Lorenz Helmschmied

In that year, the Augsburg city tax records first alluded to his creation of expensive armours for the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III.

[3] During the 1480s, Lorenz created spectacular garnitures, or matching sets, of armour for Frederick and especially for his son, the future Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I.

In February, 1480, then-Archduke Maximilian summoned the armourer to Ghent to serve him during his military campaigns in the Burgundian Netherlands; he remained in the Low Countries until May, 1481, and is mentioned in the Burgundian court records as "Leurens de Helmestede armurier demeurant en la ville de Hapsburg en Allemaigne."

One of the garnitures that Lorenz created for Maximilian during this period is preserved in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and another may be the elegant example of the attenuated "late-gothic" style of armour that is now in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Lorenz's grandson, Desiderius Kolman Helmschmied was also an important armourer to aristocratic patrons throughout Europe into the late-sixteenth century.