Grab your scimitar, spear, bow and horse because it’s time to send the franks back to where they came from! The Victrix Islamic Cavalry is here, and they’re well worth the wait!
I have been waiting for this set for a while – building up a pretty substantial Islamic force for Crusade era games, and furiously painting up the rest of my Islamic infantry from my last review. Until now though, it’s been missing something – highly dynamic plastic cavalry – and, after a teaser in I think late 2023, the Victrix Islamic kit is finally here to fill that gap. It’s a fantastic kit, so let’s dive in.
What You Get
You get 12 cavalry in the bag, with enough options to ensure you’re not going to repeat a combination of pieces. They’re all armoured either in mail or lamellar/splint armour, and you can easily split the bag into six heavily armoured (lamellar, visible chain etc) and six lighter (thawbs over mail) if you wish, with your arm and head choices going a long way to selling a particular look. That makes this a very flexible kit, and with compatibility with other ranges – see below – should form the base for a massively varied set of options.
Weapon options are wide (lots of swords, axes, spears) but some particular combinations are impossible with a single kit. There’s one double handed lance (with associated body) per sprue, and a limited number of archer arms. While a huge provision of quivers, bows and swords can make all 12 of the cavalry obviously mounted archers, only a few of them can have bows in hand.
Where the kit really shines with options is in the heads, and it’s there that you can answer the question “who are these guys anyway?” There’s a lot of different “types” of Islamic armoured cavalry from the era of the Crusades, and the idea behind this kit is that you can make all of them. It mostly works, I think. Enclosed mail and armoured heads will let you build up the idealised image of the Mamluk soldier as per the Osprey guides (how reliable these are is in the eye of the beholder), open-faced helms, turbaned helmets and ornate headgear for the Faris (slightly knight equivalent? Noble warriors, anyway), while a solid range of braided heads will let you theme your models to Turkic/Seljuq cavalry. There’s a couple of heads that fit the popular image of the Ghilman too, so if you want your various types of slave soldier to look distinct, you can manage it.
The heads are really great, with exceptional detail, massive variation and pleasingly crafted helms and mail. The very fine detail on helmets is exceptional, beautiful faint tracings that are just prominent enough to pick up a wash – if you wanted to go absolutely above and beyond with these, you could!
Everything is, as you’d expect at this point with Victrix kits, sculpted well. Thawbs, robes and kaftans have the same intricate folding and creasing as in the Islamic infantry kit, reflecting the use of silk, linen and damask rather than heavy flat wool. The tricky bits of cavalry detail come out well – mail wrapping around arms, heads and bodies is perfect on every component (bar one, the mail balaclava), stirrups and and stirrup leathers sit proud from foot and boot and legs fit onto horses perfectly. The horses themselves are very nice, with appropriately varied saddles, shabraques and tack, much finer and more ornate than the Crusader horses. Everything in the kit fits together nicely, with more modularity than the Islamic infantry kit due to more bodies with at-the-shoulder flat joints.
There are some slightly tricky bits with the kit that are worth mentioning. As the body/arm joints are largely flat, you do get a lot of modularity and kitbashing potential, but it can leave some of the bodies looking quite stiff and flat in the saddle. That’s as much down to my component choice as anything else, so give your weapon arms a bit of thought before you glue them on. The other tricky part is the horses. I am a big fan of what I now think of as “the Victrix horse”, as these are the same basic horse poses as in several of their other cavalry kits. It’s a lovely horse, full of dynamism, but this time they were a bit harder to put together. Without locator plugs, I found that the sides tended to slip apart as they were built, leaving one or two with a gap and overlap that needed sanding down and filling. I’d advise glueing the sides of the horses together and leaving them largest side down for a while before sticking them on the bases.
Scale
Victrix models tend towards the top end (or “true 28mm”) with realistic-ish proportions. They’re noticeably larger than the direct comparison kit, Gripping Beast Heavy Cavalry, and finer in all respects, I’d argue replacing that well-loved but fairly ancient kit altogether.
L: Gripping Beast Arab Heavy Cavalry Credit: Lenoon
They compare well to Footsore and Perry metals, again a little chunkier but within the range of human variation. All three ranges complement each other well.
L: Perry Turcopole Credit: Lenoon
L: Footsore Mamluk
Credit: Lenoon
The Crusaders, mounted on their massive destriers, are larger than their Islamic counterparts, as is probably accurate, the Faris relying on faster, more nimble horses instead of a giant slab of horse charging forwards.
L: Victrix Crusader Cavalry Credit: Lenoon
Compatibility
The Victrix website notes that these are compatible with the Norman Cavalry, which is certainly true – legs will fit on norman horses (and vice versa). Most of the head connections and many of the arms will work too, which is great – there’s a huge amount of overlap, borrowed/looted kit and conflict between the Islamic nations and Normans (including the first crusade Norman stuff), so if you want to model the border conflicts, friction and acculturation, you can mix and match these to you heart’s content.
The kit also works well with the Islamic infantry heads and weapons to make for slightly less armoured cavalry, and, if you don’t mind using foot archer arms, can let you depict more of your cavalry with bows in hand. That goes the other way too, so the use of armoured heads and hands with some of the Islamic infantry bodies will give you much more kitted out infantry compared to the lightly armoured levy in the original kit.
They’re not super compatible (and there’s no particular reason they should be) with the Crusader cavalry kit. I wanted to add another barded horse Mamluk to go with my metals, and had to do a bit of filing to get the Islamic cavalry rider onto the horse. Nothing unsurmountable, but bear in mind the crusaders are a fair bit stockier in arm and hand than the Islamic cavalry if you’re thinking about weapon swaps. A bit of clipping and filing is required, but the result looks good.
Painting
I was quite happy with how I painted these, using a bright but limited colour palette initially – red, white, green, blue and yellow – before I looked at the Victrix website versions. Usually I’d talk at excruciating length about my own painting process, but instead I’m going to use some of these shop images because I absolutely love them – look at the saturation! The brightness! The detailing! Stunning work there team.
As usual I took a few shortcuts with mine – I’ve not painted all the trim around armour sections, and quivers particularly are just washed leather. However, I did do a little patterning on most of the fabrics. It’s a period of highly detailed embroidery, letting and quasi-lettering on clothing and, given that most of these models represent rich minor nobles and their retainers, it wasn’t enough to do block colour or stripes. Everyone got something, whether gibberish in arabic lettering, square-kufic reminiscent lining to shabraques or simple diamond embroidery.
Overall
This is a beautiful kit and alongside the Islamic Infantry allows you to pretty much complete Islamic forces in the High Medieval. With enough options to go between lighter and heavy cavalry, heads for Turkic horse, Mamluks and Faris and a load of weapon options, it absolutely sorts out any Saga or the Barons’ War forces in a single bag. My twelve, split into a couple of different units, will bulk up my Hearthguard and form the heart of two large units of warriors, so I can do the all-mounted Saracen army without breaking my back lugging around a lot of lead.
I hope the range doesn’t end here. Light Cavalry have to follow, and if we’re doing Medieval kits noone else is, and if there’s space in Victrix’ release schedule, add the third and most terrible protagonist the the Middle East in the Medieval – the Mongols. This one is the heavy cavalry, but I’d love to see the Victrix take on Islamic barding, the even heavier cavalry, camel riders (imagine victrix camels!) or taking the range into the later Medieval and beyond – even combining the clear expertise in both Napoleonic and Islamic miniatures to get plastic Napoleonic Mamluks on the table too. Come on team, more Islamic minis!
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