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The Mongols wore silk shirts under their mail. It acted like primate Kevlar. If an arrow penetrated the mail they would grab the cloth around the would and extract the point as it often would not penetrate fully and often resulted in simple flesh wounds..
They learned that from the Chinese who wore silk armor underwear for thousands of years before the Mongol tribes united.
Silk was commonly used as armor throughout the mideast when the Crusaders arrived, quickly learned a lesson, and they started doing the same thing. Silk was too expensive and rare as a commodity to be used in the Europe.
When the Romans were defeated by the Scythian tribes, the Romans complained their arrows couldn't penetrate the Scythian armor. Recent excavations of Scythian graves in eastern Europe, northern Turkey, the Balkans and the Russian steppes have shown remnants of silk underwear under the armor the more important people were buried in. The Romans never defeated the Scythians, neither did the Greeks before them. The Scythians were nomadic tribes with no written history, no cities, and no monuments as their legacies. We know very little about them, other than minor mentions in both surviving Greek and Romans texts, both who feared their women warriors. They are believed to the first who domesticated the horse and who rode horsed into battle. The are also believed to be the source of the Amazon myth, all women warrior tribes. They were also believed to be the first who used war dogs, specifically the ancestors of the larger mastiffs.
That's what I want to fight, some crazy woman on horseback swinging a sword at me with her mastiff ready to bite off my head. As if women can't be vicious enough without those accessories. I'm going to go hide.