Are any Res Historians knowledgeable about the history of the hennin, the pointy headdresses medieval women sometimes wore?  I've looked on Google and found one theory that they first appeared in the Burgundian court but I encountered another school of thought that held that such headdresses came about because Marco Polo brought back from China a hat which warrior women among the Mongols wore to differentiate them at a distance from their male counterparts. The Marco Polo story sounds somewhat fanciful but there have been times when truth was stranger that fiction. Then it's possible that neither of the explanations I found on Google were accurate.  I'll be grateful if anyone can cast some light on the subject.

I don't know, but since the hennin first appeared in Northern France/Burgundy a century after Marco Polo's death, I feel it's unlikely to have anything to do with him. If the hat Marco Polo brought back was so inspirational, why was the Hennin most popular in Northern and Western Europe and not really in Italy? Why didn't something similar happen in Russia, which was actually under Mongolian occupation for a while? I'm also unaware of 'warrior women' being a significant component of Mongol armies. Moreover the Mongolian boqta seems to have been more cylindrical and flat-topped, so doesn't actually look much like the conical hennin.

Mongol headgear as the origin for the hennin seems to arise from one particular author who posts a blog on tumblr, though it has since been picked up by other sites such as this short piece on the Smithsonian Magazine site, but all these articles ultimately originate from the same blog. The original author's medievalpoc.tumblr site seems to have as its mission to illuminate the contribution (or simply the presence) of people of colour (poc) in pre-modern European society, as a reaction to the 'conventional wisdom' that at the time Europe was entirely ethnically 'white'. The blog posts articles and pictures about non-white people in European art and culture, and complains that black people are being systematically cut from official histories in schoolbooks, despite not actually presenting the reader with a single example of a schoolbook that does so. The hennin's Mongol origin is simply presented as an assertion with no citations and little evidence: it sounds to me like it's bad history written by someone with an axe to grind.

So while the hennin may somehow have been inspired by Mongolian headwear, I think it is a pretty big stretch to say that it's because of Marco Polo. More likely to my mind is that it was simply the fashionable development of existing French/Burgundian headgear, especially as the tall pointed hennin did not suddenly appear: earlier paintings show that it was preceeded by much shorter and blunt tipped hats.

Thanks for your helpful thoughts, MM.  Of course when something has 'Smithsonian' in the title at first glance it gives it an air of credibility even if here it is probably spurious.  Perhaps the magazine was short of content in the edition containing that article.

However if one really insists on finding a non-European influence for the hennin, then surely there's no need to go as far as Mongolia: the Ottomans were a lot closer and with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and their expansion into the Balkans they were very much in contact with western Europeans. They too had tall pointy hats with gauzy veils:


Ottoman women from a painting in the Topkapı museum, c.1450.


Hurrem Sultan, also known as Roxelana, the consort of Suleiman the Magnificent, as painted by Titian in 1550.


Women's clothing depicted in the 'Album of Ahmed I', a collection of Ottoman love poems from 1610.