Specifically I was wondering about areas such as Asia and Africa and the common armour/protection they would use. This could be common for the average soldier or common for high class (if these areas are similar in ways such as not every soldier was a respected knight in plate).
Thanks for the help!
So, plate armor was a big deal at the time, same as in Europe, but there was no real "warrior class" in China, so the various empires would furnish their infantry and cavalry with the appropriate armor. For an example of the armored cavalry around the Tang and Song dynasties, see this figure.
If you want more detailed info about armor starting from around 500 CE, I can go into that as well.
Full disclosure, I am not really able to address the period you are talking about (roughly 1300-1500) just because what books I have read that address African warfare commence at earliest in the 1500s and most often pick up in the 1700s and 1800s.
Everything I have read suggests that metal body armor was not that common in the Western Sudan from the period from 1500-1800. John Thornton in his book Warfare in Atlantic Africa^1 states that:
African armies did not devote as much attention to armour, although they certainly did use some sort of body protection (especially shields) in most areas. As a result, powerful missile weapons were less important. Many African armies relied heavily on shock tactics rather than missiles to win the day, and these in turn required the use of the arme blanche (hand-to- hand weapons) such as swords, battleaxes, or stabbing spears, rather than missiles.
as well as remarking that
Given the musket’s general inaccuracy, musketry was most effective when masses of troops confronted each other, and less effective when soldiers advanced in dispersed order (as they often did in Africa) or in environments such as rainforest.
This general picture of things is supported by British expeditions to the Kanem-Bornu sultanate in the 1820s. In the expedition of Walter Oudney, Hugh Clapperton and Dixon Denham, the latter wrote of an encounter with the Sultan of Mandara
At about a mile from the town, we saw before us the Sultan of Mandara and about five hundred horsemen, posted on rising ground to receive us, when Barca Gana instantly commanded a halt....these people were finely dressed in Soudan tobes of various colors; dark blue, and striped with yellow or red; bournouses of coarse scarlet cloth; with large turbans of white or dark colored cotton.^2
So, generally speaking for the Sudanic empires of West Africa, the picture that survives is of forces with armor consisting of shields.
Now, for the Eastern Sudanic regions along the upper reaches of the nile, we do have surviving examples of originally Ottoman armor reaching the sudan, demonstrating a certain amount of exchange between the Middle East and the Sennar Sultanate.
Warfare in Atlantic Africa 1500-1800 by John K Thornton, 1999, pp 10.
Narrative of Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa in the years 1822, 1823 and 1824 by Dixon Denham, Hugh Clapperton and Walter Oudney, 1828, pp280-1.
