helmets is definitively disproved by a surviving order signed by Charles I himself for 33 'potts', along with other cavalry armour, for the use of his own troop of horse in 1642. Another order, this time from the Parliamentarian authorities, dating to 1644 for 300 "potts with three barres English" indicates that each helmet, no doubt of basic quality, cost 7 shillings.
  Similar helmets were worn in the 17th century by Polish winged hussars and were termed "szyszak" in Polish, again a derivative of the original Turkish name. Austrian cuirassiers were equipped with the lobster-tailed pot helmet as late as the 1780s, long after its use had died out elsewhere, when campaigning against the Ottoman Turks.
caption: Polish Hussar szyszak with elaborate wing-like crests of pierced metal, 17th century
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