Furcoat - a luxurious necessity

Even in the Ist century of our era, standard-bearers of the Roman legions covered their helmets with skins of lions and bears. However, it made them once again to sweat on the powdered roads of military glory. Nevertheless, it was considered, that skins of these animals added to legionaries a little bit of mystical power of gods. These traditions were professed by the enemies of Rome - "barbarians" – as well. Celts and germen of the Western Europe for the first time in the history of the continent started making clothes out of fells, sewing them with fur outside like tunics. There remained only a step up to the invention of fur coats, so familiar to us.
This invention was partially a contribution of the Arabian fashion designers of VIII - IX centuries. Using the fur, which was taken out from Russia along the road “from Varangians to Greeks”, masters of the epoch of “thousand and one night” started to sheathe with skins of sables and martens boards of long caftans. Certainly, it was done only for the sake of giving to clothes of the grandee or a merchant of additional luxury. The similar kind of clothes was called by Arabs “jubba” (in Russian language it was transformed into “shuba” = "furcoat").
An interest of eastern merchants to Russian fur had transformed skins of fur animals into a kind of artificial currency. By the XIII century, the full prototype of a modern furcoat with fur outside appears in the Mongolian steppes blown by malicious winter winds. Necks of Chingiskhan’s soldiers were warmed not with collars, but with the tops of malakhais. For additional heat, under one furcoat, they worn another one, turned out with its fur inside.
On the north from the Mongolian steppes, in Siberia and behind the polar circle, native peoples of eternal ices used short "furcoat", which did not impede movement on sledges. Different variants of these clothes – “jumper” and “sokuy” - were produced from deer fells with their fur inside. For fixing of seams and as talismans against malicious spirits such "furcoats" were stitched with ornamental strips of leather. Since X - XI centuries, similar winter attire exists at east Slavs, being called "sheepskin coat".
To the Europe, the first prototypes of furcoats were brought along trading ways of the early Middle Ages from the Muslim East. Both in the countries of Caliphate, and in the Europe, at the beginning clothes were finished with fur for the sake of luxury only. Up to the end of XVI century, outdoor and indoors, merchants and aristocrats flaunted in the long sleeveless jackets trimmed with fur - “zimaras” (from Slavic "winter") all the year round. In Russia, in XV - XVI centuries, furcoats were also a parameter of a high property and social status.
Both at men, and at women, in the furcoats, a single-breasted fastener with metal (including, gold) buttons and the sleeves cut on a vertical were used. In such heavy fur coats it was possible only to go stately in a magnificent cart or to sit, awfully sweating, in the Boyars Duma. Common people, requiring freedom of movements, preferred covered with cloth short furcoats. Since the XVIII century, chuika- a kind of a caftan, furred and seized with a belt - was widely spread.