Polearms

[Mokkurkalfe]

Being a knight would be to have your own sherman tank(someone said), paying the crew and maintainance with taxes. So, the armour would translate to the tank itself, right?

[Lance D. Allen]

If the noble has half a brain, I would think that the decorations would be left on the parade field and for the Royal Tournements.

I dunno. For exactly this reason:

advertising your wealth makes you that much more interesting to capture for ransom rather than kill.

might prompt a wise nobleman to wear highly decorative functional armor. Most of the time, the nobility were leaders of their forces, and would rarely see battle themselves, if the war was going well. If it's going badly, armor that's going to keep the enemy from WANTING to kill you seems like it would be more useful than quality functional armor.. Though I imagine their suits were a good, expensive mixture of the two.

[Valamir]

The medieval and even the renaissance economies were so very different from our own that its virtually impossible to to a true economic comparison.  The best that can be hoped for is to put the expense into some sort of perspective.  

Somewhere in my various books there is a reference to how much land and how many peasants to work it was considered sufficient to support a knight.  In otherwords all of the acres of land and the labor of the peasants and the livestock they tended, the crops grown, the goods fashioned etc; went to providing an economic base that could support a guy, his armor, and his horses.  

So its not just a question of how much a suit actually cost in some monetary terms.  You also have to factor in all of the expenses for all of the supporting structure that enabled that knight to be able to afford the suit.

So if we take as a round number $250,000 as the "price" price of a suit.  There is probably several million dollars (I'd speculatively estimate around 10 million) worth of labor and the livelihood of that labor underlying it.  

We're talking the entire GDP of a manor (1 or more villages and attached farm land) per knight.

Now this was under the feudal system.  After the rise of nationalism and the empowerment of central government those central governments began bearing more and more of this expense directly.  It came directly out of their treasury.  In a day in age where the king's personal money was inseperable from the country's money its not hard to see a BIG reason why battle field armor disappeared.

The king wasn't about to pay for it.  Not when he had navies to build and palaces to raise, and lavish balls to throw.  You can almost directly trace the decline of the use of battle field armor with the decline of the feudal system of "government" organization.