This book celebrates more than a decade of collecting by the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Arms and Armor since the reinstallation of its permanent galleries in 1991. The new acquisitions complement and build upon the Museum’s encyclopedic collection, which totals more than 14,000 objects from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North America.

Fifty-eight of the most important recent acquisitions are featured in this volume, including the richly decorated armor and weapons of two French kings, the king of Sweden, and a future king of England, several members of the ruling Medici family of Florence, a hero of the American Revolution, two sultans of Turkey, and the Tokugawa shoguns of Japan. The texts provide insight into the artistic, historical, and technical aspects of this specialized field. Many of these important and intriguing objects are previously unpublished.